One Small Thing: Rebecca Chance
It’s opera for me, the grander the better. As soon as full realisation hit, we made sure we had our fishmonger, butcher, greengrocer and wine merchant sorted out and then worked our way through all the culture-availability emails that came flooding in. One of the main reasons for living in Zone 2 is that it’s barely 40 mins door to door from the Coliseum and the Royal Opera House and Shaftesbury Avenue; and one of the ironies of lockdown has been that we’ve realised that we could just have taken out a subscription to the Met in New York and bought a house in Zone 5 with four stories and a kitchen garden and orchard to grow full provisions for the next plague. The Met Opera has been streaming an opera a night for free, and our daily schedules have entirely revolved around theirs.
There have been such extraordinary performances from the world’s leading actor/singers that the rest of our TiVo is bulging with unwatched shows and films. It’s an unprecedented opportunity to see operas that are very rarely performed: “Thais”, “Werther” - or ones by the modern composer Thomas Ades, who’s a crazy curate’s egg: good in parts, awful in others. His “Tempest” was amazing, if you hit the mute button every time the soprano playing Ariel launched into psychotic birdlike twittering in a register so high that it made the cats immediately leave the room. I didn’t warm to his “The Exterminating Angel”, but it’s haunting me, and that’s impressive. And the simple richness of a perfect “Rigoletto” set in Las Vegas, or an opulent Zeffirelli “Turandot” was sheer pleasure.
Opera is huge emotion, soaring, unashamedly passionate music, life and death on the grandest of scales. For us it’s been the perfect catharsis for a period in which we have lost my husband’s father, unable to be by his side, and known that our story is just a drop in an ocean, hundreds of thousands of people coping with illness and deaths of their beloved ones, unable to take respite and comfort in the familiar rituals of grief; the funeral, the wake or sitting shiva, the relief of mourning with family and friends. Instead, we have to find another avenue where our sadness and our pain can drain away, because bottling them up will explode our souls, sending shards of glass flying through the air to damage our lovers and ricochet back on our own bodies. For us it has been opera; I hope everyone who’s needed the same kind of relief has found their own way to channel their complex and messy feelings as a worldwide pandemic rages over our heads.
You can find out more about Rebecca Chance here. Her books are available from Amazon and Waterstones.
The nightly Metropolitan Opera streams are here.
Bad Twins by bestselling author Rebecca Chance explores vicious sibling rivalry in a gripping thriller full of family secrets, sizzling scandals, and lots of money.
Never trust the face in the mirror . . .
It’s no surprise to anyone that Jeffrey Sachs, billionaire CEO of his own hotel chain, has a drop-dead gorgeous Estonian mistress. But stepping down to spend his retirement years with her? No one saw that coming – least of all his wife!
So now the prize of becoming Sachs CEO is up for grabs – and Jeffrey’s four children have until the day of his wedding to compete for the job.
The front runner is Conway, the older son and golden boy. But Charlotte, a glamorous social media star with an Instagram-perfect family, is hugely ambitious, fully prepared to scheme and backstab to get to the top. Then there’s the dark horse: Bella, her mild-mannered, hard-working twin sister. Or could Bart, the youngest child, a sexy, incorrigible playboy, somehow catapult himself into Daddy’s good books?
In a game where the ultimate prize is power beyond your wildest dreams, you should never underestimate your competitors, even if they are family . . . and, it turns out, twins can be the most dangerous rivals of all . . .
Another satisfyingly chunky rollercoaster of a read, stuffed full of family secrets, scandals, and lots of saucy sex scenes . . . I was totally gripped from the start * Daily Mail *
Chance always delivers. Pure gold * Sun *
Edgy, cheeky, knowing, Rebecca Chance sparkles -- Adele Parks
