 questo e quello
December 28, 1997 You know, La Cieca doesn't like being contrary (ha!), but she must say that lately her opinions seem to be running precisely the opposite of the prevailing critical wisdom. Stephen Wadsworth's adaptation of Handel's Serse, hailed as the rebirth of music drama and the dawn of a new age of bel canto? HATED it! And Jonathan Miller's "Pardon my Zeitgeist" Rake's Progress, which nobody much cared for? Well . . . La Cieca didn't much care for it either, but she's seen worse. Xerxes was, you know, really cute in a Merchant-Ivory sort of way. It's got kids and dogs and bustling housemaids and a big butch guy in outrageous drag and a countertenor in a supporting role (so we can congratulate ourselves on our open-minded authenticity) and a girl singing the lead (so we don't have to listen to countertenors all night long). It's light, it's fluffy, it's fun! The only problem is, it's not the opera Handel wrote. In his arch program notes, stage director Wadsworth actually draws parallels between this work and Le Nozze di Figaro - easy enough, I suppose, when you rewrite big chunks of the libretto and treat the rest as prissy camp. None of this seemed to faze anyone, least of all Mr. Wadsworth, who also provided the clanky "English" translation. La Cieca fails to see any really pressing reason for performing this piece in the vernacular. After all, Serse was composed to an Italian text for an English-speaking audience, so it's not as if the show is text-driven. All the expression is in the music; hey, most of the arias could be sung on "ah, ah, ah" without anyone noticing. As it happens, "ah, ah, ah" would be infinitely preferable to doggerel like "if you don't wed him I will behead him."
The much-admired Lorraine Hunt is also an appealing and fiercely dedicated stage personality, but she seems to lack the chops for virtuoso repertoire, with shallow breath support, a short range and no particular agility. No doubt she would be fine in less "vocal" roles like Ottavia or Charlotte. The dueling sisters, Susanna Waters and Amy Burton, sounded typically "American", i.e., adept but generic. It's a good thing their dresses were different colors. Just before The Rake's Progress opened at the Met, Jonathan Miller had a long and entertaining chats with various branches of the media in which he drew aesthetic parallels between Stravinsky's masterpiece and 1920's Berlin and pondered the psychology of everyday unconscious gestures. Fascinating, of course, but it didn't add up to anything on stage beyond Denyce Graves strutting around in Josephine Baker drag and Jerry Hadley scratching his nose a lot. The unit set, a big cold inhospitable empty box, dwarfed the performers and thwarted every attempt at characterful movement. The talented cast mostly just stood there; Hadley passed the time playing pocket pool. Not offensive, really. Just boring. La Cieca caught the "off-night" performance, with Paul Plishka and Stefan Lano doing just fine. Plishka is hardly Gable-as-Rhett casting for Nick Shadow, but he found an overbearing, seedy side of the character that worked. Hadley's love and respect for this opera is obvious: Tom Rakewell is his great role. It is true that the voice is still in a bad patch, but this is a powerful portrayal, suggesting the torment of a Peter Grimes. I wonder if he has taken a look at the Britten score? Vocally, Anne Trulove wants a Fleming (or, in a Utopian opera house, a Steber), but Dawn Upshaw has a wonderful ability to make 20th century music sound like music. The highlight of her performance was not "I go to him", but the lullaby in Bedlam, seamless legato with every word not only clear but meaningful. Now, why did Dr. Miller dress her in that dowdy little cloth coat that made her look like an unemployed stenographer? As Baba, La Graves was anything but drab, but the director vetoed all the character's best gags: no unveiling, no wig in the face, no big exit, nothing. The "Great Auk" song lies in precisely the weakest part of Graves' healthy voice: surely the point of this music is hearing an old bat play ring-around-the-break. As Sellem, Anthony Laciura treated us another slice of his trademark glazed ham. Lano made the score sound crisp and sweet -- quite an accomplishment when you consider how the Met orchestra usually treats guest conductors.
