I’m into my last performances Billy Budd now which also means I’m on the Last Week Diet. This is not some special nutritional programme structured around a regimen of vitamins and protein with the aim of building up strength to get over the final hurdle. Psssh. Are you kidding? No, the Last Week Diet is one designed solely around the aim of finishing up all the bits and bobs of food that you’ve stocked up over the last two months so that you don’t leave a stack of uneaten stuff that is either going to be thrown away, or more likely, squirrelled away by your landlord who, to be frank, has already taken what feels like more than his fair share of your hard-earned lucre. Why on earth should he also benefit from a cupboard full of free, unused comestibles? (Though I will say that in my current digs I have a gem of a landlord who is also a good friend so I begrudge him nothing, especially as he laid on some groceries on my first arrival.)

It’s not just about waste though. I’m enough of a food nerd to see the tidying out of the larder as a culinary challenge; a bit like a perverse form of Ready Steady Cook where, rather then be presented with a bag of fresh ingredients, you have to see how many meals you can knock up from the mangy things lying forgotten in the back of the fridge.

At the moment I’m mulling over nearly a whole bottle of olive oil, a net of garlic bulbs, half a pack of spaghetti, half a bag of polenta, a block of mature Gouda, a pot of apple syrup, two potatoes, a chunk of celeriac and a tin of corned beef. I’d love to see what Ainsley whatshisname could knock up with that lot.

Hmm, I wonder if corned beef and polenta meatballs would go with spaghetti… topped with Gouda and whole garlic cloves roast in olive oil…

Between my last two performances of Billy Budd I made a flying visit to Geneva to spend a couple of days with my wife Lucy. She’s rehearsing “Punch and Judy” at the opera, a show which opens at the start of April. It had been three weeks since our last rendezvous and it will be another two before I return there for a week or so when the Britten is done here in Amsterdam. Sorry if you’ve heard all that before but if nothing it serves to remind everyone of the strange way in which opera singers (especially those married to other opera singers) have to conduct their marriages. Our rule of thumb is never to spend more than five weeks apart, even if it’s only a two day catch-up between two chunks of five weeks. I don’t know what we’d do without video calling.

Lucy was busy for much of the time I was there so I wandered around on my own for a bit and, as I tweeted at the time, I spent all my time wishing I were the other side of any of Switzerland’s borders. Geneva is EuropeLite. It isn’t France (far too Calvinist and lacking in joie-de-vivre). It certainly isn’t Italy (too prissy, again too protestant, too clean). It isn’t even Germany where at least you know you can duck into an inviting pub and see people having a good time. It’s just there, stuck in the middle, being neither one nor the other. It’s a diet yoghurt of a place; worthy and difficult to enjoy. And it is ridiculously expensive.

Lucy and I dined at a very modest chalet-style Swiss restaurant. The sort of place that appeals to tourists if I could figure out why anyone would visit Geneva for pleasure. We thought we’d have some meat fondue as I’ve never actually eaten it. It was generously portioned – so much so that we couldn’t finish all the meat – and it came with chips, just to up the fried quotient. We shared a salad, a bottle of water and I had a small bottle of beer. No puddings or starters and yet the bill for us two came to about £70. For a fondue.

I’m an habitual menu-checker when wandering about cities. I’ll stop outside pretty-well any eatery and check what’s on the carte. Well in Geneva you’ll never get away with paying less than around £20 for a main course, even if that means having bangers and mash. So, unsurprisingly, the restaurants aren’t fully of happy carefree diners but are modestly replete with businessmen and diplomats on expense accounts or people like us who are feeling the pinch with every mouthful. I don’t honestly think anyone goes out in Geneva to have a good time. It certainly doesn’t look that way. At night the streets are fairly deserted. Everyone has rushed home to count their money.

I’ll try harder to like Geneva when I go back and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on the subject.

Coming back to Amsterdam presented an emotional paradox. On the one hand it meant leaving Lucy again but on the other, Amsterdam is familiar, homely yet effervescent and has so much more to offer the itinerant than Geneva. Last night I met up with a few of the usual Billy Budd suspects in the Engelbewaarder on Kloveniersbrugwaal, a lovely brown bar in a canal house, where we had a couple of Palms before pottering north to O-Cha, a good little Thai café just north of Nieuwmarkt. There a couple of courses and pot of tea cost us just €17 each. After dinner I took Clive, our Claggart,  to De Oloofsport Prooflokaal, the jenever tasting bar at the top of the red light district that was built in 1619 and which has nothing to do with its seedier environs. It’s a beautiful little bar and was utterly empty but for us and the owners.  The landlady was more than happy to chat to us about the bar and its many ranks of bottles of gins and flavoured brandies.

Getting there we wandered up Zeedijk, one of the main arteries through the red light district which, I confess, I don’t think I’ve walked up before in its entirety, believing it to be full of crud and seediness. And I think I used to be right but not any more. Now it is full of promising-looking restaurants, many full of Amsterdammers and not tourists as I expected, as well as smart boutiques and bars. You think you know a city and then it takes you by surprise. I shall have to go back in the last ten days I have here.

It hasn’t all been nothing but opera in the week since we opened. Far from it.
I’ve returned to a few old noshing haunts and tried a couple of new eateries too.

