Italy
Mingardo, Gritton, The English Concert, Bicket, BarbicanSaturday, 27 November 2010
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,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Conductor Riccardo ChaillySaturday, 27 November 2010
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... Read more... |
Adriana Lecouvreur, Royal OperaFriday, 19 November 2010
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... Read more... |
Salvator Rosa: Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, Dulwich Picture GalleryFriday, 01 October 2010
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... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Pordenone Montanari, An Italian DiscoverySunday, 26 September 2010
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... Read more... |
Eat Pray LoveSunday, 19 September 2010
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... Read more... |
Don Pasquale, Royal OperaMonday, 13 September 2010
Anticipating revivals of productions that were hardly vivacious in the first place, you can always find reasons to hope. Perhaps there'll be a dazzling house debut. Maybe someone, preferably the revival director, will bring a more focused individual... Read more... |
Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, Gardiner, Royal Albert HallSaturday, 11 September 2010
Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers are something of a musical enigma. Neither their true pitch nor order of movements, their origins, nor even whether they were intended as a complete sequence is known for certain, prompting scholar Denis Arnold to conclude... Read more... |
Tuscany is Ready for Her Close-UpMonday, 30 August 2010
As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three... Read more... |
The Leopard: The Original Film for FoodiesSaturday, 28 August 2010
The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il... Read more... |
Francesca da Rimini, Opera Holland ParkSaturday, 31 July 2010
They're having a laugh at Holland Park, surely: offering 700 pay-what-you-like tickets to hook newcomers on the wonderful world of opera, and then serving up a Pythonesque staging of an immoveable Italian dinosaur. Three fine singers wasted, a... Read more... |
Opera Holland Park invites audiences to try Zandonai for freeThursday, 29 July 2010A new "Inspire Project" over in Kensington hopes to catch more new audiences for opera by inviting 700 people to watch the new production of a real operatic rarity, Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, and pay what they like, if they like, at the... Read more... |
