Italy
alexandra.coghlan
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics, and subversion for celebration, the production is generous in laughs but lingers scarcely longer in the mind than on the lips. With previous alumni including Mark Elder, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez, there are some long shadows looming over the show’s hot-pink horizon, adding a not unwelcome sense of edginess to this latest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There must be good reasons why the fine crime novels of Michael Dibdin have been absent from screens large and small. They're probably to do with Dibdin's deadpan satirical tone and the anti-heroic nature of his protagonist, the Venetian detective Aurelio Zen. Also, his shrewd observations of the hidden undercurrents of Italian society are almost bound to get lost in screen translation. "Books and movies are completely different media", Dibdin once commented, "and the more the Hollywood crowd learns to knit their own stuff, the better."So, it's pleasing - perhaps even slightly miraculous - to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime writer Michael Dibdin (1947-2007) was four years before his death. It was a freezing February morning in Bologna, where he was researching the 10th and (it turned out) penultimate book in the Aurelio Zen series. The interview was at 9am. In the fug of a crowded bar, Dibdin soaked up several espressi and a warming tot of grappa.Having concluded our Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a climactic moment in Loose Cannons when one of the characters has rather more dolci than is good for her. For anyone without a sweet cinematic tooth, the two hours’ traffic of this soft-centred Italian melodrama may induce a similar kind of diabetic shutdown. For everyone else, it’s a dessert trolley to feast the palate. But there is one intriguing discrepancy between this and other entertainments blown up from the bottom of Europe on warming southerly thermals. While everyone here wears hearts on exquisitely tailored sleeves, one character has to keep quiet about the emotions which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They have period names in the foreign country we call the past. In last night’s documentary about a brilliant wartime trick practised upon Hitler, we came across a coroner called Sir Bentley Purchase, a love interest called Peternel Hankins and a Welsh tramp with the stirringly patriotic if implausible name of Glyndwr Michael. Charles Cholmondeley, one of the authors of the deception, would even draw attention to the absurd discrepancy between the way his name looked and sounded. More or less the only person in this entire story who didn't sound like a character in a novel was Major Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Not much snow left on the Barbican after last night's barnstormer from Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. What hadn't melted in the flames of the Russian pyre that is Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini would had been swept aside by the great quakes of Respighi's tub-thumping Pines of Rome. And the icy refuseniks clinging to Barbican pavements? Note-gobbling piano virtuoso Arcadi Volodos - doing a very good impression of a snow shovel in Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto - was dealing with that.I had been a little scared of this concert to be honest. Scared about the potential of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Before Mozart, there was Pergolesi. The 18th century couldn't get enough of the Neapolitan prodigy. He was the first great tragic musical wünderkind of the Enlightenment, prefiguring what Mozart would become for the 19th century. Like Mozart, Pergolesi died prematurely aged just 26. Like Mozart, Pergolesi was a musical simplifier and distiller, a divine and revolutionary sieve. Like Mozart, Pergolesi's popularity spawned an industry dedicated to mythologising his life and misattributing the music of contemporaries to him. Yet we celebrate Pergolesi's 300th anniversary this year, quite unlike Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
When Riccardo Chailly (b 1953) left the Royal Concertgebouw for the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Richard Morrison said it was as if Bill Gates had ditched Microsoft for Aeroflot. The Gewandhaus has since become one of the lustiest of orchestral beasts in the world. Chailly and his orchestra make a rare appearance at the Barbican next Thursday and like all his previous visits it's likely to be a pretty unmissable event.I met up with Chailly in 2008 in his vast Gewandhaus office that overlooks the square where the first stirrings of East German revolt were witnessed 20 years ago. Chailly became chief Read more ...
David Nice
In the event, Covent Garden's first glitzy star vehicle of the current season turned out to be a handsome ensemble piece, with three of the four leads bringing special gifts (though not quite the full picture) to their stagey roles, tender and nuanced yet less than ideally pacy conducting from Mark Elder and about as much interpretation and telling mise-en-scènes from director David McVicar as the piece can reasonably take.Fans of tenor Jonas Kaufmann, and they are growing with good reason by the day, will no doubt tell you that he stole the show. Not exactly. His character, Maurizio, Count Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 1631, spewing molten lava into the sea and filling the air with ash clouds that reached as far as Constantinople. The eruption and accompanying earthquakes killed 3,000 people and caused widespread devastation, all of which made a lasting impression on the 16–year-old Salvator Rosa. As an artist he was to specialise in darkly tempestuous landscapes filled with menace in which small figures are dwarfed by towering cliffs, or beset by bandits, while storm clouds gather over ruined buildings and blasted trees.In his lifetime Rosa became a cult figure, as seemingly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.An artist called Pordenone Montanari put his house in Piedmont on sale. The name won’t mean anything. Montanari, now in his seventies, had been exhibited Read more ...
neil.smith
Julia Roberts takes a long time to find her centre in Eat Pray Love, a glossy adaptation of the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir that, while offering a respite from the usual cinematic diet of reboots, remakes and comic-book blockbusters, ends up being just as simplistic and facile as its box-office competition.Female audiences are traditionally starved of gender-targeted product, so some might regard Ryan Murphy’s gentle travelogue a welcome corrective to the prevailing trend. After nearly two-and-a-half hours of soporific navel-gazing, however, even the most ardent fan of Gilbert’s 2006 bestseller Read more ...