Elektra

Falling behind again on posting in my blog. Hard to keep the balance between living my life and documenting it. Or at least some aspects of it. I've given up blogging about things I watch on TV. I'm always behind the curve anyway, so nobody is interested. And I'm not sure younger people read reviews of movies or TV series anymore, unless it's on Twitter, by some celebrity or other. I guess they just check the ratings on Netflix or on social media. But it's a sad state of affairs when movies like Iron Man versus Captain America (is that really what it's called?) do so well at the box office.
Anyways, too old for all of this. I don't go to the pictures very often. No wonder Hollywood doesn't make movies for the likes of me. There just isn't enough of us middle-aged women going to the pictures. Middle-aged women? I don't look it, but in my head I still feel like I'm 19.

So for me, it's mostly Netflix or Channel 4 On Demand, or even the RTE Player!

The only times I go to the cinema is to watch operas, from the Met HD program. The current season ended last week with Elektra.

A powerful story. A powerful opera. Not always the most melodic of stuff, but completely absorbing. Two hours, without interval. So I was home early.

What a tour de force - Nina Stemme is on stage non stop, most of the time singing her lungs out, in the title role, portraying an angry woman set on revenge against her mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of her father, Agamemnon (when going in to this opera, I was thinking of another Greek mythology angry woman, who kills her own children because her husband left her, but that was Medea! A lot of angry women in Greek stories). I loved how Nina Stemme portrayed the full range of emotions through her eyes and body - despair, anger, madness, guile, disappointment, revenge, revenge, revenge.

And I was delighted to see Waltraud Meier again. Here she is when she was a bit younger: