Italy
Building the Picture, National GalleryWednesday, 07 May 2014
Viewed through an arch designed to evoke a dimly lit chapel, Lorenzo Costa and Gianfrancesco Maineri’s The Virgin and Child with Saints, 1498-1500, is strikingly legible (pictured below right). The Virgin sits on a marble throne beneath a richly... Read more... |
PompeiiThursday, 01 May 2014
Best known for the Mortal Kombat twosome, the Resident Evil franchise (one of the DVD extras noted how the zombie dogs constantly ate off their zombie makeup) and big, bulging swipes at other genres with Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs Predator and The... Read more... |
The Trip to Italy, BBC TwoSaturday, 05 April 2014
The Trip is a hall of mirrors put together with the help of Heath Robinson. It’s a comedy vehicle in which pretty much the only thing that’s real is the actual vehicle. The stars are two impersonators who above all impersonate themselves. Their... Read more... |
DVD: Le mani sulla cittàSunday, 30 March 2014
Hands Over the City is to Naples at a crucial point in its 20th-century history what Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta is to the Italian capital and Visconti’s La terra trema to the Sicilian coast. Francesco Rosi’s decision to capture the only boom... Read more... |
Inner Voices, BarbicanFriday, 28 March 2014
We’ve now learned from the films of Paolo Sorrentino and honorary Roman Ferzan Ozpetek what great and nuanced ensemble acting the Italians can produce. Even so, the towering star of the current scene is the chameleonic Toni Servillo, already hailed... Read more... |
SalvoThursday, 20 March 2014
Given the world’s most famous crime organisation hails from Italy, it’s odd that we associate the best crime movies with elsewhere, notably Hollywood (not least its quintessential Mafia films, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II). But Italian... Read more... |
Rodelinda, English National OperaSaturday, 01 March 2014
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Because it doesn’t happen often... Read more... |
Addio, Claudio AbbadoMonday, 20 January 2014
“It is at the end that a composer can achieve his finest effects,“ declared Richard Strauss. He was thinking of his great operatic and symphonic epilogues, but apply that to the art of conducting, adjust the “at” to “towards”, and it applies... Read more... |
Cinema ParadisoMonday, 09 December 2013
Cinema Paradiso is having a third outing 25 years on. A commercial flop in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore’s homage to the big screen as an escape route into other worlds excited love on a global scale only after it was re-released as winner of the best... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Turin Film FestivalWednesday, 04 December 2013
Turin, December 2013. Berlusconi has finally been kicked out of the Italian parliament. The country is disaffected, fed up with its politicians, broke. Youngsters, including university students, have no hope for the future. It’s a perfect time for... Read more... |
The Verdi-Boito Story, Bridgewater Hall, ManchesterMonday, 25 November 2013
How do you mark the Verdi bicentenary? As music director of the Hallé Orchestra and a Verdi specialist, Sir Mark Elder gave it a lot of thought. He decided to tell a story rather than direct a concert performance of one opera – say, La traviata. The... Read more... |
A Magnificent HauntingWednesday, 23 October 2013
With a hero who’s an aspiring actor and an ensemble of theatrical types trapped outside time as supporting cast, the staginess of Ferzan Ozpetek’s A Magnificent Haunting comes as little surprise. It makes for sometimes nicely camp overplaying,... Read more... |
