Italy
David Nice
From working-class hell via convent purgatory to Florentine comic heaven, the riches of Puccini's most comprehensive masterpiece seem inexhaustible. In a production as detailed in its balance between the stylised and the seemingly spontaneous as Richard Jones's, first seen in 2011, there are always going to be new connections between the three operas to discover. Some things are stronger, some weaker second time around, but you still come away convinced that each work glows best in its original context, and that none should be prised away.Two of the three leading ladies are new to the revival Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Hell, the souls of the damned endure cruelly imaginative punishments for all eternity. Corrupt churchmen are buried headfirst in the ground with their feet set on fire, and soothsayers, who in life presumed to be able to see into the future, have their heads turned 180 degrees and are forced to walk around looking backwards. Drawn in metalpoint strengthened here and there with ink, Botticelli’s lines are as fine as spider’s silk. Sometimes barely there at all, their extraordinary refinement lends a strange, jarring intensity to the violence and terror they depict. By contrast, their Read more ...
David Nice
In the light of what follows, it's probably best to be clear that I'm completely behind the artistic side of ENO in rejecting a 25 per cent reduction of the chorus's annual salary, tied to a shorter season. A full-time chorus of this size is the heart of a big company – without it, no Mastersingers, no Grimes, no Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. A creative alternative solution must be found. Musically matters stand stronger than ever, with the new regime's most recent hit being a transformation of what was originally a lame-duck Magic Flute. Production wise, this Norma Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance.He assumed we all blindly agreed with that second-rate painter but potent myth-maker Vasari (born in Arezzo, lived in Florence), who, in his 1550 biographical three-volume Lives of the Artists, set out the case for the innovative supremacy of contemporary Italian art – the Renaissance. Vasari indeed was the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Finding the Light”, the second episode of this four-part series, took us to the period when Scottish intellectuals led the world in innovative and revolutionary thinking, Edinburgh’s neo-classical architecture in the leafy streets of the New Town made for new standards of civic architecture, and Scottish education could be of the highest quality.The exceptionally enthusiastic narrator is the Scottish representational artist Lachlan Goudie, who rather disarmingly sketches as he goes, particularly in the city and galleries of Rome where Scots of the Enlightenment went for even further Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
For his latest journey Michael Palin, actor, writer, novelist, comedian, Python, traveller, has gone beyond geography in search of the visual arts with his characteristic enthusiasm, eclectic curiosity, and sense of discovery.With his usual exuberance, here he persuasively described the packed life – and art – of that most unusual baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1655). He was inspired by sighting her ferociously violent take on Judith decapitating Holofernes (pictured below) in the Capodimonte Gallery in Naples where Artemisia lived – aside from several years in London – for the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Some time in the late 1280s, the artist Cimabue was wandering in the Tuscan countryside when he chanced upon a boy shepherd. According to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is the source for most such stories, the boy was “portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab, with the stone slightly pointed, without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature.” The young untrained artist was Giotto, who would be taken to Florence as Cimabue's apprentice and soon outstrip his master.Posterity has been deprived of the sheep scratched in stone. But Giotto would Read more ...
David Nice
Send in the clowns, as they sing in this palace-of-varieties first act, not for Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s sole foothold on today’s operatic repertoire, but for the fool-for-love heroine of a sparkling, swooning rarity. Musically, Zazà is a notch above Mascagni and Giordano for orchestral delights, just below supreme genius Puccini, but its admittedly thinly-spread plot ends by being rather remarkable. Our heroine-artiste may be temporarily broken by her infatuation with a bourgeois theatregoer who turns out to be married, but she’ll return to the stage, and she even manages to expose him for Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The strikingly architectural space that forms the upper portion of Botticini’s Palmieri altarpiece is well-suited to an entrance, forming as it does a sort of triumphal arch heralding great things beyond. And so it is that for years this painting hung over the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, oddly well-placed, but in truth of course, entirely out of place. In its new, albeit temporary position, we have a better sense of how this painting might have been seen some 500 years ago, when it adorned the altar of the funerary chapel dedicated to the humanist scholar, poet, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last month, Ludovico Einaudi's album Elements debuted at No 12 on the UK album charts, which made it the highest-charting modern classical album since Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs reached No 6 in 1992. It was proof of the quietly burgeoning allure of Einaudi, which has been stealthily expanding around the world since his first solo release, 1988's Time Out.Subsequent albums such as Le Onde, Eden Roc and I Giorni have lodged several of his limpid and haunting compositions in the ether, whence they might descend to be played on radio, or heard in commercials or on movie Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s nothing like the Palio, the race which twice each summer plunges the city of Siena into a state of collective derangement. If you’ve been you’ll know. If you haven’t, watch Palio for the closest approximation to actual attendance that any filmmaker has yet achieved. And there have been many attempts.The horse race, consisting of three circuits of the city’s apron-shaped Piazza del Campo, contains multitudes. Its roots in medieval history go so deep they’re virtually unfathomable, while the loyalty of each citizen to their district – ingested with la latte della mamma – must be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A huge lizard in sunglasses” was Robin Askwith’s impression of Pier Paolo Pasolini on first meeting the Italian director. The actor’s entertaining, often funny and affectionate recollections of Pasolini are heard during a lengthy interview which is one of the extras on the home cinema release of Abel Ferrara’s homage to the director of Accattone, Theorem, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom and The Canterbury Tales, which featured Askwith. By bringing a wider context, the interview contrasts with Pasolini which, instead of dramatising Pasolini’s career, focuses on the events in the hours Read more ...