Italy
Album: Gabriele Mirabassi and Stefano Zanchini - Il gatto e la volpeTuesday, 23 August 2022
The clarinet-player, clarinet-owner or clarinet-lover in your life is going to want and need this record. The combination of a glorious sound, lyricism that is lived and (okay, obviously) breathed, contrasted with insane finger-busting at crazy... Read more... |
Much Ado About Nothing, National Theatre review - Shakespeare’s comedy goes Hollywood musicalFriday, 22 July 2022
After gender-flipping the National’s Malvolio, the director Simon Godwin might have been expected to be equally bold with Much Ado About Nothing at the same address. A same-sex Beatrice and Benedick romance? Dogberry in bondage gear, zonked out on... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival 2022 - body and soul in perfect balanceWednesday, 13 July 2022
For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven”, is how Pier Paolo Pasolini, the centenary of whose birth we mark this year, defined his early experience of hearing the Siciliana movement of Bach’s First... Read more... |
Venice Biennale 2022 review - The Milk of Dreams Part 2: The ArsenaleFriday, 17 June 2022
Part two of The Milk of Dreams, the central International Exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, housed in the Arsenale shipyard, starts with the kind of massive, grandstanding gesture that’s necessary in a venue of this scale: a colossal bronze... Read more... |
LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - four centuries of Italian music on paradeFriday, 03 June 2022
If you sought a spectacular shrugging-off of jubileemania last night, you could have done no better than this programme to coincide with Italian Republic Day from our own national treasures Antonio Pappano – Knight of the British Empire, if you’ll... Read more... |
The Tale of King Crab review - an unholy fool's phantasmagoric progressSaturday, 23 April 2022
“Crazy? Aristocrat? Sad? Killer? Drunk?” A modern Tuscan hunting lodge’s regulars remember the myth of irascible rebel Luciano many ways, as it endures from the previous century’s misty turn. Italian-American co-directors Matteo Zoppi and Allessio... Read more... |
Ennio review - sprawling biog of the maestro of movie musicThursday, 21 April 2022
Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in... Read more... |
Benedetta review - lesbian nuns' sex and faith collideFriday, 15 April 2022
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a... Read more... |
Oberto, Chelsea Opera Group, Cadogan Hall review - Verdi’s first opera bounces into lifeTuesday, 05 April 2022
There are quite a few dull patches in the early Verdi operas that aren’t Nabucco, Ernani or Macbeth, so I wasn’t expecting so very much from the 26-year-old composer’s first shot. That was without taking into account how spiritedly the ad hoc... Read more... |
Three Floors review - nothing like good neighboursSunday, 20 March 2022
A speeding drunk driver arrows down a silent street into a Roman block of flats. The impact’s reverberations ripple through the next 10 years, in Nanni Moretti’s soulful, Italian all-star adaptation of Eshkol Nevo’s novel, Three Floors Up.The... Read more... |
Cyrano review - a heady cinematic ValentineThursday, 24 February 2022
Edmond Rostand’s familiar story of ventriloquised love becomes a sensual, sacrificial tragedy, in Joe Wright’s heady cinematic Valentine, adapted by screenwriter Erica Schmidt from her own stage musical, with music by members of The National.The... Read more... |
Rigoletto, Royal Opera review - second time luckyTuesday, 22 February 2022
Two Royal Opera staples, Verdi's La traviata and Puccini’s Tosca, now come round with too much frequency for critical coverage. It looks like Director of Opera Oliver Mears’ Rigoletto will do the same. Yet the production’s September 2021 debut was... Read more... |