Hemelse Modder on the Oude Waal, not far from Nieuwmarkt, I’ve been to lots of times in the last ten years. It’s always good value with decent rather than dazzling cooking based around top quality ingredients, which is just my bag. There were five of us and we all ate from the three course €29.95 menu, which seems to be the going rate for a set menu in town. I started with some duck confit; wild duck I’m guessing as the two legs were very small but intensely flavoured. Next most of us, including me, had pigeon served with a chicory gratin and proper potato croquettes. I like chicory but some of the others found it too bitter. Pudding was a small chunk of berry crumble that was nothing much to write home about. I should have had their signature pudding “heavenly mud” (the restaurant’s name) – gobs of dark and white chocolate mousse. But all-in-all a fine meal.

At the first night do there had been no food – which isn’t very clever as we’d been on stage for three-and-a-half hours. So, well after midnight, most of us drifted over to the Blauwbrug pub across the road, had a couple more beers and few portions of bitterballen.
For the unitiated, bitterballen look like spherical, deep-fried, crunchy croquettes, just smaller than a golfball. Whilst lukewarm to the touch, and therefore easy to pick up in your fingers and dunk in the obligatory mustard, the insides are in fact made of molten lava and many’s the time the bitterballen neophyte has burned off the skin on his hard palette by popping one whole into his mouth and starting to chew. In truth the inside is a meaty-potatoey goo found only in Dutch cuisine as far as I know, which manages to be revolting yet strangely seductive. Bitterballen are so hot because the deep-fried breadcrumb crust locks in all the heat from the fat fryer, not as the name might imply because they’re spicy; though when your mouth is combusting it does cross your mind that they may as well scrap the Hadron Collider; what’s going on in your gob must be as close to the Big Bang as anyone on earth could possibly recreate.

The day after the first night, just twelve hours after we’d left the pub, a tired-looking bunch met for a late brunch of pancakes in the imaginatively named Pancakes! on Berenstraat in the canal ring. It’s a tiny place but for €10.50 you can get a so-called American breakfast that includes a good stack of smaller cakes, topped with bacon and doused in maple syrup, with a very large tumbler of freshly-squeezed orange juice and a coffee. Just the ticket after a beery late night. That’s what I chose but I felt guilty for not having a Dutch pancake which is like a thick crepe and best ordered I think with apples, raisins, lots of butter and plenty of stroop (syrup).

Sukabumi got a visit too. It used to be right by the flower market but is now nearer Dam Square, just off Singel. I think it’s cheap-and-cheerful Indonesian food is pretty good but I’m not an expert by any means and I’m willing to have my eyes opened to some top Indonesian cooking so that I have a better understanding of what to expect. I feel like I’m reviewing, say, Indian food on the basis of a few visits to our local curry house.

Caffe 500, so called as it has an old Fiat 500, sliced lengthways, in its window, was somewhere I tried to take Lucy, but my landlord and friend Michiel took me there instead. He had trouble securing a table as it’s very popular. Again it prides itself on its produce, much of which arrives daily from Italy. The mozzarella was outstanding. That came in a plate of good antipasti. There was a large birthday party in, and it’s a small place, so I think we were unlucky but our secondi took nearly three quarters of an hour to arrive. That’s just too long and I wolfed it down hungrily without fully appreciating if it was anything more than fine. It was fagotto – a thin, breaded slice of veal stuffed with two cheeses. We didn’t have any pudding – it was too late – and the bill was rather hefty for what we’d had so I can’t enthusiastically recommend Caffe 500. It was also incredibly noisy and conversation was only possible by cupping ears and yelling. Not good for a singer. Why did it have to have background music? Why does anywhere have to play music, especially if they are busy and people are trying to converse? It makes no sense to me whatsoever. Personally I love quiet restaurants and wish all muzak was totally banned, except possibly oompa music in Bavarian eateries which is just too hilarious to forego.

I’m off to Geneva for a couple of nights to see Lucy. Often dubbed The Most Boring City in Europe I’m not gasping in anticipation, nor have I bothered to do any research beforehand. But it will be nice to hang with the missus for a few hours. She’s in the thick of rehearsals so that’s all we’ll manage. I’ll be back there for a week after I’m done here so I have plenty of time to, um, unlock its hidden treasures. I’m expecting burnt cheese, cake and chocolate to feature in the diet but I don’t know if that’s fair. We will see.

What is it about first nights? Does anyone enjoy them? And in that I include audience members.

Let’s get the audience out of the way first. It’s not such a problem here in Amsterdam but certainly in many continental houses first night audiences are largely comprised of great swathes of punters who have no interest in opera other than seeing it as an opportunity for showing off their newest wife/man/frock/earrings/handbag etc etc. And that’s just the men. You can smell their indifference across the footlights. Try playing comedy to that lot. It’s about as much fun as pinning medals on a Rottweiler.
Then there are all the opera professionals who make a habit of attending premieres, largely I always suspect so that they can scoff all the free food and booze that’s on offer at the post-show reception. These are the agents, casting directors, intendants and all their ilk who also make a point of looking straight through anyone they see backstage whom they consider to be beneath their interest or professional sphere. That’s usually most of the cast for starters. Unhindered by having to get out of costume these freeloaders are always first to get to the buffet table, so much so that I have been to some post-show parties where they’ve run out of comestibles by the time the performers have made it to the party. So, you stand there, clutching a forsaken sausage roll and a glass of warm white wine, insecure about how the show has gone for you (because the ritzy and indifferent audience is hardly likely to demonstrate any enthusiasm for anyone but big-name stars) and try to make conversation with people who spend most of their time looking over your shoulder to see if there’s anyone more important in the room with whom they should be talking.

