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I recently finished reading two more books by Linda Fairstein in her series of mystery novels featuring the fictional Alexandra Cooper, an Assistant District Attorney in New York.  Killer Heat is about a serial killer with a fondness for military settings who kidnaps and murders young women in uniforms.  Lethal Legacy is about rich bibliophiles and map collectors trying to assemble the pieces of an extremely valuable old map.  The author is an intelligent and competent writer of prose, but her stories tend to be quite far-fetched.  For one thing, I don’t think it happens very often that assistant district attorneys place themselves in situations of danger while trying to solve a murder mystery with the police and save a prospective murder victim.  Lethal Legacy also has a somewhat complicated plot, and even after reading the entire book I don’t quite understand exactly why the victims were murdered.  Still, the experience of reading the books was pleasant.

Wow! Opera Boston has announced its 2009/2010 season.  It will include Rossini’s Tancredi with Ewa Podles and Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein with Stephanie Blythe.  The season will also include the world premiere of an opera called Madame White Snake.

Opera Boston is one of the two opera companies putting on opera in Boston, and it is the more interesting of the two.  It performs in Emerson College’s Majestic Theatre, a relatively small theatre where I have often enjoyed seeing operas.  The other company, with a larger budget, is Boston Lyric Opera.  They tend to do more standard repertory, but with casts that generally don’t interest me, in the Shubert Theatre.  I’ve attended only one of their performances.  BLO was at one time a small company on the fringe, but they became Boston’s primary opera company by default when Sarah Caldwell’s company fizzled out.

From the limited selection availabe at a newsstand at Penn Station in New York, I chose a book to read while traveling yesterday. I think I’ve read at least ten of the books they were selling. I wasn’t in the mood for one of those books about a dastardly plot of earth-shattering importance with somebody being killed mysteriously every few chapters, and I’ve already read the book about Marley the dog, so I bought some chick lit Confessions of a Shopaholic. A young woman in London runs up credit-card debt from shopping, has a boring job, but eventually gets a good job and begins going out with a millionaire she finds interesting and attractive. Somewhat reminiscent of the Bridget Jones books, but not quite as good. Still, a pleasant way to while away a few hours.

I thought I saw a bobcat this morning, for the first time ever other than on television or in photos, but I can’t be 100% sure because it was so far away.  I got off the Amtrak train at the Route 128 station in Westwood, Mass., to wait for the local commuter train to travel two stops on that to get home from my New York trip.  About 100 yards away I saw an animal cross the tracks.  I think it was a raccoon.  It was about 7:45 a.m., a little late for a raccoon still to be out.  Then a few minutes later, at the same place, another animal crossed the tracks.  At first I thought it must be another raccoon, but the legs were longer.  It looked like a cat but bigger than any house cat.  I wasn’t wearing my glasses, and my vision for distances is about 20/40 without glasses.  The station is next to a large swamp called the Fowl Meadow, where there are lots of birds such as ducks and their ilk, and so that swamp is probably a good place for bobcats to live.

I went to Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera last night. I wanted to hear Marcelo Alvarez in person.  I don’t think anybody singing today could
do better than Marcelo Alvarez (Manrico) or Sondra Radanovsky (Leonora) in this opera.
Hvorostovsky was good, but I don’t think the Count di Luna is an ideal role for him.
People often call Dolora Zajick (Azucena) a force of nature. I don’t quite get
her myself. Yes, she is loud enough and she hits the notes. That’s
not nothing, of course. But ultimately so what? I could make out the
words she sang sometimes, but 90% of the time I wouldn’t know what
language she was singing or even that she was singing any language. Maybe “force of nature” means she sounds like the wind.  I
like to hear the words. Marcelo Alvarez, for one, enunciates the words very
clearly.

The sets were drab. The lazy susan for the sets was noisy. The
19th-century costumes (the time was updated somewhat) are not bad as clothing, but the characters
really don’t seem like 19th-century people and the story does not seem
like something taking pace in the 19th-century. The opera does not
need any connection to Goya. The crowd scenes were well
staged. I’ve never in my life had a conversation with somebody who
was rolling around on the ground, and so I don’t know why Leonora had
to lie down on the ground in act one while conversing with her
companion. Such a tired old gimmick.

But on the whole the performance was very enjoyable.  The audience was well-behaved.  They seemed to be giving the opera their rapt attention at all times.  They especially liked Sondra Radanovsky.  (I don’t know why the Met doesn’t do more with her.)  More of a typical opera audience than the audience for Doctor Atomic, the last opera I saw at the Met.  Nobody looked very hip.  But there was full range of ages from teen-agers to the very old.