Taking liberties with Puccini

I was grateful for a good long sleep without a nose bleed. Clare and Ann went off to St Catherine's wrll before I was ready to leave for St German's where this morning, Lay Reader Mike Cook preached a wise and thoughtful sermon and I celebrated. 

This was a welcome respite for me, as there was a christening straight after the service, for a very tired and wriggly two year old toddler. His heavily pregnant mother had to hold him over the font for baptism which was risky for her climbing up two narrow steps in high heels. The child was too heavy for me to hold and pour water over and would have screamed even louder and wriggled if I tried to pick him up. Thankfully all went well without mishap.

It was twenty five to two when I reached home for lunch. At three we drove to the Millennium Centre for the matinée performance of Madam Butterfly, a new production. The singers and orchestra were under the direction of favourite conductor Carlo Rizzi. He was cheered when he arrive at the rostrum. 

The music was superbly sung as ever by all involved. The new stage set is strikingly modern and simple, making use of LED lighting technology, projecting video effects on to the white building to conjure an atmosphere. Centre stage on a turntable was a house consisting of two cubes on top of each other. linked with stairs. The upper cube was a glass box and in the lower cube a modern kitchen and laundry room. In these spaces and on the stairs much of the action took place.  The house rotated to effect scene changes, which would have been fine if the mechanism hadn't emitted mechanical noises that penetrated  orchestral interludes.

One main criticism all three of us had was of the costume. Cho Cho San's bridal dress looked like that of a Can-Can dancer. Admittedly she's a teen bride but if she was from a traditional culture did she have to resemble a bride from a reality TV show? Or was that a deliberate interpretative insinuation? She dies by stabbing herself with her father's suicide dagger in Puccini's plot, but her instrument is now a pistol, but there were no sound effects of shooting. 

Worse still. CSI forensic investigators would have seen immediately it was staged - a neat blood stain on a shower curtain (hommage to Hitchcock's movie 'Psycho'), plus another on the bathroom door which was revealed on opening when Cho Cho San's bloody arm tumbles out from within. That may also be a cinematic reference. But, it doesn't portray the far messier horror of a scene when someone blows their brains out. This looked like two deaths not one. Its implausibility distracted from the tragic ending. Not so much a controversial interpretation of a death scene as sloppy thinking about its representation. Someone should have a word with the producer. 

After supper when we returned we watched the Leeds Piano Competition on BBC Four with five superb finalists delivering pianistic fireworks, playing with an orchestra. Then I went out for a late night walk in the park, as my knees were complaining after spending so much of the day sitting down, and not always comfortably.