Latest news with #SaintChristopher
The Herald Scotland
17-07-2025
- The Herald Scotland
Does airline travel really need to be so terrible in 2025?
July is an especially chaotic month for flying. It makes it the perfect time for workers to take a stand against staff shortages, low wages and poor working conditions. At the beginning of the month, air traffic controllers in France walked out for two days on July 3 and 4, citing low staffing levels and 'toxic and authoritarian' management. I was sitting in my cramped little window seat on board a Ryanair flight, anxiously rubbing the Saint Christopher around my neck, when the apologetic pilot announced to passengers that we might be stuck on the tarmac for several hours waiting for a slot due to airspace capacity restrictions. Flying is a privilege, I remind myself. But it sure doesn't feel like an honour these days. Between the illusion of low-cost ticket prices based on the infuriating strategy of 'unbundling' to the industrial action-inducing conditions for aviation workers across Europe and the UK, has flying ever been this bad? French air traffic controllers were not the only workers taking strike action this month. In Finland, industrial action rocked Finnair and Helsinki Airport across several days in a dispute over wages (some dates have since been called off). Across Italy, baggage handlers at several Italian airports took part in a 24-hour strike on July 10. Workers at a clutch of other airports in Italy took part in separate strikes around the same time. Spanish airline and airport workers also went on strike. July 26 should be a fun day to travel as Spanish and Italian aviation strikes coincide with the last day of a walkout by around 100 Glasgow Airport workers. Needless to say, this summer has seen record disruption with hundreds of flights cancelled and tens of thousands of passengers impacted. A huge part of the problem is that demand is back to pre-pandemic levels, but staffing levels are not. Budget cuts during Covid, coupled with stalls in training across parts of the aviation industry, have put pressure on everyone from baggage handlers and air traffic controllers to airport ambassadors, support officers and more. Then there is the squeeze on airspace over Europe caused by the war in Ukraine. Conflict in the Middle East has also led to hundreds of cancellations. As a passenger daring to go on vacation in the summer, these sorts of delays and cancellations are to be expected nowadays. And they are mostly out of the control of airlines. Industrial action on the ground is considered 'extraordinary circumstances', so airlines are not required to pay passengers compensation for any delays or cancellations caused by strikes. Airlines have been pretty vocal about their dissatisfaction at having to cancel hundreds of journeys. EasyJet boss Kenton Jarvis said the airline was 'extremely unhappy' at the French ATC strikers. Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, accused French air traffic controllers of 'holding European families to ransom'. Buckled up on the tarmac, I debate forking over more than a fiver for a pack of Pringles and a lukewarm Sprite during the agonising wait to take off. As excruciating as it is to spend hours in a parked Boeing 737 (hours that could be spent on the beach), the torture of travel begins the moment you try to purchase a flight from a budget airline. Further inconveniences, delays and cancellations do not feel out of place in a system that is broken thanks to a low-cost model that created an incredible race to the bottom. July, for the obvious reason of demand, is not a cheap month to travel, even if you are flying with a budget airline. So, I pay a fare which only covers my bum in a seat that barely scrapes the minimum legal-size standard and try and figure out how I can pack everything I need into a little backpack. The size of which (40x20x25cm) is far smaller than the actual space beneath a seat. What the heck? I think. The airline describes this allowance as 'generous'. For the honour of putting a bag in the overhead locker, you have to pay for priority boarding. It allows the airline staff to examine the shorter, non-priority queue and pick off holidaymakers with oversized bags one by one with ease. It's marketed as a system that is all about efficiency, but it doesn't exactly feel more efficient. It feels more like creating artificial scarcity by limiting how much space you and your things are allowed to take up. Last time I checked, the layout of the aeroplanes did not shrink and neither did the overhead lockers. The unbundling model, which airlines say is good because it means people pay for what they want, is infuriating to me. There is little overlap with the policies of different airlines, confusion abounds, and as a nervous flyer anyway, the mounting fees at every turn are a never-ending source of jump scares. Airlines once prided themselves on how wonderful the experience was. Now the whole process has been so dehumanised, broken by design and frustrating that it leaves me