Rake

Mary Beth and I went to see a production of The Rake's Progress by Opera Memphis and U of M. It was good, I maybe even liked it better than I expected. I went into it knowing it was part of Stravinsky's neo-classical period (his last work in that vein before, as I kinda recently learned, he moved on to serialism...I had thought he had ended with neo-classicism after his initial modernist stuff...I do really need to check out his serialist stuff). And then in the pre-talk they (our old neighbor Jeremy was there on the panel...he's a musicology professor and we've been to stuff where he talked about opera before) talked about how it was very much in the vein of Mozart. So I kinda had that expectation going in. And the Mozart stuff is there...and kind of in a way where he's taking a bunch of different Mozart operas and kind of blending them together. But the overall effect, to me, didn't FEEL like Mozart for the most part. There was a Stravinsky undercurrent of weirdness that was subtle but I feel there throughout most of it. It reminded me more of earlier Stravinsky than the other neo-classical stuff of his I've heard before. And then the content of the opera...it starts off in the vein of a typical morality play kind of lesson thing...but by the middle it starts to veer into absurdist territory and gets kinda weird and then the flow between sections is more and more nonsensical. And though it ends with a very traditional here's-the-moral cap off, it seems (at least that's how I interpret it) a bit tongue-in-cheek, plus every character seems to have a bit of a different take (except for Mr. Trulove who's just kinda like, yep, I agree with what you just said, Rakewell). Anyway yeah, I enjoyed it. Not sure about the crowd as a whole. We lost quite a few people around us during the intermission. Oh well, their loss...(I think!?).

Today I got up and went to Xanadu as they're having a final clearing-out-stock book giveaway. Friends of the Library had claimed what they wanted and what was left was just a come by and take what you want before we throw it all away and we're done with it all. So I swung by, not expecting a whole lot given that it was kinda the dregs of what was left. I did pick up a few things, some were kinda, I don't know what this is really but it seems kinda interesting and it's free so let's give it a shot. Anyway, I picked up: Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado, The Vizier's Elephant: Three Novellas by Ivo Andrić, Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Bertha and Other Plays by Kenneth Koch, Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon by Tom Stoppard, Fences by August Wilson, Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, and The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. So seems like drama was a little less picked over than other stuff, but yeah, got a few things. Also I picked up one cd: U2: Live/Under a Blood Red Sky. Then I went and drove around to two different post offices to get some stamps, exciting. Okay, now on to my day.