Don Giovanni

An indulgent trip to the opera on a balmy Sunday evening.

Don Giovanni is one of my favourite operas, and Madrid's opulent teatro real is a stunning place to see it.

The opera wasn't quite what I'd imagined it would be.  The orchestra and the singers were outstanding, but the staging was bizarrely static and contrived.  After every scene, the curtain fell with a sudden crash to the stage: the first time, there were gasps from the audience as we assumed it had come tumbling down by accident.

With the story rewritten so that it all takes place in the same room in one house, the singers had to go through some impressive miming to hold the story together.  In the famous scene where Giovanni invites the statute of the Commendatore to dinner, the singers mime the whole affair to an invisible statue, much to the audience's confusion.

Photo sourced here (Javier del Real)

Rather than a scandalous, unrepenting rogue, Don Giovanni is played as a drunkard going slowly mad.

My favourite scene, where hell opens and the statute drags Don Giovanni down into the depths, was something of an anticlimax.  In this production the scene seems to become a metaphor for Giovanni's final descent into madness, or the inevitable result of a life of excess: he clutches his chest and collapses, as if having a heart attack, but the literal hellfires and booming choirs of demons are nowhere to be seen.

Russell Braun as Don Giovanni
Photo sourced here (Javier del Real)

But the music is, of course, absolutely beautiful, and despite the bizarre direction the singers were superb.

A very Spanish glass of cava and slice of tortilla on the sun terrace during the interval, overlooking the Palacio Real, made for a dreamy Sunday evening.

http://www.teatro-real.com/es/eventos/don-giovanni

Vai Vai, Italy in Germany

Saturday night in Frankfurt, out for food and drinks and fun.  Boyfriend had had his eye on this restaurant since he moved to Germany, and had been waiting for me to try it out.  Vai Vai is a slice of hipster Italian cool that wouldn't be out of place in Shoreditch or the Lower East Side.

Part cocktail bar with DJ, part noisy, buzzing restaurant, Vai Vai serves up sexy Italian food not unlike that of our London favourite, Pizza East.

We started with Hugo cocktails - elderflower, mint, lime and white wine - whilst we perused the small-but-perfectly-formed menu.

Of the enormous starters, polpette (veal meatballs in tomato sauce) were tiny parcels of deliciousness, and the burrata was one of the creamiest and richest I've ever come across.  Bistecca alla Fiorentina, so rare it was practically still mooing, was as good as anything we've had in Florence.  

We left long after midnight, on the search for Frankfurt's famous 1920s smoky piano bar, Jimmy's, but the party at Vai Vai was just getting going.

Vai Vai is Italian for Go Go.  There's isn't much to add to that - if you find yourself in Frankfurt, go.

http://www.vaivai.de/

Guten Tag Frankfurt

The Year of the City Break continued with a weekend in Germany to visit Boyfriend.

Frankfurt gets a bad press sometimes, as being largely just a financial centre which empties at the weekends.  But that couldn't be further from the truth.  It's a young, vibrant city that lives its life outdoors, with plenty of hidden gems.  Hipster shopping, a terrace cafe culture and, above all, fantastic food.

The Bull and the Bear, outside the Deutsche Börse

http://www.bikeboutique-ffm.de/

Alte Oper, the old opera house

Sculpture in Rothschildpark

No trip to Germany would be complete without a schnitzel lunch.  On Saturday lunchtime Boyfriend ushered me into Apfelwein Wagner, a traditional German dining room packed with tourists and locals alike, feasting on enormous fried schnitzels and apfelwein, a sour cider.

At first sip, apfelwein tastes like something you might use to sterilise medical equipment, but paired with the rich, greasy schnitzel, it got better with every gulp.  After polishing off a schnitzel between us, along with the obligatory frankfurter (when in Frankfurt...), we were full to bursting.

A favourite spot for coffee or a light lunch is Brot und seine Freunde (literally 'Bread and its friends', awww), a tiny cafe with mismatched garden furniture sprawling out into the street.

My weekend visit was timed beautifully with one of the first hot days of the spring.  Frankfurt is a city built for the outdoors, with endless cycle lanes, paths along the river and sonnenterrasse (sun terrace cafes and bars).

At the first sign of sunshine, everyone flocks to Walden for weekend brunch on the sun terrace.  We kicked off Sunday morning with elderflower, mint and white wine cocktails, settling in for the day with a crispy pizza to people-watch and soak up the sun.

Danke Frankfurt, I'll be back soon.

http://www.apfelwein-wagner.com/htdocs/english/essen.htm
http://www.brotfreunde.de/
http://www.walden-frankfurt.com/website/walden.php?lang=deu&site=about

Marisquería Ribeira do Miño

On a tip from a friend's boss, we found ourselves one Wednesday night in Marisquería Ribeira do Miño.  An unassuming, no-frills Galician restaurant, Ribeira do Miño is famous for its shellfish.  With the simple room and laminated menus, we had no idea about the seafood feast that was to come.

We looked around at our fellow diners to find that everyone had ordered the same thing: huge mountains of shellfish were being ripped apart everywhere you looked.

"So many eyes."

The mariscada (shellfish platter) is overwhelming: a plate of garlicky clams, swiftly followed by a teetering tower of huge whole crabs, claws and legs, tiny crabs, langoustines, king prawns and percebes (goose barnacles), which seemed so alien that we had to ask a bemused waiter whether or not we were supposed to eat them, and how.

Although they look like tiny tortoise feet, percebes are considered a  delicacy all over Spain and Portugal.  They depend on the movement of the water to feed, so are frequently found on wave-battered cliff faces, mainly in Galicia.

