A second dog's dinner

Glad I took up my programme-article prerogative of two more tickets to revisit A Dog's Heart, English National Opera's surprise hit of the season so far, on its last night. It was enough to confirm that the score isn't just a jumpy bag of polystylistic tricks*: some of the more pathetic ideas in the accumulating tension of the second act have lodged in my mind. And I do love the music for Sharik's dreams as well as the extra cut and thrust the splendid Garry Walker has been able to draw from his brass-in-ten-league-boots.

Performance-wise, Steven Page and Leigh Melrose (pictured above, with Nancy Allen Lundy's hyper maid, and below by Stephen Cummiskey for ENO) seem to have really wrapped their voices around those unkind, all-over-the-shop lines. And I'm sure the puppeteers had added detail to the uncannily realistic Giacomettiesque stray. Peter Hoare never seemed to have any trouble with man-dog Sharikov, a supremely touching and funny portrayal.

It was, in short, a trumph in every department, and won a deserved standing ovation last night (ENO audiences don't rise to their feet easily, though I suspect the Complicite fans probably do). I haven't enjoyed every Complicite show I've seen - least of all the Kharms nightmare Out of a house walked a man, which would have been 'out of a theatre walked a punter' if I'd been able to extract myself from the middle of a Lyttleton row - but, yes, Simon McBurney is a genius. I hope ENO can sign him up immediately to tackle Shostakovich's The Nose, long overdue a visit to the Coliseum. And hopefully this production will be back, too.


Setting aside memories of the vomit-inducing silhouette operation above, and parallel with the sybaritic tastes of Professor Preobrazhensky, we've been dipping into some of London's restaurants in the past week as seasonal gatherings accumulate. With, thank God, nary a line of tinsel in sight nor a piped Xmas carol in earshot. Fabulous discovery yesterday lunchtime of the unbelievably good and fresh food of the Spanish Casa Brindisa in South Kensington.


Best potatoes I've eaten out in a long time; the garlicky prawns and the bacalao (salt cod, like the Italians' baccala) with apple all tasted of themselves. Worth knowing, now that humble Daquise nearby has transformed into a pretentious Polish haute-cuisine (oxymoron) joint.

Earlier jollies were a Monday lunch arranged by my stalwart class monitor at the City Lit, Margaret Beaton, at Le Deuxieme on Covent Garden's Long Acre - for a lunchtime set meal, simple but tasty, this beat all the others we've tried, with superlative steak in pepper sauce - and a gathering of old Edinburghians 30 years on chez Julie's of Notting Hill. I've just read that this famous establishment, once a Sloane pitstop then a film-stars' haunt, was fined for claiming organic products when it was saving itself a fortune on unhappy chicken. Well, its nooks and crannies with a Marian theme were very cosy on a snowy, freezing night, and the eight of us who materialised in 'adverse weather conditions' had a whale of a time (sadly the hostess was stuck in Switzerland and couldn't make it), but the food wasn't great - though I can't complain about my lamb chops.

Where else might you try if you want to escape false seasonal cheer? My own favourites are two Italians - the unpretentious Rosso di Sera on Neal Street, run by Samuele and Igor from the Marche. It's one of the few of its kind where you really do feel you're getting good, straightforward cucina tipica as you would in Italy itself.


We were a bit taken aback by the huge portions at Bocca di Lupo (above) in the heart of Soho; I suffered from indigestion after eating too much there. But it was good quality, and of course the new Gelupo gelato bar over the road is ideal for doing as the Russians do and consuming your ices on the freezing streets. Salute!

*interesting that Grange Park doyenne Wasfi Kani, who said she didn't want to hear it again, was gainsaid by other, surprisingly articulate and sympathetic guests on BBC2's Arts Review, one of whom sagely pointed out that the music perfectly illustrated each and every character. Kirsty, meanwhile, told us about 'Bulgarov', reacted to Prof Carey's commendation of the coloratura prospective bride with illustration of Vassilieva barking through her megaphone, and this week issued an apology for misattributing the puppeteers.

