Italy
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 ...
stephen.walsh
List all the problems that the pandemic places in the way of operatic performance, and you might well end up wondering why anyone would bother. Opera Ensemble, however, have bothered, in the shape of an accomplished and moving production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, stripped down in a variety of ways, deprived of its normal house-mate, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, and accompanied by a band in various degrees of shrinkage: a piano trio when the production opened at St.James’s Church, Islington, in October, and for a couple of performances at the Grange Festival earlier this month, nothing Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the historical scope of Judith Herrin’s wide-roving history. From the gem-like “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia (425-50) to the flowery meadows of S Apollinare in Classe’s apse, consecrated in 549, covers little over a century of the nearly five covered here – 160 pages out of 399. For all the beauty of the colour illustrations, Herrin is an historian, not a scholar of art, and her straightforward prose has another objective – to make clear the imperial tergiversations which surround the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This seems a perfect project for Matteo Garrone, a director who has found new ways to conjure old Italian dreams, and invests even his most grimly realistic films with fairy tale logic and wonder. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story is here returned to its local time and place, as Pinocchio’s picaresque journey of experience unfolds in a deliberately traditional, lovingly crafted children’s film.Roberto Benigni’s Geppetto, pictured below, adds Spielbergian sentiment and expert comic business to early scenes, and touching frailty later. Garrone’s two best-known features, the sociological gangster Read more ...
mark.kidel
The tortuous drama of James M Cain’s 1940’s thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice has inspired many films: the slow-burning mix of erotic desire, temptation, murder and guilt was ideally suited to American film noir, so it’s in some ways surprising to find is as the source of inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni’s first full-length film (Cronaca di un Amore – Story of a Love Affair) a kind of counterblast to the neo-realism that dominated Italian cinema in 1950, the year of the film’s release.The story is only loosely based on the Cain classic, more the tawdry spirit than the thrilling Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example. He was uncompromising, never learning English or moving to Hollywood, however much he was cajoled by film types there.It appears he saw his non-film music as the serious work and posterity will no doubt give the verdict on that Read more ...
David Nice
The latest wave of musicians to make their voices heard comes from the freelancers who haven't been able to claim anything so far for their loss of income and of the ability to work together. As a group of top players putting out their plea observes, "readers may be surprised to learn that even those of us who appear regularly in various top orchestras - often including those who hold titled positions in such groups - are nonetheless paid on a concert by concert basis in the same way as freelancers". They need our support, while the government hangs fire on those who've slipped through the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s too early for a definitive account of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this was very much a Sky News version of what we’ve been through so far. Although it seems the virus has peaked and we’re entering a tentative stage of partial de-lockdown, the message was relentlessly grim.The government’s catalogue of blunders was rehearsed once again, from the catastrophic decision to send hospital patients to care homes without being tested for the virus to the serial failures to establish comprehensive testing and tracing. As Sky’s reliably morbid political editor Beth Rigby outlined, the Johnson Read more ...