A friend of a friend had an extra ticket to a pre-production performance of Rossini's 'Le Compte Ory', so I went to see it last Sunday evening. I would not have guessed that it was a dress rehearsal; it seemed to me that the company was throwing everything they had at the silly farce, and having a great time dancing, mugging, and singing incredibly well. The principals all had the ability to sing over the orchestra AND articulate all of the vocal ornaments that Rossini wrote. Some of the minor roles had very funny comic moments, and there was enough sexual innuendo and drunkenness to please anyone who enjoys such. I got a bit tired of the inevitable V-I chord progressions at every climax, and I don't understand why dinosaurs appeared at the end of Act 1, but on balance it was a lot of fun.
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Our host here in Bologna has a small terrace completely filled with cacti and succulents. One of these odd plants has a very strange flower (see the photo). It is quite hard to the touch, as if made of plastic or laminated, and has a disgusting smell. But it is beautiful in its odd way. My notes say that it is a stapelia variegata, or perhaps orbea variegata.
My pictures so far are kind of dull, but we passed some street musicians today near the Santo Stephan churches, and I recorded a bit of their music.
AIRPLANE, TRAIN, WALKING (Monday and Tuesday)
Our journey from home to Bologna went off without much trouble. I forgot my passport at home and had to go back for it, but we were in time to catch our plane, and everything else was pretty smooth. We flew into Dublin, and it was fun to hear Irish accents and some Irish language being spoken. After a layover we flew to Milan, caught a shuttle bus to the train station, and took the fast train to Bologna. Then we walked to a bookstore-cafe near the Two Towers and had a sandwich. Our friend Pietro met us there and, on his scooter, carried one of our bags to our apartment in Murri (south-east of the central part of Bologna). We walked from the towers to Murri, which was a lot of unaccustomed walking, but good for us. We met our hostess, Roberta, and had dinner at the apartment with her and Pietro and Cinzia. It was so good to see them again. Since we hadn't slept on the plane, we went to bed. WALKING, WALKING, WALKING (Wednesday) The following day we tried to register with the Questura (declare that we are residing in Italy). The confused-looking policemen directed us to an office across the street, which was, of course, closed for the day. We did a lot of shopping for electronics at Comet, then went to Iliad and bought SIM cards for our phones. We toured the neighborhood where we stayed last year, and went to Cinius to look at interesting beds. Then we walked back to the apartment. In the evening we went out to dinner with our friends Lynn and David, the pianists (and composer) couple who are performing our concert on November 6. The food was great, but by this time it was just TOO MUCH WALKING for one day. It is a 40-minute walk one way from the apartment to the center of Bologna, and we had made three round-trips! However, it is wonderful to be in Bologna again. We like it here. CRASHING and SALA BORSA (Thursday) We spent much of Thursday napping and talking to Roberta, who is a former singer and now teaches voice in addition to another administrative day job. We also spent some time getting our new Italian SIM cards to work as hot spots for our computers. In the evening we went to the Sala Borsa library where we are volunteering to speak English to people who need to practice their English skills. There was some kind of miscommunication, so we re-registered as volunteers and had an apertivo and dinner at F.G. Pasquini, near the Comet store. We strolled home, enjoying the nice weather and the sights. THE QUESTURA AGAIN AND ACCADEMIA FILARMONICA (Thursday) Our second try to register with the police as a failure; we had the right office but were now told that we should register online. We hope that works. Italian bureaucracy has a reputation for being nightmarishly complex and hard to understand. We are beginning to grasp the truth of that. We stopped at the Accademia Filarmonica and had a lovely time talking to Laura Maccanti, the segreteria, a very energetic, knowledgeable person with excellent English, thank goodness. The Sala Mozart has a very good piano and the acoustics are perfect; I could not find a dead spot anywhere in the audience area. We have decided to return to Bologna in 2023 to see our friends and see the city again in a slightly different season of the year. We will be there during most of October and the beginning of November. A CONCERT One of the reasons we are going is to present a concert in Bologna. Last January we became friendly with Lynn Rice-See and David See. Both are professional pianists, and David is a composer. We had connected online through the NYC choral group C4; the Boston choral group Triad was a member of the C4 network. STRADE BOLOGNESI and FANTASY ON CENERENTOLA After we returned from Bologna last February I wrote a suite of piano pieces that celebrate Bologna. I named most of the pieces for streets in the historic center, and named the suite "Strade Bolognesi' (streets of Bologna). I sent these to Lynn and David, and they got interested in presenting my pieces in Bologna. David composed a "Fantasy on Cenerentola" (using tunes from the Rossini opera) for 4-hand piano, which will be a humorous and rousing conclusion to the concert. Lynn will play my pieces, and Lynn and David will perform "Cenerentola." See the poster below for date, time, and location. We hope to have the concert recorded (audio, and we hope, video) so that we can share the event with those who can't attend in person.
