Yesterday evening about twenty of us took a train to Poltava. Not a place I’d heard of which exposes my ignorance. I hadn’t heard of Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa either; there is a connection.
Even Wexford has shied away from Offenbach’s operetta, Robinson Crusoë. It has rarely been performed since it premiered in Paris in 1867. In fact it ran for only thirteen performances and then slumbered like Rip Van Winkle until it was awakened (woke?) at the Camden Festival in 1973.
Some twelve years ago I was invited to a Sunday lunch party in Marylebone and sat beside Elena Roger. Sunday was her only day off so it was flattering that she was prepared to spend it with my friends and me.
It is enjoyable to invite friends to something. The criteria are: it should be something they could reasonably be expected to enjoy, it should be something they might not do themselves, it should be something I can afford to pay for.
The Queen of Spades at Covent Garden has a lot of super music and is an interesting production by Norwegian director Stefan Herheim. The road to operatic hell is paved with ‘interesting’ productions.
A few events I went to in November went unrecorded here. The rarely performed five act version of Don Carlo, sung in Italian, put on by Fulham Opera for starters.