Latest news with #Palestrina
Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Ian Hislop: I wasted an evening watching With Love, Meghan
The instrument I play I don't play any instruments. I am very jealous of anyone who can play anything. I went to a baroque concert recently where a man was playing an enormous sort of lute and thought I would like to be able to say: 'Oh yes I play the theorbo.' Or the sackbut or crumhorn. The music that cheers me up Dolly Parton or Palestrina. Depending on how much I need cheering. There was a great BBC TV series called Sacred Music in which the choir the Sixteen were singing Palestrina. The presenter, Simon Russell Beale, just walked up and joined in. Now that was impressive. ALAMY If I could own one painting it would be Hogarth's Election Series. I have some large copies in my office, but quite fancy having the real thing on the wall. This satirical masterpiece is currently in the Soane Museum, but if they won't sell it then anything by Hogarth would do. A Rake's Progress or Marriage a la Mode would be fine or the portrait of his servants or the self portrait with the dog. I would be happy with any of those. My favourite author Apart from my wife [the author Victoria Hislop], obviously. This changes all the time. Recent favourites include James by Percival Everett, a funny and savage retelling of Huckleberry Finn. I am keen to tell people that I had read his satirical novel about race and the literary world, Erasure, long before it was turned into the popular film American Fiction. Then there is Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which is a retelling of David Copperfield and is an extraordinary tour de force about the American opioid crisis. Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow is an absolute delight that feels like a retelling of a great Russian novel, but is actually original. And for an insight into modern Russia, The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli is extraordinary. I also love Cloud Cuckooland by Anthony Doerr, which is an erudite classics based sci-fi thriller and is a hopeful tribute to the power of the written word. At least I think that is what it was. • The best paperback books of 2025 — April's picks The book I'm reading I am re-reading the medieval Mystery Plays as research for my Radio 4 series Ian Hislop's Oldest Jokes. These short plays performed in the street are vernacular versions of the Bible stories and were produced by the craft guilds. The combination of the sacred and the profane, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and the ridiculous is extraordinary. No wonder they were banned. BRYN COLTON/GETTY IMAGES The book I wish I had written The Complete Beyond the Fringe, the collected sketches from the 1960s revue by Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore. I was lucky enough to work with Cook at Private Eye when he was the most hands-off proprietor in publishing history. It is not always true that you shouldn't meet your heroes. I have this slim volume on my shelf next to AG Macdonell's England, Their England, the collected plays of Oscar Wilde and quite a large number of other works of comic genius. My favourite film Toy Story, with Toy Story 2, 3 and 4 as very close runners-up. Wise, witty and wonderful. They really do make one think about infinity and beyond. Or on second thoughts it should probably be The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, which is the film I have seen more often than any other and enjoyed the most. My favourite play I recently went to see Tom Stoppard's Invention of Love with Simon Russell Beale as AE Housman. I had seen the original version in 1997 and thought it was brilliant. On seeing it again 28 years later I thought it was even better. The other play I saw when it first appeared and twice again since — once as a student production — is Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. It is magic every time and Mark Rylance's performance is simply the best thing I have ever seen on stage. The box set I'm hooked on Bad Sisters by Sharon Horgan. Beautifully written, compelling and really funny. ALAMY My favourite TV series I enjoyed the recent Wolf Hall series with Mark Rylance hugely. I read the Hilary Mantel novels over lockdown, which was a good time to read very long novels and also to be reminded that things have been quite frightening in our history before. Detectorists is also terrific. Funny and melancholy and reassuring about unfashionable England. I found a 9th-century Anglo-Saxon coin in a field when making a documentary for Radio 4 and was so excited I could hear the Detectorist theme tune in my head. My favourite piece of music Handel's Messiah. I first came across it at school and thought I knew it backwards, but then I heard it again in Hampstead Church a few months ago with a cut-down choir and an orchestra with period instruments directed by Geoffrey Webber and was overwhelmed. The play I walked out on I try not to do this, although someone recently walked out of a play I wrote. The lady in question did have medical assistance and they did have to stop the performance. It was The Autobiography of a Cad at the Watermill in Newbury and I am pretty sure that the paramedics said the problem was that the play was just too funny. The poor theatregoer was overcome with mirth and her sides threatened to split. Fortunately she recovered and was fine and the play restarted allowing a triumphant, hilarious performance by James Mack as the Cad, the ultimate Tory politician, to the delight of the audience.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Tallis Scholars review – inspired pairing of Palestrina and Pärt brings shining warmth and clarity
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Palestrina, the Italian composer who took the name of his native town, just east of Rome, now part of the metropolitan city. In director Peter Phillips's inspired pairing of Palestrina with the music of Arvo Pärt in the year of his 90th birthday, there was a particular frisson in knowing that in January, the Tallis Scholars had sung this very programme in the cathedral of Sant'Agapito Martire in Palestrina, where the young Giovanni Pierluigi may have been a chorister and was certainly organist from the age of 19. Phillips has described Palestrina as the 'most consummate of renaissance composers': it may surely be said that the Tallis Scholars are the consummate vocal ensemble. Opening with his motet Surge Illuminare, the 10 Scholars immediately brought a shining warmth to the St George's auditorium, the clarity of the polyphonic lines as notable as their impeccable diction. This was followed by the Missa Brevis, only marginally shorter than the hundred plus others and exemplifying the infinite care with which Palestrina set the words of the Ordinary, the Scholars' use of dynamic and tonal colour, as well the attention to changes of metre, vividly achieved. After the Kyrie's gentle plea for mercy, the Gloria was indeed gloriously rich. Three solo voices – soprano, alto and tenor – brought a serene calm to the Benedictus, contrasting with the then full-bodied and joyous Hosanna, before the heartfelt plea for peace of the Agnus Dei. Their singing of Pärt had the same implicit authority. His Da Pacem written in response to the terrorist bombings in Madrid in 2004 attuned the ear to his tintinnabuli style, transparent yet resonant. And presenting settings by both Palestrina and Pärt of the Nunc Dimittis, highlighting their expressivity and the common commitment to the meaning of the text, made for a symbolic connection. Given the austere beauty of Pärt's music, so characteristic and unmistakable, the notion of his having fun with the music seems unlikely, but in the Scholars' rendering of Which Was the Son of … a litany of names tracing the lineage of Jesus, an almost mischievous playfulness emerged, with syncopations and the occasional feel of gospel-singing. By way of encore, a Pärt setting in his native Estonian added a final celebratory touch.
