monsieur, you are a rake, and you shall get nowhere with me

Read an interesting little pop-sci piece this morning on new research in language and the brain. The general swing of the thing was that the more we learn about the brain, the more a strict adherence to localisation of function looks obsolete. I was reading about the argument posited by Friedemann Pulvermuller at Cambridge that certain functions - in this instance language processing - are far more complex and that simply reducing responsibility to the infamous Broca and Wernicke areas provides an incomplete picture. Indeed, Pulvermuller suggests that around two thirds of the brain is involved in language processing. The idea of language being a whole brain experience means that we also understand language in a sensory capacity: when we think of words that have to do with the mouth - licking or eating or kissing - we're also activating areas of our brain that are involved with controlling our mouths, not just our language. Reading the following sentence stopped me in my tracks: we don't just understand words, we feel them. It's so obvious, of course, but having such a clear-cut explanation connects all the dots. Feeling words, not just understanding them - I think this has long been the assumption underpinning my entire view of aesthetics - but I'm not sure whether I consciously realised it until this morning.

What I actually wanted to write about - The ROH production of The Rake's Progress I saw on Wednesday evening - ties perfectly into this idea of feeling words, not just understanding them. I love most genres of music and I especially love going to see live music, but there are few musical experiences where I actually feel moved by the words, moved by the music, as I do with opera. It's not a given and nothing that you can take for granted - not all operas have this unique power though, or at least not for me - but I always find it amusing when my friends say they don't like opera. It's like saying you don't like music, for there are as many different kinds of opera as there are other kinds of music.

I'm still finding out what I like in opera. I love Mozart and Handel, of course, though I'm not such a big fan of the bel canto composers and I didn't really think I was into the German composers, but both Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander rocked my world last year, hence the still figuring it out. My general attitude, though, is to see everything that comes to town, so off I went to The Rake's Progress, mind open.

I won't say that I don't like Stravinsky, but the score was far from music to my ears. And a libretto written by Auden?! While I've written before about how I feel Auden lacks aurality - after my early-morning reading maybe what I really meant is that his words don't make me feel the way I want poetry to make me feel. Auden's words are just words: sometimes they're words that make me laugh or words that make me think, but they are rarely words that move me. Auden's lack of power combined with Stravinsky's 'difficult' music results in exactly the sort of thing I don't want from an opera. Having said that, I can see why Stravinsky and Auden work well together - if you're into that whole atonal, unresolved, jarring sort of modernist music. Personally, I'm not. At least not at the opera, when it's not what I expect - don't get me wrong, though: a bit of well-timed Steve Reich is glorious stuff.

Maybe the performance could have been rescued by a super-human cast, but I thought - apart from Kyle Ketelsen's lovely baritone Nick Shadow - that everyone was horrendously weak. I was surprised that these people were singing on stage at the ROH - no dynamism, no power, poor projection - ouch. That said, the staging was witty and the production was surprisingly funny, but whether this is the right attitude or not, I go to the opera to be moved, to experience those sublime overwhelming sensations that only come from this bizarre combination of human voice and orchestral accompaniment, and for me the music should come first. Unfortunately, visual trickery can disguise neither shoddy performances nor a general lack of feeling.

take care of yourself

Am way behind the times here. This is no doubt due to the increasingly frequent nightmares where the board who sit on my viva line me up against a wall and shoot me instead of just failing my thesis. Hence writing thesis, not blog. Good times.

Having said that, I've still been out and about to see and do lots of interesting things in the last few weeks (yes, aside from work and nightmares): Ravel's L'Heure espagnole and Puccini's Gianni Schicchiat the ROH - amazing, hilarious, and beautifully performed - and who knew this ravishing aria was in the rather unassuming one act about a cheeky Italian farmer. Divine dinners at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon (the third best dining experience I've had in London in the last year, after Landau at the Langham and the fine food and wine evening at the White Swan) and on the old Pullman Orient Express train. If I have the time, I'll write these up properly but I did want to single out one thing in particular: the Sophie Calle show on now at the Whitechapel Gallery until 3 January.

It's a sort of retrospective of Calle's work but the clear star of the show is Take Care of Yourself (as vile a phrase in French as in English: prenez soin de vous), a piece which won rave reviews at the Venice Bienalle in 2007. After receiving an email in which her then lover breaks up with her, Calle whizzed the email off to 107 various women and asked them to use their professional skills to interpret the missive. While the exhibition is simply unmissible and anything I say about it here would only get in the way of your own response to and enjoyment of what is a very, very clever piece of artistry and social engagement, there was one thing that really stood out for me and that was the email itself.

