After being Pope, killer, former CIA agent, French libertine, space pirate, painter and even an octopus (the villain of the Penguins of Madagascar) in cinema and on TV, John Malkovich has turned into a music critic on stage with The Music Critic, staged at the Arcimboldi theater in Milan.
The show - conceived by the violinist, poet, orchestra conductor, comedian, composer and director Aleksey Igudesman - brings together criticisms of great artists such as Beethoven, Schumann and Dvorak declaimed by Malkovich himself (in English with surtitles, not always exact, in Italian) to some of their musical pieces, performed by Igudesman himself with the pianist Hyung-Ki Joo, the violinist So-Ock Kim, the violist Max Baille and the cellist Tom Carroll and as guest star the flautist Massimo Mercelli.
The result is a musical and recitative crescendo. If Beethoven is criticized for his "mass of barbaric agreements", Brahms is directly defined by Tchaikovsky as a "scoundrel" and a "bastard without talent" while according to a perfidious Nietzsche he has "the melancholy of impotence". Chopin? "it's an artistic nothing".
No one is exempt from criticism, not even Malkovich himself, who finds himself reading the review of one of his shows in Istanbul in which the critic complains that the actor cannot be deported because he is already gone. All while the musicians perform the 'Malkovich torment' piece of which even his voice ends up being part.
However, this is not the conclusion of the show which also highlights Igudesmann's skills as a showman who with Joo starts from Bach / Gounod's Ave Maria to finish, under the bizarre and amusing indications of Malkovic, with Astor Piazzolla and also involves the audience in a Mozart finale standing applauding.
(HANDLE).