Most comedians know what it feels like to die onstage, but when Andy Parsons's fishtank cracked open during one show last week, his sidekick Roger the goldfish nearly gave the phrase a tragic new definition.
But his not knowing that "religion and science" is a field of study and his surprise at hearing the two words conjoined together into a single phrase is a tragic manifestation of our epistemological crisis.
It is a phrase that rings with tragic irony today.
Working with a soprano on an aria from Cherubini's "Medea" (sung in Italian), she demonstrates the quality of tragic calm she thinks the magisterial phrases should have.
The piece is very much a musical rite of passage from youth to adulthood, the games of the outer movements flanking the mature central Andantino, with its broken melodic phrases that suggest the tragic nobility of operatic recitative.
The vulnerability with which she returns to folded-over swan imagery, as if returning to her nest, and the tragic poignancy with which she invests each phrase are both superb.
The second Part begins in G minor, a key which, in Hogwood's phrase, brings a mood of "tragic presentiment" to the long sequence of Passion numbers which follows.
A collection of vignettes that are somewhat tragic, the song is punctuated with the phrase "I'd love to turn you on" -- either a reference to drugs or the need to tune in to the Beatles' message.
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