Italy
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 ...
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 ...