 parterre box is proud to announce its latest DivaPage, dedicated to veteran dramatic soprano Dame Gwyneth Jones. The several linked pages include a biography of the artist, appreciations from her fans, photographs, links to other Jones sites, and a defense of the soprano against her detractors. Coming soon: a discography and a videography including rare "private" tapes. To enter this unofficial site, click here. Dame Gwyneth remains La Cieca's favorite Turandot, of course - especially int the video of the Andrei Serban production from Covent Garden. But now she has a rival. In her final Met performance of the Chinese Princess, Eva Marton was ON in a big way, her performance growing audibly and visibly more confident and poetic minute by minute. Certainly the voice shows signs of wear and tear. The vibrato is wide, and La Cieca admits that even on Marton's very best days there is simply no high C anywhere in this voice. Yes, of course she flubbed most of "In questa reggia" -- nerves. (Is this news? Who since Nilsson has sung this piece well on a regular basis?) But beginning at "Straniero, ascolta!" Marton's voice took on a ping and vibrancy that La Cieca has not heard from anyone (except La Sweet!) in years. I certainly do not remember Marton's making such moving use of sustained quiet singing in middle voice. "Che nessun mi vida! La mia gloria e finita!" took on a really heartbreaking color of regret; how often do we hear a Turandot who can be wistful? And, while the top was inconsistent early in the evening, Marton rocked Sybil's barn with a massive high A in "So il tuo nome" and an even larger B-flat on the final "Amor!" (These moments were, you will remember, exactly where Jane Eaglen crapped out.) I could go on for pages about Marton's fascinating choices, but that would tend to suggest that her performance was a collage of effective "bits". Not at all -- each act was one sustained moment with a thousand inflections, all of them directly inspired by the text and the music. Even the way she folded her hands into her sleeves was moving and poetic. And how beautiful a woman Marton is -- Gaborlike with those high cheekbones and almond eyes. I do not know if she is in fact slimmer than she was years ago or if that she merely seemed that way because next to Eaglen anyone looks slimmer, but, anyway, she was as glamorous a Turandot as we are likely to see at the Met this century. Would you believe La Cieca FORGOT the Liu was Ruth Ann Swenson? I remember thinking "this girl might make a pretty good Mimi if she could clear up the middle voice a bit," when I remembered who she was. Ms. Swenson shows a real affinity for this music, phrasing with real abandon, and dipping into chest voice like a mid-sixties Scotto (that's a VERY good thing!). I cannot say I care for the way she produces those high pianissimi -- sounds like the fake place to me, and they lack body -- but otherwise everything works fine. I was very happy to see Swenson did not settle for the standard Luise Rainer poor-sad-me reading of "Tu che di gel sei cinta", opting instead for determination and even a grim kind of hope. And it speaks volumes for Ms. Swenson's concentration that she could hold the audience's attention while Marton was doing psychodrama only a few feet away. Even Kristjan Johannson seemed inspired, delivering a spot-on high C and plenty of sustained power throughout the range. Sergei Koptchak's massive bass voice rolled like thunder as Timur, and his final line ("...si vendichera!") wierdly enough brought forth a ringing "brava! from the gallery. (That's right-- "bravA". Then someone else yelled, "Shut up!" A real Met Moment.) A singer La Cieca has not much cared for before, Stephen Powell, really turned me around with his sweet-voiced Ping. Not a very large voice, true, but elegant and smooth in the best tradition of American lyric baritones. In wig and makeup Philip Creech (Pong) looks eerily like Eartha Kitt doing a guest spot on Babylon 5. Sharon Sweet burst into tears at her curtain call at the Met's first Tannhauser of the season: it's been long time since she received so unanimously warm an ovation at this theater. She deserved it, because she sang Elisabeth with rich, powerful and beautiful tone, and acted the part with dignity and even a certain charm. She's no Rysanek dramatically, and occasionally the top notes fly a little sharp, but the soprano is back in form after years of off-nights. And La Cieca thinks think we have all noted by now that her broadcast Turandot left the overrated Jane Eaglen in the dirt. La Cieca was disappointed in Bryn Terfel, who seems determined to become as mannered as Fischer-Dieskau. He likes to hector in full-voice, almost barking in act one, and his quiet singing tends to get fussy. "Blick ich umher" was just too tricked out with interpretive detail for what is after all a one-idea aria. (And what is the DEAL with these baritones and their damn hair? You get Terfel, Hampson, Chernov