Intramural sights

Proof of the egg

Saturday was the day I was going to show off my knowledge of York: the places I have frequented, the things I have discovered - to be topped off by a performance of Falstaff, broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in the other York.

After the eggs were produced and consumed, the first thing on the programme was a short walk over Heslington West, via laundromat, restaurant (closed), supermarket (closed) to the Library Cafe (opening just when we arrived), back around the lake. Cold winds, empty grounds, clear skies, good impression.

Then, taking advantage of the rented bike, a tour over Heslington East, including in particular Richard's office. This had the double function of also giving me the opportunity to clear out, which was necessary since Richard will be back again on Monday. Since I had not been to the office either on Thursday or on Friday, I had completely forgotten about this. I'm allowed to use Radu's office for the next week, after Christmas we'll see. For now it was a question of collecting all the papers strewn all over Richard's office into a single pile, putting the coffee cup on top, and marching everything two doors further along the row.

An angel

Sport Village with swimming pool and equipment; then via the rails-converted-to-bicycle-paths to the city. We actually passed the now-abandoned Rowntree chocolate factory (see my earlier post) which I had not seen the previous time as it was dark then. It's huge but crumbling, a sad sight. Roald Dahl can't fail to come to mind.

From the deserted campus and the equally deserted bike trails we plunged back into tourist-riddled scenes. What with all the walking and cycling it was most certainly time for lunch, but before we had found a likely-looking reataurant (the Slug and Lettuce, I'll take suggestions for explanations of the name) we had discovered our first ice sculptures of the "festival of angels". Though the day had started off quite brisk it was by this time back to Friday's balmy temperatures, the ice was dripping furiously and the curious childrens'  hands did nothing to slow down this process. All in all, the angels did not move us to burst into songs of praise and glory.

The Christmas market was a lot more lively than on Friday, but anyone travelling to York on the strength of the Tubantia's enthousiastic report of the wonderful Yorkish reply to the traditional German Weihnachtsmarkt is in for a disappointment; or as we say in Dutch, will come home from a cold fair. They do their best, and it is a gallant effort, but no, the true sense of the word Kitsch is lost on the English.

More interesting was a demo of the ice sculpting process itself, going on at another square. Here we saw a moose emerging from a block of ice, in a process involving ever-finer tools but ending with a blowtorch. (This was to smooth away all the edges.) Fascinating, and a good deal faster than Michelangelo rescued David out of the marble.

We concluded the day with Falstaff. This was to be a screening very much like the Spartacus ballet I have seen months ago, except that it was not brought to us not from east but from west: live from the Met, shown at the Cityscreen cinema. (There are screenings in the Netherlands, too; in fact my mother alerted us to this, though they will go to the encore tomorrow so I can't wave at the screen.) With some effort I persuaded Elise that it would be interesting to join a pre-performance meeting of an "opera interest group" that I had seen announced, quite coincidentally, when I went to a movie some time earlier. As it turned out, this was the first ever time they had organised something like this, and for us it was a very good introduction. All Elise and I had seen from Verdi before were some of the famout tragedies - Aida, La Traviata and the like - but this is his only successful comic opera, which he wrote at the ripe old age of 79. We were also not aware that Falstaff is a character from more than one Shakespeare play (there he is again! I recently learned while playing Scrabble - or rather a mobile app variant thereof - that the very rich English vocabulary includes the fanciful word "bardolator" for people who idolise S.). All this and more we learned in the one hour before the screening started.

Falstaff: not only witty in himself but the cause of wit in others

I know it is silly to applaud in a cinema for a performance broadcast from thousends of miles away, but we did it anyway. This was wonderfully ludricous and ludricously wonderful. Falstaff is a big fella, as both he himself and his opponents do not stop stressing. Obviously in very different terms: Falstaff sings praises of his "magnificent belly" from which a "thousand tongues proclaim his name"; others use less lyrical terms like "tub of lard". The singer performing Falstaff,, Ambrogio Maestri, has been born for this role. I do not for one moment believe he had to put on fake layers of clothes to become that tub of lard. He has sung the part 200 times and woe to the director who tries to teach him anything about it. But apart from the music (no need to extol the virtues of Verdi) and the performance (not just Falstaff's, the others were great too but his makes or breaks this), also the staging was by an order of magnitude the most elaborate I have ever seen. It was time-travelled to the middle of the previous century, and the degree of detail in which a '50s kitchen was reconstructed, to name just one scene, made us understand how it can be that, according to the commentary, the revenue from the tickets still pays only 50% of the cost of the production. Opera at this level is, pure and simple, a structural, permanent financial black hole. But what a magnificent hole!

Trouhy collection at the Trembling Madness

We had ordered dinners during the interval, which came in a cardboard box with a glass of sparkling wine, and turned out to consist of sandwiches of acceptable quality. Our lunch had been extensive enough to make this all that was required. To round off the day we tried the last pub on my list, the Willow, but having found it (with some trouble) we essentially did not dare go up: a long dark stairway over which hung a sign "open only for regulars and university students." Might have been fun to pretend we fell into one of those categories, but being tired we didn't feel like making the attempt. Instead we had a final glass at the Trermbling Madness, then it was back to the apartment for a good night's sleep.