Wagner and BSG 2.03, Fragged

shezan is back in Paris - brought her to the airport earlier this afternoon - , and I've had the most splendid weekend, showing off my hometown Bamberg (shezan is going to write a post about this) and going to the Bayreuth festival. This year's production of Tristan and Isolde wasn't the overcrowded horrible mess last year's production of Parsifal was. It was bleak, but with an internal logic (mind you, a perverse one, which was all about the impossibility of love and increasing coldness of the world in an opera which offers basically pure musical porn eroticism - the protagonists hardly ever touched), and you could see the singers had actual directing and acting guidance. Voice-wise, they were splendid, especially Isolde (Deborah Stemmer), Brangäne and Marke. What struck me most was the climax of the first act, where Isolde confronts Tristan and gets him to drink what she believes to be a poison but which is actually a love potion, and drinks it herself - very well acted - and the one point at which the director did allow them to touch, Isolde - who in act two is dressed as a sixties-style wife, presumably to show the artificiality of her position as queen of Cornwall - removing her glove.

***

Thanks to shmashcj, I got to see the newest BSG episode, Fragged. So far, it looks like season 2, like season 1, doesn't have a missable episode. Wow.

( Theirs is bloody well to question why )

It will be a torturous week of waiting for the next episode...