Napoli Tarantella

Napoli Tarantella. My colorization of Giorgio Sommer´s (1834 - 1914) photo from ca. 1870. The original is in the Metropolitan Museum archive.

Italian land artists Meneguzzi and Sponga in the Sofiero castle park

Italian land artists Gabriele Meneguzzi and Vinzenzo Sponga have created an installation for the summer season 2017 in the Sofiero castle park in Helsingborg: 

Land artists Gabriele Meneguzzi and Vinzenzo Sponga in the
Sofiero castle park. 

Installation by Meneguzzi and Sponga.

More information about the artists here:
http://www.vivoverde.com/en/

"Souvenir" from Milan

A "souvenir" from my favourite shop in Milan:

Ponte Vecchio in the 19th century

I hope you like this late 19th century photograph of Ponte Vecchio in Florence,

hand coloured by me:

My "musical" wine

My "musical" wine. 

Homage to Claudia Cardinale and Lucino Visconti

Homage to Claudia Cardinale and Lucino Visconti:

 

Claudia Cardinale in Lucino Visconti´s "The Leopard"

 

Martin Scorcese once said this about Visconti´s "The Leopard":

 

"One of the films I live by"

 

It is not difficult to agree ...

 

 

The Harpsichord - The World's Most Beautiful Instrument

If there was a poll about which instrument is the most beautiful, my vote would go to the harpsichord (cembalo). The shape of a harpsichord is beautiful as such, but what makes some of the historic instruments stand out, are the magnificent decorative images painted on them.

This 1682 harpsichord was photographed in Rome's Rospigliosi palace in ca 1897. The owner was Prince Rospigliosi. The Rospigliosi-Pallavicini family still owns the palace, but whether the instrument still is there, I do not know.

PS

In case you are interested in harpsichords and harpsichord music, and excellent source is this site.

Marconi's mobile radio telegraph station in 1905

Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi's new mobile radio telegraph station was introduced in 1905:



Marconi's mobile radio telegraph station



The mobile radio telegraph station preparing for action.

King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy as an early car driver

King Victor Emmanuel III (Italian: Vittorio Emanuele III , 1869 – 1947) enjoyed driving around in his automobile already in 1905:

King Victor Emmanuel enjoying a drive, with his aide-de-camp as passenger. (Photo probably from 1905)

The Best European 2013-2014 New Year's Concerts: The Dancers of the Wiener Staatsballet "stole the show"

Dancers from the Wiener Staatsballett

The televised New Year's concerts from the Berlin Philharmonie, the Dresden Semper Oper, the Vienna Musikverein and La Fenice in Venice are the eagerly awaited best "delayed Christmas presents" for music lovers in Europe and many countries on other continents.

This year was no exception. All four concerts were wonderful in their own way.



Sir Simon Rattle

The Berliner Philharmoniker under Sir Simon Rattle have been doing their "own thing" quite successfully for years now. The Philharmoniker web page describes it in this way:

For classical music fans, jaunty dance rhythms are just as much a part of New Year’s Eve as the sound of corks popping and fireworks. But need it be waltzes from Vienna, the city on the Danube, ringing in the New Year? By no means, according to the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle – and they traditionally programme different music for their New Year’s concerts along the river Spree.

The highlight of the Berlin New Year's Eve concert this year was Sergei Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto, with the Chinese virtuoso Lang Lang as the brilliant soloist. The entire evening was a great success, with the Philharmoniker and Sir Simon in top form.

Klaus Florian Vogt, Renée Fleming and Christian Thielmann

The Staatskapelle Dresden's "competing" New Year's Eve concert has during the last few years focused on operetta music. The fact that Christian Thielemann, the orchestra's eminent chief conductor, is a self-confessed lover of operetta, is of course a god sent gift to all of us who share his passion.

This year's concert was another smash hit, with the wonderful, velvet voiced Renée Fleming as the highlight of the evening. What an entertainer this multitalented lady is! She certainly knows how to charm an audience. German star tenor Klaus Florian Vogt was as good as was to be expected, and sounded great also in the duets with Fleming.

