Italy
David Nice
First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment, and this unwieldy epic, with its opportunistic grafting of a melodramatic plot on to the Palermitans’ massacre of the French in 1282, has more than enough vintage music to be worthy of anyone’s close attention. What’s more, Antonio Pappano is surely the best opera-house music director in the world to reveal its colours and beauties, and he rose to a Read more ...
Ronnie Flynn
Puglia, otherwise known as Apulia, is the heel of the kinky boot that makes up Italy. It’s usually associated with the golden sands of the Ionian coast, the clear, sun-spun waters of Castellanata Marina, the palaces of Bari, and the sublime fish restaurants of Peschici. There is, however, another side to this Italian paradise. It boasts a music scene whose chief contenders resent being lazily lumped in with cheesy holiday Euro-disco or worthy local folksiness, bands and DJs who wish to engage with the wider spectrum of western pop, rock and dance music.For four days Puglia Sounds is bringing Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
L’Arpeggiata are everything that crossover should be and everything that this arranged marriage of genres so often isn’t. The work of lutenist Christina Pluhar and her band of period musicians is organic and authentic, a blend of musics that amplify and enrich one another, a conversation between friends and equals.After a too-lengthy drought of UK appearances (save one token visit to the Proms last year), L’Arpeggiata are at last back. Last night’s concert was only the first in a residency at the Wigmore Hall that will take us all the way through to next July, giving the group’s British Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This season opener was about closure too. The London Symphony Orchestra was back at the office last night, but this fresh stretch of concerts opened with an opera it has been performing while also acquiring a suntan in Aix-en-Provence. A new cast of singers replaced gaudy costumes and facepaint with elegant evening garb, and semi-acted their roles on the thin strip of forestage not occupied by the massed ranks of the orchestra.The concept of the concert performance has never had more enthusiastic support than at the recent run of seven Wagner operas, amounting to a gazillion hours without Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Paolo Sorrentino's latest opens with a Japanese tourist keeling over at the mere sight of an ancient Roman vista: he takes a snap and wipes the sweat from his brow before his fatal fall to the floor. As the Small Faces sang in "Itchycoo Park", for this gentleman at least, "It's all too beautiful." The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a love letter to Rome, in the vein of and as grandly ambitious as a Fellini, but don't be fooled by the title. Sorrentino's sixth narrative feature isn't merely a celebration of the city's already much celebrated beauty. It follows a man in existential and Read more ...
David Nice
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it fairly dances over the pitfalls is due partly to a well-calibrated ensemble, but above all to the fact that the great Italian playwright made an exception to social commentary and searching examination of the human condition, coming up instead with a piece of fluff about babymaking village-style.Happy-go-lucky local stud Liolà (Rory Keenan) – the name translates as “here or there” – breeds too many Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, Mariame Clément grumbles in the Glyndebourne programme that Don Pasquale “poses no specific ‘conceptual’ challenge” to the opera director. Sighs of relief all round. Donizetti’s final comic masterpiece turns out to be “about” nothing but its own subtly nuanced retelling of the stock tale of the old buffer who plans to marry his ward, nephew’s sweetheart, or some such, but is outwitted by her with the help of a smart confederate. But that, it also emerges in Clément’s witty and intelligent production first staged on the tour two years ago but new now to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Revivals are for a conductor to show off some voices he’s discovered, do some role debuts, develop some careers, and as far as the production's concerned pour new wine into old bottles. There was some good new wine in this revival of Elijah Moshinsky's 22-year-old production. The Abkhazian soprano Hibla Gerzmava was the shining beauty, doing her first Amelia, with a sterling new tenor voice coming from the American Russell Thomas. Thomas Hampson made his house debut in the role of pirate-turned-Doge Simon Boccanegra, and Dimitri Platanias - a previous Rigoletto in the house - debuted as his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community. From its Italian title Io sono Li (I Am Li), we might have expected a subject based on more documentary strands involving the life of the film's eponymous Chinese immigrant heroine, who’s paying off an unquantified debt to those who arranged her journey to Italy by working in any job she's assigned, but Sigre’s film develops far beyond that towards human drama of the subtlest kind.Li mostly Read more ...
David Nice
It took Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, melancholy last scion of a never very reproductive family, a lifetime to get round to writing one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. Publication of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), based on the life of the author's great grandfather and the changes of the risorgimento, only took place over a year after Lampedusa’s death in July 1957. Events then moved very fast. By March 1959 the book had gone through 52 editions. French and British translations won a warmer critical press than in Italy, but it was there that Luchino Visconti made his Read more ...
william.ward
I was once the summer guest of friends in southern Calabria, where the head of a hapless “family traitor” in the nearby village of Taurianova had been hacked off and then kicked around the piazza like a football: the news was greeted by the locals with no more than raised eyebrows and a resigned shrug of the shoulders.These things are not often caught on film, and certainly weren’t on offer in The Mafia’s Secret Bunkers. Indeed it’s a good thing that eminent bespectacled academic John Dickie has a good head for heights, as he spends a good deal of this fairly breathless BBC documentary Read more ...