Criticultura em Portugal

 Sintra is a delightful hill town west of Lisbon and a few miles north of my home in Cascais. It's home to many fancy palaces, where the royals and wealthy of Lisbon went in the past to escape summer heat.  Now Sintra is a suburban community that hosts lots of tourists, as well as an annual summer music festival. I recently saw two VERY different concerts there. The renowned pianist Andras Schiff is a Hungarian-born British pianist, now in his 70s, who these days specializes in Bach.  His Sintra recital featured Bach in the first half, and Mozart pieces mostly influenced by Bach in the second half. The recital was superb. Schiff uses very clean articulation and minimal pedal. While he cannot make the piano sound like a harpsichord, he accomplishes the clarity of its inner voices really well. There was no  printed program, and Schiff introduced each piece verbally (in English) in an engaging and intimate way, complete with little examples to explain what we were about to hear. This

Tableaux vivantes (living pictures) are an art form that dates to the middle ages. In these, live humans (often amateurs) would depict a famous scene from the Bible or or from a famous painting, complete with sets and dramatic lighting. They were usually static (a snapshot before the era of cameras). They became popular in the Victorian USA and UK, as amateurs could show their pious nature by depicting Jesus and the disciples, the Virgin Mary, the Last Supper, etc. A less pious advantage was that 19th century law in both the USA and UK allowed public nudity on the stage as long as the actors remained motionless--so tableaux vivantes was also an early version of legal porn.  Tableaux vivantes have mostly died out, but returned in a few movies like Derik Jarman's erotic Caravaggio  (1986), in which the famed Baroque painter's violent life is intertwined with tableaux vivantes of some of his famed paintings. Intriguingly, this device was recently brought to the live stage in Li