If any of you opera lovers are devotees of the growing Twitter craze, here's a story to warm your hearts and exercise your minds.
The question is, how do you fit the plot of an entire opera into a tweet (for the uninitiated, you get the grand total of 140 characters).
A Canadian journalist has been running a competition to do precisely that, and attracted hundreds of entries. The winner, not content with doing a whole opera, went for doing the whole of Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Another outing to 20th/21st century opera, this time to Carlisle Floyd's 1955 opera Susannah, performed by Hampstead Garden Opera at the pub up the road (yes, really). Like La Cabeza del Bautista, which we saw in the rather grander surroundings of the Liceu at Barcelona (see my previous blog), this is a dark, dramatic work. Floyd takes a bleak biblical story of false witness, rape and abuse of power, and makes it even bleaker by surgically removing any attempt at redemption.
Coming as we do from City and technology backgrounds, it's fascinating to get an industry insider’s view of the world of opera. It’s also been unusual to see a conference including so many diverse disciplines, where you could find anything from heads of opera companies to creative directors, marketing people, administrators, media and broadcast folk, back-of-house technical crew and the occasional conductor and composer.
This blog comes to you from the classy surroundings of the Opera Europa conference, held this year at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. The place is quite magnificent: in the rebuild after a devastating fire in 1994, the architects have combined the highly gilt decorative splendour of a traditional 19th century opera house with all the technology and amenities of a modern theatre, in a space that is generous. Coming here was an experience not to be missed.
2008 saw the arrival of the Metropolitan Opera's MetPlayer service (pictured right), allowing you to watch opera in high definition video, on demand over the Internet. January 2009 saw the first broadcast from the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall, a similar concept although with licensing more geared to a live season than to a collection (pictured below). Hard disk drive costs are plummeting, allowing you to store a huge CD collection in excellent quality, and modern wide screen televisions can give near-cinema quality directly from a low cost PC. Streaming audio services like Spotify and the Naxos Music Library give access to enormous amount of classical repertoire. While there's been talk of home cinema (home theater if you're in the US) for several years now, the time to create a "home concert hall" is now on its way.
Late last year, the Berlin Phil launched its "Digital Concert Hall" with great fanfare. For the first time, they announced, the seasons's events of a major, internationally renowned orchestra are brought live into your living room over streamed Internet video.
The first performance went out on January 6th, with Simon Rattle conducting Brahms's Symphony no. 1, preceded by the Dvořák Slavonic Dance no. 8. I've just listened through to the Dvořák, which is available on their "concert archives".
I've written about Met Player before, but it's worth mentioning the latest performance that we've watched: Richard Strauss's Salome, with the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila.
I was drawn to seeing Salome by the description in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, where he describes the immense shock that it caused in polite Austrian society at its première in 1905. It rates as pretty strong stuff even today, particularly the necrophiliac scene at the end of Salome kissing the severed head of John the Baptist, and Ross gives a great explanation of how Strauss's musical language matches the shock level.
The "graphic novel" (what people of my age used to call a cartoon strip) is achieving more and more respectability these days. It's certainly moving away from being an item solely for children, especially in Japan where its "manga" form is hugely popular with all ages.
That said, I've seen it coming up in a couple of unlikely places in the last month - both opera and Internet technology - and been really impressed by the results.
Nearly a year on from starting Bachtrack, we keep on finding ever more improbable concert venues. It transpires that the main Blüthner piano showroom, a short stone's throw away from the uber-posh offices in London's Berkeley Square, puts on concerts once a fortnight or so. The concerts are played by aspiring young musicians, they are "by invitation" (in other words, you have to get in touch with Blüthner and ask to be put on their mailing list), and they're free - including the glass or two of wine provided on the house. The whole thing is a pleasantly sociable occasion.
We went to the Wigmore Hall on Saturday for a kids' concert put on by our friends at Cavatina: the Kungsbacka Trio, augmented by Laurence Power and Graham Mitchell, playing Schubert's Trout Quintet. It was a full performance of the whole quintet: what made it a kids' concert (apart from the audience) was the fact that the musicians preceded the main performance by teaching about the Quintet, using a pleasant story about young Franz going on a fishing trip. They adorned the story with various snatches of the music to explain to the children what to listen out for.
