The Idle Woman’s 5th Birthday

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5th Birthday Cake

Today I am five years old! Not personally, you understand, but as a blog. So crack open the champagne and have a slice of cake with me. I can’t remember any more what it was  like not to write a blog: not to have a way of recording and thinking about the books I read and the films, plays and concerts I saw. Now, whenever I come across something wonderful, my first thought on finishing is to share my enthusiasm for it, and to hope that others will come to share their own thoughts and recommendations.

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Divine Comedies: Christoph Willibald Gluck and Thomas Arne

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Divine Comedies: Bampton Classical Opera

(Bampton Classical Opera, 22 July 2016)

Philemon & Baucis (Gluck)  ·  The Judgement of Paris (Arne)

On a warm summer evening, the village of Bampton in Oxfordshire is almost indecently beautiful. The golden stone glows in the sunlight, the leaves look even greener against blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds, and flocks of swifts dart at dusk around the church tower. But one thing sets the village apart from its Cotswold rivals. Every summer, the Deanery garden is transformed by an outdoor stage and Bampton Classical Opera put on productions of lesser-known Baroque music. Past years have featured a wealth of tantalising rarities and this season saw the performance of two one-act operas, given the overall heading Divine Comedies: first, Gluck’s Philemon and Baucis and, second, Arne’s Judgement of Paris.

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The Grace of Kings (2015): Ken Liu

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★★★★

The Dandelion Dynasty: Book I

Choosing books by their covers has sometimes come back to bite me, but not in this case. I’ve wanted to read this novel ever since I saw the simple and very elegant cover design, and the wait was worth it. Although the book has inevitably been dubbed the ‘Wuxia Game of Thrones‘, that doesn’t do just to its dense and labyrinthine originality. Political ambition is interwoven with martial glory, technological experiment and cunning, as two very different but equally brilliant men vie to define the future of a crumbling empire, and the gods themselves are tempted to break their own laws and interfere in the affairs of men. Indeed, so much happens in this book that attempting a summary is doomed to failure, but I’ll give it a go.

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Idomeneo (1780): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Mozart: Idomeneo

★★★

(Trinity Laban at Blackheath Halls, London, 14 July 2015)

This is another post from the deepest, darkest depths of the drafts folder, as you can see from the date I saw this opera. Admittedly there’s limited point in posting on something more than a year after I saw it, but the post was almost complete and it would be a shame not to use it. Besides, it can still be interesting to see how different productions approach the same opera. And Trinity Laban’s performance at Blackheath Halls was a particularly intriguing choice last summer, because only eight months earlier we’d had another, much higher profile Idomeneo in London, which hadn’t exactly received rave reviews. It was a brave decision to put on another version of this challenging opera, so soon after it had come back to bite the team at Covent Garden.

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Ercole Amante (1662): Francesco Cavalli

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Cavalli: Ercole Amante

★★★

(Concerto Köln and Chorus of De Nederlandse Opera, with Ivor Bolton, 2009)

We haven’t had a properly weird opera in a while, have we? We’ve had imaginative and updated concepts, but nothing sufficiently mind-boggling to take its place in the Pantheon of Odd alongside the shark and the flying skeletal fish. But fear not, my friends. I have a new addition for those hallowed halls: Francesco Cavalli’s Ercole Amante, designed for the stage by David Alden. Sit back and marvel.

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The King’s Pleasure (1969): Norah Lofts

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★★★★

I thought twice about buying this, mainly because of the title, which implied an historical romance full of heaving bosoms and ripped bodices. Plus, did I really need another take on the overly familiar tale of Henry VIII, Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn? But I’ve heard a lot about Norah Lofts over the years and so did buy it, and to my relief it was a very pleasant surprise. Thoughtful and intelligent, it was grounded in the period mindset in such a way that I never felt myself sinking into a quagmire of historical exposition.

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Shadowplay (2014): Laura Lam

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★★★

Micah Grey: Book II

Some months after reading the captivating Pantomime, I discovered that the second volume in Lam’s Micah Grey trilogy was actually available for Kindle after all. Longing for something light and gripping, and unable to exercise restraint, I devoured the entire thing on Sunday in my haste to find out more about Micah, his history and his strange, beguiling world. Please bear in mind that of course this post will include spoilers for the first book in the series, so proceed with care if you haven’t read it.

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Broken Faith (2015): Toby Clements

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★★★½

Kingmaker: Book II

It’s been over two years since I read Winter Pilgrims, the first book in Toby Clements’s Kingmaker series. I always meant to continue with the story, but what with one thing and another I only got round to borrowing the second book from the library the other day. After such a long gap it took a while to catch up with the plot and characters but, once I’d found my bearings, I discovered that Clements’s sequel has the same brutal honesty as his first. Eschewing grand speeches and noble solars, this novel plunges the reader deep into the experiences of ordinary men among the grit and misery of the Wars of the Roses.

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The Chimes (2015): Anna Smaill

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★★★★

When I asked to review this book, it was a shot in the dark. I knew nothing about it, nor the author, nor that it had been longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. I was simply interested by the blurb’s description of its world: a future England, post-apocalyptic and dystopian, with the crowded hubbub of London at its heart. It turned out to be a gem: one of the most original concepts I’ve encountered for a very long time, and a story told with a profound sensitivity to the musical quality of words.

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The Wicked Boy (2016): Kate Summerscale

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★★★½

The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

This is the third book I’ve read by Kate Summerscale, after Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace and the excellent Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which I haven’t yet got round to posting about. Like her earlier books, it is a vivid recreation of 19th-century history based on dramatic cases heard in the Victorian courts and reported in the press and, like Mr Whicher, it focuses in on a horrific act of murder. Unlike Mr Whicher, however, this is not a whodunnit. The ‘who’ is clearly and frankly admitted from the very beginning. Summerscale’s investigations seek to understand more about the ‘why’ and to unpick the historical context of the crime and the way in which it was reported by the rapacious press.

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