Austria
edward.seckerson
When Schoenberg made his steroidal orchestration of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet he saw and heard what many don’t - that Brahms was more of a radical than the music world was ready to acknowledge, that he was not the conservative in the shadow of Wagner that commentators at the time felt the need to brand him. And yet at the heart of that orchestration, at the root of its motivation, was Schoenberg’s deep-felt reverence for the past, and who better to reveal that than an orchestra - the Vienna Philharmonic - so steeped in tradition that voices of approval from the likes of Brahms, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For all the brilliance of its leads – Jean-Louis Trintignant back in the cinema after many years, Emmanuelle Riva cruelly pipped for an Oscar – it’s easily forgotten that Amour is a zeitgeist film. As the First World’s population ages, narratives of old age are starting to grow on trees. The difference is that Michael Haneke’s resounding chamber piece about fractured geriatric identity is not in the business of saccharine consolation.A romance set in the deep midwinter of a married couple’s final years, Amour watches pitilessly as Georges and Anne – refined equals in intellect and taste – Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The sixth Altitude Festival takes place on March 18-22. The festival of Alpine comedy started in 2008 when Marcus Brigstocke decided to combine his day job with the family's snowboarding holiday and invited a few of his comedy mates to join him in performing in Méribel in France while skiing or snowboarding (some of them for the first time, which made for good comedy in itself). Latterly Andrew Maxwell has taken over producing the event, which has now moved across the Alps to Mayrhofen in Austria.Among the strong line-up this year are John Bishop, Phill Jupitus, Brendon Burns, Maxwell and Read more ...
David Nice
Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially brilliant Mahler series like Gergiev’s, squeezed into a single anniversary season, seem a distant memory, many of Bělohlávek’s slow burn, deep vein interpretations live on in the mind and soul. Last night’s Second Symphony, following an equally well prepared Schumann Piano Concerto with the scrupulous Francesco Piemontesi, shared many of those qualities. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You’ve never seen so many people at a Prom, thousands of them packed into every space of the Albert Hall inside, while outside a 100-metre line of hopefuls queued in vain to stand in a pit where a small cat couldn’t have been added. But then this was a luxury Prom: with the Vienna Philharmonic and two musicians of golden integrity and sensitivity, lifetime members of the high table, the pianist Murray Perahia and the conductor Bernard Haitink playing two works born in Vienna.Size matters in the Albert Hall - they played spacious Beethoven and epic Bruckner - but it takes musicians of special Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No sooner had the Olympic torch been run out of town than in rushed the cavalcade of opera singers, musicians, actors, dancers and literary talkers for the start of the 34th Buxton Festival. Leading them, so to speak, was Stephen Barlow, the new Artistic Director. Nothing daunted, he decided to take up the baton for the opening night.The tradition here is to surprise us with works from opera’s old curiosity shop. Even if we’ve heard of them, we may well not have seen them, sometimes prompting the ironical “I wonder why?” Not the case with Intermezzo, but we have the double bill of Sibelius’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not so very rare for actors to be given a shot at directing their own film. It happens slightly less often that they find financial backing to work on their own script. What makes Breathing, which opened this week in the UK, such a collector’s item is that it is so very accomplished.Karl Markovics (b. 1963) has long experience as an actor in Austria. He is best – in fact, solely – known internationally for his extraordinary performance in The Counterfeiters (2007). Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film tells the true story of Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, a Jewish black marketeer who is rounded Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This one sounds like a hard sell: a muted, taciturn, cautious film from Austria about a friendless boy in a young offenders’ institution who takes a job working for the municipal undertakers. Breathing (original title: Atmen) would appear at first glance modest in scope and gloomy in outlook. But whatever the odds stacked against it, this quiet, observational debut from Karl Markovics turns out to pack a discreetly powerful punch.The name may not be familiar, but the face will be: a few years back Markovics was the poker-faced lead in The Counterfeiters, which won the best foreign film at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any shade you want, as long as it’s dark. Songs like “Extinguish Me”, "Deathmental”, “Mr Gaunt Pt 1000” meant last night wasn’t going to be defined by uplifting toe tappers. On album, Soap & Skin’s music is desolate, emotive and turbulent. The songs are tremendously affecting, with a touching intimacy. But live, too few heights were scaled.I wanted to love this. Unequivocally. The recent Narrow and 2009’s Lovetune For Vacuum are tremendous albums. And that is where the problem lies. This concert opened with Narrow’s “Deathmental”. On record, its crashing cacophony fuses the industrial Read more ...
graham.rickson
De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena has recently succeeded Gianandra Noseda as the BBC Philharmonic’s principal conductor. You trust that the choice of repertoire on this release was driven by Mena himself, and this disc has loads to commend it – playing of real verve, and the more-than-decent acoustic of the BBC’s much-maligned Media City in Salford. The Three-Cornered Hat isn’t heard enough in its complete form; Mena’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Poles is a significant step for Lonely Drifter Karen. For their third album, the pan-European trio have moved their trademark piano-led, torch song-influenced introspection into new territory. The graceful Poles is a pop album of the very highest calibre.The shimmering harpsichord glissando that opens the album and “Three Colors Red” lays the table for a rhythmic, minor-key song which traces a path from Martha and the Muffins to the yearning pop of Rose Elinor Dougall. The Eighties are in there, so are John Barry and Lykke Li. As the album unfolds, Lonely Drifter Karen reveal a new fondness Read more ...
fisun.guner
Michael is a work of fiction, but it is also clearly an amalgam of real-life events. For first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer (former casting director for Michael Haneke, whose influence you may detect), the subject must have particular resonance: in this story of a child abduction by a lone paedophile, it’s unavoidable that we think of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, as well as Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux. Schleinzer has created a script that bears comparison to all three cases in ways that are incidental but also striking.Schleinzer also appears to rely on some of the Read more ...