Berlin
joe.muggs
An extraordinary musical movement has been bubbling over from the far left field into the public consciousness in the last couple of years. A very loose international alliance of musicians like Elysia Crampton, GAIKA, Ziúr, Arca, Rabit, Yves Tumor, and the NON Worldwide collective of Angel-Ho, Chino Amobi and Nkisi have been making sounds that unceremoniously strip experimental electronica of its straight white male trappings, and rebuilding it from first principles as something nonconformist in every sense, shot through with a strong sense of urgency and possibility.J’Kerian Morgan aka Lotic Read more ...
graham.rickson
Peer at the small print and it’s clear that Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill is actually a spruced-up repackaging of a show originally devised by Gene Lerner and arranger Newton Wayland, about whom Opera North’s programme tells us nothing. The cabaret-style production’s two halves take us neatly through Weill’s career, the linking narrative divvied out among the 11-strong cast in a manner that suggests a primary school class assembly.But it works handsomely. Veteran director Giles Havergal’s hands-off approach would surely have pleased Weill’s testy collaborator Brecht. And having the songs Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship during the war combined with the traumatic human toll meant that lone helmets and ravaged trees came to stand easily for the dead, while wrecked landscapes and crumbling buildings questioned the senselessness of such utter destruction.In one photograph the cathedral crouches like an abject creature, low and painful behind a foreground strafed with Read more ...
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based Read more ...
David Nice
Punching well above their weights, population-wise, on the international music scene, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are celebrating, and being celebrated, in style over the year of their 100th birthdays. Berlin has just finished a 10-day "Festival Baltikum" at the fabulously recreated, Schinkel-designed Konzerthaus in the old city centre, in which championship of a massive Estonian oratorio finally reached Germany's current capital of musical culture. Leipzig, its second in terms of size, if not ambition - where the composer Rudolf Tobias first conducted the disastrous 1909 premiere of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1-6 Berliner Barock Solisten/Reinhard Goebel (Sony)This set’s arrival sent me scurrying back to listen again to Reinhard Goebel's 1985 DG set of Bach’s Brandenburgs with Musica Antiqua Koln: hyperactive, sharp-edged performances which still sound disarmingly fresh. The issue back then was Goebel’s propensity to adopt speeds on the edge of playability: I'm showing my age in remembering that I could squeeze his set onto a single C90 cassette. Happy days. The Third Concerto was the jaw-dropper, its second movement improbably, ludicrously swift. This new set Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The German director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is best known for the insouciant screwball comedies he made in Hollywood. Many who haven’t seen his films will have heard of “the Lubitsch Touch” – at its most basic, his winking way of signifying sexual activity was afoot without breaking the censorious Production Code. A form of visual evasiveness, it reminds us Lubitsch was the slyest of sophisticates.The six films included on Masters of Cinema’s Lubitsch in Berlin are packed with moments of deftness that seldom require the imprimatur of sex. Having said that, the comedy Ich möchte kein Mann Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sky Atlantic’s German import is an intoxicating mix of intrigue and betrayal, set in the excessive days of the Weimar Republic. Gripping stories and extravagant production meet in the opening two episodes of this brilliantly promising Euro-noir.Babylon Berlin lays its cards on the table from the opening moments – a montage in reverse of gun fights, riots and war, no doubt all to come in the show’s upcoming eight episodes. It’s tense, engaging, and a serious marker that Germany is ready to carve its place in the television landscape.Inspector Gereon Rath is a recent transfer from Cologne, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an intriguing combination of style and atmosphere in Berlin Syndrome, one that proves that, although director Cate Shortland has embraced genre with conviction, she certainly hasn’t left the arthouse roots that she established with her first two films, her debut Somersault and the much-acclaimed Lore from five years ago, behind. Whether the result finally and fully convinces may be another mattter, especially over a rather protracted length of nearly two hours, but it’s certainly a curious journey.It begins in laid-back mode, as we encounter heroine Clare (Teresa Palmer, intense) Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the Third Reich had stuck to a non-aggression pact with Britain and expanded unopposed into the lebensraum of the Soviet Union. One founding fact of the thriller was that at Munich in September 1938, Britain and Germany made a commitment to peace in our time.That infamous piece of paper has lured Harris back to Nazi Germany after 25 years. This time he Read more ...
Maggie Bain
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.The script Bruce handed me was a photocopy of a typewriter copy he had been emailed by the National Theatre Literary Department; faded, smudged and with some of the bottom lines cut off, I had to Read more ...