Wagner at the weekend

Parsifal was pretty mind-blowing. Bum-numbing, too, of course, but I didn’t really mind as the music was so good.

I’m not entirely sure, with hindsight, that I ever had a clue what the production was trying to say, but there were a lot of striking stage pictures and musically things were absolutley top notch. My admiration for Stuart Skelton went up another level as he threw himself heart and soul (and frequently bodily as well) into things, armed with that huge and incredibly beautiful voice of his. To maintain such immense beauty even at that scale of volume is astonishing. To play a gawky boy when you are six-foot-odd and built like a - well, like a Wagnerian tenor - is pretty impressive too.

Iain Paterson’s Amfortas was searing and John Tomlinson’s Gurnemanz an anguished, patient, saintly figure - and vocally amazing, especially considering he must be well into his sixties. The three of them made the Kundry pale a little into the background at first, though she fought back. The orchestral playing was shattering.

I just wish I’d known want the heck the director was trying to say. I don’t have a problem with non-traditional productions; but I want them to be coherent; and this wasn’t.

Dreams odd and dreams odder

I dreamed last night that I was given a whole bunch of bicycle safety reflective dangly things. It seems too obvious, to say “This must be a dream about cycle safety…” so I guess it is about safety or caution or risk-taking in some other context. I’m still struggling to sort out what lay behind my dream on Friday night, which was a good deal weirder; it involved bondage (not of me, luckily) and marinated artichoke hearts, and someone I have never thought of in, um, that sort of context… The guy in question is a nice, courteous, friendly bloke of about my own age who is a mine of information about hothouse plants, and he’s perfectly presentable, but I’ve never looked at him going by and thought “Phwoar!”. I’m a bit baffled to have dreamed about him. Oddly enough, this morning he sent me a cheerful email with a beautiful picture of a sacred lotus attached. Spooky…

To add insult to injury (in a manner of speaking), I have been unable to shake the memory of this dream all weekend. Even during "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg"; through six and a half glorious hours of Wagner in the sweltering gallery of the Royal Albert Hall, even as I listened in awe and delight to Bryn Terfel and Christopher Purves being utterly, utterly wonderful, there in the back of my mind was this image of the, ahem, marinated artichoke scenario.

Am I in lust with X without ever having noticing it? Can the subconscious hanker after someone without the conscious mind realising? Did my brain pick this chap to symbolise something else? If so, what? And why bondage? – bondage is pretty extreme, even the, ahem ahem hem, clearly consensual bondage in the aforementioned dream.

I don’t need to wonder about the artichokes. I love artichokes. They’re one of my very favourite foods. If I were into kinky activities involving food I’d be a lot more likely to use marinated artichokes than chocolate body paint, which is sugary disgusting stuff…

Oh, this is all too much for me. I’m going to make a nice cup of green tea and get back to the chaos that is registering Community Groups…