The Vienna New Year's concerts do not need any introduction. The Wiener Philharmoniker's concert on January 1 is the world's most famous and well known annual music event. I belong to those who in the 1960s and 1970s always looked forward to see the legendary Willi Boskovsky conduct the Vienna concerts on television.

Since1986 the orchestra musicians have chosen a different conductor every year. This year it was great to see maestro Daniel Barenboim in charge of the orchestra, which - as always - sounded great.

But for this "reviewer" the greatest stars of the event were the dancers from the Wiener Staatsballett: Maria Yakovleva, Nina Poláková, Irina Tsymbal, Ketevan Papava, Prisca Zeisel, Kirill Koundraev, Mihail Sosnovschi, Ene Peci, Kamil Pavelka and Alexis Forabosco.

I have never seen more beautifully danced and choreographed concert performances than the ones in this New Year's concert. Kudos to Ashley Page for the choreography! An the dresses by Vivienne Westwood were gorgeous.

Diego Matheuz at the La Fenice New Year's concert

The last of the New Year's concerts was the one from La Fenice, broadcast on ARTE in the evening of January 1. This year the orchestra's young chief conductor Diego Matheuz had chosen a nice mix of well known, mainly Italian opera music by Rossini, Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, Mascagni and Donizetti for the concert. It was again a memorable evening of bel canto from one of the world's most beautiful opera houses. The two soloists, Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio and American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, were excellent.

 The wonderful dancers of the Wiener Staatsballett: 

 

Suddenly the dancers turned into a painting! It was magical television!

 

Odessa - an "Italian" port city

The port of Odessa. (Photo published in the Swedish magazine Allers Familj Journal in 1905)

The Black Sea port city of Odessa - now the third largest city in Ukraine - has a fascinating history, much of which has for various reasons remained unknown for decades. The city, founded by a decree of Empress Catherine the Great in 1794, was a major international free port (1819 - 1858) and the fourth largest city in Imperial Russia in the 19th century. In the 20th century it was the most important port of trade in the Soviet Union and a Soviet naval base.



"Odessa" ,anonymous engraver,published by James S. Virtue about 1842.
 

What is not widely known, is the major role Italians played in the economic and cultural development of Odessa.

In his book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, professor Charles King (Georgetown University) describes the Italian influence in Odessa in the early 19th century:

As the owners of the major trading houses and with strong family and business connections with the Mediterranean, Italians dominated city life, a recapitulation of their role when Genoese and Venetian trading centers ringed the Black Sea. Italian became the city's lingua franca, lilting through the commercial exchange and wafting up from the docklands. Street signs—another innovation of Richelieu's tenure—were written in both Italian and Russian, a practice that lasted well beyond his days in office. An eight-hundred-seat opera house, established by Richelieu only three years before the plague and designed by Jean-François Thomas de Thomon, one of the great shapers of St. Petersburg, featured a visiting Italian company performing a standard repertoire of classics. The company offered an early-nineteenth-century version of surtitles: a Russian actor would helpfully summarize the libretto for any audience members who happened not to speak Italian. Even the city's ubiquitous carters and petty traders, or chumaks, were known to break into choruses of "La donna è mobile"—that is, unless they were singing their own ditties about the glories of the city at the end of the drover trails...

For those who would like to explore even in more detail the role played by the Italians in Odessa,
Dr. Anna Makolkin's book A History of Odessa, the Last Italian Black Sea Colony, should be great reading.

Here is some information from the publisher:

Italians were not just another wave of Odessa immigrants, not just another part of her multicultural mosaic, they were her founders and colonizers of the region.