Then there are the critics. Hardly there to have a good time are they? Or so it would seem. The least said about them the better.

And finally there are the performers themselves. Wracked with nerves most of them, their careers are on the line. (They are always on the line.) Even the most comprehensive of rehearsal periods cannot prepare you for the sudden and awful intrusion of an audience. “Like having strangers in your living-room” someone once called it. I’ve never heard anyone sing their best at a first night. I’ve even heard it said that the anxiety causes blood vessels to expand in your neck which in turn hinders by several percent your ability to produce sound. If that’s just a singers’ myth, certainly it is very hard to feel as relaxed and in control as you would really like. And who came blame us? There are thousands of damn people watching us and a fair percentage of them, like Romans at the coliseum, have come to see us fail.

Nope, they’re no good, first nights but you have to do them anyway. But if I’m buying tickets to a show, I’ll always avoid the first night if I can.

It’s funny how a few things in life can come together to plant a single notion in your head. Today, everything for me has suddenly become about authenticity. Not so-called “authentic performance” as it relates to classical music (which, I’m afraid, 50% of the time is about as authentic as a TV advert for stain remover) but meaning being genuine and true.

I was lucky enough to see the National Theatre’s “Hamlet” before Christmas where the desperate search for authenticity was the motor for Rory Kinnear’s brilliant performance, so perhaps there’s something in the air, or this has been germinating in my head for a few months.

If I have one chronic sadness it is that the publicists have become as adept at lying about classical music and musicians as they do about pop. I rail against pop not because the music is always bad – it isn’t – but because the industry itself is not interested in the quality of the music but only in its commercial potential. Now, this ethos has all but taken over the classical world and my industry is awash with people in charge who care neither for the abilities of a performer nor the music he plays. They only want to know if the performer can be sold. Just look at the modern classical recording industry which is dominated by beautiful young things, often of very ordinary ability but with great PR skills.

This seems to be so much at odds with the way things were when I started out 30-odd years ago. Perhaps I’m looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses but back then we we seemed to spend more time concentrating on music-making than wondering what would sell. This came sharply into focus when I started watching a documentary yesterday on YouTube about the great conductor Carlos Kleiber, called “Traces to Nowhere”. 

Kleiber held no truck with PR. It didn’t interest him in the slightest. To watch him rehearse on the film is an utter joy. I was lucky enough to work with him twice and to have one brief conversation with him. Even though my role was small (Roderigo in “Otello”) I still hold those experiences to be up at the very pinnacle of my professional life, because for every single second I was with him I had no doubt whatsoever why I was doing what I was doing. I was being a musician without any distractions from the essential task of being a musician. It was the only thing that bothered him so it was the only thing that mattered to us.

I’m lucky enough at the moment to be rehearsing with a director, Richard Jones, for whom authenticity is also at the heart of his work. That could sound odd when I also tell you that this production of “Billy Budd” is not set upon an 18th century warship but in a 1950s English naval school, identical to my own school, Pangbourne. While that may have puritans up in arms when it comes to the many textual references that don’t, as a consequence, make any literal sense, the fact is that the new context allows for a theatrical experience that is devastatingly authentic and real. At the end of the hanging scene I have to help carry out Billy’s corpse. As soon as we got to the wings after that scene today, I was so overwhelmed by what I had just witnessed and experienced – the institutionalised cruelty of public schools if you like – that I just burst into tears. I hadn’t had to “act” anything beyond taking part in a ritual, yet the very lack of acting was what made the scene so devastating. I can’t think of a better opera which better demonstrates the idea that it is usually best simply to play the action, nothing more.

