Young talent

David Corcoran sings

David Corcoran and Amanda Windred sang for the Wagner Society of NSW last Sunday, accompanied by pianist Bradley Gilchrist. Both these young singers have the voice quality to make a career and it was wonderful to hear them sing. David is understudy for Siegmund in Melbourne and Amanda is planning to further her music studies in Germany next year. Organiser Leona Geeves finds young singers with the most amazing talents for these events so thank you to her too!

I sketched them as they sang/played and put the sketches online.

Privacy in the Internet age

If you thought email privacy or lack of it didn't relate to you, I recommend you read this article from Groklaw called Forced disclosure. 
Groklaw is an award winning information service for lawyers which is closing down.  I'm not a lawyer so you might think a law information service would hardly touch my life, but it does because it informs others whom I trust to inform me.

Groklaw is closing following the demise of Lavabit which was a small email service that shut its doors and is stuck in a legal battle with the US Government. The Lavabit owner, like others in  USA required to comply with a requests for information, cannot tell his own wife about the request, let alone any employees. They would have lost their jobs without knowing why a flourishing business was suddenly being shut down. It is so Kafkaesque that you'd think it impossible, but it is possible and it is happening.  US citizens and many of the rest of us are suddenly becoming aware that they/we live in a State that is transforming itself into East Germany. It is no accident that the Germans are the most upset about the routine privacy breaches we learned about in the documents released by Snowden .... they know the consequences better than most.

Read this article - it is worth it.

PS. As I type the labels 'privacy USA Snowden Groklaw Lavabit' into blogger it occurs to me that this post might make me a suspect worthy of watching ... and by logging on to this post, you might have made yourself a worthy candidate for watching too. See, its working .... in a surveillance state people become paranoid. So they self censor.  One way to counteract this over-surveilling state is to use these words a lot, discuss this a lot, link to posts like this and send emails with surveillance trigger words to clog the system. My admiration for Snowden increases the more I think about it.

(The image above comes from the website  www.hoax-slayer.com)

Sydney Symphony Orchestra

SSO 2014 brochure and CD

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra sent out a CD with their program this year. It was a master stroke, because the pieces are there in full (well, whole movements - over an hour of music) and once you have listened to the CD you want to hear everything on it live.

I am listening to Beethoven's 7th as I write ... just bliss. Besides which of course Christine Goerke is coming to sing Elektra with the SSO in February. Bravo SSO and Maestro David Robertson. I have just subscribed!



And here is a bit of Beethoven's 7th ... swoon ...

Asher Fisch on leitmotifs

I have just discovered Asher Fisch talking about Wagner's leitmotifs. Now I want to hear him conduct. Pity the Seattle Ring Cycle is just finished.

Christine Goerke coming to Sydney

Whoopeeeee  ... in six months Christine Goerke will be in Sydney to sing Elektra. 

Hold on to your hats!

Delicate beauty

It is August and the Australian bush is alive with flowers, flowers quite different from the garden azaleas.

When you first arrive in Australia you tend to overlook native bush flowers because they are so small, but once you have your eye in you suddenly notice these perfect little beauties and they warm your heart. They might not be as showy as garden azaleas but they are delicately beautiful and quite as delightful.

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Azaleas not music

My predecessors in this house must have had a particular liking for azaleas as there are a lot of them in my garden, each one different and although I have lived here for some time  this is the first time I have seen them flower.

In fact this is the first time in five years that I have not been on my way to the Maribor Music Festival (Slovenia) in August. I am sorry to miss Maribor and the music this year but I am very pleased to be at home this August and able to see the azaleas bloom.

There are also irises, originally from previous gardens, given to friends during my nomadic years then transplanted again into this garden.

Spring flowers don't last long in Sydney because the weather has a tendency to change from winter to summer in a single day. You have to be here in August!

Singing and Storms

Lisa Harper-Brown sings

I drew the lovely Lisa Harper-Brown as she sang for the Wagner Society of NSW some time ago.

The society later used the picture on an event brochure and ever since then I seem to have become a sort of unofficial artist for them.

Below is my latest effort ... an online collage. It advertises an event on 25 August at the Mosman Art Gallery in Sydney. Come if you can!

Swords and Winterstorms

A Vivaldi Tribute with a difference

.... and she is 14 years old!

Wagner cards!

Zazzle has a new look ... so my zazzle Artsmitten  store has a new look too.It's where you buy arty cards and T shirts ... including lots of Wagner cards in this Wagner birthday year!

 

Artsmitten Original Art Product Store

Lisa Gasteen returns

 

Simone Young conducting ... sketched in my program

Simone Young conducted the Sydney Symphony last night with Lisa Gasteen singing Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder. She sang with tenderness and secure voice delighting the Sydney audience. The last time I heard Lisa Gasteen  sing was in 2004 when she sang a wonderful Brünnhilde in the South Australian Ring Cycle. In 2008 she pinched a nerve in her neck while picking cumquats of all things and was forced to give up singing. Let's hope this is concert is a portend for good things to come.  

