A Spanish opera début for WNO

Another day of summer humidity. Clare went off early to a meditation workshop at Ararat Baptist Church on Whitchurch Common, leaving me to cook lunch. Having prepared chorizo y haber tapas yesterday, my task was to make a prawn, spinach and mushroom risotto. I lacked white wine to use, so first went to visit Tesco's to buy some, and spotted a bag of shallot onions to bring back and use. They are small and fiddly to prepare, but I like the flavour. M4 traffic through Newport was so slow it took Kath and Anto an extra hour to arrive. I drove to Whitchurch to fetch Clare at one and they arrived just after I returned. Both the chorizo versions met with approval. Disappointingly the risotto was slightly overcooked. I'm more used to cooking paella rice than the risotto kind.

After lunch we went for a walk down to the river. The water at Blackweir Bridge was busy with dozens of children playing. There was a Traveller family having a good time. One of their horses was in the river and another on the bank, being made a fuss of. It was good to see. As we walked down the path that leads to the river, between us we picked up two dozen discarded plastic bottles and cans in four hundred yards, most of them dropped along the edge of the games pitches yesterday evening or this morning. The few ill space rubbish bins were not full, having been emptied at tea time yesterday.

At six, Kath drove us to the Millennium Centre to join other guests at an opera friends' reception and talk by WNO artistic director Aidan Laing about this evening's Cardiff première of the opera 'Ainadamar' by Argentinian author Osvaldo Golijov. We were entertained with wine and nibbles in the backstage area where rehearsals had been carried out, honoured by the presence of the Spanish Consul, and the renowned artistic director of the opera, choreographer Deborah Colker.

It's set around the murder of Frederico Garcia Lorca at the start of the Spanish Civil war, reputedly at a place outside Granada called 'Ainadamar' meaning 'Well of Tears'. It looks back to the murder in Granada  of Mariana Pineda, an early 19th century female champion of libertarian thinking, about whom Lorca had written a play. The actress Margarita Xirgu who had played her part, fled Spain after Lorca's death and continued to play Mariana in memory of Lorca in Latin American theatres. Nuria, her protegée is told the story, representing young inheritors of creative artistic freedom. 

It's a powerful piece of theatre incorporating flamenco dancing and canciónes, with stunning use of lights and visual projection in place of scenery. Striking use is made of projected quotations from the speeches of extreme nationalist politicians and generals, urging the extermination of socialist republican enemies. I have seen all these in print, this last week, reading 'Battle for Spain'. None is this is fictional. It reveals the kind of irrational hatred which populist demagogues can stir up, when power without accountability is wielded in a corrupt unjust society.

The singing was outstanding. Lorca was played by Hannah Hipp, a contralto with a powerful versatile voice, sounding very much like a man's in her lower range. It was only when she soared effortlessly to her high notes without breaking into falsetto that the ambiguity was dispelled. Nuria was sung by Julieth Lozano Rolong, the Colombian soprano winner of the audience vote prize in 'Cardiff Singer of the World' this year.

The opera lasts just eighty minutes with no intermission. It's relentlessly intense holding attention, start to finish. It's about the costliness of claiming freedom, freedom to be creative, freedom to be oneself, more than it is about political, social and economic freedom. It's also about the true prophetic vocation and how it lives on through stories told of heroic people and the sacrifices they make.

We were home by nine fifteen, sitting in on the patio in the dark, drinking wine, eating nuts and fruit, enjoying the mild night air, still thrilled by the experience shared by the four of us. All, late to bed after a wonderful evening out.

How vulnerable we are

It was truly dreadful to wake up this morning to the news about the murderous attack on people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice last night. I spent much of the day following the news, realising how vulnerable hundreds of thousands of public gatherings are across the continent. Those who are murderously insane or just purely wicked in the name of their ideology, care nothing for their own lives, only for the lives they want to destroy. They can be impossible to spot or to stop, no matter how good criminal intelligence gathering networks may be. It's down to the training and discipline of the forces law and order to expect the unexpected, and respond in the moment. 

