Chilling out at opera in the great outdoors

Champagne by the lake at Wormsley on the second night of Garsington Opera

12:00am Thursday 13th June 2013

England’s green and pleasant land has been looking lovelier than ever in the June sunshine — a consequence, one supposes, of the vast quantities of rain that had cascaded upon it in earlier months. Every cloud’s silver lining, indeed.

Back to vinyl for nostalgic chart show

Tony Blackburn switching on Oxford's Christmas lights in 2003

12:23pm Wednesday 12th June 2013

Remember when they told us CDs would last for ever? I think of this with some annoyance as I survey a shelf bearing many unplayable discs, some of them expensive opera boxed sets. Compare these to good old vinyl LPs of the late 20th century, which continued to play, albeit with bangs and hisses, whatever treatment was meted out to them.

My chance at last to see two rare operas

WNO’s Lohengrin featuring Thomas Rowlands as Gottfried and Peter Wedd in the title role Picture: David Massey

3:40pm Thursday 6th June 2013

On consecutive days last weekend I was privileged to be in the audience for performances of two operas I had never previously seen. They were I Puritani, by Vincenzo Bellini, which Grange Park Opera is giving at its incomparably beautiful headquarters in rural Hampshire, and Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, from Welsh National Opera, at the Wales Millennium Centre, in Cardiff.

Misleading words about the famous 'Jig'

12:00am Thursday 6th June 2013

In my restaurant column in Weekend today, dealing with The Perch in Binsey, I mention a landlord of the past, one George Chitty, a former opera singer at Sadlers Wells. In the early 1970s, he was as almost as famous for rudeness to his customers as Squire ‘Kim’ Joseph Hollick De La Taste Tickell was, simultaneously, to some of the Cambridge undergraduates brave enough to visit his Tickell Arms in Whittlesford. In checking the details of Mr Chitty’s career in our library files at Newspaper House, I came across a clipping that also concerned another celebrated pub character in the city. The years rolled back to September 1976 when, as a 25-year-old comparative newcomer to Oxford, I first read — through tears of laughter — my illustrious colleague John Owen on the subject of ‘Jig’ Holloway, the former landlord of The Chequers in High Street.

Pub group challenged over motorway services bar

12:00am Thursday 6th June 2013

With my reviewing duties at Oxford Playhouse on Tuesday over within an hour, I was out on the town in plenty of time for dinner. This being ‘steak night’ at J.D. Wetherspoons, there could be no better venue for us than The Four Candles in George Street, a pub named in honour of Ronnie Barker who was educated nearby. A pair of fine sirloin steaks and a bottle of Hardy’s Shiraz proved a snip at £17.99.

Shakespeare returns to Worcester College lake

Filming a trailer for The Merchant of Venice on the lake at Worcester College Picture: Angelika Benze

12:00am Thursday 30th May 2013

The stage is set for the return next week of Shakespeare-on-the-water at Worcester College. The production of The Merchant of Venice by the student drama group the Buskins is thought to be the first major dramatic offering for more than half a century to make full use of the college’s lovely lake. The last was Nevill Coghill’s legendary 1949 take on The Tempest which featured an Ariel scampering across lightly submerged duckboards for all the world as if walking on water.

Meat pie sets the mood for a night of grisly murder

Chris Gray tries the Titus Pie and Bloody Tamora cocktail

12:00am Thursday 30th May 2013

‘You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the film, now eat the pie.” Thus ran the joke when Watership Down, with all its cuddly rabbits, was in the news.

This is definitely what's not to like

4:27pm Wednesday 29th May 2013

I offer today one of my occasional outbursts in print against expressions that have me, as with playwright Hanns Johst over the word ‘culture’, “[releasing] the safety on my Browning” — a quotation often misattributed to Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering or even (by David Starkey) Joseph Goebbels.

Jenny finds a backer in an arbiter earl

Jenny finds a backer in an arbiter earl

2:40pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

I returned to my desk this week after a fortnight away to find a charming letter from a reader telling me I was wrong to contend (in Gray Matter on May 2) that Jenny Seagrove, playing an upper-crust businesswoman in TV’s Endeavour, had struck a wrong note by pronouncing ‘envelope’ with the first syllable given the French ‘on’ sound, “in the way no real toff would do”.

Masterly biography of a remarkable politician

DOORSTEPPING: Margaret and Denis Thatcher moving into No. 10 following the Conservative victory in the General Election of May 3, 1979

2:30pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

When the literary prizes are presented at the end of the year, it will be an injustice indeed if the one for best biography is not awarded to Charles Moore for the superb first volume of his authorised life of Margaret Thatcher. Not For Turning (Allen Lane, £30) is a masterly account of the career of one of the 20th century’s most charismatic politicians, up to and including the Falklands War, the episode that brought her greatest triumph.

More Gray Matter»



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