I have been blessed with being invited to yet another heavenly performance: Yesterday it was the first time that The Royal Opera House opened its doors again since March, allowing first and second year students of their Jette Parker Young Artists Programme to perform French, Italian and Russian songs - Liszt Poulenc, Strauss, Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky ...Dear David took me and we had the best seats in the Linbury Theatre downstairs at the ROH- but then David is of course a Music Critic Extraordinaire and here is his revue:
https://www.theartsdesk.com/opera/meet-young-artists-week-recital-linbury-theatre-%E2%80%93-four-big-personalities
I was childishly thrilled and proud to see that he took one of my suggestions on board-I am not an opera aficionado and normally don't have anything interesting to contribute-I am just happy to tag along... but this time I thought the Russian mezzo/contralto Kseniia
Nikolaieva (above) was full of drama and had the look and sound of Azucena in Il Trovatore and said so to David. And he wrote in his revue: "Hers is a big voice unleashed with enough power to tell us
that with careful handling she will undoubtedly go where her compatriots
Olga Borodina and Ekaterina Semenchuk have already trod, in roles with
very specific voice-type requirements like Verdi’s Azucena in Il trovatore." (!!!)
And meanwhile, back in Mali, another sort of song takes place as Maouloud has once more been celebrated. The festival commemorating the birth of the Prophet Mohammed is the most important of all in Djenne and I was often invited to the Fatias, or the Koran recitations held by the great Djenne families which I knew through the Manuscript Library. Sometimes the melodious chanting would carry on all night and would hear it drifting across from the many Koran schools in town as I lay under the mosquito net in the warm night...
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