Arise, arise, ye subterranean winds

Hurry up, planes, the winds are getting insane!


Both Orly and Roissy Charles de Gaulle airports will be closing at 20:00, because of the upcoming tempest. Paris will become an island on which no ship shall land.

Next the Seine will be coloured in blood and it will rain frogs and locusts.

No movie going then, it's a stay-at-home night. I'm debating with myself whether to watch Dial M for Murder on Paris Première or to start reading Henning Mankell's last novel, Kennedy's brain.

I have vague memories of Dial M and as I really enjoyed watching Shadow of a Doubt that was showed weeks ago this might be a fitting evening for some tense Hitchcock flick .

Hopefully soon, following Ariel, we'll sing along


Dry those eyes which are o'erflowing,
All your storms are overblowing.
While you in this isle are biding,
You shall feast without providing,
Ev'ry dainty you can think of,
Ev'ry wine that you can drink of,
Shall be yours and want shall shun you,
Cere's blessing too is on you.

Addicted

I could blog about the opera I saw yesterday evening at Bastille, Lady Macbeth de Mzensk, and how Shostakovich composed in 1934 a musical work about a russian desperate housewife decades before American tv writers thought that housewives might be desperate; how Stalin hated the work and thought it was both impenetrable and pornographic (the association of those words sounds weird, doesn't it?) while some American critics talked at the time of "pornophony". I could write about how good the soprano and the chef d'orchestre were yesterday; that the tenor flashed his bare buttocks; that the mise en scène was interesting...and that the line "make the icons fall down kissing me" was spot-on and kind of cool, but hard to reuse in a non-Ortodox context.

I could blog about it, sure, but frankly, all I want to say at the moment is that I need the next episode of Battlestar Galactica and I want it NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ETA: Composer Bear McCreary(I wonder if Bear is his real frist name) has updated his blog about his work for the last episode, "The Oath".

PS: In case you don't know, the picture above was the promo poster for season 4, Last Supper-style. Battlestar Galactica is television at its best. A must see!

Voix de femmes

Le Théâtre de l'Ile St Louis is a lovely tiny venue (about 30 seats)you may not see at all if you walk on the Quai d'Anjou by the river for it's located inside of an old builiding, in the depth of an alley.

A musical was showed in there yesterday, Hildegarde de Bingen ou le divin féminin. I knew that, as musicals go, this was not the Broadway-type or the dreadful Canadian style (I have nothing against Canadians but I can't bear the Luc Plamandon's musicals...and most musicals actually). On the small stage there were only a woman and a man, and many weird instruments. The woman, Catherine Braslavski, performed as Hildegard of Bingen; she was singing while sometimes playing drums and dulcimer. At first I wasn't impressed, but her voice slowly raised, filled the room and took me. I forgot all the religious stuff and enjoyed the musical journey.

Joseph Rowe, like many American artists, does everything. He's a musician, a composer, a writer, a translator and an actor. He played various instruments(Oud, Tibetan bowls, darbuka, mbira, tampura) and, between the songs, read or recited texts– extract from Hildegard's books, a letter she received from another abbess, letters she sent to advise and admonish either Frederik Barbarossa or the Pope.

There are extracts from the show on youtube. It is the same show as the one I saw yesterday evening, except that Joseph Rowe spoke in French yesterday. I wish I knew how to get the video embedded here.

Hildegard of Bingen had been forgotten for centuries until she became trendy at the end of the XXth, mostly for her music. I can't say that I care about her spirituality and philosophy much–although it's interesting to see how she managed to avoid being called a heretic at the time and how a few nowadays environmentalists take over Hildegard's veriditas–yes she was a mystic who thought she had visions, but she was also a creative person and a remarkable woman. She and another abbess of the XIIth century, the famous Heloïse, led the way for women like Christine de Pizan; she had balls!

PS: the picture is a scan of her famous Scivias that I got via the Heidelberg University website to which the title is linked.

PPS: I'd like to own a dulcimer, it's so pretty!

C'est Mozart qu'on assassine ?

To tell the truth, I don't like Mozart's music very much. I listen to the Requiem (perhaps it's Salieri I like actually)from time to time, and I don't hate the Clarinet Concerto in A major, but Mozart usually doesn't make it to my play list. Most of the time I find his music...annoying. As opera works go, I much prefer Puccini's or Wagner's, or Purcell's mini operas. So far my favourite memories in l'Opéra Bastille are Robert Wilson's Madame Butterfly, and the wonderful production of Tannhaüser I saw last year.

Yet I really enjoyed Die Zauberflöte,The Magic Flute, I saw on Sunday. The voices weren't great although Pamina was really good (The Queen of the Night missed a note in the famous aria and Jose Van Dam is really getting old)but I did love the extravagant and controversial production.

When it was showed first in 2005, the reactions were visceral and many conservative operagoers called it an outrage, a sacrilege. Minor changed have been made since then so the show I saw was still very original, unorthodox, daring, smart and funny. However there was no boos and no screams of horror this time. The audience may be used to Gérard Mortier's avant-guard choices now(I wonder if the Tristan and Isolde by Peter Sellars, that uses Bill Viola's videos, is still controversial, for I remember the boos it received years ago). Personally I think that Alex Ollé and Carlos Padrissa from the Catalan theatre group, La Fura dels Baus, did a great job with The Flute.

It was as if Lewis Carroll met Pedro Almadovar, with Mozart playing in the background...I guess that Amadeus would have agreed.

Modern productions with bizarre mise en scène and videos aren't always relevant; sometimes the interpretations are far-fetched and a stroke of inspiration may have only a shocking value; this one fits in the story and is quite meaningful. Papageno comes out as a sort of convincing drag-queen (see the picture above), the video was cleverly used, and the idea of using machinery(the Queen of the Night is brought on stage sitting at the end of a camera crane and is held aloft over the orchestra) and huge air-filled plastic mattresses—that either call to the mind the world of dreams and the world of madness(the stage then becoming a padded room in which those crazy characters are stuck!), or are turned into walls, doors, labyrinths and even a cocoon for chrysalis-Tamino –was simply spot-on, even though the shifting was sometimes a bit noisy.

I also loved the two parodies of magic acts, when the Speaker shows up, inside of a box, to be split a few minutes later, or when Sarastro is pierced by Pamina's swords; the chess game was also a brilliant idea, very well thought up.

The masonic allegory that Mozart imagined is replaced here by something more modern, or maybe more universal. The first video projection says it all in the first scene, as we can make up the shape of a brain on the central mattress. Everything happens in the brain...What's in a brain?–yes I'm stubborn when it comes to correspondances. Fantasy of course!

At the end of the day, the production kind of stole the show and the music could have almost been forgotten, which I didn't mind a bit.