As you can see if you look to the right, I tweet. I don’t like Facebook but I like Twitter. I like the way you have to focus an idea into 140 characters.
One of my fellow Tweeters is Rebecca Caine, a soprano whom I worked with in the early 80s when we did “The Gondoliers” at Sadler’s Wells. I didn’t get to know her very well – we only had one scene together I think – though we bumped into each other once while doing different operas in Nice in the 90s. I haven’t seen her since. I stumbled on her on Twitter, decided to follow her and it turns out she’s an excellent and witty tweeter. The other interesting thing about her is a parallel with my wife Lucy in that she has managed to work both in opera and in musicals. Indeed Rebecca was in the very first cast of “Les Miserables”, a show I’ve never seen, nor I confess have much desire to see. But the point is, she’s no slouch.
So what’s the relevance of all this? The other day Rebecca tweeted that she was going to unfollow Nick Jonas. They had performed together in the O2 concert of Les Mis (again, something I know very little about apart from what I get on the grapevine) but I gather that, nice young fellow though he might be, his tweets were all of the obnoxious and dull self-promoting type. You know, all about how much he loves his fans. All that bollocks.
What followed the un-following was bizarre in the extreme. Rebecca was submitted to a torrent of rage from Jonas fans, most of them teenagers apparently, who usually laced their abuse with the attitude that young Master Jonas was a gazillion times more famous than “that old bat”, therefore how DARE she insult his name by un-following him? Of course they didn’t use the word “therefore”. Are you kidding? Their tweets had the literary skills of a gibbon that’s just drunk five cans of Pepsi and they were laced with the usual plethora of OMGs and LOLs.
I’ll confess I take a delight in not knowing who most pop singers are. Why should I? I’m not interested in pop music. Give me a copy of “Hello!” magazine and I wouldn’t know who most of the people are inside its covers. That’s fine by me. I don’t feel any sense of loss or shortcoming whatsoever. It doesn’t strike me as very important.
What I have witnessed in the last few days has been an extraordinary sort of inverted snobbery where all that is cheap and crap, and which has no intrinsic value (beyond what it makes for publicists and all their ilk) is held in higher esteem than what is authentic and true. Of course, the inverted snobs don’t see it this way. They really do seem to believe that the fame-o-meter is a real indicator of ability and that if someone, their idol, is more of a celeb than someone they’ve never heard of, then their idol has the moral high ground. And if the idol has the high ground then, logically, so do all of his fans and they can hurl as much as idiotic abuse at non-fans as they like. Kind of like religious fanatics then.
I’ve experienced this before. A couple of years ago I got an email inviting me to watch “a bright new talent” on YouTube and leave a comment. She was a soprano that had been “discovered” by ex Take That member Gary Barlow, who as we all know is one of the world’s great experts on classical singing. She was called Camilla Kerslake and her singing was the usual, bog-standard ordinary, pop-classical product. She might get a job in a professional chorus if she can read music. It wasn’t her singing that bothered me though. It was the thing that she was singing. It was a pop song, by Barlow apparently, that by the device of translating the text into Italian and bunging in an orchestra and choir had been magically transformed into Classical Music. I was incensed and, as invited, left a comment saying precisely why I thought the whole thing was a cynical exercise in exploiting mediocrity.
Well, did I get it in the neck or what? Not from anyone who knew anything about the subject mind, but from irate fans. What right did I have…? I mentioned some professional credentials (I probably shouldn’t have) and was rewarded with “well how come I’ve never heard of you?” It didn’t go well after that and I gave up when someone reckoned that I was an idiot because if I knew anything I’d know that Beethoven was like a pop star in his time (er, no he wasn’t) so Gary’s music was up there with Ludvig van B.
I’m waiting for Barlow’s first string quartet but I won’t hold my breath.

And so today, I couldn’t resist joining Rebecca in her conflict with some gormless fan-bully called xox-Jennie. She had called Rebecca “that old bat” because Rebecca had make a light jest about Justin Blieber. I was greeted by xox-Jennie with “and you are?” meaning I assume “who are you to make fun of Justin?”
I kept my response brief. “No, after you. I insist.”

It’s a funny thing, rehearsing a tragedy.

I’m no dramaturge or theatre theorist so I’m not sure if there’s a strict definition of Tragedy. I’ve always supposed Tragedy to mean a drama in which the “hero” comes a cropper, in some shape or form, as the result of a fatal flaw, event or decision. And I’ve always supposed that in the best tragedies there is usually a moment at which the plot comes to a crossroads and, despite the entire will of the audience to take one route, the other fatal direction is the one chosen and the story takes off towards its inevitable, terrible conclusion.

If only Desdemona hadn’t lost her hanky eh?

Is Billy Budd a tragic figure, or is it Vere? Hmm, I had better not go into a lengthy debate about that here or we’ll be here all day, but I have already hit a problem in my Theory of Tragedy. Yes, there’s a moment when you know Billy is doomed, when he bops Claggart on the side of the head. You really wish he wouldn’t. But surely his fate is sealed the moment he steps aboard the Indomitable. Or is it even earlier, the day of his birth? Were he more ordinary-looking he might never have been the object of Claggart’s affections. Or Vere’s for that matter. Does this make him a tragic figure? I would think so. And, just touching on what I wrote earlier, if there’s a crucial moment in Vere’s journey, when is it? When he fails to defend Billy? Or is he a tragic figure too, but unlike Billy, gets to reflect on his fate?

The more you think about it, you just wish Billy never set foot on the damn boat.

And so it is with rehearsals sometimes. You often find yourself wishing, no matter how great the masterpiece, that you didn’t have to go through the emotional mangle every single day. It’s not so bad for me in this opera. Red Whiskers could never claim to bear the brunt (though I like to think I have my own little journey in the scheme of things) but he still witnesses all kinds of stuff he could do well without. Me too.

My wife Lucy has been here for the last three days, which has been good for me but not so good for blogging. She leaves again tomorrow just as we have grown used to being together again. Contrary (probably) to what you may imagine, a few days if reunion isn’t like a brief honeymoon. I’m having to work during the dreariest part of the rehearsal process – stage and piano technicals, and Lucy is readying herself for her next job which starts in Geneva on Monday (a new house for her), and try as hard as we might, it is often hard to relax. Besides, the organisation of my digs has so far been entirely left to me. I know where stuff goes, how much I need, there’s just my laundry to do… In other words I have been leading a selfish and solitary existence for the last three weeks and now all that is disrupted. Don’t get me wrong; I want it to be disrupted but the price of company is the loss of “it’s-all-about-me-ness” and it takes time to adjust.

