Spain
James Saynor
Are we all getting older, or are film award-winners getting younger? Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival this year at the age of just nine. To achieve that, it surely needs to be one of the best moppet turns of all time – and I think it quite possibly is. She plays an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t answer to the name of Aitor even when he’s gone missing and dozens of searchers are yelling it out. This is because Aitor, amid an extended family in the Basque country, wants to go by the name of Cocó – no, make that Lucía, she later decides. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I find it hard to know quite what to make of Ainadamar, Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s one-act opera about the life and death of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in unknown circumstances – probably by Nationalist militia – in the early months of the Spanish civil war in August 1936.Composed in 2003, Ainadamar is described (anonymously) in the Cardiff programme as “a ground-breaking opera for the 21st century.” But in many ways it seems to me something of a throwback, not just to “portrait” operas like Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer or Glass’s Einstein/ Gandhi/ Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When flamenco first came out of the shadows and started to fill big theatres, it was like something out of a historical pageant. The shows that played London in the early 1990s harked back to an imagined gypsy past where old men hammered rhythms on blacksmiths’ anvils and women swirled extravagant frills. The crudely amplified music lost much of its detail but audiences lapped it up anyway. Since then theatrical flamenco has come a long way, dropping the campfire shtick and investing in designer threads and sound design. Leading the charge has been Sara Baras, now 52, who first came to notice Read more ...
David Nice
Not a good start. The tenor (Brian Jagde) walks downstage and sings loudly, if securely, to the audience: hardly a characterisation of an idealistic young Infante meditating on love. The next voice, the Page’s, is barely heard (Ella Taylor gets better). Then we have The Presence: Lise Davidsen, who you know is Elisabeth de Valois in the only carefree mode she’s to experience throughout the opera.Davidsen holds this otherwise rather tired, if well sung and scrupulously conducted, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s respectable production together. Yes, nearly all the figures in Verdi’s adaptation of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Escapees from Eurovision in Westminster on Saturday night might have discovered that a continent-wide enthusiasm for crowd-pleasing international styles arose long before the age of glitzy pop. Two accomplished Spanish groups performed at St John’s Smith Square within this year’s London Festival of Baroque Music. Both came with an attractive, unfamiliar 18th-century repertoire from their homeland. It showed that, across the decades from Handel to Haydn, the hegemonic sounds of Italy could be zestfully customised to suit national tastes. Within the tried-and-tested formulas for a Euro hit, Read more ...
David Nice
Dream versus reality, fate and free will, love and death, nature versus nurture: they’re all here in Calderón de la Barca’ s ever-startling baroque panopticon, a play so precociously meta that every theatrical game from Pirandello onwards deserves the epithet “Calderonian”. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod heighten the Spaniard's play-within-a-play quality by framing it as the fantasy of half-awake, stargazing ruler Basilio, bringing long-term experience to provide an extra layer of roller-coaster ride between farce and potential tragedy.Back in 1999, a then not so world-famous Calixto Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Beasts (As Bestas) is all of two hours and 17 minutes long, and yet to look away is never an option. Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reels the viewer in masterfully as he builds tension and suspense.A well-educated French couple are living out their rural dream in a valley in Galicia in north-western Spain. But there's a problem: the locals hate everything about them, and the couple's dream turns into one nightmare, and then many more. This is anything but the Spain of sunshine and allegría. Bleakness reigns here under rain and snow. There are visual imprints that just won’t Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Ainadamar - meaning "fountain of tears" in Arabic – is the name given to a natural spring high in the hills above the Andalucian city of Granada, the site where the poet and playwright Federico Garica Lorca was executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. It’s also the name – and an apt one in many ways – of Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s extraordinary 2003 one act opera which tells the tale of Lorca’s life and death through a series of flashbacks.It is a ferocious mix of opera and flamenco in a production – a collaboration between Scottish Opera and Opera Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There are four main protagonists in Official Competition and they all have one thing in common: an overriding ambition to spend more time with their egos.The first of this quartet is Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gómez). He is an 80-year-old tycoon with a background in pharmaceuticals, and his form of self-absorption is to look for a project that will secure his immortality. Having first fancied the idea of financing the construction of a major road bridge to be emblazoned with his name, he starts to find civil engineering a tad unglamorous, and another plan starts to take hold. He will put Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a sculptural pile of pebbles. Some of the shrines also sheltered a handwritten prayer or a crucifix; most had burnt-out tea-candles.Phoebe Powers imagined her debut poetry collection, Shrines of Upper Austria, “as a shrine: a gathering of objects, words and images important to someone, both as discrete objects and as a composition”. Her second poetry Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-managing everything and everyone. His philosophy is that there's no task involving a staff member – or a member of their families – that's too petty or too personal for him be involved in, too. And it's his genius, of course, that ends up solving every problem. He justifies his actions because the buck stops with him: “Your problems become my Read more ...
graham.rickson
Parallel Mothers unfolds at a daringly slow pace, and there are moments in the first half of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 drama when you wish that things would speed up. And then you’re wrong-footed by the unexpected shifts in tone and direction, and amazed at the veteran director’s ability to knit together so many seemingly disparate threads.Penélope Cruz plays affluent photographer Janis; becoming pregnant after a liaison with Israel Elijalde’s married forensic anthropologist Arturo (whom Janis asks to help investigate a Civil War grave in her home village), she later shares a hospital room with Read more ...