Moscow Kickoff to Sixty

Today marked the start of the two month celebration of Cindy’s sixtieth birthday extravaganza.  To get things going I had purchased tickets for the matinee performance of Nabucco, which like all operas, is longer than it needs to be to get its point across.  It is one of Verdi’s early pieces and if it didn’t have the showstopper Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, it might have gone down the toilet like his first two operas, but that one piece has saved it and it really is a lovely opera.  Actually, I would go and watch a Punch and Judy performance at the Bolshoi and think it was fantastic. The New Bolshoi is a marvelous and intimate hall with one of the most beautiful chandeliers I’ve ever seen, although it appeared that there were seven light bulbs that were burned out.  The mural surrounding the chandelier is glorious and the colors of the interior are pastels with lots of pure white crown molding around everything. Some of these pictures will give you a good sense of the grandeur of this theater.  Our seats were just behind the guy in the red shirt on the right.  They were really excellent seats with perfect sightline to the stage so we seldom needed opera glasses to feel closer to the performance.

The performance itself was very good but I had two major complaints.  First of all, the costuming made all of Nabucco’s army look like SS troopers while Nabucco himself in the opening scenes looked just like a Nazi general.  A little heavy handed I thought, but given the animosity between Germans and Russians, not unexpected.  The sets were simple but stunning and they worked in this production. I really, really didn’t like all the intermissions.  There were three of them for a production with a run time of only two hours and ten minutes.  It wasn’t as though there were lots of stage sets that had to be changed and there certainly weren’t any costume changes to speak of.  There would be one act of about forty minutes and then a fifteen-minute intermission. This was followed by another act of thirty to thirty five minutes and then yet another fifteen-minute break.  Gracious, the breaks were almost a third of the total time in the theater. By the third intermission we were done, well I was done and Cindy was surprised I had lasted as long as I did. I knew the fourth act was mostly about one of the character’s dying with a very long aria, so rather than have her and me die of exhaustion, we left.

Belorusskya Metro Connection

We had thought we would go to the embassy to do a bit of shopping - two backpacks can carry so much more wine - but it was raining to beat the band by the time we left the theater so we opted for the Metro, which was very close.  We got off at our stop and decided to try the newly opened connection between two lines that come to Belorusskya. The connection had been closed for eight months but now that it is open it gives us a much better sense of the monumental aspects of the art and architecture of the Metro.  Here is a photo of a recently cleaned statue between the two stations.  We exited close to Il Patio and decided to get a late light lunch, which was a very good idea. After that we walked in the pouring rain for perfect little espressos before heading back to the apartment.

The rain feels wonderful and is so much needed here. If it is gone by tomorrow we have an excursion planned that will take us out of town and into a huge park where we hope to see lots of lilacs and more chestnuts in flower. If it continues, it will be a nap day! Either way, looks like a swell Sunday.

Hope yours is as grand.  Cindy and Wm

from CC: Remember that we live in the land of no smiles and no English, so imagine our surprise the other day at the grocery store when we put our goods on the conveyer belt and the cashier looked up, smiled, and said, “Would you like pah-kyate?”  She was adorable!  In Russia, like most civilized countries other than the U.S., you either bring your own bags or you buy them for a nominal fee.  Luckily we had heard this question many times entirely in Russian so we knew that a “pah-kyate” is a shopping bag and we could politely decline.   As we left she smiled again and said, “thank you very much” and we walked out shaking our heads in wonderment at the nice smiles and the valiant attempt at English.  Maybe there’s hope?!

This afternoon had no smiles and no English, but it too was filled with wonderment of a different sort:  as reported above, William took me to the opera Nabucco by Verdi.  The staging and the music were fabulous, and thanks to Wm we had perfect seats in row one of the first balcony, pretty close to the center.  In the New Bolshoi Theatre (the one they’re using until the big one’s renovations are complete), the first balcony is actually only a few feet above the main floor, so we were more or less at stage level and not too far back to see well.  It was a swell way to start celebrating my birthday.