After yesterdays loaded post, it’s time for a slice of plain art …

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I first discovered Arvo Pärt’s My Heart’s in the Highlands, which was composed for the 50th birthday of the countertenor David James, through Paolo Sorrentino’s fabulous film La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty), 2013.

La Grande Bellezza is a pure sensual overload of richness and strangeness and sadness. The film has the most magnificent soundtrack, and music is a central compositional aspect of the storyline and tone in this movie. You can find the playlist here

If you havn’t already seen it, you might wonder what La Grande Bellezza is all about. A short synopsis might read like this:

Journalist Jep Gambardella (the dazzling Toni Servillo, Il divo and Gomorrah) has charmed and seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades. Since the legendary success of his one and only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city’s literary and social circles, but when his sixty-fifth birthday coincides with a shock from the past, Jep finds himself unexpectedly taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the extravagant nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome in all its glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.

Or in the words of the director Paolo Sorrentino, who might have felt that the universality of his project fell in the shadow of a more specific critique of Berlusconi’s Italy:

“Wasting time is something that people do or feel all over the world, not just in Italy.”