Germany
David Nice
A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.Richard Egarr (pictured below by Marco Borggreve), directing from the harpsichord, no doubt deserves the credit for the line that passed, without Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
A toast to London’s Handel Festival, now celebrating its 36th year, and to Ian Page’s adventurous Classical Opera Company, for pulling Telemann out of the drawer and placing him in the forefront of this year’s celebrations at St. George’s, Hanover Square. There used to be a school of thought, part-informed and partly way off-beam, that Telemann, and others of Bach’s contemporaries, were boring: Baroque musical wallpaper, worthy but shorn of the structural daring, instrumental colouring and spiritual intensity of JS Bach’s most affecting scores. That’s not a view Bach took: he Read more ...
David Nice
Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev follows Gozzi’s playful mix of commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale characters. The 20-year-old Wagner has one moment of fun – cut in this performance – but a mere handful of musical gestures and plot devices prophesying greatness to come rises to the surface in this gloopy mess. You’ve got to admire the ambitious scope of it, but inspiration is Read more ...
David Nice
In many ways the most well-tempered of conductors, Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013) brought a peerless orchestral transparency and beauty of line to the great German classics. Even the most overloaded Richard Strauss scores under his watchful eye and ear could sound, as the composer once said his opera Elektra should, “like fairy music by Mendelssohn”. A modest and affable old-school gent, Sawallisch prided himself on these qualities and on the longevity of his devotion to one company especially: he was music director of the Bavarian State Opera for over 21 years, from 1971 to 1992.Courtesy of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brilliantly played by Saskia Rosendahl, the eponymous teenage heroine of Lore (full name, Hannelore) faces a demanding double journey: both the physical slog through end-of-war Germany, a country fallen into chaos, and the more complicated process of acknowledging, like the nation itself, past Nazi complicity. On the cusp of adolescence, she's forced into adult responsibility for her younger siblings, just as her inner world of sexual feeling is awakening - everything pushes her towards maturity, and she must cope or perish.Australian director Cate Shortland’s second feature combines a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A giant arm sweeps across the rapt audience. The newly anointed onlookers all wear the same, white-framed, glasses. A chant is heard:“We are the robots.” Those congregating in the over-sized shoebox of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall could be at a cult meeting. In gathering to pay respect, the audience share more than a passion for Kraftwerk. They also all wear the same 3D glasses. Performing their 1978 album The Man Machine in full, Kraftwerk restate the uncertainty of the natural order. Whether prophetic or not, their message still resonates.Introducing The Man Machine before its release to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Who’s That Man – A Tribute to Conny PlankThe list of acts Konrad Plank worked with is a Hollywood Walk of Fame of Krautrock. As an engineer or producer he was behind seminal albums by Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, La Düsseldorf and Kraftwerk. From outside Germany, Ultravox and Eurythmics came to him. Later-blooming locals like DAF sought him ought. Naturally, Brian Eno was around, both collaborating with Plank and bringing Devo to his studio to complete their first album. As the liner notes of this four-CD box set note, Plank turned U2 down, something Eno did not.Plank died Read more ...
Chris Mugan
“Tschernobyl… Harrisburg... Sellafield… Fukushima” reads the display above the four figures standing impassively below like toys, suddenly turning these harbingers of the computer age into proselytisers for an anti-nuclear energy policy.Kraftwerk’s reinvention as agitpop polemicists, if only for Radio-Activity, is just one surprise in a two-hour set that cements their place as a seminal cultural force whose key works reward close reappraisal. It is night two of The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, their typically thorough concerts series that sees them play eight albums over successive nights. If Read more ...
Chris Mugan
Childlike wonder is a rare emotion at a gig, so gasps of delight are doubly jolting as the first images appear to float out of the mammoth screen behind the stage and float over our heads. These are notes of musical notation that cascade from a car radio at the moment when the dial shifts in "Autobahn", the track where Kraftwerk’s concepts first properly coalesced and that gave their breakthrough album its title. The German electronica pioneers are to play 1974’s Autobahn in full as they begin an eight-night residency revisiting much of their back catalogue in order.It is also their first Read more ...
Heather Neill
A little man takes on Authority and fails. A little man dons a colourful uniform, complete with boots and spiked helmet, and he becomes Authority. Carl Zuckmayer wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power.Wilhelm Voigt, the real-life subject of the drama, had his moment of fame as the ersatz Captain of Grenadier Reserves in 1906. An anti-militarist aware of the growing Nazi threat and declared “half Jewish” because one of his grandfathers was Jewish, Zuckmayer was clearly writing about his own time as much as the early 1900s. He described his satire – in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Crossover isn’t the half of it. Not since Helmut Newton has a photographer operated so successfully in both the worlds of celebrity high fashion and the world of art. In Juergen Teller’s case there is an emotional warmth that is particularly engaging, meaning the art world’s embrace is free of the occasional smugness that comes with its acceptance of the success in the “real” world of someone like Mario Testino. Teller makes everything highly personal, and we respond subliminally to his attachment to whatever he is photographing. There is always a sense of specific biography or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last proper Ulrich Schnauss album – there have been collaborations and pseudonymous outings since – was going to be hard to top. Goodbye, released in 2007, breathtakingly took shoegazing further out than ever before: although gossamer, its sonic depth inexorably pulled you in. Now, with A Long Way to Fall, the Berlin producer and remixer has finally returned, solo, under his own name. He’s moved on, but is as assured as before.Some of the collaborations between then and now took Schnauss into techno and drum & bass, elements of which cross over into A Long Way to Fall. Initially, the Read more ...