To find there but the road back home again

[sovay]

And then last night I slept ten hours. I hope I haven't broken something. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: Unleash the Archers, "Northwest Passage." Otherwise known as a female-led power metal cover of Canada's unofficial national anthem, wherein Stan Rogers is surprisingly well served by blast beats. I kind of want to hear them take on "Barrett's Privateers." I like the many-worlds band-tour video, too.

2. I knew of several female scientists of the Manhattan Project, but somehow I had missed Elizabeth Rona until her insistence on buying her own PPE—and surviving more than one radioactive laboratory explosion because of it—came up relevantly elsenet. I'd love to get hold of her professional memoir, but I suspect that was a project for the days when I had access to academic libraries.

3. Courtesy of moon_custafer: an important PSA about left-wing anti-intellectualism. Includes a nice recommendation for an Egyptology blog.

4. To be honest, since he had been involved in the premieres of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) and War Requiem (1961), I had no idea until his obituary that harpist Osian Ellis had still been around, but I was absolutely delighted to learn he had also played for The Goon Show (1951–60).

5. Courtesy of spatch: regarding the death of Rush Limbaugh, it's time once again for these valuable words.

Comments

[sovay]

That's the only version of Northwest Passage I've heard, so as far as I'm concerned that's it for you, Canada.

My work here is done!

Predictably I look at Unleash The Archers and retcon that as a radio soap. "An everyday story of metal folk."

I bet there'd be an audience for it if you did, too.

I really wish "left-wing anti-intellectualism" was a contradiction in terms.

I know.

I may've asked this before: but have you got any recommendations for where I could get started with Britten? I really want to find some English-language opera I could get into.

You personally I would try first on Peter Grimes (1945), which Britten wrote for his lover Peter Pears—of the dry white tenor—a kind of nineteenth-century maritime noir of a fisherman on the Suffolk coast who may be a serial murderer of his apprentices or may have lost one after the other through terrible accident and either way when the tide of his community turns against him, even a man who hasn't been a notorious rough-tempered outsider and dreamer can't swim strongly enough to breast it. It's sea-soaked, ambiguous, troubled and troubling and I love it. To my knowledge there's no recording of the original cast, but there is a very fine one from 1958 with Pears and Claire Watson and the rest of the Royal Opera House with Britten himself conducting. I've never seen it performed live and would love to.

The Britten operas I have seen live are The Turn of the Screw (1954) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960). I described the former once as "a six-person rite enacted in the rigorous drag of a nightmare . . . the sense of trapped and repeating time which the twelve-tone theme and its fifteen variations build into each scene: the past has not stopped happening and there is nowhere within the music to go" and I basically stand by that; it's slipperier and more hauntological than the original novella and plays significantly with Yeats' "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." You can get the premiere cast recording and I recommend that you do, because David Hemmings in his first career as a boy soprano sings the role of Miles. I don't appear to own a recording of the latter, which is slightly silly because I have actually seen it twice, once at the Yale School of Music in 2005 and once at the Boston Lyric Opera in 2011; the latter production generated, years after the fact, my poem "A Vixen When She Went to School." What I like best about that one is the casting of Puck as a non-singer—a tumbler and, in the first production I saw, did tricks with fire—and of Oberon as a countertenor, although then I feel Britten really missed a trick by not writing his Titania as a contralto instead of a coloratura; she and Oberon should be equally reversed from human expectations. There is a live recording of the premiere conducted by the composer and I really should just pick it up one of these days.

I could have sworn I had a recording of his Albert Herring (1947), but if so it must be in storage, not on my hard drive; it's a sort of rustic screwball comedy concerning a market town's springtime crisis when the only virgin suitable to be crowned Queen of the May is the greengrocer's shy assistant, the eponymous Albert Herring. I've never seen it staged and would like to; it's always sounded like if done right it's a very funny gender-bending winner. I don't appear to own a recording of Death in Venice (1973), either, although I have a distinct memory of listening to one. Billy Budd (1951) is similarly famous and I have only heard excerpts from it. Everything else except for the one-act children's opera Noye's Fludde (1958) I am a washout on.

It is not an opera, but I love Britten's War Requiem (1962), which I would recommend you approach first in the form of Derek Jarman's 1989 film. I have been trying and failing to write about it for years. The closest I've managed is a comment recently to jesse_the_k: "essentially a feature music video for the Britten requiem which I have loved since college, a fantasia on the war experience and poetry of Wilfred Owen illuminating the 1963 recording with Galina Vishnevskaya, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Peter Pears; I try to write about it and I get ghost poems instead." It's on Kanopy, but I don't know if that's an option outside of the U.S.

As far as other operas in English are concerned, longtime favorites of mine are Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1946) and The Consul (1950) and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), any of which I am happy to expound further or shut up on. I know I have a bad case of the twentieth century here, but I have utterly failed to find purchase on John Adams even when he's writing about Oppenheimer. I loved Zhou Long and Cerise Lim Jacobs' Madame White Snake (2010), which I was lucky enough to see in its premiere by Opera Boston before it won the Pulitzer Prize, but I can't find a recording to point to. I enjoyed Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) when I saw a concert version by Emmanuel Music in 2011, but it left me in the weird position of preferring the libretto and the performances to the music itself. Oh! Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse (1980) is brilliant. God damn, I miss live theater.

[kenjari]

I have seen Albert Herring live, courtesy of Indiana University's opera department, and it was hilarious. The production didn't go in much for gender-bending as I recall, but it did include some delightful absurdities - like a dance number with a disco ball despite the late 19th century setting. Adding to the hilarity, outside the venue I encountered a ticket scalper. For an opera.

[sovay]

I have seen Albert Herring live, courtesy of Indiana University's opera department, and it was hilarious.

Nice! I am glad to know it. Also that it is the sort of opera that can stand a disco ball.

Adding to the hilarity, outside the venue I encountered a ticket scalper. For an opera.

That's beautiful.