Germany
Adam Sweeting
Beware the asteroid Horus! It’s 60km wide and it’s hurtling towards Earth at incalculable speed. Scientists say, with unfeasible precision, that the impact point will be La Rochelle in France, and it’s going to destroy all of western Europe.It’s terrifying, so it’s strange that this new series from Sky Deutschland (showing on Sky Atlantic) is so flat and uninvolving. The eight days of the title is the time left until armageddon arrives, and the story concerns a group of people (whose interconnections are gradually revealed) and how they respond to imminent extinction.The Steiner family have Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A lumbering, barrel-chested hulk with a weirdly Ancient Egyptian wedge of hair, the eponymous clay monster of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World compensates for his limited intelligence with brute strength and a dogged determination to see every task through, whether he’s doing the shopping for his household or supporting a collapsing palace by its beams. When the Golem bares his teeth, he’s terrifying – though the 1920 German film’s cultural resonance is the eeriest thing about it.Written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen (who also scripted FW Murnau's Read more ...
Katherine Waters
For a loved one to die by suicide provokes both pain and hurt. Pain, because they are gone. Hurt, because it can feel like an indictment or a betrayal. For Charlotte Salomon, the suicides that ripped holes in her family were also foreshadowings which provided the structure for her monumental cycle of narrative paintings Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) which is now on show at the Jewish Museum in Camden.About a third of the 769 gouaches that Salomon selected of the roughly 1,300 she painted over the course of two years are displayed in the exhibition. Like the full work, and in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Iiro Rantala: My Finnish Calendar (ACT)Iiro Rantala’s little commentaries for each of these 12 short pieces are almost worth the CD price alone, offering an astute guide to the typical Finnish psyche alongside handy references to weather and hobbies. This is a journey from darkness to, er, darkness, though there's much light relief along the way. January is the “month of regret”, where Finns lament having overindulged at Christmas and even quitting the booze “won't make them happier people.” Rantala's mellow nocturne makes for beguiling listening, all the more so when set against the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You wonder about the title of French dramatist Sam Gallet’s Mephisto [A Rhapsody], an adaptation for our days of Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel about an actor unable to resist the blandishments of fame, even if they come at the cost of losing himself. Those who know the story from Hungarian director István Szabó’s celebrated 1981 film with its mesmerising central performance by Klaus-Maria Brandauer might come to this looking for an element of tragedy, one moderated by the merciless accusation of complicity directed at a character unable to resist the enticements offered by Nazism, a figure who Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Almost exactly a century after the Weimar Republic’s constitution took effect, English Touring Opera presents a show whose birth coincided with the Republic's untimely death. His third collaboration with the prolific, maverick playwright Georg Kaiser, Kurt Weill’s The Silver Lake (Der Silbersee) opened in three German cities (Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt) just 19 days after Hitler had come to power in 1933. Although it lacks much of the acid topicality and mischief that marks Weill’s partnerships with Bertolt Brecht, that did not stop the newly-empowered Nazis from swiftly closing the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The only novel by the Hungarian dramatist Ödön von Horváth, Youth Without God was written in exile after he fled Anschluss Vienna and published in 1938, shortly before his death. In the English-speaking world, we know von Horváth for his plays, largely through the translations of Christopher Hampton, and it’s Hampton who has adapted the novel for its UK premiere at the Coronet (now minus its Print Room moniker), where Stephanie Mohr’s production plays very satisfyingly, making the most of the venue’s spacious, uncrowded stage as well as its striking sense of period dereliction. When it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hatari’s 10th placing in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest hasn’t done them any harm. Neither did ruffling the feathers of the European Broadcasting Union and host nation Israel with their stance on Palestine. Based on their performance in Hamburg at 2019’s Reeperbahn Festival, Iceland’s favourite BDSM-leaning popsters haven’t smoothed-off their rough edges.The more gruff of their two singers, Matthías Haraldsson, sounds like a Dalek were one of the wheeled monstrosities angrier than usual, and even more stentorian. Team this with co-frontman Klemens Hannigan’s somewhat sweeter tones and Read more ...
David Nice
While we wish the great Mariss Jansons a speedy recovery, no-one of sound heart and soul could be disappointed by his substitute for the two Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Proms, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whose supreme art is to show the score's construction in the face, with gestures to match. Some of us, on the other hand, weren't quite so happy that Shostakovich's Fifth replaced a deeper, richer symphony, the mighty Tenth. But Nézet-Séguin was as sure of intent and as attentive to dynamic possibilities in this as he had been in Beethoven's Second, even if the Munich orchestra might not, by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.Loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter, probably Germany’s foremost visual artist, his new film Never Look Away, epic in scale, the story spanning several decades over more than three hours, is a dramatic rollercoaster, both a pleasure and shocking to watch. It is also very moving. And yet, although made with great brio – the camerawork, editing Read more ...
mark.kidel
Weimar Germany produced some extraordinary cinema, with Pabst, Murnau, Fritz Lang and others creating a language that transformed the medium and is still a core reference today. People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), a silent film made in 1929, entirely on location – itself unusual at the time – features a team that would make tracks once established in Hollywood. The credits include a story by Curt Siodmak, Billy Wilder as screenwriter, Edgar G Ulmer and Robert Siodmak as directors, and Fred Zinnemann and Eugen Schüfftan as cinematographers.The film tells the story of a group of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Politics, in case you may not have noticed, has been in the air of late: questions of escape, release, borders, refugees, things like that. So WNO’s June season of operas about freedom has been suspiciously well timed. We’ve had the dead man walking (Jake Heggie’s opera, but you may have your own candidate), we’ve had Menotti’s visa opera The Consul, Dallapiccola’s study of hope deceived in Il prigioniero, and Beethoven’s of despair conquered by woman in Fidelio. To fit Hans Krása’s children’s operetta Brundibár into this topical gallery takes some special pleading, because although the Read more ...