A little bit about what the term meant – ‘slipping into a warm bath’ sounded perilously close to ‘putting on an old pair of slippers,’ which doesn’t sound altogether nice to me. More still about what mine might be.
I don’t listen actively to a lot of opera at home, unless I’m trying to get to know something new. I prefer the live experience and have the privilege of living in a place where plenty is within reach. There are, though, various operas I can listen to more or less whatever mood I’m in: Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Platée, one or two Händel pieces, Die ägyptische Helena, Die tote Stadt, Mr Brouček…
But in the end, I decided that my default opera, when I don’t want anything more demanding but do want something I know by heart and am totally at home with, is Prokofiev’s War and Peace. Prokofiev has been a favourite of mine since my teens – I remember choosing to write about him for my ‘A-Level’ exams (the ones that helped determine where you could go to university) – and War and Peace is such easy listening that a friend of mine has always called it ‘Prokofiev’s Sound of Music.’ It’s one opera I’m willing to travel to catch, so far at the Met, and later with the WNO (Welsh, not Washington), in Birmingham, UK.
The two versions I usually listen to (though I have others) are either Gergiev’s Kirov one, or the Paris Opera’s DVD, with or without the picture. Zambello now gets a lot of stick, but I was dazed by her Bastille production, and it’s remained with me ever since.
