music

so last week we went, back to back, to two very different musical events, the kind of variety that makes me sigh happily and say "oh the joys of big, culturally rich cities!"

well, I didn't actually say that, but you get the point.

Thursday night we went to the opera and saw La Boheme, the first opera we've seen in London that put me on the edge of my seat.  As a musical performance, par excellence - for its type, of course - a few small figures on the stage, feigning shivers and raising their voices to compete with the full orchestra, the massive coliseum filled with carefully constructed, finely polished sounds.

And then Friday, down to the Blues Kitchen for their array of bourbon and the band on their tiny stage, the long narrow room - what fraction of the coliseum's space, a thousandth? - filled with the fashionably dressed young people of Camden town.  And the reward for our wait was blues like I've never seen it before - four people flooding our ears with sound, a drummer in the shadows, a dorky keyboardist lost in his own world, an aloof guitarist and at the heart of it, the lead singer, alternating shots and gulps of ale between songs, then leaning towards us with his arms embracing his double bass, growling and screaming into the mic.  dirty, raw, pulsating, overwhelming, that amplified bass making the whole building throb.  we were lost.

And then we caught a few hours sleep - then a train - then a plane - a pleasant day in aberdeen, another train, a few more hours sleep, then up to the highlands for the silence and the wind and a wide-open sky, instead.