Bruce Wayne

Super-Daddy Activities...

Gotham City, his bat-inhabitant and the "MID" building in Moscow

This week-end was a Batman double-whammy for me. I braved the raucous "circensis" masses at the Warner Bros. Park in the outskirts of the Ciudad, where I delighted in the roller-coasters and the bat-plane flight simulation; and I went to see with Fritz the Boy the latest cinematic installment ("Batman Begins").

The architecture of Gotham City in the first Batman films (Tim Burton's) was superb and I'm glad that what they replicated in a theme park has a bit of the feeling of the original. The best "Gotham City" building is of course the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, in Moscow. Almost a ready-to-use set for chiropter's adventures...

I just wished there were less prominent warning signs about the risks of rollercoasting when you have heart disease, or backache, or neckpain... It makes those of us no longer teenagers slightly uncomfortable.. I had to say a eve-of-military-operation goodbye - including stressing how pleased I was to have met Frizt the Boy, and how honored I was of being his father - each time the safety belts were adjusted and the rolling started...

Felipe II

The Rise and Fall of the Spanabsbourg Empire...




Sofonisba Anquissola's "Felipe II" (1573)

Thanks to the invitation from the Visiting Soprano, I found myself seated, Friday evening, at the excellent butaca 4 of row 7 in the stalls of the Teatro Real watching "Don Carlo".

This 2001 production is very much a "Mise en Scene d'auteur" . Hugo de Ana, is not only the Director but also both the Scenographer and the Costume Designer. The sets are about grandiloquent Renaissance grandeur, to make us - the mere subjects of the Sovereign- share the awe for the personification of Imperial Power. In that sense the story of Don Carlo becomes a Mythology. Felipe-Jupiter presiding over the whereabouts of nymph-goddesses (like Elizabeth and the Princess of Eboli) and demi-gods (like Carlo and Rodrigo). The dark "Grand Inquisidor" is the only god-like figure that can be said to be in the same league as the King.

Where does this take us? What is the point of blogging this thoughts, the Honourable Reader might ask.. Well, as I said to Tatiana in the after-performance supper, we are in Lost Empire Syndrome (LES) territory all over again. States that have at some point acquired Imperial status of world significance, and then return to normalcy, produce spoilt unbalanced child over-bragging about the uniqueness of their heritage or forever whinnying about insufficient attention paid to them and their unique country. (I am told that in a recent launching of a new book on the Escorial Palace a Ministerial Authority said with utter seriousness that "without referring to the Escorial one cannot understand the history of Spain? the history of Europe? the history of the World". That is the type of LES-related delirious hyperbole I'm talking about).

LES is a fate that affects all of us who had their glorious "moment" (as they say in script-writer's lingo) in History. That includes my own, I rush to say. Many clever things have been told about Britain/Classical Athens enlightening America/Ancient Rome as a new role for LES-ridden UK; or about the world power projection of the European Union Project as the new chance for LES-affected France; or the megalomaniac celebrations of S.Petersburg Centenary as an obvious compensation for the acute form of LSE Russia is experiencing since she has lost Soviet Union-related Superpower Status.

So, I'll argue that seeing "Don Carlo" in the heart of Hapsburg Madrid in an awesome imperial scenographic approach dangerously becomes a political manifesto..

(ps. Roberto Scandiuzzi (Filippo II) and Olga Guryakova (Elisabetta) were the most credible as impersonations of royalty and tormented love pursuits. Dolora Zajick (La Princesa de Eboli) sings like an (slightly overweight) angel and makes life very difficult in the bravometer for the other feminine lead role. (In any case,in the score of "Don Carlo" Verdi has treated the Mezzo much better than the Soprano... Some affair he was conducting at the time?)

Olga Guryakova

Backstage with a Soprano and a Prima Ballerina ..



Ms. Guryakova ( http://www.stanislavskymusic.ru/english/opera/stars/guryakova/ )
in a recent production of Die Fledermaus


The Honourable Reader of this blog has been promised some first-hand account of the inner loins of the Teatro Real and he should not be kept waiting.

Tatiana had put my name down on the list of people to be granted access to the backstage area and I duly followed on. Immediately after the clapping and the "Bravo!" shouts died down, I follow my instructions. As I leave the Stalls I turn right, then right again after the small Cava Bar and walk through two successive varnished wooden gates, like upper-deck doors on a nonchalant cruise liner. ( As I walk briskly I keep remembering my other example of theatrical speleology, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow).