Percebes are so difficult to harvest that they're apparently worth more than their weight in silver, with harvesters risking their lives to reach them.  (There is an incredible short video of the barnacle harvest here.)

Some hours later...

We had a ball ripping it all to pieces, and all for a bargain €60 between four of us.  Dinner rarely gets this fun, or this messy.

www.marisqueriaribeiradomino.com

Hyperrealismo

Last week I wandered into the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, one of Madrid's "big three" art galleries on the Paseo del Arte, for its exhibition of hiperrealismo (photorealism), which is touring several European cities. 



Don Eddy, Untitled (4 VWs), 1971

With its roots in the US in the late 1960s, photorealists use cameras and projection to create photo-perfect paintings of modern life.

Late morning on a Saturday, the exhibition was absolutely packed.  It's grouped around themes, from a room of shiny motorcycles and car bonnets, gleaming perfectly as if they were real, to a room of vast photographic cityscapes.

Ben Johnson, Looking back to Richmond House, 2011

In front of each canvas there were audible gasps of disbelief that these were really paintings and not photographs.



Rod Penner, House With Snow, 1998

 

Audrey Flack, Queen, 1976


With the movement spanning nearly fifty years, but the paintings grouped by subject rather than time period, the exhibition also made it clear how photography has developed over time, as well as painting techniques.  The high resolution and depth of field of digital photography allows the artists to project an almost unnatural sharpness onto their canvasses.  Some of the cityscapes and modern still lifes on show were so perfect that they seemed artificial, an exaggerated version of reality.



Robert Bernardi, Meeting, 2012

My stand out favourites were Yigal Ozeri's stunning portraits of young women, based on soft-focus photographs painstakingly set up with a film crew.  They were so lifelike, so photo-perfect, that jaws were dropping all around the room. 

The exhibition is in Madrid until June 2013, after which it will be at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from November 2013 to March 2014.  UK readers, you won't regret it.

http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/exposiciones/2013/hiperrealismo/index_en.html
Until 9 June 2013

Surrealist topiary

Gaudí-esque gardening, Parque del Buen Retiro.

Literary Madrid...

...where even the road signs have excerpts from Don Quijote quietly hidden on the back.



Calle de Alcalá

 

 

La Ciudad en Viñetas

Across the hall from its beautiful exhibition of Spanish fashion design, which I wrote about here, is centrocentro's showcase of enormous comic strip cartoons about Madrid, La Ciudad en Viñetas ("The city in cartoons").

Every two months, a new artist supplies the comic strip panels, especially commissioned for the project, with their own graphic narrative of Madrid life and its people.

It's currently the turn of the Pacheco sisters, Carmen and Laura, with their very helpful Guia de Peligros de Madrid para Criaturas de Provincias ("Guide to the Dangers of Madrid for Creatures from the Provinces").

With witty illustrations, they warn out-of-towners of the dangers of relying on the metro, of getting lost amongst the ghosts in the streets, and of falling in love with a madrileño...

"If I wasn't a madrileño, I would die."

But the absolute worst thing you could do?  Leave Madrid and escape to the other side of the world...

...only to miss it when you've gone.

http://www.centrocentro.org/centro/exposicion_ficha/29



The Pig

Living in Madrid but with Boyfriend in Germany, we've decided that 2013 is going to be The Year of the Mini Break.  So we started as we meant to go on with a long Easter weekend at The Pig, a country house hotel in the New Forest in Hampshire.

 

The Pig is an indulgent mixture of luxury, countryside and gluttony - think wellies meets champagne.

 

The design of the hotel makes it feel more like you've stumbled into someone's home: crackling fires in the drawing room,  mismatched sofas, Edwardian portraits on the walls and shelves in the library piled with board games and books on country walks and British wildlife.  Our four-poster, shabby-chic bedroom came equipped with an old-style telephone, a claw-footed, roll-top bath and a handy stack of national trust manuals on keeping chickens.

 

The dining room, the star attraction, is a renovated Victorian-style conservatory, with mismatched crockery and the most enormous kitchen dresser I had ever seen.

The food (the real reason we were there) centres around the kitchen garden: the chef is driven by what the gardener and the forager turn up with at the kitchen door.  It's famous for its 25 mile menu, in which every ingredient is sourced, if not from the kitchen garden, then from a 25 mile radius.  The kitchen even smokes its own salmon, kippers and hams on the premises.

 



Keeping to the porcine theme, the menu starts with a selection of pre-starter "Piggy Bits".  Little slivers of crispy pork belly with spiced honey were delicious porky bundles of heaven.

 

Hand-dived Lyme Bay scallops with streaky bacon were so good that I ordered them two nights in a row, and forced rhubarb jelly with foraged rosehip syrup and Dorset yoghurt sorbet was so springlike and sweet that I cursed myself for not ordering it two nights in a row.  Breakfast is homemade "naughty granola", poached pears and cherry compote, an enormous pile of eggs benedict, and the Sunday papers.

After a lazy stroll around the vegetable patch, a visit to the quails and chickens in the garden (the pigs were, sensibly, huddled inside out of the cold), and a stomp in our wellies through the New Forest, we were in need of warming up.

 

Even the elderflower and mint in our champagne cocktails were homegrown.

The cocktail menu, nestled inside a pig keeping manual.  There's a theme here.

Although we had optimistically brought tennis rackets and cycling gear with us, and pondered the idea of booking into the spa (massages are given in a little potting shed next to the kitchen garden pond), curling up for the weekend in front of the fire with a book and a bottle of red wine was just too tempting.

 

 

www.thepighotel.com



Sushi Saturday

Tuna tartare with apple, cucumber and caviar

"Black tulip" sushi: herring caviar with avocado

www.sushishop.eu/es/