BWW Reviews: CHARLES CASTRONOVO: DOLCE NAPOLI, THE NEAPOLITAN SONGS, King's Head Theatre, April 7 2013

It's twenty minutes on a Vespa from Covent Garden to Upper Street, but they are worlds apart in so many other ways. Or they were, until Adam Spreadbury-Maher started a mini-revolution with his OperaUpClose residency. Now small-scale operas (with the familiar big voices and all the rollercoaster emotions) pack the pub venue with new enthusiasts, like your writer, for an often intimidating form.

Now - for a very limited season - American tenor Charles Castronovo is living in both worlds simultaneously. During April, he is starring at the Royal Opera House and also performing a set of Neapolitan classics at the King's Head. It's not quite Phil Collins at both Live Aid gigs, but it's impressive all the same!

Backed by a wonderfully understated band comprising percussion, double bass, guitar and a very Italian-sounding accordion and mandolin, Charles Castronovo looks like the lost Corleone brother between Fredo and Michael. Though singing these old standards (the most recently written predates the Beatles by ten years) in the original tongue, Mr Castronovo does favour us with a short account of each song's subject matter - almost always involving a lovelorn suitor tempting his Catherina, Carmella or Maria down from her balcony. What we lose in the language we gain in the passion and the connection through the generations stretching back centuries. It's a connection Mr Castronovo feels and, like all the best performers, he uses his art to make us feel it too.

Though I was sometimes reminded of the wedding scene in The Godfather and sometimes (I'm afraid to admit) of Tom and Jerry's lovingly rendered forays into classical music, these melodic old songs reminded me most of Naples itself. The tunes, the voice, the instruments and the atmosphere so created took me back twenty-five years to bars festooned with photos of Sophia Loren and Diego Maradona, to the volcano brooding in the East and the sea glinting in the West, to the girls with their black-eyed glances of curiosity and the boys with their rather less alluring and more menacing stares. The South is Italy at its most Italian, and Naples is the South at its most South - unless you count Sicily. These songs returned me to my favourite place on Earth - they may do the same for you.

Charles Castronovo is at The King's Head at 7.15pm on 8, 14 and 29 April.

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