The most faithful Odyssey

When L’Odissea, the Italian TV series considered among the most faithful screen adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey, was first broadcast on RAI in 1968, it gained an audience of up to 16 million. In eight parts and directed by Franco Rossi, its almost nine hours’ running time allows the timeless story to evolve slowly but not without drama, with an otherworldly atmosphere rooted in the distant past. An especially nice feature is that each one of the episodes is prefaced by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti reading passages from the original verse. Compare and contrast with Christopher Nolan’s soon-to-be-released, and rather more condensed, blockbuster.

Discovering Karl Goldmark

The brilliant young Korean violinist Sueye Park follows on from her acclaimed solo project Echoes of Exile with superb interpretations of works by composers who were themselves violinists, in Goldmark and Sibelius: Works for Violin and Orchestra. The Violin Concerto by Karl Goldmark will be unknown to many. Much acclaimed during his lifetime, this lyrical work reflects the hybrid of his background as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire: the rhythms of Slavonic dance encased in German Romanticism. He taught Jean Sibelius, represented here not by his own dazzling violin concerto (the greatest of the 20th century?), but by fascinating shorter works, including the Suite for Violin and String Orchestra from late in his career (with delicious evocations of Spring and Summer), the Two Serious Melodies and Two Humoresques. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the baton of Valentin Engel prove accomplished accompanists to Sueye Park’s virtuosity.

The Dr Johnson of film critics

David Thomson was once described as the Dr Johnson of film critics. Given his epigrammatic prose style, his bracing judgements and capacious knowledge, the verdict is a sound one. His Have You Seen…? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, published in 2008, is one of those books – like Luca Turin’s Perfumes: the A-Z Guide, and Ian Nairn’s Nairn’s London – that manage to be both idiosyncratic and wholly authoritative. Thomson’s latest, autobiographical book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: a Revisionist History of the Movies, may be his last; he is 85, after all. How better, then, than to pronounce Fin with this tremendous, vigorous sweep through the whole history of cinema, from the Hollywood pioneers to the European and Asian masters. Its conclusion is not kind to Donald Trump, a man, Thomson writes, who has ‘despaired at the idea of seeing’.