To class tonight with Boola - the second in our Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen series. It's always a bit miserable when you've got three hounds, to take one out and leave behind two little faces, looking up at you with big brown eyes and a hopeful expression. I was just getting ready to go when I had a quick phone call from a friend in GRW - firstly, she's interested in coming to see Fidelio, being done by WNO later in their season, and secondly a suggestion for some contact on my dog microchipping work as detailed in my Houndmistress website (see link in sidebar).

I saw Fidelio many years ago, done by WNO at the Swansea Grand theatre, with my mum, and it was one of those performances that was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The music and singing were (as is usual for WNO) superb, but there were a few issues. Now, it's always vexed when an operatic heroine is meant to be doing something like dying of consumption and yet manages to sing well enough to fill a theatre and looks, hmmm, a bit well-nourished. Most opera goers are happy to suspend disbelief if the singing is good enough - myself included. Anyway at this particular performance, the singers playing the main two roles of the imprisoned husband and his wife who dresses as a man to get a job in the prison to be near him, were both generously proportioned, to put it mildly. Frankly, I do remember me and my mum sniggering when there was heartfelt singing about the diet of only bread and water for months.

At the end of the performance there is a stunning finale with the chorus and in this case, the designer and director had gone a bit mad. The chorus were dressed as "freedom fighters" through the ages, so there was everything from bare breasted maidens to geurilla fighters with machine guns, all on a kind of stepped arrrangement. This was meant to sweep forward but kept getting stuck, with disastrous wobbles (especially for the bare breasts) and at the end when various curtains fell, was knocking the freedom fighters. It was one of those (rare, thankfully) moments when a technological glitch completely subtracted from the glorious music, but it at least ensures the performance will stay in my memory. When we saw Meistersinger recently, they also had a stepped bank of seats for the chorus,and I took a sharp intake of breath, but fortunately it stayed still so perhaps WNO have learned from the previous experience.

I've just found out through a comment on the previous post that this blog has been longlisted for the Welsh Blog of the Year, much to my surprise. I'm delighted!