Dirt and opera

Yesterday morning I went to the wonderful Wellcome Collection. As well as a splendid permanent collection (which includes a piece of Jeremy Bentham's skin - his whole body is just down the road at University College London) there was an excellent exhibition called Dirt which looks at our relationship with the multifarious things we refer to as dirt. Some of the art works in the show were made from dirt and house dust, and the scientific displays included some fascinating old films. The film about the Peckham health centre, made in 1948, is an interesting example of propaganda for the newly-created National Health Service.

In the afternoon I went into the TKTS office in Leicester Square to see what was available. As luck would have it they had £85 tickets for the ENO's Simon Boccanegra at the bargain price of £25. A superb seat in the middle of the stalls - perfect viewing was ensured by the three empty seats in front of me.

The production is ... interesting; and not helped by huge amounts of text explaining the back story (a complicated plot à la Trovatore) being typed across the front drop. The prolog setting is a William Hopper Nighthawks style scene with a town square on the right.

The transition between the prolog and the first act was one of the most amazing things I've seen in the theatre. The crowd scene at the end of the prolog froze and this image was projected onto the front drop; the first act then starts with two characters walking in front of this image, which then starts to shrink until it is the contents of a painting on the wall ...

Anyway, the work is very sombre: lots of low brass in the orchestration and only one woman's voice; all the men's roles are bass or baritone except for the lead tenor. The performance was excellent musically, including the small parts, but the work itself is mostly without many arias, the music being mostly declamatory.