No time just now for a full review. It was slightly bizarre yesterday afternoon being number one on Google for this.
I am so glad that I went. I was a bit anxious about the music. It wasn't exactly Tosca or Traviata or Mikado where you go home humming the tunes, but it was okay. You could say it was drama with the music as incidental background, but that's way too simple.
Everything was excellent from the orchestra to the singing to the acting to the sets, costumes, settings. A truly good night out, theatre at its best. And Covent Garden is such a friendly place - everyone seems to talk to everyody else (in the cheap seats, anyway, god knows what the rich do...). There were some Russians behind who said they had never seen this in Russia; they were arguing, in Russian, about whether it was suppressed in the Soviet era. It must be a bit bizarre, visiting a foreign country, to hear an opera in your own language, but sang mostly by Swedish and British singers, with English surtitles.
And I still contend it is easier to follow a foreign-language opera with surtitles than one translated into English with less than perfect projection and articulation.
More later.
But it's straight drama tonight, in another Gert bad planning move.