The study reconstructs the Italian protohistory of Odessa, founded in 1794 by the immigrants from Genoa and Naples, Venice and Palermo. For the first time and upon the lengthy and elaborate archival research in Italy and Ukraine, the Odessa of Alexander Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova, battleship Potemkin and Eisenstein, Babel and Kandinsky enters European historiography as a world of the dynasties of De Ribas and Frapoliies, Rossies and Bubbas, Bernadazzies and Riznich, Molinaries, Iorini et al.. Having revised the narratives of the tzarist, Soviet, pre- perestroika and post- Communist past, the monograph not only reclaims the first Italian settlers, but examines the process of forging Europeanness, a cultural identity, beyond the traditional East and West, nation and people. European culture has been notably influenced by Italian civilization, and Odessa is one of the important manifestations of this phenomenon

Here is what University of Toronto professor (emeritus) Michael Ukas says about Makolkin's book:

“Dr. Anna Makolkin’s monograph is a carefully researched and accurate account of the foundation of the port city of Odessa(1794), and tells of the part, played by the Italian immigrants in this historical event which lead to the successful exploration of the Black Sea frontier - Novorossiia/New Russia. The materials about this obscure migration have been scattered in archives of Italy and Ukraine, and most 19th and 20th century historians, intimidated by radical nationalism, politics and geopolitics of Europe, and post-colonial trends did not have sufficient courage to address the topic. Italians were not just another wave of Odessa immigrants, not just another part of her multicultural mosaic, they were her founders and colonizers of the region. None of the so far available historiographical materials have ever suggested this, and it is the main accomplishment of Dr. Anna Makolkin and her timely, elaborate, well-researched and erudite monograph.--

Historians of music and theater will be interested in Odessa’s Italian operatic tradition, the legacy of Rossini and Cimarosa, performances of Tati and Brambilla, Fabbri and Guerini, Salvini and Duse, Ristori and Di Grasso and the lasting impact of Italian music on the cultural ethos of Odessa. The Italianness has forever shaped the Odesseans, imparting the aesthetic sensibility, the elegance, taste in music, attitude to life, their wit and specific speech.”

A late 19th century photo of a Sicilian boy and his donkey

Until the middle of the 20th century donkeys - transporting heavy loads, powering millstones and dragging plows - were a common sight in the Sicilian countryside. During the heyday of sulphur mining in the 19th century the island was crossed by long lines of donkeys carrying the "yellow gold of Sicily".

Donkeys have of course also been - and still are - used for transporting people. The boy in this late 19th century picture earned his living by taking visitors on donkey rides:

The highlight of the Verdi year: ARTE's broadcast of Verdi's Messa da Requiem from Teatro alla Scala




 

At least for this "reviewer" the Arte broadcast on October 20 of Verdi's Messa da Requiem, recorded last year at the Teatro alla Scala, has been the absolute highlight of the composer's 200th anniversary.
It is difficult to imagine a finer combination than La Scala, Daniel Barenboim, soprano Anja Harteros, mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča, tenor Jonas Kaufmann and bass René Pape for what sometimes - slightly ironically - has been called Verdi's "finest opera".

I cannot but agree with what the critic Richard Morrison wrote in The Times:

"If you were to devise a dream casting for this most theatrical of sacred masterpieces you might well come up with Anja Harteros, Elina Garanca, Jonas Kaufmann and Rene Pape, plus the Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala, Milan, under their current maestro, Daniel Barenboim... I was blown away by this Requiem... Kaufmann’s first entry was like an erupting volcano. Garanca was as mesmerising, floating creamy legatos while mustering a thrilling chest voice that I never thought she Read more possessed. Harteros, looking like a distressed pre-Raphaelite beauty, turned the final movement into the most sublime death scene never to appear in an opera. And that incredible chorus, with their barrel-voiced basses and wonderfully hammy rolled consonants and gasped aspirates, hurled out the apocalyptic moments as if determined to blast the roof off.”

I am particularly happy about what Mr Morrison said about the La Scala chorus. What a joy it was to watch and hear the power of this mighty instrument! Without a first class chorus even the best of soloists and orchestras cannot make a great performance of the Verdi requiem.



