What I Did with My November Vacation

Interior of the Coliseum, London*

I went to London and saw four (4) operas on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice. You can read my review at SFCV.

In retrospect, I'm mildly surprised that they didn't do one of the 17th c. Orpheus operas, for which they would likely have swapped out The Mask of Orpheus. The night I saw Mask, the stalls (orchestra section) appeared to be sold out. No idea what was happening upstairs, because the circulation space at the Coliseum is not great, and the intermissions were short.

Hiring Daniel Lismore was probably a smart move in terms of ticket sales. He is famous, or maybe I mean notorious, and surely drew in audience members from the fashion world. Also, it took me a while to figure out the person in the stalls whom I thought was cosplaying the opera was, in fact, Daniel Lismore. He was dressed something like the photo on this page. (If you are using a screen reader: photo shows a person in a red hat. The person has large artificial eyelashes, has a face powdered white, and is wearing red lipstick. The person has a red veil on, covering from the sides of the face back; you can't see the person's ears or hair. There's also some irregular gold mesh falling out of the hat and down the person's face to their chin, also covering the veil from the hat to the jawline on the sides of the face. The person's head is in an upside down orange bowl.)

I'm seriously curious about the fate of the 400,000 crystals that went into the costumes for Mask. Will this production ever be brought up again, at ENO or elsewhere? Surely no US company will be interested; if they were to stage a Birtwistle opera, it would likely be Gawain or The Minotaur. (But personal to US opera companies: Yan-Tan-Tethera is the real entry-level Birtwistle.) I'm also curious, as noted in the review, about how ENO funded Mask.

Other things I'm curious about:

• Why major US opera companies don't do Orpheus in the Underworld, which has delightful music and can be very, very funny.
• Why I found this Gluck Orpheus and Eurydice so much more rewarding than West Edge Opera's production this past summer. Tentatively, the conducting was way better. Also, this was the Berlioz edition, although since WEO had a mezzo Orpheus, they might have been using that too.
• Why Glass's Orphée isn't done more often. I'm very sorry I didn't get to see it twice.

More of the interior of the Coliseum

* Why, yes, ENO does invite you to photograph the interior, and also film or photograph curtain calls. They also put sweet messages to audience members on the title screen before the show and during intermissions. "Happy anniversary, dearest!" Etc.