A walk in Thompson's Park after breakfast to wake me up and clear my head so that I could concentrate better on recording next week's Morning Prayer and the Reflection I quickly wrote yesterday. The job was done by lunchtime, with fewer editing corrections needed. Perhaps I should discipline myself to prepare for creative tasks by doing this more often.
In the afternoon, a short siesta and another walk around Thompson's Park before an early supper ready to drive to the Millennium Centre for this evening's landmark performance of Rossine's opera 'The Barber of Seville'. A landmark because it's the first full length opera in front of a live audience in eighteen months. To celebrate the occasion, Clare donned a lovely blue and white frock and I my white suit plus blue shirt, and we wore of WNO 'Partners' badges. I was surprised to find that our names are printed in tiny print in the supporters list at the back of the programme for the night. Amazing!!
This is the same English language production as we've seen twice before, brilliantly theatrical and funny, and well worth repeating, as a kind of signature work in the hands of a great opera company. The singing was superb and the pace at which it was taken was breathtaking, if anything to my mind a bit too fast for one to read the surtitles. Reading them was necessary when the speed of singing began to lose the sense of the libretto. Now and then it was impossible to speed read them. There were also occasions when the connection between singers and orchestra became a little ragged, and that's very unusual for WNO chorus and orchestra. Tomas Hanusch drove them all a little too hard to my mind, un-necessarily so. Perhaps the sheer excitement of the occasion, getting back to live performance accounts for this. After all, it was a very different kind of first night to remember.
The arrangement of the entrance area of the Millennium Centre has been significantly modified, hopefully for the time being and not forever. All the ticket desks are boarded off, no longer in use. Ticketing is being done on-line only at the moment, so you can't just walk in and book things. You can have tickets posted to you or emailed, including discounted car park tickets. Each one contains a QR code which is scanned by one of the stewards on entry to the auditorium. This automatically reports your identity and contact details for track and trace reporting.
The car park barrier has a scanner which operates the barrier in and out. I had misgivings about the size of the coded tickets embedded in the confirmatory email, and the quality of the printout possible, so I took a computer screen grab of each instead and saved them to my Blackberry, producing a full screen image of the coded ticket, just as it's been possible to do with airline tickets for the past five years. It works a treat, as long as you remember to take your phone with you! It really would have been better if the tickets were attached as .pdf files to the email. More people know how to handle these than know how to take a screen grab. To be fair, the email does contain a live link to Apple Wallet, but what good is that if you don't have an iPhone?
Nevertheless, all steps in the right direction I suppose. It's so good that the Millennium Centre is working again, with its wonderfully welcoming staff and outstanding musical offering. Rossini is resounding in my ears as I go to bed a happier man tonight.
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