Kaufmann talks Lohengrin

A fascinating interview with tenor Jonas Kaufmann about Lohengrin and about 'new' productions of 'old' operas. You can see why Kaufmann's performances are so memorable - he not only has a lovely voice he thinks abut what he is singing.

Ralph Hotere, visionary artist

Vale Ralph Hotere, visionary New Zealand artist and activist who died on 24 February aged 81. His work has an uncanny knack of etching itself on your memory, never to be forgotten even if seen only once.

Ralph Hotere (photo: .tangatawhenua.com)

Ralph Hotere

Mädels and music

I am not very good at throwing things away as I always think there must be another use for them. Same for drawings. Perhaps I should have discarded these pre-2006 life drawings but I kept them and  today made a new composition. It reminds me of the painting of the girl with violin by the Italian Orazio Gentileschi.

Mädels and music

Young Woman Playing a Violin by
Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639)
 

Electric Violin

Last Friday I saw Richard Tognetti play Brett Dean's Electric Preludes (commissioned by Jan Minchin) on his electric violin.  The violin is bright red .... very fitting.

Electric Tognetti

Review of concert  and chat between composer and violinist

Ya-Fei Chuang plays Rachmaninoff

How's this for fancy finger work?

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.

Wagner weekend

This weekend I am going to a weekend workshop called Forging Meaning out of Music Heritage, Complexity and Vision of the Ring with Dr Antony Ernst as presenter.

Anthony Ernst addressing NSW Wagner Society members in 2002

I made this sketch of Anthony Ernst when he addressed the NSW Wagner Society in 2002 and it was  later used on the cover of a book he published with the support of the Wagner Society.

Since then Anthony Ernst has been in Germany working with several European orchestras. It will be very interesting hearing if and how his views have changed.

Elisabeth Meister - British Soprano

I just discovered the British soprano Elisabeth Meister's blog. She writes so well about the rigors of a singer's life .... delightful stuff.

elisabeth meister's blog

A jacket for all time

A long time ago, when women were wearing clothes with large padded shoulders I bought an Escada jacket  It is 80% linen, 10%silk, 10% cotton which is a combination that never seems to crumple and I wore day in day out for several years. It was so beautifully made that I was never able to throw it away despite its unfashionable huge shoulders.

Today I undid the part of the lining that had been the last thing sewn up and turned it inside out. When you look on the inside of expensive European clothes you see why they are expensive. Everything is properly reinforced, the jacket can be turned inside out through a gap just wide enough, the sleeves are eased in with double tapes and, when you try to alter them, you find it is easy!

 In no time at all I had taken out one layer of padding (the foam had completely crumbled but the other wadding was intact), trimmed down the shoulders and sewn it together again.

That jacket reminds me of good washing machines that are easy to service and never wear out.

What happened to February?

14C Gosford, 15C Sydney, 15C Dunedin, 3C in Hamburg

Fifteen degrees? In February? In Sydney?

It is nearly nine o'clock and 15C (feels like 9C with wind chill factor said the radio announcer). Dunedin is 15C too but it is 12 degrees latitude further south.

[Dunedin is at latitude 45° 52' South, Sydney is 33° 52' South]

In Sydney February is usually so hot and humid you think of moving elsewhere, like Dunedin. Today you would move to Dunedin to get dry because it is not only cold in Sydney it is raining solidly.




A lot of Sydney events will be washed out. Who wants to see Opera in the Park in pouring rain? The poor performers will have to wear woollie jumpers.

The garden though is happy and sighs with relief. A long drink is very welcome after six dry months and so much heat.

wet wet

Burnt by 46C 2 weeks ago and happy with 14C and rain today

When the tourists leave town

I feel like the Venetians must in October when all the tourists leave.  Suddenly after the Australia Day long weekend my town is back to normal: you can turn right onto the main road, get a park outside the post office and skateboard along the side roads without being run over. 