The Teatro alla Scala chorus was a revelation.

Members of the chorus.

Soloists Harteros, Garanča, Kaufmann and Pape.

 

Tenor Jonas Kaufmann.



Barenboim with soloists.



Harteros and Garanča.

Music to cheer you up: Neapolitan songs performed by the great Italian tenor Franco Corelli

 

These musical greetings from sunny Naples will cheer you up on a grey and rainy late autumn day. Franco Corelli was not a Neapolitan, but I do not think that anybody could sing Neapolitan songs more passionately than he did:

Lorenzo Bartolini's Columbus Monument in Genoa

Christopher Columbus, who on October 12, 1492 set foot on one of the Bahama islands, must be one the historic persons with the largest number of monuments erected in his honor. The Dutch Columbus fan Peter van der Krogt has a webpage, where he has listed 590 Columbus related monuments in in different parts of the world.

Only in Genova (Genoa), the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, there are at least 20 monuments dedicated to the explorer. The Columbus Monument on Piazza Acquaverde is probably the most well known of them. Italian sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini began working on the monument in 1846, but the sculptor, who died in 1850, did never see it finished. Others continued his work, and the monument was finally inaugurated in 1862.


The photo of Bartolini's masterpiece shown here dates from the end of the 19th century.

The 160th anniversary of Verdi's La Traviata

The beautifully renovated La Fenice opera.

On this day, 160 years ago, Verdi's La Traviata was performed for the first time. The venue was Venice's gorgeous La Fenice opera house. 

The premiere was not the great success Verdi had hoped for. The root of the problem was, according to the distinguished baritone Franco Varesi, who sung to role of Giorgio Germont, that Verdi had composed the opera with disregard for the vocal capabilities of his principals."This caused much strong feeling among the Venetian public". 

Another view of the La Fenice. 

Verdi then withdrew and revised the opera, which was presented again a year later, in 1854, at the Teatro Gallo di San Benedetto, also in Venice. 

Those who want to see La Traviata again at La Fenice - one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world - will have to wait until February next year, when the new production is due to be performed. 

Diego Matheuz

The conductor will be the young Venezuelan Diego Matheuz, who in 2011 was appointed Principal Conductor at the La Fenice. 

Here the great tenor Piotr Bezcala (Alfredo Germont) and soprano Eva Mei (Violetta) perform the famous Brindisi.

Sulphur mines in Sicily a hundred years ago: "The nearest thing to hell"

The  temperature in the sulfur mines could rise to 50 degrees
Celsius (122  Fahrenheit).

Already in ancient times, sulfur was found in the volcanic regions of Sicily. Originally Sicilian sulphur was extracted from open-pit mines, but later on the mining was done under the surface of the Earth:

Eventually the surface-borne deposits played out, and miners excavated veins that ultimately dotted the Sicilian landscape with labyrinthine mines. Mining was unmechanized and labor-intensive, with pickmen freeing the ore from the rock, and mine-boys or carusi carrying baskets of ore to the surface, often through a mile or more of tunnels. Once the ore was at the surface, it was reduced and extracted in smelting ovens. The conditions in Sicilian sulfur mines were horrific, prompting Booker T. Washington to write "I am not prepared just now to say to what extent I believe in a physical hell in the next world, but a sulphur mine in Sicily is about the nearest thing to hell that I expect to see in this life."

Thank God, things have improved since those days!

A sulphur mine in Sicily in the early 20th century.

Sicilian sulphur miners. The 13 - 17 year old mine-boys - the carusi - had to carry the sacks of sulphur - often weighing up to 20 kg - to the surface along the hot and slippery tunnels. (Photo probably from 1908).

The smelting ovens.

A cableway was used for transporting the ore. 

Nordenskiöld's Vega in Naples in 1880

The Vega in Naples on 14 February 1880.

