We've got a pal in Palumbo

At this point, unusually, I've already reviewed Saturday's performance of Aïda a half-dozen times orally, and I can't tell whether that will make this remarks sound more focussed or more stale. The bottom line is that it's far superior to the previous performance at the Lyric and may be the best Aïda I've ever seen. (It's hard to say for sure because the first performance I saw was also one of my first opera experiences ever so obviously my critical faculties were fairly embryonic.)

First the bad news: Giordani as Radames was fairly disappointing. Very can-belto from the start. When he attempted the diminuendo at the end of "Celeste Aïda" it sounded like he was being strangled. Only much later did it occur to me that he might've been trying to cover up a cold which would've made a softer register sound raspy, so if you haven't seen it yet there's still hope. There are far worse flaws in a tenor than being shouty and one-note, but it does make for a fairly boring characterisation of a pivotal character.

Still, as I told Nuphy at the time, I'd rather have a miserable Radames and an outstanding Aïda than the other way around and I loved pretty much every bit of Sondra Radvanovsky's performance. Only once or twice did she fail to rise above the orchestra and she maintained a beautiful tone throughout (which is especially important since screechy sopranos are the bane of opera in my eyes). Jill Grove as Amneris was also outstanding and did a better job of selling her character's repentance than I've seen before.

The other voices are a mixed bag. The ever-reliable Raymond Aceto was a terrific Ramfis. Gordon Hawkins had a lot of presence as Amonasro, but his diction left something to be desired and he was surprisingly weak at times, such as during his Third Act duet with his daughter where he was drowned out by the music even as Radvanovsky sailed above it. But he still managed much better than Evan Boyer, who was completely out of depth as the Pharaoh. It doesn't really support the drama to have him as the weakest voice on stage.

That said, I can't remember the last time I heard the chorus perform this well. Despite his other criticisms (and we'll get to those soon enough), Nuphy's colleague H. was impressed that you could understand almost every word they sang. But the real joy of the evening was the conductor, Renato Palumbo. Although Nuphy's seat partner found that he took some of tempi too fast, he and I were in agreement that we loved the extra pep. Usually I'm so worn out by the final scene that I'm praying under my breath for the fools to run out of air already, but this time I actually felt moved by their plight.

Nuphy found the tomb in that scene "more Hänsel and Gretel than Egypt", but overall it's quite a good production. I even think they made some improvements to it since the last time I saw it. For one, none of us remembered the Ethiopians being blue before, but I thought it subtly brought out the racial undertones. And I certainly don't remember the dancing being this enthralling. Again, some of that might be the difference having a conductor who understands Verdi makes, but three ballets would normally be deathly and for a change I enjoyed them all.

Nach till me gu brath

Happily, it's been a while since I pushed myself to finish a book just so I could be done with it and move on to something else, as I did earlier tonight. At least it wasn't anything I'd been looking forward to but a $3 impulse purchase from Market Fresh Books after lunch at Pret a Manger last Thursday. I think No great mischief by Alistair MacLeod may be two-thirds of a really good novel. At least it was about the two-thirds mark where I began to ask myself, When is this going to end?

The absolute nadir is Chapter 34, which consists of an extended conversation between the narrator and his sister about their extended family. It reads like MacLeod has gotten to this point and thought, "Hmm, I've still got a lot of assorted bits of Scottish history and family incident and what-not I haven't been able to work in yet. Well, here goes." Which is utterly unnecessary, since there would've been plenty of room to fit it in earlier if he hadn't been repeating himself so much.

I appreciate what he's trying to do, building up a rhythm by using certain consecrated phrases passed from one generation to the next. The book is shot through with invocations of the Gaelic singing tradition of Cape Breton and it's not a bad reference point for structuring a novel about the influence of place and shared history. But if it's not making your eyes well with tears of recognition, even the most beautiful refrain can become tiresome after a while and several of MacLeod's callbacks wear out their welcome with by the fifth appearance or so.

He seems to have built his fame on the back of his short fiction, so I'll be as generous as I can and assume that he's overextended himself by attempting a novel. Initially the prospect of reading his collected stories excited me, but now I'll proceed more cautiously. There's one in the back of my reader's copy of the novel (that's a thought: wonder how many pages the finished edition was?) and presumably it was chosen to give an idea of his range.

The other serious problem for me was that I found the narrator too much of a cipher. One review I came across online criticised MacLeod for romanticising mid-century working class life too much, but I think it's telling that he chose to make his protagonist someone who escapes that life of noble poverty for the cushiness of an orthodontist's practice. However, he never gives us much insight into why he chooses that path. (Something I'm more than a little curious about, given that it so neatly parallels my own father's experience.) Our man walks straight from his college graduation into a job at a uranium mine which he takes out of some atavistic sense of familial loyalty and it's not for another forty or fifty pages that he makes any comment at all on how he feels about this. And we does, he doesn't tell us much.

That same reviewer faulted the author for not including enough telling details about life in the mine, but they were sufficient for my taste. No, it was the Gaelic that let me down. Predictably, that's what landed the book in my hands in the first place, and at first glance it looked pretty solid. But I was looking at the parts where he quotes traditional songs. His attempts at including supposed snatches of natural conversation are much less successful--not least of all because they suffer from overrepetition, often successively deployed in less and less appropriate contexts.

For example, the first time a character is described as "Cousin agam fhein", it's a colourful and convincing bit of code switching. (There is no Gaelic word for "cousin"; you simply have to describe the relationship.) By the time it gets used by the narrator's grandfather to refer to his grandson, it's simply nonsensical. And if it gets exhausting to see a mention of "clann Chalum Ruaidh" ("Red Malcolm's descendants") on every other page, as others have complained, imagine what it's like when you can't overlook the fact that Chalum is not the correct genitive form.

Given this, it's a joy to find that Edna O'Brien's most recent book of short stories is up to the high standards of her earlier work. While "Manhattan medley" feels like a bit of a retread, the other stories so far have been genuinely affecting, the kind that you need to pause after reading before you're ready to take on another. Between that and Ó Flaithearta's Dúil, I'll be set for a while.