OUR PLANS We are excited to be going back to Bologna. We plan to do a lot of walking under the porticoes, seeing our friends, and we plan to again volunteer to help people learn English at the Sala Borsa library. We may take a side trip to Siena to see a friend who is teaching there. I am sure that a month will feel short - there is so much to do! I have gone to conferences and even ComicCon in the past, but Arte Fierra Bologna is the first art fair that I have seen. I spent much of the day there on Friday, February 3. Directions to the entrance were oddly lacking in the publicity for the event, so I naturally started off in the wrong direction from my bus stop. I was rescued by a mother and daughter from Modena; the daughter seemed to know where she was going, so I tagged along. It is interesting to compare the experience of Arte Fierra with a visit to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence a few years ago. In the Uffizi I felt glutted and drained, as if I had no more attention to give. At Arte Fierra, I felt better at the end of the day, more energized. There could be many reasons for this, but I think one important reason is that contemporary art often requires less attention. Often it is less detailed; its 'idea' is either obvious or deliberately hidden. You don't have to examine it closely to know whether it interests you. After entering the fair I stood around at the first of the many booths and asked myself "why are you here?" I decided that the answer was "to find out what I like!" to choose from the smorgasbord and later try to discover common threads in what I liked. I wrote down the names of about a dozen artists, and I took a few pictures of things that I wanted to remember. My favorite artwork in the show was a blue abstract painting by Claudio Verna. I did not get a picture of it, unfortunately, because it was in a small alcove and it was hard to get near it. Apparently Verna was wandering around Arte Fierra - he is 80 years old or so and still painting. I also liked some scrappy little cartoonish pictures by Gustavo Foppiani and some soft-edged abstractions by Mirko Baricchi. There were lots of well-known artists in the booths, too: Baechler, DeChirico, Severini, Moore. I liked the large, fragmentary neo-classical heads by Igor Mittoraj. So I think I know a bit more about what I like now: beautiful textures and fantasy. I am posting here a collage of sounds that I recorded when I heard something interesting and had time to think about recording.
Here is a list of the sounds, in the sequence that you hear when the collage plays: 1 - Bells from a neighboring church that we hear every day many times. We can open our apartment window and hear them coming down an inner courtyard of our building. 2 - Sounds of a protest that we heard. The local teachers were protesting right in front of our apartment, because the offices of the school system are across the street from us. The reasons for the protest seem to be about respect and high-handed behavior by the administration. 3 - Some Gregorian chant that we hear in a church early in our stay in Bologna (we think). Both of us recorded it (I think). We don't remember where! 4 - Bells at the ancient church of San Stephano, Bologna. I only caught the end of this. The bells were very loud and a bit showy, I thought. 5 - A bird on a rooftop that we heard on a street one night. We didn't see it, so we don't know what it was. 6 - This mercifully short sound is something that I heard in the bathroom of the museum of the history of the canals of Bologna. 7 - Bells of the Neonato Baptistry in Ravenna. 8 - Busy birds in a yard next to Sant Apollinare in Classe. Yesterday I went out to a laundromat on Via Inerio to wash my bedding. The tiny washing machine in our apartment wouldn't handle the volume of my load, and there is no dryer. On the way there I got some cash at an ATM, but the denominations were too large to use in the laundromat, so I put my load in to wash using coins, then went to a convenience store nearby (Frutta Inerio) and bought some cookies and a drink. The proprietor spoke good English and asked me where I was from after I spoke to him in Italian. Is it my midwestern accent that gives me away? The instructions in the laundromat were not too difficult to understand, but I couldn't figure out how to start the dryer, and an older man helped me. When I struggled to fold my sheet and duvet cover, a stout, blonde woman took pity on me and we folded them together. Bookstores are like catnip to me, and there a many in Bologna, especially in the