A quick trip down to London to see Verdi's "Il Trovatore" at the Royal Opera House.
An uneventful journey on the 15.12, arriving at 16.27, followed by a short ride south on the Picadilly Live to Covent Garden tube station. A stroll around the area to kill time, and then to dinner.
Having enjoyed our first experience of eating at the Tower Bridge branch of The Real Greek a few weeks earlier we had decided to eat at the Covent Garden branch on Long Acre. Our first impression was that this venue was much smaller than the one at Tower Bridge, with small tables packed in tightly; by the time we left, the place was heaving, with all tables occupied.
For the most part, we ordered the same as we had at Tower Bridge, though on this occasion Amanda swapped her Chicken Skewer for Chicken Monastiraki - marinated chicken thighs served with tzatziki, fresh tomatoes, onion, and Greek olive oil. A combination of hunger and forgetfulness meant that we failed to get any pictures of the food, but my empty plate was evidence of a meal much enjoyed.
Out, and a stroll to the Royal Opera House, where we purchased a programme and managed to nab a couple of seats in the foyer to watch the world go by.
Before the opera started, and during the interval, we struck up a conversation with the American couple sitting to my right; it was clear that they were trying to fit as much "culture" as possible into their vacation and we soon established that they too had been to see Richard II at the Bridge Theatre at around the same time that we had. We compared notes on that, and then shared our feelings about "Il Trovatore" - he in particular thought it an egregious mistake to try to leaven the production with injections of humour. This in turn led to a discussion of productions of Shakespeare that we had seen at Stratford, with me expressing similar unease at the introduction of "modern" humour into 16th C plays. As our conversation wound down at the end of the interval it transpired that he had once lived in Leicester for a short time when he was a student, 50-odd years ago...
So - what of the opera?
In July 1907, George Bernard Shaw, writing in The Nation (an early forerunner of The New Statesman), noted that:
"Il Trovatore... ...has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigor, and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity. It is swift in action, and perfectly homogeneous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest: (my emphasis) the appeal is to the instincts and to the senses all through. If it allowed you to think for a moment it would crumble into absurdity like the garden of Klingsor".
so no-one could say that we didn't know what we were in for - and so it proved. The plot IS bonkers. On the other hand the staging was 'interesting' and the singing superb. We both had favourite moments: Amanda loves the Act II "Anvil Chorus", whereas the Act IV "Miserere" always makes me just a little misty eyed, as it was one of my Dad's somewhat eclectic choices of lullabies that he sang to us as toddlers...
The reviews below provide excellent summaries and further information.
Out, to fight our way through the throngs attempting to catch the tube at Covent Garden - one of the very few stations in central London without escalators. We opted to use one of the four lifts down to the platform in preference to the spiral staircase with 193 steps... In the event, we had to try two different lifts, after a woman in front of us mistakenly thought that she could control her claustrophobia, had a full-blown panic attack in the lift and refused to let anyone else (including us) enter it, despite it being designed to hold 56 and only being about 60% full. My sympathy for her plight was severely limited, as a few minutes earlier I had seen her and her husband in the Ticket Hall explaining her problem to a member of TfL staff, who had advised them to walk 300m to Leicester Square, where she could have used an escalator...
Home on the 23.35 and bed by around 02.10.
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