Eye saga

Felt a bit queasy about the big brother eyes in the ENO/Complicite Dog's Heart on Saturday (photo by Stephen Cummiskey). Not because of Graham Danby's unduly sinister party man, but because I was slightly nervous anticipating the visit to the Western Eye Hospital yesterday.

And with reason, as it turned out: after I'd been jammed up against a machine and had anaesthetic drops put in the eyes, and had lenses and sticks jammed in them, and had to swivel them every which way in front of bright lights, a big eye cheese decided I needed a torn retina lasered shut. In fact, I think this may have been a longer term problem dating from before the bike smash, from what an optician said a couple of years ago; but I'm glad to have had it sorted because a detached retina is no joke.

But from being told nothing about what they were doing to me, I then found out a bit too much: the specialist was going to burn around the tear. So the laser light show was accompanied by the odd shooting pain. Enough: it was over in fifteen minutes, the pink room returned to its normal colour and I stumbled out on to the Edgware Road with my eyes streaming.

By 4, I was fighting fit for the Adriana Lecouvreur class at the City Lit, and we had a happy time comparing versions of 'La dolcissima effigie' (Alagna, Kaufmann, Gigli, Corelli, Domingo and - tops - Aureliano Pertile). Then it was Judy time, and any initial scepticism about Tracie Bennett's impersonating the fundamentally inimitable were swept away by the second act of Peter Quilter's play End of the Rainbow, freshly transferred from Northampton to the Trafalgar Studios. Here's star Tracie as photographed by Peter Day.


Read all about it in my Arts Desk review.

And finally, a real tonic. You may have heard about the hideous demise facing the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Centre (Muziekcentrum van de Omroep) and all its ensembles in Holland. I signed the petition against the government cuts along with thousands of others - you still may here - and was rewarded with this flashmob film in which the beleaguered players all gathered together for Bernstein's West Side Story mambo in a busy Rotterdam train station. Stick with it while the percussionists allow the other musicians to put themselves together.



Brought tears to my eyes - there's communication for you.

Good company down the A&E

Well, I'm not sure Hans Fallada, born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, makes exactly congenial reading when you're waiting for three hours to be seen in the mayhem of an accident and emergency department, but anything is bearable so long as there's humanity at the heart of it. Of which more anon. I should explain that it was the long-term accident rather than another immediate emergency which caused a concerned doctor to send me to Charing Cross Hospital nine days after the all-too-perfunctory inspection at St Thomas's. Last week's bash was still giving me gyp, and she discovered a dent above the eye which in my squeamishness I hadn't felt.


X-rays and further checking finally revealed, after three and a half hours' hanging around, that I have a left supraorbital fracture which, horror, may mean maxillary surgery. But in the meantime they're more concerned about the orb itself, so off I go first thing tomorrow to the Western Eye Hospital. The CX experience could have been a lot worse, despite a fair bit of wailing and crying from a failed suicide behind drawn curtains. Chief entertainment was an old parlare-ist called Reg, who'd been there all day for brain scans and tests, and his merry men. I just assumed they were a bunch of old London pals, which they were - but with a bit of a difference.

The giveaway was when Reg gently broke into a rendition of 'I am what I am', and of course the parlare which cropped up when one of his chums spoke of his old mum's ailments. 'You need to keep up your fluid intake', quoth another a little bit later, to which came the quip 'as the Bishop of London said to the actress'. There was a bit of bickering between them, which prompted me to tell Reg how fortunate he was to have such loyal companions. He agreed, felt my dent and invited me to drop in some time on a kind of friends-only casbah off the Battersea Bridge Road. Which I am, of course, very curious to visit if I can, and if indeed it exists as Reg, for all his eloquence, wasn't quite all there.

In the meanwhile, jammed between two slumped young men, I moved deeper into the horrifying world of Fallada's Alone in Berlin, German title: Jeder stirbt fur sich allein (another curious admission, by the way, had to sit cross-legged on the floor, where he was soon engrossed in Gautier's My Fantoms [sic]).


