More Culture

In Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood Mrs Organ Morgan complains about her husband - "With Organ Morgan its Organ Organ Organ all the time." With us the last few weeks its "culture culture culture all the time".

A week after hearing Handel's Messiah in Trinity College Chapel we were back there last Thursday to hear Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Its lovely music and the student choir and orchestra did justice to it. Not sure how the relatively scantily clad soloists endured the cold though. It was worse than the previous week, and that was bad. Still, we did get a free glass of wine to cheer us up in the interval.

Saturday we went to London. My sister in law had managed to buy tickets to the opera at Covent Garden and then discover that both she and her husband had arranged to go to watch rugby matches in different parts of the country - so she gave us the tickets for Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina'a Slippers.

We made a day of it, walking first the few hundred yards along the Euston Road from Kings Cross station to the British Library where there's an exhibition on the history and development of photography. Their own holdings are enough to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject and there is a broad range of stunning and intriguing imagery. And lots of early camera equipment too. The story was told of some early photographer who went to Egypt and had the bright idea of having a small caravan like structure which was his darkroom and equipment store. The locals he travelled amongst were convinced this was where he kept his harem.

Then we tubed (is that a real verb?) to South Kensington to see the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Stunning. It looks like thirty million pounds well spent. We had about two hours and I reckon saw about a third of the exhibits. In the nineteenth century the V&A must have had collectors out plundering Italy, for half the stuff in the first section we saw appeared to have come from churches in Venice and the Veneto - tombs, sculptures, well heads, the whole east end of some chapel.

Further on are medieval altar pieces and other religious artifacts, none of which I can remember their having on display before. Left, detail of the St Margaret Altarpiece, Germany around 1520.








There were some old favourites though, like the Luck of Edenhall (left), a piece of Syrian glass from the time of the crusades, with its own leather carrying case, and the Becket Chasse (pictured above).

Then we ran out of time and had to go and eat, which we did in a Polish restaurant near South Ken tube station which we think is the same one we first ate in around 1973. I had Kartofflen, a sort of potato and onion and bacon tart, with a mushroom sauce. Very good.

Then to Covent Garden, where the seats turned out to be in the Amphitheatre, a steeply raked section a dizzying forty or fifty feet above the stalls. The Tsarina's Slippers (no, we hadn't heard of it either) is a delightfully silly piece, with plot which is partly Feydeau farce and partly Last of the Summer Wine, about a young blacksmith whose young lady won't marry him unless he provides her with a pair of slippers just like the Tsarina's. His mother, the local witch, and eligible widow, is wooed by the Devil and several local men, including the father of the young lady. In one scene the witch is visited by several suitors in turn, and every time the next chap arrives the current one is hidden in a sack. When the son arrives home he drags the sacks out, thinking they contain either coal or his tools. Subsequently, on the way to commit suicide in despair of winning his girl, he finds the Devil in what he thought was his tool sack and forces him to take him to St Petersburgh where he persuades the court to give him a pair of the desired slippers. All then ends happily ever after. The Royal Ballet is involved too, as there are a couple of dance scenes in the second act.

The Guardian critic slated the production. I got the impression she wanted the whole thing transposed to a tractor collective in Soviet Russia. That would have ruined it. The eighteenth century peasant and court costumes were delightful and Tchaikovsky's music is just right for this light piece.

On another subject, you may or may not have noticed that I have a link on the home page of the website to a list of vestments and clerical garments I am selling. They mostly belonged to my recently deceased father in law, though a few were mine. It would be nice to find homes for them.