It's dreadful to contemplate that failure or success in such attacks is down to bad or good luck. Video footage showed that before the killer went on his destructive rampage a few traffic police risked their lives trying to stop the lorry, but to no avail. It's hard to imagine what those brave defenders must be feeling now, having done their utmost. 

In the end, I made myself stop watching the news and go for a walk. I went into town, initially with the intention of photographing the two bridges that cross the riu Servol, but once I'd done that, I kept walking to the south side town boundary, as far as the Romanian Orthodox church beside the N430a, which I visited back in September 2012. Then I walked to the sea, and returned along the coast road. I covered all of 10km, my longest walk so far. It's good to feel fit enough for this, heat notwithstanding.

After crossing the riu Servol bridge on the way back, I noticed for the first time a fenced plot of land by the side of the road among the houses. It was empty, except for a small concrete clad building in one corner with a metal door. 

There's no notice on the fence, either to say what this is, nor even to tell you to keep out. Someone mentioned recently Vinaros still had an historical remnant of Civil War time military installations, but didn't say where, and I've been looking along the coast to no avail so far. If this building is of military provenance, its windows aren't the right shape for a defensive building housing guns. Although close to the coast road, it's two hundred metres from the sea. So I'm wondering if it was a communications post, well behind front line defences. All I need now is a local historian to check this out with.

   

Lunch and an evening exhibition

Michael and Pamela took me out lunch today at L'Antic Moli, one of their favourite restaurants outside of St Rafael del riu on the road to La Senia. This old mill building has been interestingly renovated and expanded, and has an excellent varied menu. I had braised pork cheek and mushrooms with a seafood 'swiss roll' to start with, consisting of minced morcels of fish and raisins, wrapped in a thin layer of a sweet brioche. Quite original. Nice wine too, a Catalunyan vin negre of deep dark colour.

On the way there, at the end of morning, I noticed many fruit pickers at work in the orchards alongside the road. As Michael pointed out, this is the time for harvesting Clementines and Tangerines to bring to market for Christmas. Oranges get picked later, in January. At the moment the former are present on fruit stalls in abundance, and they're cheap as well as deliciously fresh.

In the late afternoon, I walked into Vinaros to savour the evening atmosphere. As the sun sets the skies fill momentarily with tens of thousands of starlings, regrouping before heading to their roosting place for the night. They look like a dark cloud of locusts, swirling in exquisite aerial forms, then they leave as quickly as they appear.

Crowds of kids come out of school at five, then the streets wake up. By six they are busy with shoppers for the next three hours. The number of toy shops in the town centre is remarkable, as well as shops selling children's wear generally. It's a family oriented town in many ways.

In one of the streets there's a 17th century restored nobleman's town house, called the Caixa de Vinaros, which serves as a town museum with an interest in its economic history, displaying photographs and artifacts to do with its agrarian, maritime and industrial past. There's a very fine display of model ships from different periods of regional history. The model maker was there, chatting with the custodian and we got talking. Then he gave me a personal tour of his collection, which was an interesting challenge to my primitive Spanish, but most enjoyable.

The top two floors of the house are given over to an exhibition of paintings by Antoni Miro, an artist who lives in the town of Alcoy, north of Alicante. During the Civil War, a hospital was set up in his home town to treat the wounded. It was funded by Swedish and Norwegian supporters of the Republic. The paintings on display tell the story of the hospital. They are based on photographs taken at the time, made up into large lithographs, tinted in reds, oranges and yellow republican colours, with the faces painted in human flesh tones to take away the sense of abstraction attached to old enlarged photos, not always well defined or in focus. An interesting interpretative device for a powerful narrative about solidarity.

I asked if I could buy a couple of the booklets explaining the exhibition and was told they were for giving away. Free culture and history!  This gives me two more presents I can mail out from here. Pity I didn't take one for myself as well. Sadly there's nothing on Miro's website about this exhibition of his works completed in 2012. The Caixa de Vinaros is an unusual civic asset to say the least.