Italy
L'Arpeggiata, Wigmore HallFriday, 11 October 2013
L’Arpeggiata are everything that crossover should be and everything that this arranged marriage of genres so often isn’t. The work of lutenist Christina Pluhar and her band of period musicians is organic and authentic, a blend of musics that amplify... Read more... |
Rigoletto, LSO, Noseda, BarbicanMonday, 16 September 2013
This season opener was about closure too. The London Symphony Orchestra was back at the office last night, but this fresh stretch of concerts opened with an opera it has been performing while also acquiring a suntan in Aix-en-Provence. A new cast of... Read more... |
Prom 72: Calleja, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, ZhangFriday, 06 September 2013
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese... Read more... |
The Great BeautyMonday, 02 September 2013
Paolo Sorrentino's latest opens with a Japanese tourist keeling over at the mere sight of an ancient Roman vista: he takes a snap and wipes the sweat from his brow before his fatal fall to the floor. As the Small Faces sang in "Itchycoo Park", for... Read more... |
Liolà, National TheatreThursday, 08 August 2013
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it fairly dances over the pitfalls is due partly to a well-... Read more... |
Don Pasquale, Glyndebourne Festival OperaFriday, 19 July 2013
Her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, Mariame Clément grumbles in the Glyndebourne programme that Don Pasquale “poses no specific ‘conceptual’ challenge” to the opera director. Sighs of relief all round. Donizetti’s final comic masterpiece turns... Read more... |
Simon Boccanegra, Royal OperaFriday, 28 June 2013
Revivals are for a conductor to show off some voices he’s discovered, do some role debuts, develop some careers, and as far as the production's concerned pour new wine into old bottles. There was some good new wine in this revival of Elijah... Read more... |
Shun Li and the PoetThursday, 20 June 2013
Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community. From its Italian title Io sono Li (I Am Li... Read more... |
The Leopard: 50 years on from CannesWednesday, 15 May 2013
It took Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, melancholy last scion of a never very reproductive family, a lifetime to get round to writing one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. Publication of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), based on... Read more... |
The Mafia’s Secret Bunkers, BBC TwoThursday, 02 May 2013
I was once the summer guest of friends in southern Calabria, where the head of a hapless “family traitor” in the nearby village of Taurianova had been hacked off and then kicked around the piazza like a football: the news was greeted by the locals... Read more... |
Love Is All You NeedThursday, 18 April 2013
Following in the footsteps of hugely popular television dramas and film adaptations of various Scandi noir novels comes this overwhelmingly sympathetic piece, a romcom that hasn't an ounce of gloopiness and, unusually, is about middle-aged people... Read more... |
Nabucco, Royal OperaTuesday, 16 April 2013
"Oh, wretched old man! You are but the shadow of the king”, sings Plácido Domingo’s Nebuchadnezzar about himself in Lear-like abjection before his Goneril-Reganish daughter (the flame-throwing Liudmyla Monastyrska). It’s only true of this brief... Read more... |
