Italy
william.ward
There has long been a conviction in Italian drama circles that there exists a “Special Relationship” between themselves and il Bardo di Stratford: something to do with the complexities of Elizabethan English syntax and the unusual amount of words of Italian that Shakespeare appropriated from the dominant European language(s) of theatre of his day.Indeed, going to almost any contemporary production of Italian theatre (for anyone raised on the English language canon and its main schools of interpretation), is to hit a very hard wall of cultural dissonance. We go for grades of naturalism; our Read more ...
william.ward
Now here is something genuinely original and genuinely innovative coming out of Italian cinema, a very welcome surprise. Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature film has a freshness of outlook and a sharpness of overview that could put many of her more venerable rivals in Italy to shame. Corpo Celeste – Heavenly Body – based on the novel by acclaimed Anna Maria Ortese - recounts the story of 13-year-old Marta (Yle Vianello) and her somewhat traumatic return to the city of her birth in Southern Italy after spending the last 10 years in Switzerland as the daughter of poor immigrants. The most Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to take a loving and empathic approach to decidedly intractable material, the director Michael Attenborough achieves precisely that with Filumena, in which Samantha Spiro follows on from (and surpasses) Judi Dench in author Eduardo De Filippo's title role of the one-time Neapolitan prostitute who in early middle age decides that what matters most is to be una mamma. Staged on a terracotta, plant-filled stage dominated by an orange tree whose limbs extend out towards the theatre's upper level, the production looks as handsome as Spiro makes it sound, and it's only Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The British grand tourists not only fell in love with Italy. They fell in love with the landscapes of 17th-century ex-pat artist Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682), depicting the Roman campagna in which the gods disported themselves. JMW Turner (1775-1851) also fell for the Frenchman, whose work he had seen in significant stately homes while visiting his patrons. Turner studied and copied, and it is the anatomy of this artistic love affair over two centuries that is exposed, to enchanting effect, in the National Gallery’s spring exhibition.Turner was marvellously ambitious. Rather like Picasso (who Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Remember Primal Scream’s woozy “Higher Than the Sun”? It’s a fair bet Mauro Remiddi does. His debut album as Porcelain Raft drifts through 10 foggy songs as disconnected, yet warmly melodic, as that era-defining excursion through the ether.Italian born and America-dwelling, Remiddi has been through a few musical incarnations. He’s played klezmer for the Berlin Youth Circus, was pianist for a New York tap-dance show and in the Sixties-ish band Sunny Day Sets Fire. Where he’s landed up is familiar, but still satisfying. As well as nodding towards the rave/indie crossover, he’s got the chillwave Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Gabriel announced WOMAD’s 2012 festival in Sicily this afternoon. It’s a year of anniversaries for the annual showcase of world music, with 2012 also marking the 30th year for Britain’s big brother festival. On a wintry afternoon, sharply contrasting with Sicily’s climate, Gabriel was joined at London's Italian Cultural Institute by Carlo Presenti, the institute's director, and Roy Paci (pictured below right), Sicily’s cultural polymath and musician whose past collaborators have included Manu Chao and the Netherlands' The Ex.Presenti said this year’s festival, to be held on 5–8 July at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the 1450s in Florence, Alberti was working on the facade of Santa Maria Novella, Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi were active, while Leonardo was born in nearby village of Vinci. And the English established a diplomatic presence. It has continued almost uninterrupted, pausing only in times of direct conflict. This month, it ends as the British consulate closes its doors for the last time. Cuts to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget and global geopolitical shifts mean that the United Kingdom no longer needs a man in Florence to tend to the needs of tourists and expats. It is an Read more ...
David Nice
Among the many singularities of Pasolini’s films, the proportions of his narrative structure have to be the strangest. Here we, like the young Jason who grows before our eyes, get a six-minute introductory lecture from the hero's foster centaur which tells us what to look out for in the obscurities that follow: all is sacred, nature is never natural, myth and ritual are a living reality, this is a story of deeds, not thoughts. Then there’s hardly any dialogue for the next hour or so: look away, if you’re squeamish, at the climax of the chthonic rituals to which Medea's Colchians who guard the Read more ...
David Nice
It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the second half of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s even bigger all-Chopin programme. Last night Lortie offered a comparably monumental homage to this year's bicentenary birthday boy Liszt in all his Italian-inspired variety, and there was no need to miss, or to wish to miss, a note. It still didn’t convert me to the idea that Liszt, like Chopin in 2010, has more to him than first meets the ear, but it was Read more ...
william.ward
In his home country, the release of the latest film by Nanni Moretti is always an event, all the more so in the case of We Have a Pope – a bittersweet psychological comedy with tinges of tragedy about a cardinal who is elected to the throne of St Peter, has a panic attack, and does a runner leaving the Catholic Church in crisis and the world media with a bonzer news story. It arrives a full five years after his last outing, Il caimano.A profound neurotic whose long-term relationship with psychoanalysis seems to have resolved little, but which has provided him with endless material for his Read more ...
David Nice
Many of Italy's artistic institutions may have tottered or crumbled during the Berlusconi years, and the more capable new man in the Palazzo Chigi can only offer painful sticking plaster, yet one major orchestra has never sounded better. Of the two elder statesmen among conductors returning to Rome this month, Riccardo Muti may bring a cosmetic gravitas to the tentative renaissance of Rome's beleaguered Opera House; but Claudio Abbado revisited the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia last Sunday after a 30-year absence to confirm perhaps the country's only blazing musical success story, an Read more ...
fisun.guner
Leonardo da Vinci was not a prolific artist. In a career that lasted nearly half a century, he probably painted no more than 20 pictures, and only 15 surviving paintings are currently agreed to be entirely his. Of these, four are incomplete. Indeed one painting, abandoned by the artist but currently hanging in the National Gallery, is so far from being finished that the two figures in it, that of Saint Jerome and the lion in the wilderness (c 1488-90, Pinacoteca Vaticana, pictured below), have been barely touched by paint.Yet the aged saint’s musculature, the way the taut sinews of his Read more ...