Italy
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Consequently, his first concert saw him throw out the Classical niceties and fill the hall with impish dash and boyish extremes.Beethoven's Second Symphony gained in stature. With a beefy Read more ...
David Nice
Who would have thought that in a comic opera by Donizetti, least orchestra-indulgent of Italian composers, the conductor could be paramount? While Mariame Clément's production frisks around the soft edges of the stock opera buffa plot - sometimes imaginatively, elsewhere a bit superfluously - and four classy singers ensure Glyndebourne pleasures at a high level, it's Enrique Mazzola down in the pit who sets a vital pace: culling any slack business from his cast, according elegantly with the backdate to the 18th century and razor-sharp enough to keep us interested when plot and music threaten Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. And after the entries from Denmark and France, now a succulent Italian crime drama takes its turn to stick around for an Read more ...
David Nice
You don't need to buy into the loose hell-purgatory-paradise trajectory of Puccini's one-act operas to greet the triptych as his comprehensive masterpiece, full of wry interconnections, orchestral wizardry and grateful if tough vocal writing. Fourteen years on from his gorgeous recording, Royal Opera principal conductor Antonio Pappano is still digging for treasurable detail in each opera; and that master-director of the unexpected Richard Jones was bound to find hidden links between his already classic production of towering operatic comedy Gianni Schicchi and the two thornier propositions Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
This year’s Venice Film Festival has been awash with great directors from what one might call the old guard: David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Aleksander Sokurov, Philippe Garrel. But when the jury presents its prizes tonight, I hope that it honours some of the new, young film-makers who have been the ones to set this festival alight.Chief amongst those has been a Brit, Steve McQueen, who follows his extraordinary debut, Hunger, with a second film that has shaken and stirred the critics here. The focus of Shame is Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a successful New Yorker whose Read more ...
David Nice
The Swiss-born Sicilian tenor has died, far too young at the age of 43, 10 days after an accident on his Vespa. He was one of the best and most stylish of his rare breed, even if the scrummage to find an heir to Pavarotti sometimes pushed him into a corner. I'll not forget his Alvaro in Verdi's La forza del Destino at Covent Garden: here after so long was another true Italian tenor with a golden middle range who could at least act with his voice.That London debut was memorably conducted by Antonio Pappano, though the advertised maestro who'd haughtily gone walkabout was Riccardo Muti. He'd Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I wonder if it’s possible for a film festival to kick off with a bigger bang. For your first three competition films to be directed by one of the world’s biggest movie stars, one of its most celebrated (and controversial) auteurs and arguably the world’s most famous woman, is no mean feat. And two of these films are pretty damn good. Italy’s economy might be down there with the dregs of Europe, but its premier film festival, now in its 68th year, shows no sign of being knocked off its perch.To call George Clooney a movie star does the man an injustice, of course, since he’s well on the path Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
An awful lot of people involved in producing electronic dance music find a niche and stick to it. Many do this with a very po face. Speak to them about it and they may play you a track they think is "poppy" to demonstrate their range. It usually isn't, it's just a teensy-weensy bit less purely dance-floor functional than the rest of their oeuvre. Because all they ever listen to is techno, dubstep, fill-in-the-blank, their ability to make a comparative judgment has eroded.In truth, this is also one of the great things about dance music, that zealot-like devotion to the conceptual core of a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mid-August Lunch (2009) was the most purely enjoyable of the welcome new wave of Italian films. Watching its writer-director Gianni Di Gregorio, then 59, star as a failed Roman rogue with a lived-in face, swigging wine while failing to corral his irascible mother (movie debutante Valeria de Franciscis Bandoni, 93) and her ancient cronies, this was la dolce vita lived amiably on the bottom rung. In a summer of lazy remakes and sequels, this odd couple’s swift return in Salt of Life is a delight.This isn’t strictly a sequel but, as when Chaplin would bring back the Tramp, another variation on Read more ...
howard.male
The title in part refers to the container ships that as well as bringing food stuffs etc, to many of the world’s ports, also bring people and their music. But this album is far from just another melting-pot fusion of all the usual styles - Balkan, reggae, ska, funk – all the usual suspects. The focus is just on the taranta (the other half of the title) - a collective term for a number of up-tempo Italian folk dances originating from the heel of Italy.Proceedings open with just the rippling muscular sound of an accordion and a lone acoustic guitar, suggesting tasteful restraint. But then after Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The phenomenal Eduardo de Filippo has no parallel in British theatre. Cross Olivier with Ayckbourn and you get a national institution who acted in and directed his own plays in his own theatre. Born in 1900, it seems odd that he had to wait until 1977 for his first honorary doctorate, odder that the award came not from his native Naples but from the University of Birmingham.De Filippo (or Eduardo, as he was universally known) first tied a bond with this country when he brought Napoli milionaria, his first mature postwar work, to the Aldwych in 1972. The bond was tightened by the National Read more ...
bella.todd
Halfway through Sean Mathias’s gripping new production of The Syndicate, Ian McKellen’s Don Antonio Barracano reaches for his hat, stick and gloves and heads out through the olive groves to "make [a man] an offer". He looks and sounds like a nice old gent setting out for an afternoon stroll. Unless, of course, you’re passingly acquainted with The Godfather.Set in the criminal underworld of Sixties Naples, Eduardo de Filippo’s dark-cornered comedy is a far, far better play than its performance history here in the UK (just one radio production with Paul Scofield) might have you believe. A Read more ...