Italy
The Syndicate, Chichester Festival TheatreWednesday, 03 August 2011
Halfway through Sean Mathias’s gripping new production of The Syndicate, Ian McKellen’s Don Antonio Barracano reaches for his hat, stick and gloves and heads out through the olive groves to "make [a man] an offer". He looks and sounds like a nice... Read more... |
BBC Proms: William Tell, Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, PappanoSunday, 17 July 2011
Rossini's William Tell has to be the most well-known unknown opera ever written. There's unlikely to be a man, woman or dog on the planet who can't whistle or bark a part of the overture. But the other four hours? What of that? One opera aficionado... Read more... |
This World: Italy's Bloodiest Mafia, BBC TwoWednesday, 13 July 2011
Programmes about Italian organised crime made by the foreign media are always hampered by the finnicky nature of the beast itself: there is so much background detail that needs to be staked out at the outset that your head is whirling from... Read more... |
Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500, National GallerySunday, 10 July 2011
Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the... Read more... |
Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, Dulwich Picture GalleryFriday, 01 July 2011
Some years ago the Dulwich Picture Gallery invited Howard Hodgkin to exhibit alongside the Old Masters in their collection. I am not a fan of this vastly overrated artist, but even a diehard enthusiast must have found the juxtaposition cruel. How... Read more... |
Simon Boccanegra, English National OperaThursday, 09 June 2011
Public feuding, private sorrows: the elemental passions of Verdi's Ligurian power struggle haven't had a vivid London staging since the Alden-Fielding ENO classic gave it a guiding (or, according to taste, hindering) giant hand in the late 1980s.... Read more... |
Don Pasquale, Opera Holland ParkWednesday, 08 June 2011
Nothing says summer opera quite like the skittish melodies and Neapolitan oom-pah-pah of a Donizetti overture. It doesn’t get much cheekier or more playful than this, the kind of music that makes you long for a pea shooter to pelt opera-goers with a... Read more... |
Turandot, Welsh National Opera, CardiffSunday, 29 May 2011
No point in going to WNO’s Turandot expecting to see images of old Beijing, for all the charming lady in a Chinese floral hat on the programme cover. The curtain goes up on the inside of an enormous galvanised dustbin festooned with photos of what... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Boyle, Martin, RachmaninovFriday, 27 May 2011
This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a... Read more... |
Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare's GlobeThursday, 26 May 2011
Everybody’s talking about Much Ado About Nothing. At dinner tables, the pub and on the Bakerloo Line the only cultural conversation to be overheard having is whether David Tennant and Catherine Tate will be as wonderful as we all want them to be as... Read more... |
European Festivals 2011 Round-UpMonday, 23 May 2011
Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative... Read more... |
Le Quattro VolteMonday, 23 May 2011
Last night Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, described by one critic there as “a hymn to the glory of creation”. At last year’s festival another film fitted the same description, only it... Read more... |