I’m quite open about saying this because it’s an entirely common experience and when I pop to Geneva myself in a few weeks’ time for a couple of days, the shoe will be on the other foot. Let’s face it; it’s much easier to be a singer and do the job of being a singer when you have no-one to take care of but yourself. I may have actually said all this before in a blog last September, but I really cannot remember and as I write this offline, I have no way of checking. Oh dear, oh dear, I may be starting to repeat myself…

In spite of a few teething troubles of an entirely minor kind (usually provoked by some funk of my own where I contemplate out loud what it’s all about, this life malarky) we have managed some good meals out and a particularly enjoyable wander around the new photography museum FoAM.

The first meal was up in the Jordaan in the unpromising-sounding but excellent Burger’s Patio. It has nothing to do with hamburgers but serves a limited menu of modern French/ Mediterranean dishes in typically Amsterdammy surroundings; i.e. a sort of minimalist shabby chic which combines formica tables with subtle lighting. We were lucky to get a table but we both ate skrei, “a white fish like cod”, we were told. I think it’s what we call Pollock. Nevertheless it was excellent. (I’ve now had a chance to look up skrei and in fact it’s a strain of cod in its own right – the Norwegian-Arctic. So there you go.)

Last night we celebrated Lucy’s birthday a week early. Rashly and foolishly I thought our luck was good and rather than book led the way to a well written-up Italian place near the Albert Cuyp market, Caffe 500. This neighbourhood, De Pijp, twenty years ago is not somewhere where you’d lead a date for the evening unless your idea of a good night out involved munching at a cheap Indonesian caff and dropping by a seedy-looking brothel. Incidentally Pijp is also what the Dutch call a blowjob. I don’t how I know that. But De Pijp is on a rapid rise upward, as are most areas of Amsterdam including the red light district, and it is now home to some very fine eateries. The reason is probably because this is where young professionals can now afford to live and the restauranteurs are hot on their tails. It also home to one of the best chefs’ shops in the world, Duikelman, but that’s another blog.

Needless to say Caffe 500 looked great but was fully-booked. We tried another place around the corner. No luck there either. A Friday night – what did I expect? Everywhere was looking full. I led us down Frans Halsstraat, heavy with the sense that wandering the streets on a cold night in search of a table wasn’t the birthday celebration that Lucy had in mind. Frans Halsstraat has plenty of eateries. Surely one of them would have a small table for two? We stumbled on an elegant-looking place called SenT (the capital T is deliberate), busy but not full, and chanced our luck. After a lot of lip-chewing we were given a table by the window, we glugged down a glass of prosecco and started to relax. Another great meal followed. Phew. I had the 3-course chef’s menu at €29.50 and it was a bargain.

So, I’ve had a few days off rehearsals. Days off rehearsals are both adored and resented by singers, in pretty-well equal measure, though I lean much more to the former.

I’ll explain. The resentment bit first.

You’re away from home to work, you’re not being paid (because singers are never paid to rehearse, only to perform, something which I keep banging on about because very few people believe me), and yet you have to stay in the city. In theory you might be able to go home but as often as not it’s impractical or hideously expensive. Some opera companies forbid it; you are not allowed to leave the city without the consent of the boss. You’re renting expensive digs (and yet you’re not being paid). You’re thinking: I could have arrived here a week or two later, paid less rent, and still got the job done in the time I’ve been used. You could find yourself in a city that is, very often, an absolute armpit (I’m thinking Liege here) with no redeeming qualities whatsoever and sod all to do.

No wonder then that resentment can sit heavily in the breast like a dump in a baby’s nappy.

On the other hand you can find yourself with no-one to please but yourself. You have time to potter about, as I did today, buying tea and toothpaste. I even have found myself polishing my shoes. Angry Birds becomes a task rather than a guilty pleasure. I can read, watch Mad Men by the ton. I can even find time to….PRACTISE. Yes, I’ve been using a studio in the Muziektheater for long sessions of preparation for my next jobs. Even at my age I have to practise. Well, that music doesn’t get learned by itself. Though it has to be said that the ability to use a studio is a rare and luxurious facility. I can’t think of many other houses I’ve worked in where you can do it so readily. There’s something very satisfactory about going out to a studio to work rather than doing it at home. A set period of study after which you leave and turn out the lights is much better for focussing the mind than working at home where the piano sits piled with music that you mean to get around to tackling as soon as everything else like paying bills and washing the kitchen floor has been taken care of.

It’s a bit like the gym. The amount of people I know who have exercise equipment in their bedrooms that has become an expensive clothes horse… The thinking is “why bother to go to a gym when we can do it at home?” without realising that it’s the the going to the gym that is the vital step out of indolence.

So, you see I don’t resent having a few days off. I’m getting much more done than if I were at home.

It’s a lazy Sunday in Amsterdam for me. Saturday would have been lazy too; no rehearsals, for a change, and nothing pressing to do. But it didn’t turn out that way. A handful of Brits, despite a free weekend on the cards, decided to stay put in town rather than cough up the ridiculous sum it now costs to pop home for a weekend. Gwynne Howell, despite his mammoth career, has never spent anything more than a few days in the city. He’s 73 and his wife is joining him in a few weeks’ time. He wanted to know where they should be going, what the city had to offer, and having established my credentials as the cast’s longest-serving Amsterdam hack, it was only natural that he should turn to me for advice. I volunteered to take him on a little tour.

