Clouds and sunshine today, and cold. The usual Saturday pancake breakfast with mushroom added. I made an effort to go for a walk before lunch as I was feeling unusually stiff despite a good night's sleep. We heard from Kath that she's been awarded an Arts Council grant to produce her next show. She wasn't sure she'd be successful in the present economic climate, and can now look forward to realising her plans to bring her creative ideas to life on stage. Naturally we're thrilled for her.
Clare cooked us a prawn stir fry with rice earlier than usual as we had a matinee performance of Puccini's opera 'Il Trittico' starting at three. We walked to the bus stop by Canton Library and caught a number 2 bus that took us all the way to Mermaid Quay in the Bay, a short walk from the Millennium Centre. A convenient route, which we took only because it was the first to arrive at the bus stop. It seemed like a roundabout route, but in reality no more travel time than taking any bus into the city centre and waiting for a number 6 from the centre to the Bay. The down side was a dreadful noisy vibration the vehicle made any time it stopped in traffic queues, at lights or bus stops. It sounded like a pneumatic drill. I had to block my ears, as it was becoming painful. Anyway, we survived in time to have a glass of wine in the patrons' area before curtain up.
'Il Trittico' is three one act operas. It was a new operatic format with which Puccini wanted to experiment. Each one is different. Two tragic, one black comedy. The cast of singers and chorus had roles in all three. The sets were brilliantly conceived and constructed, requiring a half hour interval between each, making it a four hour long show, The singers were superb as was the attention to detail, with movement and visual symbolism reflecting the libretto. The first was about a love triangle leading to a crime of passion on a barge in Paris, a scenario in which the workers have a hard insecure life in grinding poverty.
The second is set in an enclosed convent with a severe penitential rule of life dedicated to devotion to the blessed Virgin Mary. A young noblewoman is one of the nuns, dispatched there after she gives birth of a child. Others in the convent, are not nuns but servants. There are suggestions of this being like a Magdalene Laundry. It ends in the noblewoman's suicide, out of grief when she learns her child died two years earlier. In effect it denounces the shame and emotional cruelty which may run through life in a community whose piety is detached from its spiritual roots in the Gospel.
The third is about a bourgeois family squabbling over the legacy of a rich dying relative, talked into concealing his death and re-writing the will, so that his wealth doesn't go to a monastery. They are tricked by the street-wise father of a girl who is being wooed by a younger son of the family, and end up losing the prized assets they were fighting over, and the young couple inherit instead. It's hilariously funny and the behaviour of the greedy family members is played for laughs. The movement and interaction between them is superbly choreographed. I don't think I've ever heard so much laughing out loud throughout the hour long performance. It's a satire on human avarice, observed with great insight. What a performance, by everyone involved! At the curtain call, cast members donned their protest campaign tee shirts for their bows. The applause reassures them their audience doesn't approve of the threatened cut back in orchestra and chorus, forced by government reductions in arts subsidy.
We didn't have long to wait for a number six bus back to the city centre, nor for a 61 bus for the new bus station, so we were home just after eight for a light supper of pasta and pesto with salad.
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