Been there . . .

...except that it's not he that falls but the chair that fails...

- 'twas ever so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsAoUo0Fkjk

One day soon: my campaign against plastic chairs.  (But you can tell this poor charley's was of wood.)

Dich trink' ich sonder Wank!

or: Tristan Barfly in Barcelona

Two foot of snow (in the south of France, n.b.) did not deter me from reaching the aeroport to fly to Barcelona, my first visit against the tide of the nose-long sniffers, oh-haven't-you-ever-been?-golly...  
The 'plane skirted out across the coast and we swapped the hills in their dusty baker's white caps of snow, for similar little white peaks across the lonely, empty, ruffled sea.  Then came the coast of Catalonia.  I don't think we did Barcelona or Spain in Miss Mackenzie's class and so I had no idea that it wasn't towny like Nice, but a vast sprawlsome city with gasometers and spidery infrastructure.  Luckily there's a little towny bit in the middle.

Thither.  

Well, that's enough of that; there's not much new to say about Barcelona, the sniffers have it.

All the same, nobody had told me 'rambla' means river-bed and that 'the ramblas' is a collective, nor that 'four cats' is a locution for some gist similar to 'the usual suspects' as in an answer to: "So who was there last night?"  
A question easy to have to ask even if you'd been there last night yourself, since in Barcelona the operative syllable is bar and the bars are magical, a time-travel to where there's an ubiquitous and unfretful sense of relax in the company of vergessens güt'ger Trank, through nearly to a hammy breakfast. 
They also smoke if they wish but, the way the world is going, they smoke much less than a decade ago and the slight gauze of blue-grey was a delightful curtain back in time, to flap through like the sailor sinuating into the brothel on rue d'Avignon...  After a day in bars my clothes didn't have so much as a whiff of puff or spliff.  I missed out the big gaudy wiggly Gaudi church but (like Irving Berlin's sailor) I saw the sea, and seventeen streets.  Happy to be away, I was.  Spain is a country that still has hat shops and the cutler I walked past had a range of antique machine guns.  Yo.  At the market there is ham so expensive and so delicious you expect them to tell you the name of the pig and his pedigree.  Maybe they did, I don't have Spanish.
I don't have no Catalan neither...
...though by my reckoning the surtitles for "Tristan und Isolde" were in Catalan.  
Ideal in grandeur and intimacy, the Teatre del Liceu has a long history of championing Wagner and this production, with the twenty-year-old sets by Hockney, was in a run of eleven performances, no less.  As with many operatic tales of predestined love, doomed, damned or despite, "Tristan" is an opera of intimacy and grandeur, effects which Hockney seeks to achieve in a language of space articulated through shape and lighting. 
The look is painterly, of course, and light washes the set rather as Wagner's seas and distant hunting lanterns lap the narrative.  I can't say it has worn well because it hasn't seemed to have worn at all, and one is giddy in the rush of gratitude that where Wagner asks for e.g. a ship, or a crag shaded by a Schubertian linden tree, we get a ship and tree shade.  In Act I we have the tree-textured mast and in Act III a leaf-like crag as if it had once been the carved flourish on the back of a throne that's now been knocked to the ground. The ship and sails billow as the scene of a simple twist of fate and the pivot of Act II, the Calderon moment at which the deed is done and the reckoning begins, is traced by the extreme perspective, as if the lovers' vanishing point.
The central character in Wagner is always Nature, of which we are molecules, albeit singing molecules, and that fractal suggestiveness is at the heart of Hockney's flamboyance.  If anything, he's not quite flamboyant enough - for instance, his masts and trees go straight up and his horizon straight across where in Wagner "there are no straight lines", as he himself said of Nature - but we're happy enough to have masts and trees at all, enlaced by Celtic hints and costumes that might seem not quite the perfect visual fit, if you don't know your Fra Angelico, that is.
Still, fellow nerdies will miss the fact that in Act I, Wagner didn't & doesn't want us to see the ship till after Isolde and Brangäne, huddled together, have brought us up to speed; and at the end of the end of that act one of his surest creative touches is that King Mark just doesn't appear, we sense and fellow-dread his appearance - the music and the drama tell us this but I suppose directors hate the idea the singer can stay in the pub till Act II, so they wheel him on as disrespectfully, to the composer, as if they added the banjo to the scoring of the love duet; and, in Act II, he did & does want the lovers to sink down upon a 'flowery bank' rather than a tree stump for their transcendental foreplay - however symbolic it may be, it's an uncomfortable petting place.  Yet again, if you have any sense of what is unfurling in the Prelude to Act I you wouldn't be able to conceive, let alone allow that the curtain come up at all before the sailor chants his chant... 
Helpfully, though, the curtain has Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner inscribed on it like the logo on a gasometer, so that people who have got Puccini night wrong can slip away...
...to a bar.  
At last I entered the 4 Gats, scene of Picasso's teenage exhibition début and for whom he did the menu card they hand you to this day.  Their web site has a frame in which wafts of smoke are simulated from the diners & drinkers, it is all so robustly quaint and ingrained that I feel at home there just as I do at The Harp.  The beer comes in a china mug and the house wine is two and a half times the price of the cheapest on the list, a ploy even Stephen Potter didn't invent.  Indicating my appropriate artistic penury to the waiter I ordered an old bottle of Tarragona (following S.P., the second cheapest on the list) and instructed them that I would take onion soup in an hour.  Not a problem.  Whereupon I sketched.  (www.villaparasol.com/bcn10.htm)  And left into the night.  
At the aeroport I admired the stumpy wide snifter glass the wine was in, that typically Spanish galleon, and the girl gave it to me.  
I shall return.  Sniffers, shush-ye.

