Germany
Boyd Tonkin
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes to wed his widow and bring a kind of peace to the conquered land.Meanwhile, another local leader has thrown in his lot with the invaders – to the dismay of his rebel children. You can see why the action of Arminio, which Handel saw premiered at Covent Garden in 1737, might appeal to a director with an eye on recent history – or on today’s headlines Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s hit show Drive to Survive has proved that F1 can grab ratings, but Villeneuve Pironi: Racing's Untold Tragedy (Sky Documentaries) is a more esoteric offering.It’s a story from the annals of early-Eighties Formula One, in which filmmakers Torquil Jones and Gabriel Clarke (both have pedigree in sports documentaries, and Clarke also wrote and co-directed Steve McQueen: the Man and Le Mans) flash back to the fatally entwined careers of drivers Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi. The film opens with the words of Villeneuve’s widow Joann: “This is a story about a very deep betrayal. It Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 17th century romantic tragedy Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Ealing Studios' first Technicolor film, was conceived as a magnificent spectacle. The opulent costumes and Oscar-winning sets, shot in pleasingly muted tones and rendered almost 3D by Douglas Slocombe’s deep-focus cinematography, make for a visual feast in StudioCanal’s restoration. Sadly, it’s a banquet of stodge thanks to Basil Dearden’s cumbrous direction and dire performances by Stewart Granger and Joan Greenwood.Adapted by John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick from the 1935 novel by the Sydney-born Liberal Party Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mille Petrozza is roaring into the mic, teeth gritted, black hair flailing. Behind his growl-screeching a triumphant martial riff is holding the “tune” and behind that, never-ceasing drum beats, an exercise in pure velocity.“The failed, the outcasts, the sagacious and wise will form a bond, impeccable art crafted through aeons of time,” thunders Petrozza, in a rare popular musical use of the word “sagacious”. “Hail to the Hordes” runs the chorus to the 2017 song, and writhing before Kreator, there they are, the hordes, a mass of denim and leather and skin, buffeting around the mosh-pit like Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the total loss of its Arts Council funding, Hampstead Theatre’s future as a specialist new writing venue is in doubt. But before anything drastically changes, the playwrights and plays developed by Roxanna Silbert, who was edged out as artistic director in December last year, are still coming through.One of them is Ruby Thomas, whose Either, her 2019 drama in the studio here, was thrillingly experimental. Boy, can she write! Her latest, this time on the main stage, is Linck & Mülhahn, a historical queer love story which features a gender-pioneering couple.The scene is Saxony in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
No work gives its listeners such pleasure on the way to hell (and back) as Berlioz’s rule-busting “dramatic legend”, The Damnation of Faust. It delivers not just flamboyant thrills, but low comedy, high drama, pathos, terror, nostalgia, pastoral lyricism and crazy episodes of sheer delirium.The musical and formal prodigality the composer drew in 1846 from a beloved French translation (by Gerald de Nerval) of Goethe’s Faust: Part 1 dooms every effort to refit the piece as a conventional opera to tepid compromise. Given a $200m. Hollywood budget, with Peter Jackson or Guillermo el Toro at the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s always a disappointment when the Venusberg orgy Wagner added in 1861 to his original, 1845 Tannhäuser to suit Parisian tastes gives way to foursquare operatic conventions. Especially so in this revival of Tim Albery’s 2010 production, where Jasmin Vardimon’s choreography (pictured below) seems executed with more brilliance than ever and post-viral vocal problems loomed large last night for this hero.The static nature of the rest of the evening, though, - Wagner’s problem, accentuated by Albery, though his living tableaux are well managed - is redeemed by exceptional singing-acting from Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
What do you do when your high-achieving ensemble has just been dealt a brutal, capricious blow, but you have the most joyfully festive work in the repertoire on your seasonal agenda? To say that the Britten Sinfonia came out with all trumpets (and timpani, and oboes d’amore) blazing would be the feeblest of understatements.Along with the singers of Polyphony, their performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at the Barbican flung an exultant riposte back at the self-contradictory bureaucrats of Arts Council England. Last month, ACE stripped the Sinfonia of 100 per cent of its funding as a reward Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Royal Academy’s Making Modernism is a welcome introduction to seven women painters working in Germany at the beginning of the last century. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn-Becker even though they enjoyed international reputations during their lives, since their male counterparts (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky and Macke) are not well known here either.Käthe Kollwitz may be a more familiar name; her harrowing prints and drawings are so powerful they knock the spots off everything else here. One of her most famous etchings, Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled. It was first performed by the RSC in 1981; this production, starring David Tennant as a mild-mannered German professor who gradually becomes a paid-up Nazi, has been delayed several times by the pandemic. Director Dominic Cooke has crafted a punchy first act, but he can’t save the second from Taylor’s stodgy script.“The bands” play constantly in the head of Tennant's John Halder, their repertoire ranging from Bavarian oompah to American jazz. Halder is a professor of literature in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A black box with a red blinking light is being stashed in a cabinet under the seating of the Olympic stadium in Munich. Then a hoodie-ed man is seen in silhouette, the stadium in the background. We are about to be plunged into the darker corners of the prosperous Bavarian city where, 50 years earlier, as the footage in the opening credits recalls, the infamous massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by PLO gunmen took place.Different games are in the offing now, notably a special anniversary one between the local football team and one from Tel Aviv. This, various characters Read more ...
David Nice
Match the most multi-timbred, flexible orchestra in the world with the iridescent peak of symphonic mastery, and you have an assured winner of a Prom. Yet not even Kirill Petrenko’s previous London performance of Mahler’s Seventh with the Bavarian State Orchestra, nor the brilliance of his two previous Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic, had prepared me for the miracle he achieved last night with players who will clearly do anything for him.Unlike his predecessor in Berlin, Simon Rattle, Petrenko makes Mahler fly, much more air and fire though not without earthiness when it’s needed (update: Read more ...