Italy
David Nice
Everything is political in the world's current turbulent freefall. The aim of Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" series, taking the young players of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra to cities from Sarajevo in 1997 to Moscow in 2000 and Tehran last year, has simply been "to perform with musicians from different cultures and religions" in a community of peace. Inevitably, though, the resonances are going to be bigger when you join, as happened this year in Kiev, with performers not only from the Ukrainian Opera but also from Mariupol in the strife-torn east, part of an ongoing war the Read more ...
David Nice
Two rules should help the non-Donizettian: avoid all stagings of the prolific Bergamasco's nearly 70 operas other than the comedies; and seek the guarantee of top bel canto stylists. Conductor Mark Elder and soprano Joyce El-Khoury certainly fit that bill, and a straight concert performance of L'Ange de Nisida, given at the Royal Opera in association with Opera Rara, got it exactly right. You had to credit the hard work of reconstruction, too, on this opera semiseria which never reached the stage but was expanded, with a similar plot line and several of the same characters, as the relatively Read more ...
David Nice
Valiant Opera Holland Park, always taking up the gauntlet for Italian operas which should mostly never be staged again. Worst was Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini, where musical ambition vastly outruns technique and inspiration. Mascagni's Iris with its hideous misogyny has now been followed by the same composer's Isabeau of 1911, turgid of libretto and dramaturgy. Leoncavallo's Zazà and Puccini's La rondine are in a different league, but both had already impressed London audiences in concert and at the Royal Opera respectively before travelling westwards. Here the heart sinks to see the same Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Ciambra is a wonderful and subtle piece of filmmaking. Director/writer Jonas Carpignano captures the genuine heart and fire of family relationships with an amateur cast of relatives, led by the magnetic young Pio Amato. By trusting the audience to find the subtext themselves, they create touching and persuasive cinema over two hours.Pio is 14-years-old, living with his large family in the Romani community known as the Ciambra, in south Italy. Life here is tough – the electricity is stolen, and money is made by hijacking cars for ransom. Age works differently here, with establishing shots Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s open season on the Getty dynasty. Last month the BBC documentary The Gettys: The World’s Richest Art Dynasty briskly coursed through the family archives. In March the TV drama Trust began on FX, scripted by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle. But breasting the tape over Christmas was All the Money in the World, Ridley Scott’s account of the kidnap of J Paul Getty III in Italy in 1973. The film seems destined to be remembered for the excision of Kevin Spacey from the original cut, to be replaced by Christopher Plummer.A great deal closer in age to the dynasty’s founding father, Read more ...
Rupert Edwards
Sexy is an overused word in the arts but it’s an adjective you can’t help applying to some of Helaine Blumenfeld’s voluptuous marble sculptures as you run your fingers over their surfaces. These abstract bodily forms, often in the purest icing-white crystalline stone, are so tempting that you almost want to lick them. Licking is not actively encouraged but Blumenfeld is very keen that you touch and feel the surface of the work. It’s a transgression of art world conventions that’s typical of this sculptor, who has never had much to do with the contemporary art world… and which maybe explains Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Would you like a veil?” asked a steward, offering a length of black gauze, and when you’re at a production by Birmingham Opera Company it’s usually wisest to say yes. You get used to it - the frantic Google-mapping to locate the venue; the hike through the broken concrete and mud of Birmingham’s post-industrial fringe to whatever derelict factory the company has occupied this time around; the racing certainty that at some point you’re going to be hustled through a passageway by a bomber jacket-clad Graham Vick. (At La Scala and Covent Garden, audiences watch what Vick has directed. Only in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Made for Italian state television in 1978, Fellini’s Orchestral Rehearsal is full of clichés. Some of them do ring true: brass players and percussionists are often a mischievous, rowdy bunch. As for the others… I’d best stop there, lest I annoy any string-playing readers. There’s also a corrupt union official and an autocratic conductor who won’t stop talking. So far, so accurate – though it would have helped if Fellini’s horn-playing extras had been shown how to hold their hooters properly, and the orchestral seating layout is a bit odd. Plus, why do film-makers always show the conductor Read more ...
Helen Wallace
This was an evening of silence and shadow, a chill, moonlit meditation, where each sound demanded forensic attention. Enter the world of Luigi Nono and his admirers. As his compatriot Sciarrino wrote of Lo Spazio Inverso, which opened the concert, "Islands pulsating with sounds skim over lakes of silence… now we hear even the slightest tensions in the intervals as something new."Sunday’s concert at St John’s Smith Square completed the Principal Sound weekend, which focuses on music of the last half-century, this year Nono’s late works. Performed by crack contemporary vocal group EXAUDI ( Read more ...
Katherine Waters
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.The book is divided by materials, elements and concepts – “Sky”, “Clean”, “Rock”, “Force”, and “Clay” are all chapter titles – and each hones in on a particular structure by weaving together the stories of the people who built them, the social and historical context in which they were conceived and built, and the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Strauss: Burleske Joseph Moog (piano), Deutsche Radio Philharmonie/Nicholas Milton (Onyx)It's not you, it's me. That’s probably what I'd say to Brahms in attempting to explain why I generally prefer his craggy D minor piano concerto to its even longer sequel. That the two works are so different is a sign of Brahms's multifaceted genius, the B flat concerto's serene magnificence a happy reminder that growing older doesn’t necessarily mean becoming grumpier and terser. I've listened to this performance a lot over the past few days, and perhaps, at last, I'm Read more ...
Richard Farnes
Commentators have, over the years, variously described Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) as all things to all people: Verdi’s Tristan und Isolde, Verdi’s masterpiece, Verdi’s Don Giovanni, a pure love poem, and much more. It seems to me to be one of his most consistently exciting works, perfectly proportioned and dramatically astute.Interestingly, in this instance Verdi did not feel the need to make the extensive revisions that he undertook to the operas either side of it in his canon – Simon Boccanegra, La forza del destino and Don Carlos. Its creation was relatively swift, and its Read more ...