A young attendant, with a black T-shirt with the logo of the Teatro Real and a red scarf that reminds one of the Red Pioneers (the Stalin Youth) asks with kindness: "And you are a visitor to...? ". I smile, check that are three little clusters of people on that corridor, and decline the name of the Guest Soprano. We are in a neat passage-way with the Main Stage right next to us. Signs both in English and Spanish give strict instructions like the ones you can see in a small factory or in the wings of an Iberia Airbus.

(To get to sanctum sanctorum in the Bolshoi I had to be escorted by a member of the Staff of the Royal Ballet from the deepest foyer-bar of the Theatre until a security manned toll gate on a narrow confluence of corridors (one would have taken us to the Artists' Entrance, another to the Dressing Rooms). Miss Smile, feeling an accomplice in crime, has warned me to act like an old trooper since she had had no time to get me a Pass. I use my spy-like skills of supreme self-confidence (or should I say my experience as gate-crasher of VIP areas in trendy Oligarchs-only clubs?). The Security Guard decides to concentrate on the timid customers of his Check Point Charlie instead. I can spot the cavernous huge stage of the Bolshoi and the tiny passage we are asked to take.)

The conductor, Don Carlo and The Grand Inquisitor plus my very own Queen Elizabeth of Valois pop up in the corridor, utter a beginning-of-summer-holidays brief comment (like " This is it. No more classes") and engulf themselves in their respective dressing rooms. Well, not the Maestro ( no make-up to remove). He deals with his visitors straight away. Time passes, all clusters have dissolved, I remain in the corridor, where a CCTV monitor shows the quick progress in stripping bare the Main Stage.The black T-shirted Red Pioneer makes some inquiries in low voice at the door of Tatiana's dressing room, signaling that her visitor is now waiting outside. She returns back to me with an apologizing smile "Ms. Somethingova is having her shower".

( Mentally back to the Moscow Opera, I remember that when I walked through the passageway, going down first and then upwards into some pre-historic iron steps, the stench of cat piss was unbearable. The SwanLake Princess had warned me about it, with a mischievous smile. The dressing room was delerict but full of the right atmosphere. More like Barnum Circus on the road around turn of the century than serious operatic gilded palace, but charming. I could see members of the Russian staff, baboushkas with generous bosoms and varicose legs, carrying the enormous dresses of Odile, of the Princess, and of all the velvety anybody who was anybody in that production.)


Back in The Plaza del Oriente, a short energetic woman leaves Tatiana's Dressing Room with an imposing dress, obviously weighting a ton, and rushes towards a staff only area. She returns shortly afterwards, enters the room and extricates herself again, carrying a new dress (the Coronation one , I think). She repeats that again, this time carrying the final dress of the Queen, the one that follows the Prado portrait inch by inch. I'm at last invited to enter the Soprano's private quarters. A well-lit spacious cabinet with a en-suite bathroom, like a neat room in a private clinic. One wall is occupied by an holywoodesque mirror framed by light bulbs, another by a vertical Steinway and the third one has a cosy two-seats burgundy red sofa where I'm seating right now.


I congratulate Tatiana-Olga for her performance, feeling that she's eager for approval but at the same time too much exhausted to listen properly. A bit like congratulating an athlete after the full ten thousand meters. She's ready to leave and we go out taking a different route, with Russian language around us, because of the retiring Grand Inquisitor finding us. We leave by the Artists' Entrance, with sleek aluminum electronic card-operated revolving bays, like Metro station ticket-reading devices. We found ourselves in the warm night of the Ciudad, and think of a starting place for "tapeo".

( As the Princess and I leave the Bolshoi, through the old and modest Artist's Entrance opposite the TSUM commercial galleries, the ambivalent Moscow night calls us to supper. )

A night at the opera house with a metaphorical "Access Stage" plastic red pass...

Juan Miro

A sculpture in a quiet room at the Reina Sofia..



Miro's "Personnage" bronze 71 x 32.5 x 16 cm, 1969

Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Waiting to be called by a painting, at the Reina Sofia...


Sacrilegious manipulation of the Guernica

I took Tatiana, who can from now on be called by her real name, following her explicit authorization, to the National Museum and Art Collection Queen Sofia. I took Ms Olga Guryakova, then, to the Reina Sofia.

