Happy New Year! These few days between Christmas and the New Year have been an exceptionally wonderful break. Working in opera means very few evenings or weekends completely free of obligations and finding time for, and with, my family can be challenging to say the least. Other worldly pleasures like listening to music or reading a book tend to be heavily neglected as well. I am glad to report that I indulged in all of them over the past 10 days.

Between hours of puzzling with Marnie, her favourite thing to do at the moment, I managed to finish E. H. Gombrich's brilliant The Story of Art (which I had started reading in September!), to get through Gerard Mortier's (my former boss and mentor) recently published Dramaturgie d'une Passion and start with Thomas Mann's monumental Joseph und seine Brueder (Joseph and his Brothers), which had been waiting to be taken on since 2007.

And there was a lot of music, too. Just for the pleasure of listening. Prompted by a friend from Paris we embarked on a rediscovery of Carlos Kleiber's commercial recordings (Beethoven's 5th and 7th Symphonies, Schubert's 3rd and 8th, Brahms 4th, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Verdi's La Traviata and Strauss' Die Fledermaus), all of them very special and wonderful interpretations. The rest of our eclectic classical playlist would include Vladimir Horowitz's late recordings for Deutsche Grammophon (including his last public concert in Hamburg), and one of my all-time favourites, his recording of Mozart's 23rd piano concerto with Carlo Maria Giulini), Mitsuko Uchida playing and conducting the marvelous Cleveland Orchestra in Mozart's 24th and 23rd piano concertos, Gergiev's recording of The Nutcracker as well as Karajan's New Year's Concert from Vienna with Kathleen Battle (it was the season, after all) and Krystian Zimerman playing and conducting Chopin's piano concertos, for me the most remarkable version of the catalogue.

We've always liked listening to jazz and this was a wonderful occasion to go back to some recordings that are special to us, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (my candidate for the best jazz album ever), Sarah Vaughan's Lullaby of Birdland, Ella Fitzgerald with her Duke Ellington Songbook, but also Billie Holiday's sadly beautiful Lady in Satin (her last album I believe) and Patricia Barber's gorgeous Nightclub, two recordings I hadn't listened to in many years.

Also, a special mention needs to go to the French pop singer and songwriter Bertrand Burgalat who provided the music for our New Year's Eve dancing extravaganza.

In between all of this I caught a laryngitis which I still haven't gotten rid of completely, but tomorrow morning I will be back in the office to see how we're doing with our rehearsals for Carmen and Otello.