Italy
graham.rickson
This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a Scottish composer celebrates his 60th birthday with an invigorating collection of piano and chamber works.Rory Boyle: Music for Solo Piano, Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson
James Willshire (piano), Bartholdy Trio (Delphian)
As a 12-year-old I sang in the first performance of Scottish composer Rory Boyle’s children’s opera Alfege. Dressed in grey tights and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Everybody’s talking about Much Ado About Nothing. At dinner tables, the pub and on the Bakerloo Line the only cultural conversation to be overheard having is whether David Tennant and Catherine Tate will be as wonderful as we all want them to be as Shakespeare’s feuding lovers Beatrice and Benedick. Their West End show opens next week, and among all the hype and headlines another production (and it was always going to be the “other production”) has quietly opened down at Bankside – a show with such warmth and knockabout energy that if Tate and Tennant are not very brilliant indeed they may Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Last night Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, described by one critic there as “a hymn to the glory of creation”. At last year’s festival another film fitted the same description, only it achieved its ends in a leaner, far quieter fashion; and unlike Malick’s film, Le Quattro Volte can be seen not only as dabbling with the profound, but as being delightfully and accessibly tongue-in-cheek.Set in and around a Calabrian hill village, it opens on the person whom we imagine is to be the chief protagonist, an elderly shepherd. We follow this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luppi had already issued The Italian Story album in 2004, a tribute by the LA-dwelling Italian orchestral arranger and composer to his influences. The Grey Album surfaced the same year. Luppi and Burton soon gravitated towards each other. Both were fascinated by composers like Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni, Piero Piccionni, Armando Travajoli and Piero Umiliani and I Marc 4, the studio quartet that played on countless soundtracks including those of Morricone’s. They also loved Alessandroni’s eight-piece vocal outfit I Cantori Moderni, and the wordless vocals of their member Edda Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963-64. As well as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Asti, who's still acting, had appeared in the pimp's tale Accattone, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who employed Bertolucci as an assistant director. (Bertolucci made his directorial debut on the 1962 serial-killer drama The Grim Reaper, written by Pasolini and about to be Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Italian unification under Victor Emmanuel II - the exiled king whose supporters chanted "Viva Verdi!" (Verdi = Victor Emmanuel, Re D'Italia). Naturally, Italy's premier orchestra, the Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia, under their conductor Antonio Pappano, chose to celebrate this in Basingstoke.Basingstoke has, in The Anvil, a thunderingly good 1,400-seater concert hall regularly visited by top orchestras (Maazel and the Philharmonia soon, the Bolshoi soon after). It is a fine and moving thing to see that as anonymous a place as this Hampshire Read more ...
David Nice
What kind of Aida would you prefer: one in which singing actors stretched to the limits find Verdi's human volcano of emotions beneath the cod-Egyptian rubble, or a stand-and-deliver production with a stalwart cast of beaten-bronze voices? Having had a taste at least of the former once in my life, I wasn't very happy to succumb to the latter in this Covent Garden revival. It was the wall of sound in the big Act II ensemble which made me at least willing to be convinced.And then I wasn't. And then I was again. It's that kind of a show, a reminder of the bad old repertoire days at the Royal Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the WNO season brochure assures us, “is Italian opera at its most passionate and full-blooded”. But you could sit through this revival of Peter Watson’s seven-year-old production and overlook the fact. Always understated (to put it kindly), with age it has retreated further into its shell. The singers face front and largely ignore one another; the soldiers seem to have taken orders from the latest tottering Middle Eastern tyrant not to fire on their own people. There are no flames to trouble Azucena’s conscience; no blood, not much passion. It’s a very small volcano in a Read more ...
howard.male
No, not “trance” in the sense of galloping four-to-the-floor electronic music made by people on Ecstasy for people on Ecstasy. This trance is the original ritualised half-conscious state produced by fast, intensely repetitive, rhythmic tribal music… OK, now I’m thinking about it, we are kind of on the same page here, you just have to appreciate that what this French/Italian/Algerian/Kabyle singer-songwriter is interested in is the spiritual origins of the braindead quantised noise favoured today by the average clubber.She is aided and abetted on this, her third album, by sometime Robert Plant Read more ...
theartsdesk
From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great Read more ...
carole.woddis
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.That, of course, may have been due to the fact that we were confused and not willing to show it; on the other Read more ...