The Second Floor, with its famous Picasso, Miro and Dali Rooms, was a powerful enough shower of freshness to counterbalance the 34º C outside which were baking the stones of the Plaza at ground level. The studies for Guernica, the photographic following of the Guernica-Work-in-Progress and the 3 point 5 by 8 gigantic canvas itself are awesome. ( I tell Olga that I saw Guernica in that very same trip to operatic New York, and that definitely it looked better against a non-white background.)

I remember, as always, the tip from Professor Juvenal ( Renaissance man in his own right, about whom I will blog one of these days) regarding Art Gallery visits: "Don't worry about loosing anything, relax and stroll peacefully... the paintings that matter, that will matter to you, will call you.. You just have to pay attention to their call.. then walk towards them... and spend some time there".

I regret to say that Guernica didn't really call me, although, contradicting the late Professor, I did spent obviously quite some time there. (A small bronze sculpture by Miro, "Personnage" , of 1969, did talk to me some three rooms further down).

I felt like doing something about the sacred status that painting end up acquiring .. It's like there are different Stations in a Secular Via Cruxis of Anti-Fascism, and the "Guernica" is one of them... Too much pomposity gets one close to mischief. Maybe a deliberate virtual act of cultural vandalism is in order. All it takes is the appropriate software and a digital picture of "Guernica" downloaded from the Reina Sofia website...

Elizabeth of Valois

Operatic late-afternoon...


Sofonisba Anguissola's 1565 portrait and a modern-day live version

A phone call out of nowhere.. names of Moscow friends are dropped.. a meeting point is thereafter hastily arranged.. I find myself waiting at the Entree des Artistes of the Teatro Real for "Elizabeth de Valois" to arrive.

Tatiana, let's call her like that, has come to the Ciudad to perform in "Don Carlo" the role of the French Princess. "Drastvuitie!" - I tell her in my very best Russian, when she arrives, dressed in white and with the usual Slavic svelte long arms and beautiful long fingers, although paradoxically suntanned.

Sipping our respective drinks, in the warm afternoon, we talk opera, a subject rather warm to my heart, the way wine-buffs elaborate on the merits of a particular vintage of Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. Tatiana complains that, with the almost Visconti-like obsession with the historical veracity of every detail on stage, she is made to wear a dress that weights more than herself. An exact replica in fact of the dress of Madame de Valois in the famous portrait (depicted above) one can see at the Museo del Prado. "And the collar, you can't believe it! How is one supposed to sing comfortably wearing that?".

I tell her of my shock when, many years ago, attending an Uncle Placido's performance of "Don Carlo" at the Met, I recognized, among the flags depicting the possessions of King Felipe, the Coat of Arms of the Kingdom of Portugal. Historically true, of course, but it always tastes as if one has to host a small living pachyderm in one's oesophagus...

She was amused with the recollection of my visit to the dressing rooms of the Bolshoi, when I was honoured to witness a Royal Ballet grand ballerina removing her make-up while all the fuss of an end of a tour was going on. ( Another Elizabeth, now that i think of it). Efforts will be made to replicate the experiment in the insiders' areas of the Teatro Real.

What one is prepared to do for the sake of maintaining the standards of this blog...

Camilo

Unforgettable characters....




Camilo, D. Camillo and Camilo



( A bit far-fetched, I agree with the Honourable Reader. To be able to distinguish in the hypertrophied pixels above the features of three distinct Camilos. The severe spectacled face of Camilo Jose Cela... Fernandel with a priest's bonnet immortalizing Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo.. and the typical features of a nineteencentury gentleman-writer, Camilo Castello Branco.. They are related, the three of them, to that quintessential English double-edged expression "Joe Bloggs? ... Ah! Joe Blogg is a character". Meaning that the grey colour is an honourable pursuit in life and flamboyance or any kind of fuss, although a source of dinner-party enjoyment, should be best avoided. The two writers , "characters" in that sense themselves, were of course responsible for giving life to a gallery of characters who were "characters" in their own right. And Don Camillo... what a "character" ! )


Why am I in Camilo mood, the Honourable Reader might ask? Something, no doubt, to do with yesterday's dinner-party, where the ghost of Nobel Prize winner Cela could easily be invoked. A charming hostess, with a blessed mix of Galician and Andalusian blood, something like a strong-headed Aries mellowed by a Pisces ascendant... Old Spain manners all around... a white-suited Georgetown-educated Bogota beauty... a nice white-dressed Lady aware of the existence of Tula (Russia) for moving reasons... a distinguished couple of inhabitants, until recently, of Belgrave Square's diplomatic Arcadia... a smiling Manager-Engineer nostalgic of the Colombian verb "rumbear"... The by-the-pool pavilion a perfect set for the almost square-shape dining-table where goat cheese morsels, curried langostinos and mint and chocolat postre slices followed one another with perfect rhythm.

