Armchair arias .sx ANDREW HUBBARD .sx Anybody setting out to produce Don Giovanni must face the issue of whether the work is fundamentally a tragedy with some comic episodes or a comedy with tragic reverberations .sx This is , of course , the crux of a debate that has been running almost since the opera was first performed .sx If nineteenth-century commentators saw the work as essentially a moral tragedy , in the present century we have been readier to recognize its comic and farcical elements .sx Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back .sx This is certainly the impression given by Tim Albery's new production of the opera for Opera North .sx Albery wastes no time in letting us know that his view is one of uncompromising seriousness .sx Even before the overture has started , the principals enter the gloomily lit stage with faces set in unrelieved solemnity .sx This is entirely at one with the opening , but it is a serious miscalculation for the tableau to continue unchanged throughout the allegro section of the overture .sx There is a modern tendency to regard Mozart's lively buffo music as deliberately cynical , but I find it hard to believe that this high-spirited , joyous music was meant to be taken at anything other than face value .sx A production that does not respond to such contrasts ( and this is only one example ) , whatever its other merits , offers only an incomplete view of Mozart's imaginative vision .sx The incidental merits of the production are considerable , however :sx the graveyard scene and the descent to hell , for example .sx Giovanni's triumphalism in the face of ultimate disaster can hardly fail to thrill even in the most leaden production , but Albery's fine sense of theatre has the audience on the edge of their seats .sx The image of Helen Field's half-crazed yet dignified Donna Anna swearing vengeance in front of a burning orange sun is enough to make even the most innocent man in the audience fear for his safety .sx The production is based on a single , deliberately nondescript set raised on one side to suggest a wall .sx Dramatic space is defined by the use of armchairs , on which members of the cast also sit when not involved in the action .sx The chairs are a useful hiding-place and come into their own when forming a circle around Leporello during his interrogation - but their constant movement rapidly becomes distracting , especially during 'Il mio tesoro intanto' , an aria which is difficult to sing without the distraction of furniture removals .sx This might be a suitable device to cover up the inadequate fioratura of the second-rate Don Ottavin :sx Paul Nilon was in no need of such assistance .sx Paul Daniel's conducting , and much of the singing , is imbued with the spirit of the production .sx Exciting to the point of being hard-driven in the dramatic moments , Daniel appears unwilling to relax in the more lyrical episodes , almost , it seems , for fear of admitting that there is another side to the opera .sx Certainly the dry acoustic of the Lyceum theatre is never going to bring out the full resonance of the woodwind tone , but even so this is not a performance for those who relish the richness and variety of Mozart's scoring .sx There remains the matter of Don Giovanni's wearing of women's clothes and make-up during the champagne aria .sx This is a successful coup de th e a-circ tre .sx It certainly adds a new dimension to the relationship between master and servant , although one wonders how Giovanni had time for homosexual conquests as well as the 1,003 Spanish women .sx What was most surprising was that none of the guests at the party seemed to notice that their host was wearing an elegant couture number .sx With the naked eye .sx BRIAN CASE .sx " He moved his eyes off her , an act of will " , runs the epigraph to Lee Friedlander's book of nude women .sx His models are sometimes ill-favoured with cellulite and scars .sx Few would pass for Page Three girls .sx Egon Schiele is cited in Ingrid Sischy's afterword , but Bonnard's domestic nudes may be more to the point .sx Friedlander photographed women in their own homes , and , we are told , let them determine the poses .sx " They're the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop " , runs the next epigraph .sx The breadth of his subject matter is on exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum , and it falls into the categories of jazz , street , work , trees and American monuments .sx Very much in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank , Friedlander finds statements in the humdrum surfaces of American life .sx Car bonnets , street signs , shop window reflections , the random configurations of pedestrians :sx it is not quite honest reportage since an informing aesthetic is at work here .sx He uses a Leica because " with a camera like that you don't believe that you're in the masterpiece business .sx It's enough to be able to peck at the world .sx " The photograph of the Count Basie band asleep on the band bus is amusing if one anticipates the impact of sixteen men swinging , and contrasts the undefended faces of the sleepers with the practised stage reflexes ; but Val Wilmer has got it closer and cared more .sx Coleman Hawkins , the father of the saxophone and a slippery customer for all chronicles to date , is caught without his shirt .sx Also caught without his shirt is the photographer himself :sx though not , as feminists may wish , without his pants .sx Friedlander sits under a floor-standing lamp next to a radiator in his shorts like a man on Death Row .sx Broadly , the book of female nudes groups the photos into headless poses , reveries , and odd angles .sx The eye is caught by the revelations of flashlight .sx Some images rush at the viewer with disconcerting blatancy , others appear as flattened as cut-outs .sx A few glisten with the sort of strength-through-joy patina associated with Leni Riefenstahl .sx Avoirdupois becomes a plaything .sx The weight of a reclining bottom swags down the sofa so that the edging strip on the cushions echoes the line of the body ; elsewhere , weightless