A Monthly Culture Matrix For the Cosmopolitan Traveler
What to do, and where and when to do it
(For instance September, Picasso, Paris)
Opera as It Was
“You can’t turn back the clock and shouldn’t try,” says Will Crutchfield, who in his precocious youth walked away from a likely promotion to chief music critic of the New York Times to pursue dicier adventures as a musicologist-conductor of decidedly antiquarian leanings. Over the past two decades, his summer series Bel Canto resurrected 19th-century Italian masterpieces, many of them unjustly neglected. The pandemic has pushed his newest initiative, Teatro Nuovo, to 2021, making this a fine time to catch up with Crutchfield’s blog, “Will’s Record of the Week” … Read On
Armchair Opera
Remember opera in real time, in real space? It’s creeping back. Rigoletto under the trees in Rome, Così fan tutte and Elektra at the Salzburg Festival, Covid fan tutte (!) in Helsinki: these are a few of the temptations dangled before us in the coming few months … Read On
Paparazzi Fever
Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1963 film Contempt—his most commercially successful feature—is best known for its leading lady, Brigitte Bardot, the main event in an all-star cast that included Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, and the legendary director Fritz Lang. It also has the pedigree of its source material: a novel by Alberto Moravia; the sun, sand, and sea of the dazzling Isle of Capri; the modernist Casa Malaparte as its indelible final location; and Godard himself, the foremost exponent of the New Wave, here deconstructing a marriage, a myth, the act of selling out, and cinema itself. As if all that weren’t enough, the lavish production of Contempt served as the springboard for a pair of short black-and-white films, both capturing the Zeitgeist of that glamorous moment. READ ON
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