Italy
CD: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi – RomeSaturday, 07 May 2011
Luppi had already issued The Italian Story album in 2004, a tribute by the LA-dwelling Italian orchestral arranger and composer to his influences. The Grey Album surfaced the same year. Luppi and Burton soon gravitated towards each other. Both were... Read more... |
Before the RevolutionSunday, 10 April 2011
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963... Read more... |
Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Pappano, The Anvil, BasingstokeFriday, 18 March 2011
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Italian unification under Victor Emmanuel II - the exiled king whose supporters chanted "Viva Verdi!" (Verdi = Victor Emmanuel, Re D'Italia). Naturally, Italy's premier orchestra, the Orchestra dell'Accademia... Read more... |
Aida, Royal Opera HouseFriday, 11 March 2011
What kind of Aida would you prefer: one in which singing actors stretched to the limits find Verdi's human volcano of emotions beneath the cod-Egyptian rubble, or a stand-and-deliver production with a stalwart cast of beaten-bronze voices? Having... Read more... |
Il Trovatore, Welsh National Opera, CardiffFriday, 25 February 2011
Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the WNO season brochure assures us, “is Italian opera at its most passionate and full-blooded”. But you could sit through this revival of Peter Watson’s seven-year-old production and overlook the fact. Always understated (to... Read more... |
CD: Iness Mezel - Beyond the TranceWednesday, 16 February 2011
No, not “trance” in the sense of galloping four-to-the-floor electronic music made by people on Ecstasy for people on Ecstasy. This trance is the original ritualised half-conscious state produced by fast, intensely repetitive, rhythmic tribal music... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Guitar Heroes - Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New YorkSunday, 13 February 2011
From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one... Read more... |
Antonioni Project, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 02 February 2011
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art... Read more... |
Il barbiere di Siviglia, Royal OperaWednesday, 19 January 2011
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics,... Read more... |
Zen, BBC OneSunday, 02 January 2011
There must be good reasons why the fine crime novels of Michael Dibdin have been absent from screens large and small. They're probably to do with Dibdin's deadpan satirical tone and the anti-heroic nature of his protagonist, the Venetian detective... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Author Michael DibdinSunday, 02 January 2011
“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime... Read more... |
Loose CannonsTuesday, 14 December 2010
There is a climactic moment in Loose Cannons when one of the characters has rather more dolci than is good for her. For anyone without a sweet cinematic tooth, the two hours’ traffic of this soft-centred Italian melodrama may induce a similar kind... Read more... |
