Enjoying retirement
In The Red Rose County
We were booked to see ENB's Swan Lake in the evening and the Halle the following evening, so we booked an overnight in the Leonardo hotel. We got there via the Parsonage Gardens and the Fletcher Moss botanical gardens side by side in Didsbury. The Parsonage Gardens were very pleasant indeed even on a day of on and off heavy rain. .....and Fletcher Moss was a garden worth exploring further on another occasion. We enjoyed our brief visit. Leonardo uprated us to an Executive room (the first time in my life i have been uprated for anything), very spacious and well-equipped and with views of Manchester on the build. There was a packed audience at Swan Lake and we were treated to a powerful and well-staged performance. The audience was typically Manchester with everyone on our row talking to each other, me with an even older Manchester City fan. Drinks were welcomed in the stalls and the whole atmosphere was very very friendly and appreciative. The Palace Theatre is pretty special too. We used the Metro a lot and the journey through the cityscape is always interesting. Next day we enjoyed some of Manchester's Edwardian buildings....... and went loking for the Anthony Burgess cafe in an area with lots of development potential, some realised and some not as here...........the cafe was inexplicably closed. We then went looking for a boulder within the University precincts which were a nice surprise. The boulder in question is quite famous. Balanced on a stone plinth in front of the Beyer Building, the andesite boulder weighs over 20 tons and measures up at eight feet by nine feet by five feet. It’s understood to have made its way to the area from Borrowdale in the Lake District during the last Ice Age, around 20,000 years ago. Having journeyed over 80 miles, the well-traveled boulder remained at rest 28 feet below the surface for centuries. That is, until February 1888, when workers discovered the rock beneath the Oxford Road corridor while making excavations during the construction of new sewers. The rock has been on public display in its current position since the excavations. Impressive. Having lunched at the Art Gallery we went on another 2pm tour. The Guide was not as proficient this time but we did see areas not seen before ........... including the old theatre of what was the Manchester Athenaeum Club. It was wholly given over to an exhibition 'Trading Station : How Hot Drinks Shape Our Lives' I particularly enjoyed this majolica teapot, and this novelty coffin made by workers on a tea estate over two weeks..... We had time to look at some of the permanent collection before wandering to King Street and having tapas at El Gato Negro, as excellent as the reviews..... Our concert was amazing . ‘The chemistry between the Hallé and its music director bristles with spontaneity and colour,’ was the recent verdict of The Spectator. Whenever they make music together something special occurs – clearly Sir Mark Elder’s visits are not to be missed! Smetana’s portrayal of the river Vltava is a work Sir Mark ‘adores’, particularly for its depiction of its bubbling source, which will be exquisitely conveyed by the Hallé’s flautists. Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto is both fiendishly virtuosic and laden with his characteristic ardent, late-romantic lyricism. It will be performed by Siberian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov an artist, with whom Sir Mark has been keen to collaborate. Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) is, for him ‘a deeply affecting work’, a Hallé party-piece, full of orchestral solos that players and audiences love. Kolesnikov was, no other word for it, 'incredible' and the applause which greeted his performance elicited an unexpected impromptu playing of some Chopin which was delicious.
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August 2023
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