Italy
Nick Hasted
Edmond Rostand’s familiar story of ventriloquised love becomes a sensual, sacrificial tragedy, in Joe Wright’s heady cinematic Valentine, adapted by screenwriter Erica Schmidt from her own stage musical, with music by members of The National.The setting is somewhere between the 17th and 18th century, earthy history and fairy tale. We begin in the boudoir of Roxanne (Haley Bennett), as her maid explains the female facts of life: “Children need love, adults need money.” Cash comes from the sinister Duc de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who sweeps her off to the theatre; en route, Wright builds a Read more ...
David Nice
Two Royal Opera staples, Verdi's La traviata and Puccini’s Tosca, now come round with too much frequency for critical coverage. It looks like Director of Opera Oliver Mears’ Rigoletto will do the same. Yet the production’s September 2021 debut was clouded by routine performances from its protagonist baritone and tenor Duke of Mantua, so a second visit was due to see if fresh casting might make a difference.It has, and very excitingly. True, we no longer have Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano’s surest guidance and illumination in the pit. Stefano Montanari is in many respects Pappano’ Read more ...
David Nice
Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his deserved smash hit Pagliacci, managed the flow but not the inspiration. Give me Rachmaninov’s memorability any day, but at least Leoncavallo’s hokum had the benefit of the best singers and conducting at Cadogan Hall last night.Quality was assured before the first note of the evening. Carlo Rizzi, here conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, stands Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder. The film masquerades as a crime drama with an impressive gloss, but it can’t mask its daytime TV mechanics. Scott’s second film in as many months, House of Gucci follows box office failure The Last Duel. Sitting somewhere between bad opera and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
I last heard Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, published in 1610, at Garsington Opera as the summer light of the Chilterns slowly dimmed across an airy auditorium dotted with singers who bathed us in scintillating meteor-showers of sound. Laden with spectacle, surprise and virtuosity, this piece was born in splendour. Did Monteverdi, overworked in Mantua, write it specifically to secure a top appointment in Venice or Rome, or did he just want to bundle all his choral and instrumental grooves into one hulking, show-off package? Most performances tend to aim for splendour too. However Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Two men trade licks: one of them delves into the heart of the blues, a potent dose of the boogie, the medicinal music of the Mississipi Delta. The other with a mournful voice and violin draws on the equally stripped-down and drone-inflected roots of Southern Italian tradition. The Italian also plays a range of frame drums with phenomenal energy and technical prowess. Mixing the rocking and rolling lilt of John Lee Lee Hooker with the frenetic pulse of pizzica music from Italy might seem an unlikely combination, but the result of collaboration based on a shared passion for the music of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La caduta degli dei (meaning "the twilight of the Gods"), the writer explained, is “a masterpiece which is nonetheless suitable for the cinema-goers who fell asleep during Death in Venice (1971) or Ludwig II (1973)."Visconti did, indeed, set out deliberately to surprise and to shock with The Damned, as he explains in a 1970 interview that Read more ...
David Nice
Another season, another new production of Verdi’s nastiest masterpiece. For which we should be profoundly grateful after the tribulations of the last 18 months. Yet how quickly elements of the routine can corrode the soul of the spectator, just as fresh, urgent communication can set it alight.That communication Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano displays with a true magician’s sense of pace and sleight of hand, deftly transitioning from hollow comedy to ugly tragedy, alert as ever to the needs of his soloists, and the Royal Opera men’s chorus is with him all the way. On the other hand Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mamma Mia! hovers unhelpfully over every frame of Off the Rails, a road movie of sorts in which three women make a music-fueled pilgrimage to Mallorca to honour the wishes of a fourth friend, who has died before time of cancer.The difference here is that the scenery keeps changing and the music of choice isn't ABBA but Blondie. And while no one would cite Mamma Mia! as a paragon of writing for our time, it at least makes sense within the particular world it describes. That's more than one can say for this collaboration between Jordan Waller (screenwriter) and Jules Williamson (director), Read more ...
David Nice
“If this is love, then why have I fought it?” The stock romantic-comedy prevarications had a Greenwich Village setting in Bernstein’s Wonderful Town at Opera Holland Park less than two weeks ago. Last night, the place was nominally Alsace but the style totally Italianate. To adapt another line from the same Bernstein song, “You know it when you hear it” – and with OHP’s utterly dependable and authentic Italian tenor Matteo Lippi as the hero of Mascagni’s light-hearted but still passionate love story, that was guaranteed. More of a surprise was the utterly idiomatic style of the City of London Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-and-radio-play model is long gone, and Eilish’s high-speed ride was boosted by a deal with Apple Music, releases of individual tracks on SoundCloud and YouTube and hefty promotional support from Spotify. The pitch had been rolled for the arrival of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in 2019, which became a monster seller and Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...