Italy
sheila.johnston
Somehow the title sounds more sonorous in Italian. Io Sono l'Amore is a big, fat, full-blown melodrama, a film with the button marked "passione" forced up to 11. It looks exquisite, is a glittering showcase for Tilda Swinton as the restless Russian trophy wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist and is elegant in spades: the cuisine, the couture, the shoes, the decor, the diamonds, the lipstick, they're all to die for. So what if it's also just a bit kitschy around the edges?The film, by the hitherto little-known Sicilian director/co-writer Luca Guadagnino, opens in style with a series of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Acts of wanton destruction appear to have taken place at Camden Arts Centre, as canvases lie crushed, ripped, crumpled and broken. Monochrome and minimalist works have had their stretchers, their very backbones, ripped and cracked in two, and their once taut, painted surfaces hang, in some instances, like flayed skin. Their broken carcasses are arranged in a seemingly haphazard fashion, hanging precariously from walls or stuffed into corners. They lie forlornly on the floor, or are pushed with some force into armchairs. The gallery looks like the scene of a crime, as if we have chanced upon Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
If all orchestras inspire a sense of loyalty to some degree, then the Philharmonia perhaps does it better than most. Mackerras is still performing with them, 54 years after he first conducted the orchestra; so is Maazel, who has clocked up 41 years, on and off. There’s Ashkenazy and Dohnányi. And then of course there’s Riccardo Muti, who appears to have been given the unofficial title of conductor-in-chief of anniversaries.He was there in 2007 to celebrate his own 35th anniversary with the Philharmonia; he was there in 2005 for the diamond jubilee; and he was there again last night for their Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Imagine if Rory Bremner had been banned from British television for the past 20 years, and Gordon Brown had put pressure on the BBC to get rid of Question Time because it had been critical of him. In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi these things happen. The country’s top satirist, Beppe Grillo, has effectively been denied access to the airwaves since Berlusconi became prime minister in 1994, while just this week allegations emerged that Berlusconi had tried to block transmission of a state television talk show, Annozero, that had discussed the alleged mafia ties of members of his government. Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Was it Chopin’s birthday or wasn’t it? To be honest, no one at last night’s Royal Festival Hall concert probably gave a damn, so wrapped up were they in Maurizio Pollini’s playing. And what playing it was too. The man just sits down and gets on with it – there’s none of that airy-fairy flamboyance and arm waving that certain younger pianists seem unable to perform without. This was an unapologetically old-school concert. Pollini shuffled on in his tails (who wears those any more?), plonked himself at the piano, and had finished the first of Chopin’s 24 Preludes before most of the audience had Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For a while, actually, it appears as if a dollop of irony might just be on the cards, and during those passages, at least, British writer-director Kirk Jones's road movie looks poised to be quietly revolutionary. But once the dictates of convention settle in, watch out! At the press screening attended, a fellow near me was crying what seemed to be tears brought on by the helpless laughter that accompanies mockery. One can only assume he wasn't moved.In fact, I went fully prepared to be touched, and for a while De Niro and Jones ensure that spectators are. We've all admired this Read more ...
william.ward
The latest subject in the BBC Four series of composer portraits by Christopher Nupen is Ottorino Respighi. One of the most unfairly neglected major composers of the first half of the 20th century, his reputation has suffered less from not being considered at all, but for having been confined to his trilogy of tone poems that evoke respectively the Fountains, the Pines and the Traditional Festivals of Rome. Nupen's film, made in 1982, puts a welcome case for his more challenging but less well-known work.Composed over the course of 12 tumultuous years – from Italy’s disastrous participation in Read more ...
james.woodall
Antonio Pappano (b. 1959) enjoys the best of two opulent worlds. At the Royal Opera House in London (now his home city), he's well stuck in to his seventh season as music director, basking in popularity and plaudits previous incumbents could only have dreamt of. In Rome, he's director of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, a post he took up in 2005. The orchestra, over 100 years old - the Accademia itself goes back to the 1580s - is based at an extraordinary Renzo Piano-designed structure, called the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a couple of kilometres north of the Read more ...
william.ward
The rapturous reception for Zaha Hadid’s groundbreaking, breathtaking new confection in Rome, Il Museo dell’Arte del XXIesimo Secolo - the 21st-Century Art Museum (MAXXI for short) - has reopened for the umpteenth time one of Italy’s favourite cultural debates. Why the hell does it take so long to build anything decent in our capital city, especially when we have one of the finest traditions - if not the finest - in architecture, civil engineering and construction, of anywhere in the whole world?Well, “Rome,” as the old expression counselling patience in all things has it, “wasn’t built in a Read more ...
william.ward
“Guarda, è come se fosse morta la regina Elisabetta, sai?” I didn’t really need the comparison with the hypothetical demise of our own beloved monarch to be spelled out for me by my partner, a somewhat reserved professor of Paediatric Neurology at one of Rome’s leading hospitals, in order to drive home the deep shock engendered by the sudden death of Italy’s best-loved veteran TV compère on the collective psyche of a nation.True to his quietly heroic and endlessly energetic persona, Mike Bongiorno did not die what our Anglo-Saxon warrior forebears used to call a “cow’s death” – ie in bed, or Read more ...