Once more unto Coventry...

After a last frantic bout of tidying, I abandoned Exeter for Coventry. The train to Birmingham wasn't too bad and if the train to Coventry was packed, at least I only had to stand for twenty minutes.

The afternoon was spent helping pater fix a problem with the CD and DVD drives on one of his old computers. The fault turned out to be pretty straight forward: the ATA ribbon cable had been disconnected, probably to allow the hard disc to be upgrade. All we had to do to get things working again was to pop enuogh components to get access to the motherboard, feed the cables over the memory modules and pop the disc drives and the graphics adapter back in.

Nasty, brutish and short is not an aspiration

Watching the NRA's bizarre mirror-world response to the recent shootings in the US — essentially a claim that a return to Hobbes' war of all against all is better than any form of gun control — it hard to believe they expected to be taken serious. Indeed, on C4 News, Matt Frei had to preface the statement and an example of a typical NRA advert with a series of warnings that the pieces were not intended to be taken as spoofs.

Plácido Domingo and friends at Covent Garden

Enjoyed the Beebs broadcast of Placido Domingo and various past Operalia winners at the RoH. Verismo not really being my thing, I encountered a couple of interesting surprises. I enjoyed the Great Man's performance of Nemico della patria from Giordano's Andrea Chénier thanks, I suspect, to the brilliance of the performer and my lack of familiarity with the piece. Likewise Sonya Yoncheva's performance of Depuis le jour from Gustave Charpentier's Louise seemed delightful for much the same reasons, but I'm not sure I've got much long-term interest in it.

Of the rest, the two pieces that really stood out for me were Nina Stemme's ecstatic and intense take on Dich, teure Halle from Tannhäuser and Julia Novikova's truly astonishing coloratura in one of Amina's arias from Bellini's La sonnambula. Each, in their own way, more than knocked the ball out of the park.

ETA: I've discovered a copy of the German broadcast on YouTube!