Advice for any first-time visitor to Dublin: skip the Book of Kells experience (10 Euros to see two pages when we went on an unsuccessful lottery-win trip as Dublin virgins) and, to find out about crucial, very different aspects of the city's identity, head for 14 Henrietta Street. This is not the 'Tenement House Museum', as it's sometimes advertised; it embraces the whole history of a Georgian street in North Dublin, from opulent commission through 100 to a building by 1911, on to the more humane divisions of the 1930s-70s, and to what the place is now. Frankly, the finest museum experience ..read more

Dante's Divina Commedia was Puccini's model for the trajectory of his most comprehensive masterpiece, even if the subject-matter is quite different for the most part. You can, of course, take Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi separately, or put the individual operas alongside other one-acters, but it's reassuring to see the trilogy most often presented these days as the composer intended (and no, IMO it is NOT acceptable to reverse the orders of the convent drama and the Florentine comedy).  The beauty of it is that each is a supreme masterpiece of timing and atmosphere on i ..read more

After a worrying January during which my old mum's fate hung in the balance, and with her happily reinstalled back in her excellent nursing home, I've been able to join J in what is now his city for longer. And all the more blissfully since he's found a dream palace in the air on the same side of Merrion Square where Oscar Wilde grew up. Is there a better view in Dublin? I doubt it. On a good day the Dublin Hills/Wicklow Mountains can be seen. Not so on 1 March, when we woke to find snow everywhere. It lasted a day, not before making an excursion to a noodle bar down the hill alongside the ..read more

We're coming up to the sixth of ten Zoom sessions on Leonard Bernstein, and I think all the students would agree that so far it's been a journey of incomparable richness (West Side Story next Thursday). One of the semi-incidental joys has been the possibility of reading or re-reading some of his sources; over the past three weeks I've finaly read, in Walter Hamilton's vivid translation. Plato's Symposium - on the Greek course at university, we only covered Phaedrus and selected books of The Republic - and Auden's The Age of Anxiety, reassured by John Fuller's Auden Companion that parts of it ..read more

It was the best and worst of days: 4 January, which began with leaving glorious Volterra at 8 in the morning on the first bus as the sun rose, and later continued with heading straight to Epsom Hospital to find my mother delirious from one of several infections (the consultant simply said 'the next 24 hours are crucial').  Well, the rest of January was quite a grind of travelling back and forth for hospital visits, wavering between hope and fear and much else in between. But I'm so glad for our Italian idyll for giving me strength. After I last posted on the subject, we had an ideal New ..read more

...as Bonnie Langford is the most recent show singer to tell us, and so well (yes, really), in Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends, which I'm glad my old friend Simon encouraged me to go and see before Xmas. Actually the odds were very low on my not being still here, since the diagnosis of bowel cancer in November 2022 yielded a verdict of Stage 1/cuspal 2 and no metastatizing. Nevertheless it's been quite a year, full of inspiring people like the heroic folk of Charing Cross Hospital - I can never get tired of seeing this pic -   and I choose the top image, at one of my happiest place ..read more

Wondered what the banner which greeted us down the long beech-lined drive to Powerscourt Gardens was worth: it proclaimed the National Geographic's assignation of No. 3 among the great gardens of the world, yielding only to Kew and Versailles. Even the approach yields lovely vistas of the valley, though the Wicklow mountains beyond were only occasionally visible, and the top of the Sugarloaf, usually such a landmark, not at all. Now I certainly haven't been around like my friend Kerry Richardson, who directed a series on that very subject, but when we passed through the ticket office and em ..read more

Ten glorious Wednesday afternoons on the Wagner opera that always leaves me feeling whole have flown by, dovelike. I'll confess that musically I can do without the final transfiguration; it doesn't really take us any further, and unless you have a production where Parsifal moves on, feels a bit 'here we go again' in the non-action, too. But tears always come to my eyes in the Good Friday Magic music, whether in the opera or in the concert. It took the visit of John Tomlinson to drive home how beautiful and unusual the words are. The gist is that humans may look to God, but nature looks to hu ..read more

An enforced absence of over three months came to an end on Thursday, when I decided I could hobble sufficiently to take the train and boat back to my other half's other city, which I've come to love so much so quickly too. Decided to take train and boat as his experiences of sitting on a plane nn a runway for over an hour on several occasions wouldn't suit my discomfort and, long though the London Euston - Holyhead - Dublin Port journey is, I'd be able to move around at every point. Though every single train leaving Euston was late, that part of the journey passed pleasantly, the first half ..read more

The summer course on Parsifal in association with the Wagner Society of Scotland won't have quite ended when I descend to the bottom of the Rhine for my Autumn term Opera in Depth Zoom course on 9 October. But thanks to Paul Schofield's excellent book The Redeemer Reborn, proposing Parsifal as 'the fifth opera of Wagner's Ring', I feel halfway back in the world of the tetralogy already. Scholfield's tenet is fortunately merely a peg on which to hang his perceptions about the links between Wotan and Amfortas, Siegfried and Parsifal, Brünnhilde and Kundry, Alberich and Klingsor.  A practi ..read more