Simply as a document from someone who lived through the terrors in question, as of course did Irene Nemirovsky in the unfinished Suite Francaise, Alone in Berlin would be remarkable: the insights into the police-state Berlin of the early 1940s are unflinching, the Third Reich 'vile beyond vile', as the author incontrovertibly states. But Fallada is both blackly comic about the twisted logic of the regime and shatteringly moving about the handful of folk who insist on keeping their integrity no matter how useless their active demonstration of it might prove. The counterpoint of characters is worthy of Tolstoy, even if I'm not always sure about the felicity of Michael Hofmann's translation. My own preference would have been for the splendid Anthea Bell, but still we must be grateful to Hofmann for bringing a masterpiece to the attention of the English-speaking world.

There's an extraordinary chapter in which the imprisoned protagonist shares a cell with a psychopath who pretends to be a dog so that he can be registered as insane. Intriguing parallels here with the wonderful Bulgakov novella turned into the opera I saw last night, A Dog's Heart. I thought the staging was ENO at its idiosyncratic best - read all about it on The Arts Desk. Meanwhile, here are some shots from the Apple Store pre-performance event in which I had the pleasure of partipating. What a weird idea, to set it in the middle of a vast open shop with crowds milling and buzzing all around. I couldn't hear a lot of the earlier slots backstage, as it were, until I went and stood by a loudspeaker. There were star turns from the dog's chief puppeteer, Mark Down of the Blind Summit Theatre company, seen here demonstrating bag-of-bones Sharik to the magisterial Christopher Cook:


and from the young countertenor covering Sharik's 'pleasant voice', Iestyn Morris, who, accompanied by Murray Hipkin, made the dog's dream-monologue sound like something by Cavalli. His teacher Andrew Watts did a clarion job, too, in the show proper. We'll be hearing a lot more from this second Iestyn (can you believe there's another to follow in the footsteps of the estimable Mr. Davies?) Here he is on the left, standing by the dog-table with Tim Armstrong-Tayor, the actor who so wittily told the story from plastic surgeon Professor Preobrazhensky's perspective.


And last but of course not least, the brothers Simon and Gerard McBurney with our mainstay.


Complicite's main man had to dash off, so he did his bit with Christopher first; and then at the end I joined Gerard to talk Dog's Heart. Inevitably I was a bit in awe since he'd been, as he put it, a 'fellow musketeer' of composer Raskatov in Moscow and had a much closer bee-line to the work in progress than I did. But I'm glad to have had my preliminary hunches confirmed by such an inspiration-packed work.

Dog and diva

In this week of bizarrely contrasted operatic first nights, it should be the other way round, of course, but it doesn't sound so good. The diva is Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, purportedly a star vehicle for Angela Gheorghiu. Yet what we saw last night was a good company show, with plenty of quiet perceptiveness about the 18th century gulf between actors and aristocracy in David McVicar's production, beautifully designed by Charles Edwards. It certainly didn't make me regret taking the decision to spend four weeks on the opera with my City Lit students.

There's Gheorghiu's actress above in the Royal Opera photo by Catherine Ashmore, being attended to by Alessandro Corbelli's sympathetic theatre manager among others while Michaela Schuster's bitch princess looks on. You can read what I made of it in my Arts Desk review.


And what about Kaufmann? Well, I had the same reservations last night as I do about his new so-called verismo disc - that the top is infallibly secure, with its authentic Italianate sob, but the middle is a bit dark, baritonal and slightly in the throat, not quite the sunshine and roses I was hoping for in this rep. But as I wrote, it will be terrific for Lohengrin, Florestan and Siegmund. And eventually, let's hope, for Tristan and Siegfried. The boy has the looks, the musicality and probably the strength.


A rather different attention is being paid up top to poor old stray Sharik in the De Nederlandse Opera/Complicite premiere of A Dog's Heart earlier this year (both photos by Monika Rittershaus). I got to know Raskatov's score preparing an article for the ENO programme, and what an elaborate piece of clockwork it is: a bit like Prokofiev's collage technique, with no idea resting for more than a few pages, but quite a few repeats. Whether it'll hang together as good music theatre remains to be seen - and I will see tomorrow, since it's the first night at the Coli. Before that, I'm joining a conversation in the Apple Store on Covent Garden Piazza, chaired by Christopher Cook with the brothers McBurney and sundry performers as the other guests. It's free, so do come along at 6pm on Saturday.