Italy
graham.rickson
Made for Italian state television in 1978, Fellini’s Orchestral Rehearsal is full of clichés. Some of them do ring true: brass players and percussionists are often a mischievous, rowdy bunch. As for the others… I’d best stop there, lest I annoy any string-playing readers. There’s also a corrupt union official and an autocratic conductor who won’t stop talking. So far, so accurate – though it would have helped if Fellini’s horn-playing extras had been shown how to hold their hooters properly, and the orchestral seating layout is a bit odd. Plus, why do film-makers always show the conductor Read more ...
Helen Wallace
This was an evening of silence and shadow, a chill, moonlit meditation, where each sound demanded forensic attention. Enter the world of Luigi Nono and his admirers. As his compatriot Sciarrino wrote of Lo Spazio Inverso, which opened the concert, "Islands pulsating with sounds skim over lakes of silence… now we hear even the slightest tensions in the intervals as something new."Sunday’s concert at St John’s Smith Square completed the Principal Sound weekend, which focuses on music of the last half-century, this year Nono’s late works. Performed by crack contemporary vocal group EXAUDI ( Read more ...
Katherine Waters
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.The book is divided by materials, elements and concepts – “Sky”, “Clean”, “Rock”, “Force”, and “Clay” are all chapter titles – and each hones in on a particular structure by weaving together the stories of the people who built them, the social and historical context in which they were conceived and built, and the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Strauss: Burleske Joseph Moog (piano), Deutsche Radio Philharmonie/Nicholas Milton (Onyx)It's not you, it's me. That’s probably what I'd say to Brahms in attempting to explain why I generally prefer his craggy D minor piano concerto to its even longer sequel. That the two works are so different is a sign of Brahms's multifaceted genius, the B flat concerto's serene magnificence a happy reminder that growing older doesn’t necessarily mean becoming grumpier and terser. I've listened to this performance a lot over the past few days, and perhaps, at last, I'm Read more ...
Richard Farnes
Commentators have, over the years, variously described Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) as all things to all people: Verdi’s Tristan und Isolde, Verdi’s masterpiece, Verdi’s Don Giovanni, a pure love poem, and much more. It seems to me to be one of his most consistently exciting works, perfectly proportioned and dramatically astute.Interestingly, in this instance Verdi did not feel the need to make the extensive revisions that he undertook to the operas either side of it in his canon – Simon Boccanegra, La forza del destino and Don Carlos. Its creation was relatively swift, and its Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
You could probably guess from the assembling audience that the orchestra making its Barbican debut last night came from Milan. That many mink coats rarely congregate in a London concert hall. And under the baton of its music director Riccardo Chailly, the Filarmonica della Scala – vastly more than the house band of Italy’s most famous opera house – delivered an evening of luxurious sophistication, dressing over-familiar repertoire in haute couture that made some oft-maligned masterpieces shine out like Cinderella on her way to the ball.La Scala’s seemingly unrufflable players, under Chailly’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dario Argento’s Suspiria was confirmed as one of horror’s great fever dreams on its 40th anniversary re-release last year. The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Phenomena (1985) are lesser book-ends of the director’s peak period, when his global genre influence was vast.The Cat o’ Nine Tails (★★★) is pure Italian giallo, inserting lurid sex and violence and weird narrative elements till its crime tale twists towards horror. Karl Malden is a wonderfully muscular presence as a blind ex-newspaper photographer living in happy mutual dependence with his young niece, and thrusting through life with the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo, composer and murderer," the legendary musician who knifed to death his wife and her lover upon catching them in flagrante.Norburn's Breaking the Rules received its London premiere on Saturday (it has been performed before in various other venues) in the splendid new festival Baroque at the Edge, and it shows us the composer, on the last day Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.Writer-director Mike Hodges' intermittently brilliant career has taken several head-scratching turns (see also Flash Gordon). It’s to Michael Caine’s vanity-free credit that, having had the nerve to be unsympathetic hard man Jack Carter, he happily followed Hodges’ muse to become Pulp’s cynical hack writer Mickey King in the director's 1972 film.Righteous anger sours a Read more ...
David Nice
Are "Cav and Pag" inseparable? Clearly not, to judge from Opera North's "Little Greats" and elsewhere, but it's still the pairing of choice. Tricky, because as music-theatre, Leoncavallo's drama of rough life entwined with rough art stands high above Mascagni's Sicilian village shenanigans, despite great scenes and numbers in both. Director Damiano Michieletto, with his more than superficial connections between the two, has already been praised for solving some of the disparities (not least the fact that Cavalleria Rusticana takes a good quarter of an hour to get started). In this Royal Opera Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so the mini-boom in motor racing movies continues, this time with a look back at the history of Ferrari and the intense on-track battles of the 1950s, a decade in which the Scuderia won four of its 15 Formula One World Drivers Championships. In particular, Race to Immortality zooms in on the unique partnership of the British drivers Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, who called each other “mon ami mate” and would split their race winnings equally between themselves. Their machiavellian boss Enzo Ferrari began to suspect that their great friendship was blunting their will to win races.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not every day that an actor breaks your heart playing a character who surrenders his. But that's among the numerous achievements of Timothée Chalamet's knockout performance in Call Me By Your Name. Playing a culturally savvy and articulate 17-year-old American who comes of age sexually in sun-dappled northern Italy in 1983, Chalamet's work is a thing of wonder. As is the film, by turns ravishing and wrenching. The director, Luca Guadagnino, has explored the labyrinthine byways of desire before in the likes of I Am Love and A Bigger Splash, but never with anything like Read more ...