| | | Il Proscritto review – Opera Rara blow the dust off Mercadante's forgotten opera | | by Tim Ashley Jun 29, 2022 | | Barbican, London
A terrific cast and the fiery precision of conductor Carlo Rizzi brought this rarity to the concert stage 180 years after its premiere Saverio Mercadante’s Il Proscritto (The Outlaw) was first performed in Naples in 1842. Drawing a blank in its day, it was never revived, and has had to wait 180 years for its rediscovery by Opera Rara and this concert performance conducted by Carlo Rizzi. A cosmopolitan in an era of growing nationalism, Mercadante (1795-1870) radically pushed against the formal boundaries of Italian opera by introducing harmonic, orchestral and dramatic innovations largely derived from French models, Meyerbeer in particular. In Il Proscritto, however, the amalgam doesn’t always work, and it’s an uneven piece. Continue reading... | | | | | Next Bond film will be 'complete reinvention' but won't shoot for 'at least two years' | | by Catherine Shoard Jun 29, 2022 | | Barbara Broccoli has revealed details about the future of the 007 franchise after the departure of Daniel Craig The 26th official James Bond film is unlikely to be in cinemas before 2025, according to the series’ producer, Barbara Broccoli. Speaking at a dinner to honour Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson after the presentation of their BFI Fellowships, the gatekeeper of all things 007 (and daughter of Cubby Broccoli) said they had not yet cast the actor who will replace Daniel Craig in the tux. Continue reading... | | | | | Top 10 stories of male friendship | | by Benjamin Markovits Jun 29, 2022 | | Writers from Alexandre Dumas to Jack Kerouac and Colson Whitehead have written fiction worth bonding with about these sometimes uneasy alliances Male friendship, the way it works, the way people think about it, is going through a generational shift. To feel the change you just have to watch old movies. Last week, I made my kids sit through Diner, which I always thought of as one of my favourite films. It’s about a bunch of twentysomething guys in Baltimore in 1959, struggling to take the next step into adulthood. They argue about football and sandwiches, about Presley and Sinatra … but I’d forgotten how much they talk about sex, too. One of them bets he can “ball” a girl on a second date, another tells stories about the first time he “copped a feel”. Part of the point, of course, is that all this sexism is getting in the way of their lives. They don’t really know what to talk about with women, but the movie is also clearly nostalgic for their late-night bull sessions in the diner. All of which makes male friendship, and the way it mixes guilt and innocence, an interesting thing to write about. One of the weirdest weekends of my life was when I flew out to Barcelona to interview LeBron James. After waiting around for two days, I was finally ushered into the large hotel room where he was doing media. Our interview, it turned out, was going to have an audience – which included not just agents, publicists and Nike reps but some of LeBron’s old high school teammates who now formed part of his entourage. I wondered what it was like to be one of the guys whose whole life had been shaped by someone he happened to play basketball with 10 years before. Continue reading... | | | | | The Railway Children review – kids' adventure has lost none of its limpid charm | | by Peter Bradshaw Jun 29, 2022 | | Rereleased as a curtain-raiser for a sequel, Jenny Agutter, Bernard Cribbins and co continue to exert their grip over the national imagination There can’t be many classic British family movies which feature Russian anti-tsarist writers exiled in Yorkshire. The Railway Children from 1970 is now re-released, as a curtain-raiser to a forthcoming sequel, The Railway Children Return, which will be set 40 years on and features Jenny Agutter playing a grownup version of her original character.
The original is robustly and adroitly directed by Lionel Jeffries, who also adapted the Edith Nesbit novel and it continues to exert its grip on our collective teatime imagination, due to its unworldly sweetness and gentleness and its forthright sense of decency – especially, maybe, that final scene where the children’s wrongly imprisoned father emerges from the steam on the railway platform, a moment as dramatic and mysterious as Omar Sharif galloping through the heat-haze in Lawrence of Arabia, to Jenny Agutter’s breathy delight: “Oh my daddy!” Iain Cuthbertson is Charles Waterbury, the good-natured civil servant and genial paterfamilias who lives in upper-middle-class contentment in the London suburbs with his wife (Dinah Sheridan) and three children: Bobbie, played by Jenny Agutter, younger sister Phyllis, pertly played by the 20-year-old Sally Thomsett – the most glorious juve lead in British cinema history – and kid brother Peter, played by Gary Warren. When Charles is wrongly arrested and imprisoned for selling state secrets, the children and their mother have to move to a modest Yorkshire cottage where the mother apparently supports them by selling stories to London magazines – when one gets published they can have buns for tea. Freelance writers got paid quickly in those days. Continue reading... | | | | | | | |
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