I find this sort of thing is very hit and miss. I've just put my copy of the Philips Yeomen in my Windows computer and although all the information seems correct, I have trouble, as always, getting the album cover to appear. I'm using Windows media player and there's an icon to the left and above. I found that if I click on the left icon and choose "no visualization" and then choose "album art" a picture of the cover appears, though not before. Trying to get it appear at the top is harder. But suddenly it appeared after about five minutes.

The Mac computer always says it is accessing Gracewing whenever I put an audio CD in it but it never comes up with a picture of the cover.

Unimportant things in many ways but I just like things to work fully.

It greatly depends on interpretation, though   I have seen exactly that passage done as a frenzied, hair-tearing, agonised moment "to self"  that closely resembles another opera jester who's just realised that he's got someone else's body in a sack.  It worked extremely well, with the walls of Point's world closing in on him with the Chorus's "Ooooooh!" that drowns-out his agonising and leads on into "All frenzied, frenzied with despair..."    And indeed, he IS frenzied (although the line refers, ostensibly, to Sir Richard Cholmondely).  And of course, no-one except Cholmondely and Elsie realise the second dimension of difficulty caused by Fayrfax's disappearance....

I'm not saying that it should be done that, or that it ever was at the Savoy Theatre...   but there's a darkly bleak side to Yeomen, and it can be played that way.

Sometimes I think YEOMEN is rather like the last episode of Blackadder IV...  you expect a comedy because they were comedies before...  and then you realise the entire thing is a ghastly nightmare from which there's no escape, and there's no laugh or how-de-doo,

I was listening to Act 2 last night.  There is a perfectly adequate opportunity for a tenor/soprano duet when Elsie and Fairfax begin to fall in love after "Strange adventure".  We don't get one then.  I am sure Gilbert was very wary of sentimentality, which is why he eschews love duets at all.

However we get a far more complex dramatic situation in the quartet "When a woer goes a wooing."  Elise and Fairfax sing of their love, their two would-be partners, Phoebe and Point, reflect on their rejection.  The format is the same Gilbert and Sullivan used for the quintet "I rejoice that it's decided" in The Sorceror.  Individuals sing the stanzas, to variations of the basic melody to express their different positions, and they all join in a common refrain.

Very interesting.  Understated but giving you so much more than the conventional love duet.  And it is given prominence by being the last number in the work to be followed by spoken dialogue.

The duet in the Pirates is the most obvious send-up of the conventions of early C19 Italian opera, with the multi movement scena.  I think it is delicious, and Pirates is the next one I'm going to re-acquaint myself with.  (with which I am going to re-acquaint...)

The fact that the slow section is such an obviously parlour ballad as "O leave me not alone" adds to the joke, and allows one to enjoy as a lovely piece (Mabel Jane can still remember her pleasure in singing it) which in any other context would be unbearably slushy.

IMO.

Love the title.

That rather confirms my suspicion that the D'Oyly Carte were responsible for the iffy reputation of G&S in my early lifetime.

I did twice see the D'Oyly Carte in my lifetime: both times at the Princess Theatre, Torquay,  (Comrade Pace's nearest large stage.)  The Gondoliers when I was 7, and The Pirates when I was c17 on an outing with, blush, shame, embarrassment, with the Honiton Constituency Young Conservatives - honest guv, I was never a member, it was before Mrs Thatcher, I was young, I didn't know at the time, you never saw a copy of The Guardian for sale in Exmouth, how could I do it, how could I do it?  I realise this is a shameful admission which I have been hitherto managed to suppress from my memory.

I was not impressed by the performances, come to think of it.  The Northcott Theatre, Exeter, did The Boyfriend, Pal Joey and Guys and Dolls much better.

This board is as good as therapy at getting in contact with you sub-conscious without having to pay an arm and a leg to some pseud.

Thank you again, Tony.

This posting is prompted by the news today that 4,000 LPs have recently been donated to a charity shop. (I know there's a thread about it elsewhere but that has taken a frivolous turn. My thoughts are that 4,000 records isn't that remarkable and I can't understand the fuss The Guardian is making. Also I'd be very surprised if they were worth £25,000 altogether but those points are probably so obvious to everyone else that no one has thought them worth bothering to mention over on that thread.)

However, a set of LPs that is often easy to find in charity shops is the Readers Digest Gilbert and Sullivan collection. The point of interest is that it's D'Oyly Carte stalwarts (mostly) singing roles they never sang on stage or on other recordings. This was because they were contractually bound not to record their usual roles for anyone else but Decca. It's worth looking out.

Also, I've just had a programme about Frankie Howerd on the television and he mentioned a film he once made called The Cool Mikado. It's generally reckoned to be awful and only very loosely based on the G&S version, but the LP of the film is very rare and worth quite a lot. If you see it in a charity shop, buy it if only to sell at a profit.

It's true, ANNA BOLENA was done to death in a performance in the Moat about three years ago.  I stayed for the first half only, the cruelty of the "execution" was more than I could stand

A learned lecture on Sullivan for free at Gresham College  11 June, 6pm at Gresham's College, Holborn

http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=4&EventId=708