Adams's Klinghoffer film wins Prix Italia
(September 2003)
Penny Woolcock's acclaimed film version of John Adams's powerful opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, has won the prestigious Prix Italia.
"The screening of a brilliant, morally courageous and overwhelmingly moving filmed version of John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer once more gives this work an eerie timeliness." So wrote the Los Angeles Times after viewing Penny Woolcock's new film at the San Francisco Film Festival. Commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK, and produced by Blast! Films, the new film was unveiled at Sundance and has been screened at festivals in Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, New York's Lincoln Center and Brussels where it won the special jury prize, followed by screenings at the Jerusalem and Sydney film festivals. The film was telecast on Channel 4 TV in the UK in May, and has recently won the prestigious Prix Italia in the performing arts category, one of the most coveted awards in the industry.
"Woolcock's naturalistic film presents a vivid, realistic enactment of the Achille Lauro hijacking, fleshing out characters with back stories... Yet she remains true to the score, which is incisively conducted by Adams. But most important, Woolcock found an excellent cast of opera singers who prove inspired screen actors, able to withstand the physical scrutiny of her edgy, unflinching hand-held cameras. She zooms up uncomfortably close to them, in preparation for Adams's unflinching music, which takes us, even more uncomfortably, inside them."
Los Angeles Times
"The Death of Klinghoffer is nothing short of stunning. Filmed naturalistically by the director Penny Woolcock it comes sensationally alive. There are brilliant flashback recreations of the seizure of Palestine in 1948 and sequences that explore the hinterland of the terrorists' actions. The solo voices were recorded live on set (a real cruise ship at sea), so there's none of the phony dubbed-in acoustical effect that mars many opera films."
Daily Telegraph
"It combines the emotional kick of opera with the muscular power of film and the intimacy of television... Woolcock has completely reimagined The Death of Klinghoffer in a way that stays true to the spirit of the piece but that takes it in myriad directions unimaginable on stage... Let's hope that The Death of Klinghoffer is not an endpoint in the history of opera on television, but a marker of a new way forward."
The Guardian
"...the music is ravishing, the movie wrenching..."
New York Newsday
"The result is a triumph in both operatic and cinematic terms... Woolcock uses Adams' hypnotic chorales to explore the Klinghoffer incident within the wider historical context of Arab-Israeli violence. The moral is that inhumanity breeds inhumanity - a message embracing the Nazi Holocaust as well as the dispossession of Palestinians at Israel's founding. In Woolcock's hands, Klinghoffer's murder symbolises a never-ending cycle of brutalisation... The film is a technical tour de force, quick-cutting between ship and shore, past and present, banality and brutality."
Financial Times
The Death of Klinghoffer remains active on the opera stage: this year has brought a revival of Tony Palmer's production for Finnish National Opera, and a new staging at the National Theatre in Prague by Jiri Nekvasil in May as part of the Prague Spring festival. In addition to an immediate revival of the Prague production in October, a new staging will appear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave festival in New York in December, and the Dutch stage premiere is scheduled by Rotterdam Opera for March 2004, as part of a major festival of the composer's music.
> Further information on Work: The Death of Klinghoffer
Photo: Channel 4/Blast! Films
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