and Ramey together and it looks like they're opening for Def Leppard.) Wolfgang Schmidt remembered all his words and at no time during the evening did blood actually spurt from his throat. Jeannine Altmeyer's return to the Met found this soprano looking EXACTLY like Birgit Nilsson at her most Isolde-glamorous. Too bad she could not mimic Mme. Nilsson's voice so successfully: weak middle register and no top at all. Popping up in the cameo of the Shepherd was Dawn Upshaw, her singing joyous and free, and her tomboyish presence providing one of the few bits of life in this dreary production. The towering romantic-realistic stage pictures are still impressive, but all that went on inside them was strictly add-promptbook-and-stir. Add to that Gil Wechsler's smog-alert lighting design and you have a recipe for a snoozefest. James Levine and the folks in the pit are up to their old tricks again: oh, the sonorities are gorgeous, of course -- there is no creamier sound in the world. But La Cieca does not always hear the necessary sense of movement from one chord to the next, and the result is musical and dramatic inertia. We am not talking only about the passages when maestro and singer affected an absurdly slow tempo (the Dirge to the Evening Star). Even fleeter passages in the Venusberg music and Elisabeth's Greeting seemed to lack pulse, sounding more rushed than energetic. PS: Mme. Venus throws the cleanest orgies I've EVER seen! Speaking of anonymous sex, La Cieca just viewed the London video of Salome, conducted (superbly) by Christoph von Dohnanyi, directed (fabulouly) by Luc Bondy, and starring Catherine Malfitano, Bryn Terfel, Anja Silja and Kenneth Riegel, a quartet to rival my "dream cast" of Claire Danes, Keanu Reeves, Christine Baranski and Harvey Keitel. I am delighted to say that Mr. Bondy has created an exciting and different production without breaking a single one of Dr. Rep's 10 Rules for Stage Directors. No, I don't agree with every one of Bondy's choices: he makes the Page a girl, which smudges a layer of gay text; more importantly, Mr. Terfel is asked to behave wild and manic, perhaps too manic to share a stage with Ms. Malfitano. But in general Bondy's ideas seem firmly based in the text and the music. He has an antimythic, sometimes even comic take on the opera, defining Salome as a willful brat caught between a blustering doofus of a stepfather and a bitter ex-beauty queen of a mother. Jokanaan is madder than Salome, twitching and speaking to himself, not the usual holy man.
The dramatic high point of the opera is the scene where Herod tries to persuade Salome to ask for something besides the head of the prophet: they sit at a kitchen table and squabble while Silja lurches around gulping champagne a la Joanna Lumley. Particularly striking is Ms. Maltifano's constant acrobatic movement trailing yards of silken fabric. Her (fully-dressed) dance by Lucinda Childs is very much "after" Martha Graham and suits both the leading lady and her concept of the character as a knowing and cruel child. (I noted that Malfitano recycled many of Bondy's ideas in her Met performances of this role a couple of seasons ago.) The soprano tires about midway through the final scene and her voice loses some of the surprising power and sheen it boasted earlier in the opera. She makes it to the end, though, and her intense dramatic involvement more than makes up for a few wobbly or flat high notes. Terfel tends to oversing (even when he is in the cistern and miked) but the voice sounds huge and thrilling, wonderful for the Strauss style. (I wonder if he will ever do Mandryka?) Riegel's yelling and shrieking is at least consistent throughout the performance (unlike his embarassing showing at the Met), and the ruins of Silja's voice are perfect raw material for her imaginative portrait of the ghoulishly chic Herodias. The Royal Opera House orchestra sounds gorgeous, and the supporting singers are all fine-to-passable, though Ruby Philogene (the Page) sings far too much of the music in a tasteless belted chest voice. Since the delightful experience of last summer's La donna del lago at Caramoor (and a lot of encouragement from Mr. Bel Canto himself, Nick Fishbone), La Cieca has really have been trying to appreciate the glories of Rossini opera seria. Tancredi is such a static piece that the artists just have to sparkle that much more. And all three of the leads in OONY's concert performance missed sparkling, each in a different way. Vesselina Kasarova is an important talent, but she has apparently already fallen victim to that bane of the late 20th-century singer, "interpretitis". She just had to do something on every phrase: a hairpin dynamic change, a sudden thud into chest voice, a fil di voce, a straight-tone attack, even occasionally some Flemingesque gurgles and sighs. Hey, "Di tanti palpiti" is not by Hugo Wolf, after all -- what's wrong with just SINGING it? It certainly seemed to work for David