March before lockdown, 2020

March 2020 before lockdown – as doom approached, the main things I went to in March musically were the Opera North Marriage of Figaro and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene. I enjoyed the Weill piece a lot. It’s a kind of missing link between Porgy and Bess, and Bernstein/Sondheim – still with some of the Weimar Republic ‘Cabaret’ sort of sounds, but also with something more bluesy and ‘American’. Some very good singers – including Robert Hayward, who I’ve heard singing Wotan…the story was a bit silly but the staging made the best of it. The Opera North Marriage of Figaro on March 14^th was my final live musical event before lockdown, and it will probably be 18 months to two years before I see anything of comparable size and scope again live. Although the audience was already thinning out  – various cautious people understandably feeling they were vulnerable and ought to stay away, and despite the fact that the volunteer attendant sitting near to me had a racking  cough and a streaming cold and indeed might have been suffering from the onset of Covid, I did enjoy this – sung in English, 70% of which was understandable, lots of laughs, good singers and also a conductor/orchestra who got the right spring into the music – fastish but not gabbled. The orchestra was  conducted by James Hendry , who I’ve never heard of and I hadn’t heard of any of the singers –  Irish soprano Máire, Flavein (Countess), Welsh soprano Fflur Wyn (Susanna), Dutch baritone Quirijin de Land (the Count), and, from New Zealand, baritone Philip Rhodes (Figaro).This had a real company feel to it. It was broadly 1920’s in décor but that seemed to work fine – with and not against the music. A great event to see and hear before embarking on the bleakness of lockdown