First heat, then flood

Blueberry bush with heat-dried leaves (left),puddle with umbrella reflection (middle) and wet shoes(right)

The leaves of the poor little blueberry bush that I have been nurturing were burnt by the 46C heat last week ... and now we have a major rain storm.  Australia has always had extreme weather but it is getting even more erratic with global warming. The poor folks in southern Queensland are faced with flooded houses yet again, the second time in two years. One in a hundred year floods are becoming one in ten year floods, or one in two year floods.

Local school ...

Chris Masters: Uncommon Soldier

I just came back from a talk by Chris Masters about his new book Uncommon Soldier: The Story of the Making of Today's Diggers. He is an excellent speaker and his book looks very interesting as well. For anyone interested in understanding a bit more about the military I think this is a 'must read'.

Chris Masters

I drew Chris Masters as he spoke and when she saw my picture, one of the women sitting at my table said, "Oh you should get him to sign it, I'm sure he would."
I smiled as I remembered the trouble that Helen Clark got herself into when she signed a picture for charity under similar circumstances. There was a big fuss because she had signed a picture she had not drawn herself. An easy mistake to make.

Self portrait in dim light

Acrylic, 51 x 72 cm

Nowadays, even when I don't have a painting project underway I keep an empty canvas on my easel because I have learned that if the materials are at hand the paintings often arrive by themselves. This is one such painting. It drew itself on Monday evening and I finished it off yesterday. I didn't have much light as you can tell.

When you paint self portraits from a mirror, which is what I did, you get a mirror image which is opposite of how you look to others. Sort of amusing and it just shows that you that you never see yourself as others see you. The mirror was perched precariously on top of the canvas and it fell off as I painted ... so I had to finish the painting using the mirror shards.

Mirror with paint daubs

Blue Tulips

 

I have just published Blue Tulips, an autobiographical book about love, music and art.  Love -  music - art,  what more could you possibly want? Wagner you say? Yes, well of course Wagner is in the book as well ... and happy 200th birthday to him!


Blue Tulips is online as a Kindle book at Amazon : http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1T64E0



You can download free Kindle software onto a PC or any other e-device to read Kindle books.

Blue tulips is at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1T64E0

Cooked vege patch

The heat has passed, the damage is done. The vege garden cooked in the record 46C heat today. The  young fresh bean plants are now dried specimens. Everything suffered apart from the very heat resistant plants and even they look unhappy. Sage is normally pretty resistant but it curled its leaves.

I think it is time the rest of the population sued the climate skeptics who prevent drastic measures being taken to save the planet.

Poor little bean plant

Pumpkin

.

46C in Sydney

Holy moly ... we are being cooked alive.

46C in Sydney today

I was in Sydney this morning ... it was searingly hot. It reached 46C by 2:30 although thankfully I was nearly home by that time. As the (thankfully air-conditioned)  train traveled very slowly along the Hawkesbury River I wondered if the heat was causing problems and crossed my fingers, hoping there wouldn't be a problem that would trap us in a hot train for hours. Looks like I was one of the lucky ones.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:
"Transport problems
The record heat across the city triggered multiple failures on Sydney's train system as steel wires buckled and a hose used to run a key signalling system melted.
There have been at least three equipment failures on the CityRail network on Thursday afternoon, triggering widespread delays across the city as train commuters swelter in air-conditioned and non-airconditioned carriages.
At Dora Creek, on the Central Coast, the heat caused an overhead wire to buckle onto a train at about 1.30pm. About 250 passengers were trapped on the train for about half an hour, until CityRail could organise another service for them to switch to."

Now I am back home and it feels like  ....  like an oven. Everything is hot. The floorboards are hot underfoot, the window panes (even in the shade) are very hot to touch.  Luckily I left the shades down and the curtains drawn at home and it was only (!) 37 inside when I arrived back.

Sophia

This Sophia, painted last Saturday. Sophia is three years old (and a bit) and as you can see from the painting she has a determined streak.

Sophia, 3 years 3 months old