Daniels. And Kasarova does like to pull the tempo out of shape: the slow arias just got draggier and draggier. Her impressive agilità did not disguise the fact that her voice comes in at least four distinct pieces, and her frequent glottal attacks do not bode well either.La Cieca's feeling is that Ms. Kasarova's natural repertoire is in the von Stade/Baltsa/Ewing area; her bio predicts Oktavian, which sounds about right. Maureen O'Flynn certainly is likable enough, once you get past an ill-fitting silver and black thing that looks like a chorus costume from a 1920s Carmen. It's not an unattractive voice, with a shimmery vibrato that only now and then turns into a flutter. La Cieca cannot help feeling, though, that there is a lot more sound in there, especially in the crucial middle register where so much of Amenaide's music lies. But the soprano sounds very well-schooled, with really brilliant scales and staccatti. On the other hand, the tenor was just simply a washout: Mandy Patinkin doing a party imitation of Chris Merritt. As always, the orchestral playing moved in fits and starts, but Eve Queler knows better than anyone in the business how to follow a singer's lead. La Cieca was very pleased to see that the Met telecast of Fedora included the applause that greeted Mirella Freni's entrance and the ovation that followed the performance -- especially when she recalls how avidly the Met house staff tried to suppress these demonstrations as they occurred. A security guard insisted on examining La Cieca's bags and threatened to confiscate her confetti! Perhaps the Met should just distribute Prozac in each program to keep the audience quiet. To mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Maria Callas, Opera News took the unusual step of commissioning a hate-the-diva piece from someone named David McKee. La Cieca spent DAYS trying to figure out what Mr. McKee's point was, until finally Little Stevie cut to the chase: "The article makes perfect sense once you realize the guy who wrote it is an idiot." McKee has the gall to call Callas's recording of La forza del destino "disastrous". Ironically, an excerpt from this very recording opens the newly-released audio documentary "Callas: The Voice, The Story" [Highbridge Audio HBP 56007] This fascinating collection of interviews and extended musical excerpts is a timely reminder of just what made Callas a genius among singers, a sterling example of Ernest Newman's definition of great singing: "the constant play of a fine mind upon the inner meaning of the music." The excerpt is the recitative "Son giunta! Grazie, o dio!" La Cieca will not attempt a minute analysis of this interpretation (better you should just listen to the recording), but in a word Callas communicates all the values Verdi intended, dramatic and musical, without stepping outside the rigid boundaries of Verdian bel canto. We hear a woman frantic, nearly out of breath from physical exertion and emotional strain. As she recognized the holy place that is her goal, she manages to relax enough to feel first bone-deep fatigue and then crushing shame. She nearly panics, then gathers her strength for an impassioned appeal to the Blessed Mother. All this Callas conveys through coloring of the tone and projection of the text, and, above all, through microscopically subtle use of the elements of bel canto expression: portamenti, rubati, and contrast of legato and marcato singing. It is impossible to put one's finger on a single "effect", because the performance is not a series of moments, but a flowing, organic hole. (It is even more amazing to contemplate the fact that Callas manages to subordinate all this detail to a unified vision of the entire role). Forget about McKee's sniping and give the Highbridge CDs a try: fascinating stuff. During Enzo Bordello's fun-packed visit to the big city, we two hitched a ride to Philly with the inimitable Ed Rosen of Lyric Distribution fame. I must say Enzo and I just ADORED the Academy of Music, which is EXACTLY what an opera house should be, red velvet loges and plaster carvings and gilt and ring balconies -- and, most of all, it's on a HUMAN scale. You feel like you're in the same room as the singers, not across the street and down the block. In a larger venue, the very human-sized performances of Lando Bartolini, Diana Soviero and the rest of the strong cast of Andrea Chenier might well have seemed underpowered; here, everything was just right. Bartolini continues to boast an even, full-bodied spinto tenor with perhaps the easiest top in the business. Ideally, he would chew the scenery a little more in the later stages of the opera, but his performance was never less than solidly professional. I found La Soviero's Maddalena even more attractive than her definitive Nedda, partly because the Giordano lies a bit lower, in a comfortable and warm region of her voice, which was in fine estate. The special delights of this performance were her creamy high