Opera is one kind of music that I can't get on with. Five years ago, Lucy got a couple of tickets to the Royal Opera House to see what I thought was an opera called Lady Macbeth. I was expecting a Shakespeare adaptation, sort of like a classical West Side Story. But what we got had nothing to do with Scottish kings. It was in fact Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. I didn't make much of it. But in the interval, we went to the bar, and I saw where all that Lottery money went. Blimey! And we saw Anna Ford. That's what the opera always used to be about, right?
I went to Nixon in China a few years ago, too, but that's not proper opera, is it? I didn't enjoy that much, either. It was back in 1998 that I realised this artform and me weren't really cut out for each other. Porgy and Bess was on at the Belfast Festival, and M and I got tickets for the Saturday matinee. Gershwins, not European high art; the opera even has a hit song in it; and I already had this album, so I ought to recognise a few of the other tunes as well. I thought that, if I were ever to find a way into opera, this ought to be it. But I think we both left the Belfast Opera House pretty nonplussed, and I looked forward to seeing Robert Wilson's breathtakingly wonderful Saints and Singing for the second time in two evenings.
I guess I could possibly have caught a hint of this outcome from the fact that this CD had never sunk its hooks into me. I used to play it in my Workstation office in the early evening, but it was never more than background music. Miles' collaborations with Gil Evans have never been my favourite era of his work, compared with, say, the electric '70s stuff.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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