The SS Vega in 1879 became the first ship to complete a voyage through the Northeast Passage. Returning by way of the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Suez Canal, Vega also became the first vessel to circumnavigate the Eurasian continent. On 14 February 1880 the ship arrived in Naples, where the it was received by an enthusiastic crowd. The overwhelming welcome was probably due to the fact that one of the members of A.E. Nordenskiöld´s team, the hydrographer Giacomo Bove, was Italian. 

An Italian diving apparatus with artificial arms from 1906

In 1906 the Swedish weekly Hvar 8 Dag published this photograph of an interesting diving apparatus, designed by the Italian inventor Giuseppe Restucci. 

This is how the weekly described the apparatus:

"The arms are artificial, and are operated from the inside by the diver. There is an electric lantern on the helmet.Very heavy objects can be lifted by this new model, which has been officially approved by the Italian Navy." 

On this Dutch website you will find more information on Restucci's diving inventions. 

The best 2012/2013 European New Year's concerts

Soprano Olga Peretyatko was the star of the evening in Baden-Baden.

For music lovers the turn of the year - when major  European television channels bring out the big names in classical music and opera in their New Year's gala concerts - is always a time to look forward to. 

The New Year's concerts from Dresden's Semper Oper, the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Grosser Musikvereinssaal in Vienna and La Fenice in Venice were all pure bliss again this holiday "season". Of course there is some kind of competition going on between the orchestras and broacasters about the largest audiences, but that is of minor interest for an ordinary viewer - what is important is that you get a rare chance to watch and listen to some of the world's best musicians, without having to pay the often exorbitant ticket prices for their concerts. 

Christian Thielemann conducting the outstanding Staatskapelle Dresden.

The New Year concert "season" started on December 30 on German ZDF with the Operetta Gala concert from the Semper Oper, one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. I have already praised the concert in a previous post, so may it suffice just to state that this concert was my own favorite among the four concerts mentioned above. It was just great - and is bound to become a classic! Above all, it was a great evening for the Polish tenor Piotr Beczala, arguably the best tenor in the world in the operetta repertoire. 

Star tenor Piotr Veczala and soprano Ingeborg Schöpf, who saved the evening by standing in for Diana Damrau, who could not sing because of a sudden illness.

New Year's concerts with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker are always first class events. This year's version was no exception. It was great to see Sir Simon so relaxed and really enjoying the evening in front of his magnificient orchestra. I particularly enjoyed Rameau's dance suite Les Boréades, a work previously unknown to me. And of course Cecilia Bartoli brought additional star appeal to the evening. 

Sir Simon was enjoying the evening together with his magnificent Berliner Philharmoniker.

Mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli performing Handel's aria »Scherza in mar la navicella«.

Tenor Roberto Villazon and baritone Thomas Hampson were the big names in the Baden-Baden concert, broadcast by French-German ARTE on new year's eve. However, at least for this "reviewer", the real star of the evening was the young Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko, who brought down the house with her Verdi arias. 

Soprano Olga Peretyatko is also a great actress. 

The New Year's Day concert from the Musikverein in Vienna is of course always a very special event. This year Musical Director Franz Welser-Möst appeared more relaxed in front of the Wiener Philharmoniker than last year. It was nice that he had included a piece of Verdi in this year's program, in order to honor the composer's anniversary. 

The flower decorations donated by the city of San Ramo are an important feature of the annual Vienna New Year's concerts.

The dancers of Vienna State Ballet are always a most welcome addition to the annual Vienna New Year's concerts.

Three female members of the Wiener Philharmoniker in the same picture - a sight you did not see ten years ago. 

The New Year's gala concert from the gorgeous La Fenice opera house in Venice has also become a most welcome tradition for television audiences to enjoy. This year it was particularly nice to see early music specialist Sir John Eliot Gardiner in front of the orchestra in a Verdi program, in honor of the composer's 200-year birth-day anniversary. 

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the La Fenice orchestra.

The La Fenice in Venice is one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world.

This year the La Fenice's New Year's gala concert included a performance by members of the La Scala ballet , which probably had a particular appeal to female television viewers.