Each dinner-guest can/could be turned into a "character" if the literary need arises... Camilo Jose would have understood that... Camilo too...

John Frederick Lewis

Orientalist Painters (III)


"Women"


( After some googling I recommend www.orientalist_art.org.uk )

Eugenio de Andrade

A Poet is dead...


Pomegranate / Granada/ Romã



"Still Life with Fruit"

1.
The morning blood of raspberries
chooses the whiteness of linen to love.

2.
Morning filled with sparklings and sweetness
settles its purest face upon the apples.

3.
In the orange, the sun and moon
are sleeping hand in hand.

4.
Each grape knows by heart
the names of all of summer’s days.

5.
In pomegranates, this I love—
the stillness in the center of the flame.


(Selected from "Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade." Translated by Alexis Levitan, published by New Directions)

Luis Vaz de Camoes

National identity should be a laid-back thing...




The Greatest of us all...

(The Nuncio has just finished Mass. Our National Day being the reason for the event, the secular patriotic indulgence of singing hymns that tell of a special relationship between the Virgin Mary and the Portuguese should be understood and forgiven. The co-patriots are now arriving in a steady flow and look eager on the rissoled goodies that are on offer in the big airport-like restaurant area. We now move to a different stage, on the opposite corner, and are supposed to say a few words to the hungry and thirsty masses, thus preventing them to start feast immediately. I sense the futility of a romantic-patriotic speech under the circumstances and opt for strictly no-nonsense welcome everybody short words. But my Children were in the room and I felt the acrid taste of frustration at not being able to flog them, in a good way, into understanding the beautiful meaning of the day.)

So many countries honour in their respective National days some political figure ( say, a Sovereign) or an historical collective event, like a revolutionary success or a bloodbath with significant political impact, that one should be proud that we do things differently, this once. That the National Day was set in the day a Poet died (in the annus horribilis of 1580), is an amazing thing in itself. Let us forget the origin of that tradition (from the Republican agenda following the fall of the Monarchy in 1910 to the Nationalistic program of the Far Right in the 40's ) and concentrate on the fundamentals. We all accept that a Poet, Luis Vaz de Camoes, is the focal point of our National Day. Neither a war, nor a Independence struggle or a boring constitutional event, but something to do with an exceptional man who wrote unbelievable beautiful lines. It's like if the Englishmen had decided to adopt the birth or death of Shakespeare as their National day, or if the Russians had opted for a "Tolstoy Day".

I believe it's a proud achievement, a mark of civilized behaviour (like abolishing the Death Penalty). I always remember that every 10th of June. I hope my Children, who won awards at the karaoke competition at the party and seemed reasonably pleased with the time spent there, will end up sharing my pride. Somewhere in between nationalistic barking and post-colonial apologizing each of us has to find the healthy patriotic shores and sandbeaches. To lay down and smile.

Viva Portugal!

Noel Harry Leaver

Orientalist painters (II)


A Moorish City (detail after digital manipulation)

Elizabeth Nourse

Orientalist Painters (I)



The Mosque, Tunis 1897 (detail after digital manipulation)

Roald Amundsen

Norway: young at 100-years old...


A South-Pole inhabitant


Norway is birthdayparty-ing: one hundred years old as an Independent state. I do like Norway and for many reasons, including some non-bloggable ones. Their most celebrated hero is Amundsen who, playing fair, first discovered the South Pole. A land towards which I must confess a special interest since I'm the proud owner of a taxidermised Penguin (Ysmail, depicted above) from a species that used to overpopulate the area.

As a suggestion to honour and congratulate the non-EU but NATO member of the European Family why not doing something Norwegian in the coming days? Apart from the "usual suspects" (like Grieg, Ibsen , Munch... or Liv Ullman) why not reading the tremendously powerful novel by Ms. Herborg Wassmo, "Dina's Book"? The Honourable Reader will not regret it.