A year on – with the Met

1st October 201525th April 2015 by Chris

This evening we are off to the Malvern Theatre to see the Met Opera production of Mascagni Cavalleria Rusticana & Leoncavallo I Pagliacci.

Having seen several of these live broadcasts, including some from the Royal Opera House, this is something to look forward to – especially as another year marker arrived this morning.

Opera’s most enduring tragic double bill returns in an evocative new production from Sir David McVicar, who sets the action across two time periods but in the same Sicilian village.

Marcelo Álvarez rises to the challenge of playing the dual tenor roles of Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana and Canio in Pagliacci.

Rae Smith (War Horse) has designed the moodily atmospheric 1900 village square setting of Cavalleria, which transforms to a 1948 truck stop for the doomed vaudeville troupe of Pagliacci.

Eva-Maria Westbroek (Cav) and Patricia Racette (Pag) sing the unlucky heroines, and Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi is on the podium.

A Broadcast Screening Live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera, New York

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Ecology : Electric Vehicles : Political notes and more

October 2015

Oslo, Norway’s capital, like most of the Scandinavian country’s cities and towns, boasts bus-lane access for electric vehicles (EVs), recharging stations aplenty, privileged parking, and toll-free travel for electric cars. The initiative began in the 1990s as an effort to cut pollution, congestion, and noise in urban centres; now its primary rationale is combating climate change. Today, Norway has the highest per capita number of all-electric [battery only] cars in the world: more than 100,000 in a country of 5.2 million people. Last year, EVs constituted nearly 40% of the nation’s newly registered passenger cars. Norway is the clear electric vehicle pacesetter in Europe, which now has about 500,000 electric vehicles.

And the Norwegian experiment shows every sign of accelerating. Earlier this year, Norway opened the world’s largest fast-charging station, which can charge up to 28 vehicles in about half an hour.

Hackney Council has installed the first publicly accessible on-street rapid charging posts for electrical vehicles in London, so increasing the charging options of EV users in the capital.
The three units, which are supplied by APT Technologies a leading innovator in EV charging solutions, are the very latest Tri-Rapid Chargers and are located in Shoreditch, Dalston and Hackney Central.

China leads the world in EV usage, with about 600,000 all-electric vehicles on its roads and an ambitious plan to deploy 5m EVs by 2020.

Wind power generates 140% of Denmark's electricity demand http://bit.ly/1IOI0jV
Unusually high winds allowed Denmark to meet all of its electricity needs – with plenty to spare for Germany, Norway and Sweden too

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