Young then conducted a fiery Bruckner's 9th Symphony and judging by the response the audience would have happily heard the whole thing twice over.

Addendum: I have just read through the notes about Wagner in my program and I am wondering why those who write about his music often seem to fall into the trap of repeating scuttlebutt and innuendo.  I looked the writer up and discover he is a not-unsuccessful local composer. I recommend to him that he read Wagner's letters to Mathida Wesendonck. I am half way through them, reading them slowly and often backtracking as they are so captivating. They explain so much about Tristan and Isolde. I don't think you could read them (together with Mathilda's notes about them) and still write the sort of commentary he wrote in the notes. The Lieder and music of course speak for themselves.

Portrait of Deborah Humble

Deborah Humble sang the role of Amneris in Aida in Melbourne recently and I sketched her while she practised in Sydney. That was in March but the boxes of kitchen cupboards blocked access to my studio until last month and I couldn't paint the portrait I had waiting in my head. When I did eventually pick up the brush it was Deborah's wonderful mane of auburn hair that wanted to be painted, not my internal images of Aida. So that is what happened and this is the portrait.

Yesterday I finished uploading the portrait and also some pictures of progress of the painting.

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)

Vocal high jinx

How do singers get their voices to perform vocal high jinx? In this video the charming Joyce DiDonato tells us exactly how she practises... and defines Bel Canto along the way.

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Joyce DiDonato sings (click on the picture)

Our Orwellian age

ABC news in America reports that low level NSA analysts have access to tools that let them target whoever they like. All they need is an email address.

The problem is the lack of transparency. People who know anything are sworn to silence. I wonder how many people have suffered unwarranted surveillance by someone they know who is just nosey, who have reported it but who have not been able to talk about it because all this stuff is top secret?

The world is much more Orwellian than we imagined and when you watch the the US Government's response to people who are trying to ring an alarm bell it is even more scarey.

A room with a view

View to the garden

I hadn't realised until my kitchen was renovated how important a room with a view is to ones sense of well being.

I was banned from the sun room with view to the garden to a back room with a view to a fence. You'd think it wouldn't make much difference if you are looking at a computer anyway, but it did!

Now I am back in the room with the view, but the rest of the house remains to be sorted. Everything had to be moved during the renovations and it will take a while to sort out.

View to the fence and house next door

Making daisy chains

Small boy makes a daisy chain

Summer idyll. A small boy sits splay-legged on a lawn among flowers, threading daisies into a chain. He is a picture of concentration. The year is about 1976 and the boy is Philip, sitting on a lawn in the grounds of a southern German castle.

I made the shirt and trousers (where did I get the time?) but I suspect my mother, who was visiting Germany for the first time, put the leaf in his buttonhole.

Picture of concentration

The Dutchman Flies in Sydney

Huge sails soared to the ceiling of the Sydney Opera House concert hall on Saturday night. A sailing ship ... oh  yes ...  The Flying Dutchman no less.

Sails in the Sydney Opera House concert hall.

The Sydney Symphony together with a cast of fantastic singers presented a wonderful concert performance of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. The orchestra, the soloists and the very large choir on both sides of the auditorium were exceptionally good. They got a wildly appreciative reception from the audience and a well deserved excellent review.  A video was projected onto the huge sails during the performance, which was successful in augmenting the music rather than distracting from it.

Sydney Opera house last Saturday night

Last year Sydney Symphony put on a fantastic concert version of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and now, after this performance of The Flying Dutchman (there is another performance this evening), my bet is that the Sydney Symphony will be winning a lot of new subscribers, refugees from Opera Australia which is concentrating on balancing its books by putting on musicals.

Go Sydney Symphony!

Dunedin takes the cake

Are you looking for a great place to live? A new survey has ranked Dunedin as the top place to live in New Zealand. Now why am I not surprised!

Dunedin, New Zealand Greeting Card by elizabethgw

New kitchen

After two weeks work the kitchen is finally finished, all except the painting.

Old kitchen

The benchtop in the original kitchen was 45cm deep, the cupboards didn't close and it was hard to get anything from the back of them even though they were not very deep; the stove was well past its use-by date and the oven heated the house like a furnace. Apart from that it was quite usable - a 'functional kitchen' in real estate agent parlance.

The new kitchen .... well what can I say! It has handles and taps that give it a slightly retro look to match the age of the house, but is otherwise quite simple ... if you can call softly closing drawers and fancy pull-out corner cupboard simple.  Next week I will paint the gyp-rock wall and picture rail, then move the fridge to its new corner spot.  

New kitchen

Retro tap (and small tap for filtered water)

Retro handles

 

Walls waiting for paint