I don't know about you, but I've been broken up with by letter before (and it was handwritten, baby. One up on Madame Calle) and while his letter was as polite as the situation demanded, it wasn't anything like the email Calle's lover sent to her. I kept thinking over and over (you practically come to know the letter by heart - in French and English- if you stay in the exhibition long enough), god, why have I never gone out with a French bloke before! I don't want a boring 'I hope one day you may forgive me. It's nothing you did, nothing I can explain, blah, blah, blah' break-up letter, I want a mysterious, freakishly formal email about 'the others' and how he will always remember the 'unique and beautiful way I interpreted the world' - I still never did quite figure out what the hell he was referring to with 'the others'. Trust me, it's not as obvious as it sounds. But the disconnect between his letter, grounded in the rhetoric of courtly love, the fact that he sent it via email, and well, just that men actually exist who write letters like that sort of turned my world upside down. I think it's a sad day indeed when a gal starts looking at the men of another country differently (favourably, even) by the way the write break-up emails. Obviously, I'm not getting out of the library enough.

If Shakespeare had been in posession of a TV set, we'd never now have Romeo and Juliet

If nostalgia is a drug, I think I've recently taken an overdose.

Saturday evening I was transported for three hours to eighteenth-century Vienna, by way of the early nineteenth-century Italian composer, Vincenzo Bellini. In singing so heavenly the part of Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the magnificent Elina Garanca opened her mouth and I closed my eyes and pretended I was listening to Farinelli. You may be wondering why a mezzo-soprano would be singing the part of Romeo, obviously a male singing role. Since we no longer castrate young boys, we no longer have great castrati in the opera world. Certainly I'm not suggesting we reinstate such barbaric practices, but who wouldn't give their left lung to spend a night at the Opera House under the spell of the divine Farinelli.

This is what Farinelli actually looked like,


but I much prefer this outlandish image from the 1994 film about his life, well - not really about his life, maybe about his sexed up and not very accurate life, but it's still a fun film.

And the singing is heavenly, indeed, though it's particularly interesting to see how the film's producers got around the tone problem. They recorded the Polish soprano, Ewa Malas-Godlewska and the American countertenor, Derek Lee Ragin separately and then digitally merged the two voices to recreate the sound of a castrato. In a live staging, such digital manipulation is impossible which is why roles like Bellini's bel canto Romeo are typically handled by mezzo-sopranos.

And Elina did not disappoint as a stand in for our missing castrato: her tone was marvellous, in fact I've seldom heard a more toffee caramel tone from a mezzo and it blended sumptuously (can you tell I'm hungry? Caramel, toffee sumptuousness?) with Anna Netrebko's Giulietta, who provided an equally accomplished performance. Sadly, the supporting players were lacking slightly and the staging was at times embarrassingly contrived, but this is after all the story of Romeo and Juliet and the leads more than made up for any of the production's other failings.


Then today I went to the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch - another one of those places you sometimes hear about, yet never get around to visiting. It's an absolutely marvellous place; very easy on the eye and, of course, provided another dose of nostalgia to perpetuate my weekend high. The museum is housed in a former home for elderly people and is comprised of "middle class" domestic interiors from 1600 to the present day. While I found the place delightful and fascinating, I also found it quite depressing to watch the gradual ebb of family activity and entertaining from the sitting room give way to the invasive, insular act of watching television. I also found the demise of the fireplace quite sad, and while central heating is obviously more effective (well, sometimes - only when it's working), from a purely ridiculous and aesthetic point of view, radiators are viciously ugly.

All these beautiful sitting rooms, which used to emphasise company, conversation, activity, and entertaining became completely reorganised in the 50s and 60s when the TV set took over. I don't know if people are consciously aware of it, but in so many sitting rooms the television is the central axis around which everything else must be arranged. And here the nostalgia kicks in again. Why can't we go back to spending evenings reading, playing cards, talking, and drinking at home? (she says, as she tap tap taps on her laptop late into the night...) I suppose for many who live in places like London, it's because we don't really have the space. But really, I think it's because TV has become an essential home, especially sitting room, activity. You don't need a lot of space to arrange a convivial sitting room. Get rid of the TV (ha!) and see how easy it is. And if you don't believe me, make a trip to the Geffrye Museum where you too can become a convert to the cult of nostalgia.