Multi-tasking with Siegfried and Parsifal

ABC Classic FM is playing the Ring Cycle this week, courtesy of Bayerische Rundfunk (Bayern Radio) which announces each evening in three languages. Tonight is night three and Siegfried is singing his heart out. He has just discovered the wood bird as I write. The music under the direction of Kyril Petrenko is fantastic and well paced. No wonder the Berlin Philharmonic chose him as their next music director. He takes over from Simon Rattle and I think he will be equally successful. Lucky Berlin Philharmonic.

Next week I will be traveling and as I listen to Siegfried I am transferring some opera DVDs to a microSD card to take with me and watch on the way. It takes a while as you have to reformat them. First I tried transferring direct but the only one that worked was a Bolshoi recording of Tchaikovsky's Queens of Spades. Copyright protection was the problem with the others so I had to search around the internet to find a way to fix that and now my computer is working hard with the transfer. (Bravo Bolshoi on making their work accessible!)

Currently DVD#2 of Parsifal is being transferred and as Siegfried and the wood bird sing to each other I watch to make sure the computer doesn't turn itself off mid-transfer. I am knitting as I watch.

Surely that is multi-tasking?  I read that you can only do one thing really well when you multi-task, and for me that is currently listening to Siegfried. Everything else is on automatic.

Greatest Ring Cycle Award

The Wagnerian website is giving out gongs for the "greatest  Ring Cycle of all time" and are looking for a suitable (virtual) award, so open up your photoshop and get creating. I stood him on a piano.

And while you create, listen to the Knappertsbusch' Götterdämmerung video below (thanks to The Wagnerian for the link). 

Ring Cycle holiday

Watching Harry Kupfer's Ring Cycle: what could be a better way to spend the days between Christmas and New Year. I have a Wagner-loving friend staying and we are spending our afternoons with the Ring, . Our mornings are spent at the local library or drinking wonderful coffee (Allpress) at the Soul Food Cafe. I can't think of a better recipe for a holiday.

It was such a pleasure in particular watching the Kupfer Rhinegold. I could feel the images of the recent Melbourne mardi-gras Ring (that I had so disliked) being overwritten in my brain ...

Invisible wall

The Ring Cycle begins today in Melbourne (my thoughts on the Melbourne Ring coming soon) but I flew back to Sydney, having spent 10 music/art related days in Melbourne. I am feeling a bit shell-shocked, as if I have been away six months not three weeks. The past weeks have been a hurdy gurdy, travel to NZ to farewell my Mother, then a day home to recoup before racing south to Melbourne.
Now I am home again and I am wondering if I am going to hit some invisible wall. I think a good sleep will help.

The Big Raspberry

Melbourne Arts Centre

The Melbourne Arts Centre, venue for the Melbourne Ring Cycle, is called the Big Raspberry by locals and you do indeed feel as if you are in a raspberry as you decend into its depths. Most of the wall space is occupied by a permanent collection of very large works by aboriginal artists and the likes of Sydney Nolan, but even they have a hard time competing with the acres of red and brass/copper.

Paintings with sound installation

My Grane pictures now hang on what little space remained. We had to be inventive to hang anything at all and some of the pictures simply didn't fit. 


The remainder of works in the WagnerLicht Exhibition are being installed today, ready for the media event and opening tomorrow.
.

A horse for our (Ring Cycle) times

Grane, dashing through the musical flames

As I look at my previous posts I can't help but think my images for the Melbourne Ring Exhibition are prescient. Grane gallops through the flames as NSW burns.

As I write the air is full of smoke and we are told the weather may be even worse than forecast for tomorrow, the day the fire-fighters have said will be the worst day of the week.

I read that Neil Armfield, Director of the Melbourne Ring Cycle, refers to the environmental catastrophe on our doorstep in his version of the Ring. I hope that it speaks to opera patrons who are in positions of power and inspires them to devote their energies to saving the planet for their grandchildren. Is that too much to ask?

Brünnhilde's horse Grane

Brünnhilde's horse Grane. Collage of Intaglio etchings

Wagner's Ring Cycle will be performed in Melbourne in November and all sorts of Ring related activities are planned. I have just finished a series of collages featuring Brünnhilde's horse Grane which will be exhibited in the  WagnerLicht Exhibition at the Melbourne Arts Centre, opening 15 November. Toi Toi Toi to Opera Australia for their first Ring Cycle.

The Grane series is online here.

Twenty thousand applauding fans

If you are a Wagner fan ... or even if you aren't, here is a video (in German) to entrance you!

Ring Cycle in London (click on the photo)

Under the duck's wing

Today I sorted through the boxes of materials I had accumulated while writing Blue Tulips. As I worked a tiny (about 3cm wide) circle of paper dropped out of one of the files. It was a small drawing from mid 2005 that had eluded my search when I looked for it to include in the book as an illustration. I had not remembered it was so small ... had probably looked for a larger drawing. It says a lot about my state of mind at the time when I drew it.

Under the duck's wing

I kept the cards, the letters, the original emails (not sure why these) but discarded the draft versions of the book. I had a lot of disc versions as I knew it would be some years before I could work on it again and I was afraid of loosing the material in the interim. I didn't guess there would be a seven year gap between finishing the story and publishing it.

Today as I sorted I thought of Richard Wagner who had a seventeen year gap between the third (well, half way through the third) and fourth operas of the Ring Cycle. Like me, Wagner moved a good deal and I suppose he also had boxes of materials he had to take with him. My sympathies Mr Wagner.

Famous Ring Documentary

I recently discovered a brilliant summation of Wagner's Ring Cycle on You Tube. It's called In the Eye of the Ring.

Anthony Ernst, exceptional presenter

Anthony Ernst was a good speaker when I saw him 10 years ago but he has become an exceptional speaker since then.  This weekend he spent two days presenting his ideas about Wagner's Ring Cycle to a gathering of 150 Sydney music lovers and at the end he got a well-deserved standing ovation.

Anthony Ernst at the Sydney Weekend workshop.

He is not only a good speaker (he spoke for one and a half days without notes), he is a thinker and a lateral thinker at that. His wide musical experience (he currently works with the Strasbourg Orchestra) enables him to make connections in the music that elude many and it certainly also helps that he started his career as a student of voice.


I had always thought of the Ring Cycle as a story about the demise of the aristocracy, which it is at one level, but it is also a story about the rape of the environment and how we can rescue our world. This is the story at a deeper level which I had only recently begum to appreciate.

Anthony started by taking us on a historical journey through the time from when Wagner was 20 up to the time when he started writing the Ring Cycle when he was 40 years old;  from bucolic landscapes to the industrial revolution, a change that deeply affected Wagner.  It is a change that is still working through the system today which makes the Ring Cycle as pertinent today as it was in his century, perhaps even more so.

Not many operas address current issues and present a philosophy for dealing with them.