university area. I stopped in three of them on my way home, wishing that I could read Italian at something resembling normal speed. The last bookstore I stopped in (Modo Info Shop, Via Mascarella) had a definite counterculture vibe; it also had a few of the Penguin Classics, and I bought two, How to Use Your Enemies by Baltesar Gracian, and Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls, by Marco Polo. About an hour after I got home, I discovered that my wallet was missing. Panic! I rushed back to Modo Info Shop. The clerk took one look at me and handed me the wallet with both hands, as if it were a holy object. We had a laugh over it. So there is a moral to this little narrative. People in Bologna have been uniformly kind and friendly to us. Since we emerged from Covid isolation and the Christmas holidays, we have also made a lot of friends. We are impressed by how open and hospitable the people in this city seem to be. Modena is only a 30-minute train ride from Bologna, and what we saw of it looked interesting and attractive. I did not take a systematic set of pictures, but see below. At the opera, we were seated in the Ducal box, dead center in the lowest balcony. We tried to behave appropriately, as Dukes and Duchesses should. The opera was Pelleas and Melisande, as I wrote about in the last post. I took a few pictures of the theater, but none of the performance. We went to see the opera Mirandolina on January 15 in Bologna. The libretto is adapted from a comedy by Goldoni, and the music is by Czech composer Boluslav Martinu. Since the Teatro Communale is being renovated (for the next 3-4 years), the opera was presented in another venue, a 10-minute walk for us instead of 2 minutes! Unfortunately, the Teatro Manzoni does not have a pit, so the singers had to negotiate a narrow stage area in front of the the orchestra. Martinu's rather beefy orchestra and fulsome orchestration meant that the excellent singers were often overpowered.
You might assume that a libretto drawn from a successful playwright like Goldoni would be a safe bet for a composer. In this case, the libretto is weak, and it sinks the opera. The title character is a woman innkeeper who is in love with another member of her class, Fabrizio; he happens to work for her. A pair of male aristocrats are in love with Mirandolina (or simply lust after her). She encourages and discourages them, trying to make Fabrizio jealous and (maybe) propose to her(?) The trouble with this is threefold: a) there really is nothing to keep Fabrizio and Mirandolina apart, b) the Mirandolina model of woman is a sexist construction and is vastly outdated, and c) there is not enough stage action - it isn't a farce, so everyone stands around doing silly, distracting things which aren't related to the spine of the story. Also, advice to opera composers: don't start the opera with a scene in which two characters talk about a third character for 10 minutes, then have the main character wander onstage for no discernible reason. The music was lively and sometimes funny, and the musical performance was very good. I especially enjoyed an orchestral set-piece which formed a prelude to the third act. It's a bit odd to have a kind of overture in the middle, but it was fun. Last night we went to see Pelleas and Melisande in Modena, at the Pavarotti-Freni theater, a real opera house with a pit, which meant that the voices always stood out clearly. The singers were again excellent, though we didn't like the vocal habits of the Melisande very much. It hadn't occurred to me before last night that Melisande is pregnant throughout the later scenes, and I'm glad that the staging showed that. The acting, costumes, and sets were appropriately atmospheric, though every major character wore a white wig, even Pelleas! We didn't like the wigs. There was also a scene of gratuitous nudity during an orchestral interlude after the first scene. We think we understand why they did it, but the nudity was completely unnecessary to the plot point. Carping aside, it was wonderful to see this most singular and original opera. It really is moving at the end when, in his grief, Arkel sums up the life and character of Melisande. In fact, in this production, Arkel seems to be the moral/spiritual foundation of the dark world, while Pelleas at times seems to be breaking free into daylight. And Debussy's music just can't be beat. I had forgotten how much fast music there is; it is not all languid languishing in the gloom. It's a great opera. |
Nancy Rexford
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