WordPress tells me that the first draft of this post is from January; I have started and stopped editing the same post again and again, every time feeling just as uninspired. It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing things – I was – it just was that I had little to say about them, no words … More Lately
Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England. Among your heart-shaped leaves Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing Their little weak soft songs; In the crooks of your branches The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs Peer restlessly … More Lilacs
another year, another Connolly Fest done – every year around October or so, there’s a blurry of Dame Sarah related activity. This year was a near repeat of the last – Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in London and a Lieder Festival concert in Oxford – with an added bonus of an opera, Wagner’s … More Lately
What a long silence it’s been. Between the last post and now, I have gone through illness and health scare, and through a spell of just general sort of fatigue. I also already in March made the decision to not to photograph any of the things I usually photograph (as a part of the annual … More Pilgrimages
In lieu of a blog post, here are some pages from my art journals, some recent, some dating back to before I came to Oxford. I have never been a diary writer (and I have tried, so hard), but somehow the visual medium has always worked better for me. I draw (sometimes even well), make … More Visual diary
It’s been a while. In fact, it’s been a whole month since I even looked at this blog. I haven’t gone away though – it just so happens that December is always rather busy. And I’m good at wasting time – for example, I spent one whole weekend painting Nutcracker illustrations, with results that I … More This year
After the gloriously busy first week of half term, the second was quieter and spent largely preparing for a surgery I had three weeks ago; it got rescheduled meaning I missed Andrei Bondarenko’s recital at the Lieder Festival. I did catch Roderick Williams singing Die Schöne Müllerin in Saint John the Evangelist, which is one … More Lately
It’s been one of those mad glorious weeks that tend to roll around once or twice a year, filled with goodies of every kind. Thursday week ago I saw a fab concert performance of Rameau’s Dardanus by the English Touring Opera at the Sheldonian. As it happens, this is my only opera this autumn – … More Lately
I saw Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, directed by James Macdonald at the Harold Pinter Theatre, during the last week of previews, and have a ticket to see it again in April; I’d like to say that I’m sophisticated enough to pick such dates so that I can compare the performances etc. but … More Lately, or Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf
I made several attempts at getting everything I saw in one mosaic. Turns out that I don’t have an pictures from the Ariadne auf Naxos I saw in the spring, and only a curtain photo of Boris Godunov. And quite possibly nothing at all from Nabucco (either that, or I’m blind). The two recitals that … More It was a very good year. In some respects.
Shakespeare for absolute beginners 