Yo!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8497427.stm

My Disc of the Decade

Now that we've had ten years of the year two-thousands I can safely say that the most astonishingly beguiling and arresting record to have come my way in the decade is of a Chopin waltz, recorded by Michael Zadora in the early 1920s on a German 'Vox'.

Born in New York, in 1882, Zadora had a mild career more teaching than performing (though performing at e.g. New York Town Hall, or Carnegie Hall, when at all) but his complete recorded output does at least fill two generous discs just out from apr. The first disc is of acoustic recordings, almost all on a Blüthner, the choice person's choice of intimate home piano, and the electrical recordings on disc two are substantially on a Bechstein, the choice person's choice of intimate concert piano... and the set is full of delights, full, full, full: bins of Chopin, slices of the others, and a good cupful of Busoni for whom Zadora despatched a lethal dose of Mendelssohn on the former's deathbed.

En tout cas, Chopin's Op.69 no.1 comes first and blows the ship out of the water. It lasts 3'53"; Cage, eat your heart out.

Why so special?

It's refreshing and plain, perhaps that's the it of it, as when spring water beats a dry martini. (Yes, rare.)  The playing has nothing to do with the intercontinental ballistic pianists we suffer now, he plays the piece gosh-ok as if to keep guests glad while dinner is served late. We are in a drawing room, not a cultural shipyard, in the presence of Chopin, not an agent's favourite competition winner. (Still, the sole photograph suggests that Zadora knew he was kinda dishy and his tailor's darling.) The playing is completely natural, not at all contrived, but rich with all the then tolerated nay expected expressive devices perfectly in place: ever-so-slightly stretchy rhythms and little pointings & prods, dyssynchronated hands and so on. The flourishes that are understated by Chopin are flicked from the cuff, yet if you follow the score (and as we know, the score killeth) every indication Chopin makes so meagrely such as the con anima, the treadingly light sforzandi &c., is translated, whereas Zadora's freedom in linking internal references, be they between repeated whole passages or small gestures, in a strategy of inventive, suggestive liberty, is that of a natural blue blood, respectful, improvisatory and unassuming.

OK, as with Erroll Garner or Artur Schnabel there is at least a couple of fluffs, for instance seven bars in and one from the end, poor chap, anxious perhaps about the cigarette ash, but here, though, it's as if Zadora has just had to nod to the butler about the consommé and he adds one or two flourishes which, as inheritor of a Polish Baronetcy, he is entitled to, imagining the while that Chopin would have done so too had he only thought of them... I mean, just before the carefully slower peroration reprise he adds, like Hutch no less, a quick froth of chords that evaporate like champagne overflowing the glass, and they communicate a love of music-making, not of his music-making, nor Chopin's, but of the whole universal wonder of timeless sounds that we are so recklessly lucky to share. Our cup overfloweth. And dinner is still to come!

And, passing what is for me a litmus test of a studio recording, it scarcely sounds so transcendentally great as it did the first time I played it, albeit in the company of a 2005 Côtes de Beaune Villages after a long waltzless day. I shall place it back carefully to the shelves of the music cellar, to be savoured again when I am ripe.  But we shall never be parted.

It is the disc of centuries. 

At least, for this week.

Time for a shot of Bison.