swimmers and divers float on the upholstery .sx The photographs emphasize the contrast between the rich eventfulness of the bodies and the functional lines and textures of a door frame , a flowerpot , a roll top desk .sx Was kitchen chair ever more inanimate than when occupied by a nude ?sx Bodies are paired across a double spread , a palindromic landscape of hills and dales , a symmetry of shapes and spaces , a knot of flesh .sx Friedlander's is not a reverent eye .sx Breasts are a rich jest , and hang pendant into the top frame of the photo .sx A shelf of books in the background perhaps prompted the schoolboy phrase , four-eyes , and the breasts become spectacles .sx A nude lying under a low table shares her photo with a photo of the Marx Brothers .sx Perhaps the broadest joke occurs on pages sixty-three and sixty-four which seems to centre on super-abundant pubic hair .sx A model , foreshortened at the start of a handstand , becomes a copse of crotch and armpit hair , while , as if to balance this , one delicately cocked foot peeps into frame .sx Some models appear to be lying in a hammock of their own gender .sx Clearly , Friedlander is no fan of depilation .sx Among the reveries , women's faces are cocooned in dreams , lost as Rossetti heroines , while the foreground is dominated by a breech presentation of vulva and foot soles .sx Tristesse contends with a giant knee , a looming foot , and net curtains blow in a breeze .sx Some of the photographs are severely cropped and may remind the viewer of Edward Weston's work in the genre , or the great Blue Note album covers .sx There are four studies of the pre-stardom Madonna , interesting in view of her cultivatedly raunchy image , amusing in view of the photographer's selection of " women in their prime " .sx She could be an extra in some Italian Neo-realist film with her unshaven armpits , bobby pins and hairy legs .sx Bob Guccione Sr , publisher of Penthouse , rejected the studies .sx Madonna was not well groomed ; to use Friedlander's photos would be " like scraping the bottom of the barrel " .sx According to photographer Herman Leonard , who also started in jazz before gravitating towards the female nude , Heffner's directive to photographers was that there should be something in the photo to imply the presence of a man within the last five minutes .sx There's none of that here .sx None of the brouhaha that surrounded Marilyn Monroe's 1949 nude calendar poses for Tom Kelley - he paid her $50 - has attended Madonna's unveiling .sx The one and the many .sx A. W. MOORE .sx Mathematics , according to many philosophers and mathematicians , is set theory .sx They may be overstating their case .sx But it is a primary task for anyone who aspires to a self-conscious understanding of mathematics to say what a set is .sx And the standard explanation , David Lewis complains , is inadequate .sx A set , we are told - this is Cantor's definition - is " a many which can be thought of as one " .sx Alternatively , it is a one which corresponds to a many .sx But what about a singleton ( a set with only one member) ?sx Where is the " many " in that ?sx The standard explanation seems to fail already in this most basic case .sx Lewis's sic !sx guiding idea in his Parts of Classes is as beautiful and as powerful as it is simple :sx to take seriously the conception of the singleton as the most basic case , and to regard bigger sets as quite literally made up of singletons .sx Thus your singleton and my singleton together constitute the set of which you and I are the only two members :sx each is a part of it .sx Set theory , on this conception , is not fundamentally about how many begets a one ; it is fundamentally about how a one begets a ( different ) one - which in turn begets a ( yet different ) one , and so on .sx Thereafter it is just a matter of putting the bits together .sx This does not solve traditional philosophical perplexities about sets .sx But it does , in Lewis's sic !sx view , locate them .sx We need to know what kind of thing a singleton is ; how , if at all , we grasp the concept ; why some things ( and in particular , some things which are otherwise just like sets ) are too big to have singletons ; and so forth .sx Lewis is content for the most part just to raise such questions .sx His more immediate concern is to establish , from within a logical framework that governs the relation of parts to wholes , that he has an adequate formal base for set theory .sx This he does in rich , fascinating detail .sx He argues en passant that the relation of a thing to its singleton is the very same relation as that of a natural number to its successor ( so 6 is a set whose sole member is 5) .sx And in an appendix , written jointly with Burgess and Hazen , he spells out a structuralist construal of singletons to which he is nevertheless unsympathetic ( because he takes it to be too revisionary) .sx His presentation is throughout brilliant , elegant and witty .sx I am less clear how much it has in the way of philosophical impact .sx Two things are crucial to Lewis's sic !sx overall conception .sx ( 1 ) Pure assembly - putting things together - does not yield anything new :sx wholes are nothing over and above their parts .sx ( 2 ) Wholes , just like their parts , can have singletons .sx It seems to me that , given ( 1 ) , ( 2 ) is every bit as mysterious ( or as unmysterious ) as the idea that a one is a special case of many , the idea that Lewis finds objectionable in the standard explanation of what a set is .sx It is true that someone broadly sympathetic to Lewis's sic !sx reconstruction of set theory need not accept ( 1) .sx They could say that putting many things together , and applying the singleton operation to one thing , are two different ways of getting a new thing ; and this would ease the mystery , such as it is .sx But how much of a mystery is it ?sx I find myself much less troubled than Lewis by the idea that a one is a special case of a many .sx ( Likewise , for that matter , a none .sx Lewis is forced to make some very bizarre claims about the " null set " - the set with no members .sx )