pianissimi and her gutsy and idiomatic parlando, with generous use of open chest tone. All she really lacks for this part is a few really fat high notes, which never were a part of her equipment anyway. She looked divinely trim and girlish throughout. Her struggles with Gerard (Richard Paul Fink) were almost animalistic in their desperation, and her "La mamma morta" ended on a uniquely quiet and disturbing note of melancholy resignation. Mr. Bartolini is a curiously uneven artist. Only a few days after his Chenier in Philly, he sang the "Vicino a te" duet with Deborah Voigt at the Richard Tucker Foundation gala, and made a whopper of a musical mistake that left the diva sitting on a high B-flat for about 15 minutes while everyone regrouped. Anyway, I do not think the all-verismo program showed Voigt off at her very best, as she still has something to learn about the rapid vocal attack so basic to this style of opera. It was a pleasant surprise to hear her Cerquettian chest tone in the Gioconda ensemble, and she looked stunningly glamorous, in black velvet and violet watered silk, her hair in an "Evita" French twist. Marcello Giordani was in fine voice too. "O Souverain" is really a little heavy for him right now (especially with the Met orchestra and 200 choristers thundering away behind him), but it's a pleasure to hear so healthy and vibrant an instrument combined with strong musicianship and a real joy in performance. All this tended to point up Jerry Hadley's current uneven vocal estate: I hope he can work out these problems soon. It's too late for June Anderson. Bad enough that she looks like a drag queen doing a cruel parody of Katharine Hepburn, but she sounds elderly, too, and anemic, with every sustained tone well below pitch and whiny. David Daniels was his usual dreamy self; I cannot trust myself to be objective about this wonderful singer. Even others less enamored than I with countertenors in general and this countertenor in particular did agree, however, that Daniels sang his pieces with sweet, unforced and vibrant tone, and that his musicianship is impeccable. What joy he takes in performance; what genuine FUN he finds in "Di tanti palpiti"! My biggest beef (no pun intended) was Bryn Terfel, whose ugly assault on the Toreador Song deserved booing. That Terfel hammed mercilessly during his Cenerentola aria is, I suppose, par for the course -- many unimaginative singers have the mistaken notion that Rossini is such lousy music that it needs "punching up". Mr. Terfel has (for the moment, anyway) one of the world's great voices, and so it is a mystery why he chooses to play to the gallery like the cheapest sort of provincial nobody.
Leonie Rysanek accepted her awards with her customary grace and charm. She looked slim and elegant in a high-necked black evening dress and diamonds, her hair almost as blonde and floofy as La Voigt's. Why, oh, why, La Cieca asks, must opera queens be namedroppers? And what's more, why must they be FIRST namedroppers? "Jessye's high C was like a beam of sunlight." "Renee told me her new CD with Michael Bolton won't be out until next summer." "Sam is really looking forward to his first Met Boris." I don't care if these artists are your personal friends (which they probably aren't or else you wouldn't be bragging about your acquaintence) -- an artist should ALWAYS be given the honor of being called Miss or Mr. or Madame (or "La", if she's earned it) -- if not for respect of the artist, at least for respect of the art. Being an Opera Queen is a fine and noble way of life; why spoil it by degenerating into a mere starfucker? Regine Crespin made a personal appearance last month at Florence Gould Hall to promote her autobiography, now available in English translation. The program followed the familiar public-interview format, followed by questions from the surprisingly sparse audience. The diva remains a wonderfully handsome woman, her huge eyes, smiling lips and dimpled cheeks familiar from so many album covers. She was simply but chicly dressed in a blouse of scarlet crepe de chine and black tailored wool slacks. Her interlocutor Will Crutchfield (recently divested of beard, silky locks and unctuous manner, improvements all) asked questions which were to the point if not exactly concise. And he only sang ONCE to illustrate a phrasing point in "Les Nuits d'Ete". All in all, I think the erstwhile "Trilling Will" deserves a big shiny "A" for good behavior. Mme. Crespin discussed frankly and with a light touch her experiences and her art. Particularly interesting to me were her anecdotes about working with Herbert von Karajan. The two artists at one point did not speak for three years because Crespin turned down the role of Elisabeth in Don Carlos for Vienna, but reconciled in time for her performances of Brunnhilde in Die Walkure. She added that she always knew that this role was a "special event" in her career; she could not wait to return to Sieglinde. She