wondering just how bad things are really going to get before they start getting better. Air fares might be low, but they are still increasing. So are all of the ancillary charges. As a customer, I am becoming less and less tolerant of being squeezed for every last penny before I've even landed. I look forward to travelling and taking time off work, and the first few hours of it are sometimes, if not always, completely ruined by the terrible state of air travel. Across the UK and Europe, we seem to be reaching a breaking point. If staff and passengers are the losers under the current system, who are the winners? Those who decided that air travel was a financial product and not a service. And I reckon those folk can afford to fly First Class. Marissa MacWhirter is a columnist and feature writer at The Herald, and the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. The newsletter is curated between 5-7am each morning, bringing the best of local news to your inbox each morning without ads, clickbait, or hyperbole. Oh, and it's free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1
San Francisco Chronicle
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
The finale after the finale: S.F. Symphony Chorus shines in Verdi's Requiem
Like a baseball game rescheduled after a rainout, there was one more concert on the San Francisco Symphony's season calendar after last week's grand finale with outgoing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The orchestra staged its makeup performance of Verdi's Requiem on Friday, June 20, a concert that was canceled during the Symphony Chorus' strike in September last year. James Gaffigan generously stepped in to conduct the work, which Salonen would have led in the fall. The program is slated to be repeated on Sunday, June 22, at Davies Symphony Hall. After its extraordinary contributions to Salonen's farewell performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, the Chorus showed it was worth every penny of the anonymous $4 million gift made in the months following the strike. The singers came to the fore not just in the 90-minute Requiem, normally programmed by itself, but in a first part that included three choral pieces by Gordon Getty, himself a generous donor to the Symphony (and a co-founder of San Francisco Classical Voice). Getty's works are genial, melodic and accessible, and Gaffigan, a friend of the composer, led them deftly and with evident care. The Intermezzo from Getty's 2017 opera 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips' begins delicately, with spare lines in the marimba giving way to the harp, then acquiring a more definitive melodic profile in the strings. It's a meditative piece that finds an unexpected climax when the choristers interject a school hymn, almost as if overhead from afar. The Chorus also gave fine performances of 'Saint Christopher' (2024), which features effective writing for voices, and 'The Old Man in the Snow' (2020), a more substantial work in several sections that Getty skillfully sets apart with different instrumentation, including a trombone choir, keyboards and mallet percussion. If the performance of the piece as a whole lacked finesse, their contributions were nonetheless stellar. The singing was artful, from the opening 'Requiem aeternam,' with the sound humming in the air through the nasal consonants, to the explosive 'Dies irae' and the stentorian 'Rex tremendae.' The women made a luminous entrance in the 'Lacrimosa' at the line 'Huic ergo parce, Deus' (Therefore spare him, O Lord), and the whole chorus concluded with the fearful declamation and hortatory final fugue of the 'Libera me.' The singers encompassed the range of Verdi's writing in finely balanced sound that pulled emotion from every chord change. Gaffigan's conducting, however, emphasized drive and the titanic climaxes while shorting the Requiem's poetic side. Certainly, this is a public religious work, conceived as a memorial to Italian art — first to the composer Gioachino Rossini and then, when that initial plan fell through, to author Alessandro Manzoni. But it's not only theatrical. This interpretation was driven by inflexible tempos and a sameness to all of the climaxes and fortissimo outbursts that ultimately became wearing. Though the orchestra played well, earning deserved applause, the performance was missing a sense of transcendence and the overarching struggle of mourning and fear giving way to tranquility and acceptance. The soloists — soprano Rachel Willis-Sørenson, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, tenor Mario Chang and bass Morris Robinson — were generally excellent. The notable exception was Chang's effortful 'Ingemisco' prayer, sung without any bloom in the tone and generally unresonant and unconvincing. The violins joined Willis-Sørenson in a moving 'Sed signifer sanctus Michael' (Let the standard-bearer holy Michael), the soprano singing sweetly in one of the score's many standout lyrical moments. If there had been more of those, this Requiem would have been even better.
