Pantomime (2013): Laura Lam

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★★★ ½

Micah Grey: Book I

I can’t quite remember how this book ended up on my Kindle, but I suspect it was another Goodreads recommendation. I’ve always enjoyed novels about theatre and performance, and this one promised something along the lines of The Night Circus: blending the sleight-of-hand of the circus with a more mysterious, elemental kind of magic. I freely confess that the ‘young adult’ designation put me off reading it for some time: nothing but a silly prejudice of mine; and one that I regretted as I was drawn into the story.

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The Goldfinch (2013): Donna Tartt

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★★★★ ½

To say that The Goldfinch is a good book, now, feels rather superfluous. Everyone has already read it and written about it and the most surprising thing is that it took me so long to read it. But its size was daunting and I’m always slightly put off by a book during its moment of high fashion, when it crowds in on you from every bestseller table and ‘must read’ list. This weekend, having to take two unplanned cross-country train journeys, I grabbed the closest thing to hand that would get me through four hours of the British rail network. That just happened to be a dogeared copy of The Goldfinch that I’d snaffled from the informal lending library at work.

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L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643): Claudio Monteverdi

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Poppea Norway (7)

★★

(Norwegian National Opera 2010, conducted by Alessandro De Marchi)

I’d been itching to see this production of Poppea for some time, ever since stumbling across some clips of Tim Mead’s E pur io torno on YouTube. The clips showed a bare, stripped-back set and a very striking use of colour, and the cast list looked promising. So on Saturday night, after a rather draining couple of days, I settled down to lose myself in one of my favourite operas. As you’ll be able to deduce from the rating, it wasn’t quite the treat it was meant to be.

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Three Days in Berlin

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Museumsinsel Berlin

Last week I was sent to Berlin for a few days on business, which meant that I was finally able to knock several major museums off my ‘to do’ list. I’d only been to Berlin once before, as part of a sixth form trip, during which our programme took us to the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie and Wansee but signally failed to consider anything pre-1933. In desperation, during a couple of hours’ free time when all the other girls went shopping, I begged my teacher and a hapless friend to come with me to the Gemäldegalerie, and my abiding memory of the entire school trip is standing in front of Caravaggio’s Amor Victorious, uncertain whether to be scandalised or delighted.

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The Story of a New Name (2012): Elena Ferrante

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Nothing would delight me more than being able to give you a picture of Elena Ferrante, but it’s a pseudonym and no one knows who she is

★★★★ ½

The Neapolitan Novels: Book II

The first installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels moved me deeply and there was no doubt I’d continue with the series. For various reasons this week has been challenging and so yesterday afternoon, on a whim, I bought the second book and have spent a few hours here and there absorbed afresh in Ferrante’s compelling world, by turns painfully familiar and shockingly alien. As in the first novel, the characters have a presence and reality which means one can’t comfortably dismiss them as fictional. Once again, this book has the charge of thinly fictionalised autobiography: nostalgic, fearless and merciless, a forensic dissection of the anatomy of friendship.

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Adriano in Siria (1734): Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

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Pergolesi: Adriano

★★★★

(Opera Settecento at Cadogan Hall, 16 September 2015)

It’s no exaggeration to say that I’d been looking forward to this Adriano in Siria since the curtain fell on the last one. It’s the first full opera I’ve heard by the precociously gifted Pergolesi, who died at the age of only 26, and who is best known here in England for his haunting Stabat Mater. However, I suspect I’ll get to know Adriano itself pretty well by the end of the year. The production company Parnassus will soon* be releasing their own new recording of the opera, featuring a rather formidable cast, and Opera Settecento’s concert performance was perfectly timed to whet appetites and throw down the gauntlet.

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Drawn From the Antique (2015)

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Agostino Veneziano: Baccio Bandinelli's Academy

Artists and the Classical Ideal

(Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, until 26 September 2015)

It’s 1531. A group of men have gathered in a low-ceilinged room in the Belvedere wing of the Vatican. All natural light has been banished. Clustered around a table, they are drawing from a classical statuette, lit only by candlelight to emphasise the curves and shadows of its graceful form. At the back, holding the statuette, is a bearded man in a cap. He is Baccio Bandinelli: sculptor, draughtsman and master of this little group of students. This engraving is the first depiction of artists drawing from classical models, and also the first depiction of a gathering which regarded itself as an art ‘academy’.

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The Oresteia (458 BC): Aeschylus

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The Oresteia

★★★★

(The Globe, London, 6 September 2015)

Seeing this the day after Hamlet, I definitely feel that I’ve met my Great Tragedy Quota for this month. Written in 458 BC, when Aeschylus was in his late sixties, this feels like the Dane’s ancient counterpart: if Hamlet is the great modern exploration of the self, then the Oresteia is a monument not just to human nature, but to civilisation itself. Continue reading →

Ariosto (1988): Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

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★★

Ariosto Furioso: A Romance for an Alternative Renaissance

This was a strange one. My policy of buying books by their covers usually works, but not this time. I haven’t read any of Yarbro’s books before, although her Count of Saint-Germain series has loitered tantalisingly at the edge of my mind for some time. When Goodreads recommended me her Renaissance fantasy about the poet Ludovico Ariosto, I was intrigued: the cover art caught my eye, and I eventually tracked down a copy of this edition in the US.

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