Gwynne had both his knees replaced in the last year or so, so his mobility is not what it was, and in Amsterdam this can pose a problem. But I remembered bringing my recently widowered dad here thirteen years ago, when he was much the same age, and it is possible to steer someone around who isn’t as nimble as they would like to be.

When I woke up it was teeming with rain, but it often lets up mid morning so when Gwynne rang me to ask if I was still up for it I said we should go for it. I cycled to the theatre, a brolly in one hand, the other on the handlebars and we met at ten. There was hardly anyone about. The weather can’t have helped. We took a number 14 tram from the stage door and headed a few stops west to the Westekerk, which is next to the Anne Frank House. I offered to take Gwynne inside, but he thought he’d leave that til Mary, his wife, got here. Though it was something of a missed opportunity as there was, extraordinarily, NO QUEUE! I haven’t been inside for years, but now it is part of the Museum Card scheme and I can get in for free by waving my pass, I shall probably go again. Early on a midweek morning would be my guess as the quietest time to go.

We pottered northwards, the rain easing into a drizzle, all the way up to the Saturday organic market on Noordermarkt. We nosed around the stalls. Gwynne got some fine looking sourdough bread and I picked up some stewing goat, some minced beef, a squash and some leeks. That little lot cost me a bomb. I had planned to get a chicken but at €13 a kilo I reckoned an average chicken was going to set me back almost £20, which seems a tad too steep. I can get a free range chicken at home for half that price.

The rain started to pick up again, Gwynne needed the loo and it was mid morning, so we dived into a café and had some coffee and shared a truly awesome piece of apple pie. It seemed to be the only thing they served in there, or it was famous for its pie, because portions of it were already served up, waiting on plates for the stream of customers who were piling inside. I was offered slagroom – whipped cream – and accepted it, thinking only, hem hem, of  Gwynne of course who had never experienced this Dutch delight. I asked for two forks, but hadn’t noticed that the plate was already armed with two. They expect you to share a piece. It’s the default. I like that.

Gwynne is full of stories and it’s always fascinating to hear him talk about singing Luisa Miller with Pavarotti, about how nervous Domingo was in the wings before Aida in Barcelona… He represents a different and, dare I say it, golden age that I suspect has passed, unlikely to return.

We moved off in the direction of Central Station, ambling gently along the Brouwersgracht, which is simply lovely. I wouldn’t normally go this way but we were going to rendezvous with Henry, our Lieutenant Ratcliffe who had spent his morning learning Meistersingers  in the theatre, poor bugger. When he turned up, I led them into the red light district. Well you have to, and hidden amongst the garish crap are some gems. There’s the ancient bar that sells wonderful jenevers, shut til the evening, but more immediately, Ons Liever Heer Op Solder (the merchant’s house with a Catholic church in  the attic) and the Oude Kerk. We did both of those and I got that smug feeling of sharing something that I’m sure they wouldn’t have seen had I not been there to steer them. Worth it I can tell you.

From there we headed south and into De Engelbewaarder, aka the Literary Café, a great old pub just five minutes from the Muziektheater, where we had a bowl of soup and a Palm to warm our chilly bones.

After that it was all downhill. We met up with our Mr Flint, Stephen, and went on a rather silly journey out to the Ajax stadium to look in MediaMarkt, a vast electronics warehouse stuffed with boys’ toys, and Decathlon, the sports shop next door. Retail wasn’t on my plan. It wasn’t on anybody’s. Gwynne got a power cable for some gadget or other but otherwise we spent our time getting separated from each other, then wandering around trying to find the rest of the group. Over two hundred years of life among us and we were still like a bunch of small kids.

The end of the day out, for me, was so absurd I cannot find the words to describe it. But it involved making an unwanted journey to Central Station in order just to swipe my travel card to avoid paying a penalty fair of €15 for a journey I hadn’t made. Sound nuts? I hope so, and it proves that for all the wizardry of the new travel card system they have here, and of which I wrote so much last year, it still isn’t working sensibly.

Now the lads are standing outside my front door and we’re off in search of Sunday lunch. Oh boy.

It’s a strange thing about being a singer, that you far more readily remember your failures than your successes. Well, I suppose that’s probably true of any performer and it’s not just confined to the singing fraternity. The difference is, I guess, that singing technique is very much tied to confidence; half the battle goes on in the brain rather than in the throat, and anything that makes your brain say “really, are you sure you can sing that high note? Well, best of luck but don’t count on it!” is far from welcome.

The truly great singers, or the ones we celebrate the most, all have their bad days and duff performances. But either they don’t let it bother them or they brazen it out so well that the world quickly forgets their shortcomings. I’m not going to name names or cite examples but I certainly could. I think the great singers are like great tennis players. They may lose a set or two but they don’t confuse losing a set with losing a match. They move on from their unforced errors, immediately put their lapses behind them and focus on the next point. The rest of us are inclined to stew in our own shortcomings and descend into an Andy Murray-esque funk, slamming down our proverbial racquet and moaning that it’s “not fair!”