expressed a certain annoyance with herself for turning down so many roles, among them Lady Macbeth (which Bing offered her at the Met) and Isolde. She did justify the latter omission by quoting her colleague Leonie Rysanek: "Better the public should say, 'what a pity you never sang that role' instead of saying 'what a pity you DID'!" Mme. Crespin seemed to be fighting a cold (like everyone else in town), and she did beg off telling a story about Giuseppe di Stefano: "Too long! Tell them to read the book!" In response to questions from the audience, the diva talked about her admiration for Germaine Lubin and Lotte Lehmann, her first encounter with Francis Poulenc (during which she tactlessly told him that Dialogues des Carmelites should NOT be set to music!), her facility in chest voice, her delight in singing Offenbach ("other than Carmen, my only comic role") and her refusal to sing the Marschallin at La Scala ("I hated the theater.") As I noted before, there were fewer than 100 people in the auditorium Apparently there was almost no publicity about this event; I heard about it only by accident. I did see the inevitable Lois Kirschenbaum (who managed to schnorr a ticket to the reception afterwards as well). Leaving the auditorium I ran into Ira Siff, just returned from a successful tour to London. He introduced me (in person) to Eric Myers, frequent contributor to such magazines as Opera News and parterre box, and to Eric's vis-a-vis, actor/playwright Charles Busch, fetching in a "tete de peau" coiffure. As a long-time fan of La Gran Scena, La Cieca was amazed and delighted to discover tonight that their new show Vera Life Of A Diva is funnier, better-sung and more moving than any of their previous programs. This campy chronicle of the life and times of diva Vera Galupe-Borszkh (Ira Siff) offers flashbacks to the company's most pungent successes (Tosca, Manon, Madama Butterfly and Samson et Dalila) as well as arias and songs illustrating the via dolorosa of the legendary "traumatic soprano". Siff, in fine voice (after an opening night that apparently found him a little scratchy vocally), performed his customary miracles of breath control and rubato phrasing. He was at his best in the segment spoofing Master Class, which managed to slip some very serious artistic points among the bellylaughs. In the midst of coaching "young American soprano" Kavatina Turner (Kyle Church Cheseborough), Vera slipped into a stream-of-consciousness monologue that is far more in the spirit of Callas than anything Terrence McNally ever wrote. She railed against the commercialism of opera today, the current overemphasis on recordings over live performances, and, of course, those tacky semi-operatic stadium "events". Strong stuff, and the audience responded with a rousing ovation. And then, as Vera initiated Kavatina into the subtleties of "Io son l'umile ancella," we saw a gauche girl blossom into a Leontynesque Great Lady of the Stage -- a funny but intensely moving representation of the holy act of inspiration. Mr. Cheseborough is a relatively recent addition to this company, but veterans like Phil Koch and Keith Jurosko had a few new tricks up their pailetted sleeves. Koch played the good-old-gal mezzo Philene Wannelle as an operatic Jane Russell, uncorking a high B in the Samson scene that would shame Dolora Zajick. Jurosko's five(!) roles included Last Living Castrato Galupe (with a classic performance of Tosti's "Ideale"), two-faced baritone Fodor Szadan and "America's Most Beloved Retired Diva" Sylvia Bills, who fractured the story of Madama Butterfly most delightfully. ("Pinkerton tells Cio-Cio-San that he will return from America at the same time as Robin Byrd with red breasts"). Patrick Jones was the sweet-toned and terminally dimwitted tenor Bruno Focaccia, particularly well-cast as a hornier-than-expected Samson. Todd Sisley (Maestro Costalotta-Denaro) was indefatigable and ever responsive to Mme. Galupe-Borszkh's very, uh, personal sense of rhythm. | |
And then David Daniels walks on stage. Oh, yes, this is an artist with "enough": ravishing timbre, formidable technique, and impeccable musical taste; rarest of all, he has a singer's heart. His quiet, uncomplicated second-act aria was one of those times when 2,500 people all hold their breath for five minutes, and then the whole place explodes: no wonder that Marilyn Horne and Frederica von Stade consider Daniels their artistic heir!
The set is apparently a disused wing of some 19th century mansion, a place that has fallen victim to earthquake or really massive neglect. Only a glimpse of the moon is visible through a French window. Costumes are simple and "Star Trek" timeless, with Malfitano in veil-like scarves and finally a black knit tshirt, Riegel in vaguely Japanese lounging clothes, Silja in a '40s cocktail frock that looks like something Gale Sondergaard might wear, and Terfel in what appears to be a stained bedsheet.
It was a pleasure to hear scrummy