I got a nice call yesterday from one of my online friends who lives in Wellington and is a musician. She's in the orchestra for NZ Opera's current production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and she very kindly gave me one of her free tickets for the dress rehearsal tonight. It was a good - though admittedly not great - production. I was way up in the Grand Circle (which would be an Upper Circle in some theatres) and it was a looong way down to the stage, but the set design was such that it didn't matter too much. The set would have been superb if the water feature hadn't emptied itself all over the pit before the show started - so there was a big black hole in the middle instead of a pond!
I didn't know any of the music for the opera - I can see why it's become a popular one, the story's good and the music's lively. Sometimes I thought it was perhaps too lively for the Gothic subject matter (unwanted marriage, evil brother, thwarted love, murder, madness, death). The Russian soprano playing Lucia was very good indeed, with a lovely clear voice that worked particularly well in the mad scene. Anyway it was a nice evening out.
Winter's hitting hard now with storms predicted. We had a mini-storm this evening but it blew over very quickly. There's lots of snow in the South Island.
The Crown announced tonight that it's going to retry a guy called David Bain who was convicted of the murder of his family and imprisoned before the Privy Council quashed the conviction a few weeks ago. As the PC quashed the conviction on the basis of an unsound trial rather than deciding Bain was innocent, I'm not surprised in the slightest. However I have been puzzled by the way Bain's been treated in the media recently. Innocent until proven guilty, sure; but until he has had a fair trial he's still a suspect.
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