Equally upsetting is the performance that you know went well but which is greeted with indifference or even a snotty review. We all get snotty reviews. Domingo gets tons of them in the blogosphere. But I bet he doesn’t waste any of his time on Google, wondering what people are saying about him. It’s the rest of us who fall prey to that sort of thing. Everyone has an opinion and these days they’re only too willing and capable of broadcasting it. I’m a fine one to talk as I type my blog. The internet has emptied a whole new and vast bucket of vitriol on the poor performer’s soul and it’s harder than ever to not only keep one’s head in the game but also from having your poorer moments telegraphed all over the world. YouTube can be a useful selling tool but it can also be like a window on the Oudezijd Voorburgswaal where you are unwillingly exposed like a naked old tart, your flaws and blemishes exposed for the world to laugh and sneer at.

What brought this meditation upon me? I’m not going to tell because it’s simply too self-indulgent and boring, but getting it off my chest has certainly helped. So, the internet has its uses after all. Thanks!

I had some of the cast, all Brits, over for a good old-fashioned Sunday lunch today. Despite having come to Amsterdam regularly for the last 21 years I’ve never done this before. There are many reasons for this.

First, for many, many years I used to fly home most weekends so it wasn’t a possibility. Second, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve done a show here with enough old friends who not only understand the concept of Sunday Lunch but who are also not flying home themselves every possible weekend. I’ve got used to spending Sundays here on my own. And third, this is the first time I’ve found a butcher who sells roastable joints of meat. Roasting is not something the Dutch generally do. Meat is normally stewed, fried or grilled. There must be historic reasons for this which I can only guess at, but the mere existence of the so-called Dutch oven, which is really a heavy stewing pot, must be a clue. It’s not something in which you’d stick a leg of lamb.

I was nosing around the Albert Cuyp market the other day and was surprised to see several roasting joints in one of the butcher shops that line the street. Not only that but they sold pork in joints with skin still on. This is something I’d never, ever seen here before and I was so excited I promptly bought a piece of belly for my supper. I’ve only ever seen belly in slices with the skin removed. I also bought a craft knife from one of the market stalls so that I could score the skin for crackling. Got to have crackling.

The same butcher had lamb shoulders and legs so I headed back there yesterday for my Sunday joint. Bugger me if all the lamb had gone. None in the cold store either. Damn. I’d even bought mint for some good old fashioned mint sauce. There was a large slab of beef but it looked unwieldy and difficult to roast because of its uneven shape. I was sure if I had a go I’d end up with a joint that was overcooked and dry on the outside and raw in the middle. Too risky. A shoulder of lamb would have been perfect. The only option was a shoulder of pork that was still on the bone – not how you’d buy it back home where it would be boned and rolled, but it would do.

I realised later that I could probably have got a shoulder of lamb at a halal butcher, or even a leg, but to be honest I worry about the welfare of animals that end up in halal butchers. That might be terribly unfair, and I really need to find out, because if could be sure of that I would have absolutely no problem with buying halal meat. Why should I? I’ve bought it before but always with a slight feeling of uneasiness. A quick trawl on the internet and I’m none the wiser. Some claim that ritual slaughter is humane and others claim it isn’t. More research needed I think, and even if the slaughter is painless, under what conditions have the animals lived? It’s something I really miss from home, the ability to buy meat direct from the farmer without having to mortgage the house first.

Enough rambling. Lunch was a success. There were five of us. Our Dansker, Gwynne, is 73 and has sung with all the greats in a long and illustrious career. It was an uncommon treat to share lunch (and the two bottles of red he brought) with him while he told stories of productions he had sung with the likes of Pavarotti, Sutherland and Boris Christoff. And the crackling was pretty good too.

There are days when you are reminded that Amsterdam sits below sea level and today is one of them. That’s not to say that the city is literally underwater but it is so shrouded in damp and dankness that we may as well be a few feet under the North Sea that lurks, a grey and grumpy beast, just a few miles to the west, barely tamed by dunes and dykes. I used to swim in the North Sea as a child, on its western edge in Essex, and it has always struck me as grim and inhospitable. Cycling in to work today, to board the HMS Indomitable so-to-speak (a little nerdy opera speak for you there – it is the ship on which Billy Budd is set), it felt as if the clouds were joining the canals in a damp marriage. It wasn’t raining but it might as well have been for all the cold moisture in the air.

On my way in I usually pedal past a small café on the corner of Herengracht and Utrechtstraat. It looked so cozy today, with its regularly placed tables in the middle of which sat solitary tea lights (at ten in the morning, mind), that I could have happily given up singing there and then and become a humble barrista. No, not a mis-spelled lawyer, but a simple brewer of coffees. Polishing cups with a tea towel, frothing milk, chatting with the customers… It all looked so much more appealing than spending four hours in a windowless studio pretending to be a sailor.

But no, I cycled on and spent the day recreating The Royal Tournament instead. Brit readers will get that; Americans probably not. Suffice it say it involved lots of looking enthusiastic, running about, and assembling a field gun, as you do in the normal course of a day’s work.

I’m off to see the premier of a new Dutch opera tonight. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has any enthusiasm for it but I’ll try and keep an open mind. Even the conductor told me that it’s “crazy”. At least there’s a party afterwards.

My daughter Tessa is in town for a long weekend visit to celebrate her 24th birthday, along with her BOYFRIEND James. They’re staying in the spare room, door firmly shut and me wondering whether I should have bought some earplugs. So far though all has been quiet though, thank heavens.

It’s hard for someone like me with control-freak genes to let them wander the city and see what they want to see. I’m too easily inclined to say “go there, avoid that!”, though I have made my opinions clear on some things; for instance that anything with Madame Tussauds on it will be utter tripe and a waste of euros.

Her birthday treat package from me includes tram passes, a museum card (James is borrowing mine), a boat trip and, best of all, a lovely dinner.

I took them both to Borderwijk, a restaurant on Noordemarkt that I last visited about fifteen years ago. It has the same owners but, I think, a different chef. Our meal was terribly good. The bread was so fantastic that I asked where they bought it, but it’s made by the owner’s wife on site and isn’t for sale, dammit.

James and I started with a carpaccio of raw halibut with scoops of crab meat, slices or artichoke heart and various other garnishy bits, while Tess, who doesn’t do fish (yet) had her baptism into the yummy world of foie gras – a substantial slab in which you could see the separate nodes, served with a wonderfully tangy, chopped Muscadet jelly that balanced the fattiness of the liver so well I quite wanted to cry (yes, of course I was leaning over her plate and helping myself to the odd chunk).

Next we all had Dutch teal; a sliced pink breast served with a confit of the tiny leg and a mound of the liver, accompanied with scoops of mash, wafer-thin turnip slices, some wild mushrooms and an intense reduced gravy, rich and yeasty (“Marmitey” said Tess, but I think that was the fungi making themselves known – like fish, something she doesn’t yet do).

Tess and the BF took a cheese course. Very cleverly, sensibly and generously, the restaurant offers a choice of three, four or five course menus. Each one includes pudding but they don’t make you commit to how many courses you want from the get-go; they ask you after the main course what you want to do next. I was happy to move straight to dessert but the kids liked the look of the cheese trolley so much that they opted for four courses. They had about six chunks each, mostly French, but I got to steal the odd mouthful off Tessa’s plate.

Our desserts were based around a “white chocolate crème brulée pie”, which really meant that they’d made a crème brulée enriched with white chocolate (I’m not a great fan of white chocolate but here it brilliantly gave density and richness to the custard) on a terribly thin pastry, which makes it easier to serve I should think. With it were a spoon of chocolate sorbet, some biscuit and chocolate decorations and small slices of mandarin and blood orange, peeled of course.

Like all good meals I felt I’d had exactly the right amount to eat – replete yet not stuffed. What else is there to say?

There’s quite a lot of doom-and-gloom at the Netherlands Opera thanks entirely to the massive cuts they are about to suffer. Fees are being slashed and the word is that if you’re not singing a major role then your only hope of working here is if you already live in Holland and are prepared to work for a pittance. So, a bit like England then. The new Dutch government wants the Arts to follow an American model of funding where rich patrons hand out vast endowments and have their names stuck on theatres as a reward. That’s all very well but I’m not sure that Holland boasts too many of the sort of billionaires who fund opera in the States. And besides, flaunting your wealth is not really a Dutch characteristic. I don’t see it catching on. There are very few statues in Amsterdam; people, even the eminent, are expected to know their place. Ostentation is greeted with derision and though the Dutch are rarely religious these days, the spirit of Calvinism still rules.

Still, things aren’t too bad at the moment. This production of Billy Budd is set in what is basically my old school, a naval college. When I heard that at the director’s introduction, I almost blacked out, so overcome was I by a sudden sense of panic and nostalgia.
More exciting though is a new branch of the “farmers’ supermarket” Marqt, just around the corner from the opera and en route back to my digs. It has a proper butcher’s counter and fish slab and the best selection of vegetables I’ve seen outside the Saturday market on Prinsengracht. The cheese table is also excellent.
I bought a couple of lamb shanks (not cheap though – £9 for them both) and slow-cooked them in red wine, onions, carrots and garlic. I ate one last night. It lay on a duvet of polenta, the dark gravy puddling around the edge, and was so tender my only cutlery was a spoon.

Well obviously, after so long an absence from the blogosphere, the very first things I want to blog about are bogs. No, I didn’t misspell that. Bogs.

Loos. Lavatories.

There’s something that has puzzled me for some time and after a couple of pints in the opera’s local boozer, the Blaubrug, and a couple of visits to the smallest room, I felt compelled to bring it up. So I asked Clive, our Claggart: “these loos with two flush buttons, which do you reckon you’re supposed to press? Is it small button for small flush or big button for big flush?”

Clive had no doubt that small for small and big for big was the correct flushing etiquette.

“Ah,” I said, “but what if they’re trying to encourage us to use only a small flush, so the big button is the obvious button to push rather than the extravagant small button?”

“No, no, it’s obvious. Big button, big flush.”

But then Jacques, our Billy, weighed in. “No, it’s big button, small flush!”

In comes John Mark, our Vere: “oh, what the hell, you just press both buttons.”

So which is it? I side with Jacques, especially when you bear in mind the cisterns that have a very small flush button with a tiny, independent nipple set in them. The nipple is too small to find easily when making a blind stab at flushing so I can only assume the big button is the default and the nipple is an extravagance.

Still, I’m not entirely satisfied and I’m afraid I’m going to have to waste gallons of water (but there’s no shortage of it here at the moment) and an unnecessary amount of time finding out for sure and making a definitive judgment about this, just, if for nothing else, to encourage some harmony amongst my fellow shipmates on the good ship “Billy Budd”. Whatever I discover though I’m inclined to side with Vere. One button is very rarely enough.