Berlin
Simon Thompson
I’m all in favour of the EIF taking artistic risks, and of them bringing a high-prestige international production to Edinburgh. This Marriage of Figaro from Berlin’s Komische Oper is both of those things, because it is the first production by Kirill Serebrennikov – the high profile Russian director, placed under house arrest by the Putin regime, now based in Berlin – to be seen in the UK.But the EIF agreed to host it before its Berlin premiere, and while they must have had their suspicions about how “radical” it was, I doubt they were prepared for just what a mess it turned out to be. For one Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s supposed to be funny (and it often is), but should I really be giggling? That's hardly an uncommon feeling watching a black comedy, but there’s something in the rhythms of Maja Zade’s translation and the bleakness of the Berlin period, Bowie inflected soundtrack that undercuts the guilty pleasure with an insistent Teutonic froideur. With Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Paavo Berglund: The Warner Edition (Warner Classics)Jean Sibelius’s presence looms over this box like a friendly giant. Paavo Berglund (interestingly, one of the few left-handed conductors to have achieved international fame) recorded the seven symphonies three times and revisited the tone poems at various points in his career, and Warner Classics’ acquisition of the old Finlandia catalogue means that almost all of the conductor’s Sibelius is here, filling around half the box. It’s a mark of Berglund’s musical intelligence that there’s never any sense of going through the motions, of Read more ...
David Nice
Successful performances, conductor Robin Ticciati once suggested to me, are when “the head has a conversation with the heart”. The same goes, surely, for great music, though from personal experience one has to reach a certain age to find that true of Brahms. Last night Igor Levit seemed to favour the head, occasionally missing, for me, that very elusive something at the heart of Brahms’s late piano pieces.There can be no question of his magisterial oversight, though, or of how well 20 pieces in four consecutive opus numbers work in sequence. It was clear, for instance, how turbulence in one Read more ...
David Nice
During his transformational time at the helm of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski conducted the complete Threepenny Opera in concert and two performances of Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony which changed my mind about its being good only in parts. Last night’s interpretation made his fellow Russian’s late fantasy billow and soar, while Weill’s Little Threepenny Music opened with sheer stylish delight in the song/dance numbers framed by incisive austerity.That supposedly orchestral pianist so responsive to a genial Jurowski and the wind players of the Berlin Radio Symphony Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This was one of the more strait-laced concert performances, with few concessions to Wagner’s underlying stage drama. The soloists were in formal concert dress, strung out in a line at the front of the stage, with interaction between them limited to looks of anguish and the sparest of gestures. The shepherd boy in Act 1 was banished to the upper reaches of the organ gallery, and there was a substantial off-stage band in Act 2, but otherwise there was nothing to distract us from the music.But what music! Wagner's Overture to Tannhäuser is justly seen as a masterpiece in its own right, but under Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s flabbergasting. OK, there’s the power of the internet as a propagation tool but here’s a German band playing their first UK show to a jumping-up-and-down audience punching the air while shouting along with the chorus of “X-Ray Vision” – which, indeed, is “X-Ray Vision”. The reception is extraordinary.Die Verlierer are from Berlin and have made one album. Their mix-and-match look takes in suit trousers, T-shirts, work boots and the odd formal jacket. Hair is short, a little bit glam-rock feathery. The sound is punk rock without being rooted in The Ramones, Sex Pistols or anything Read more ...
David Nice
It’s coming up for two years since some of us watched the first three seasons of what’s increasingly coming to seem like television’s greatest dramatic triumph. Babylon Berlin. So we might be excused for being in a bit of brainwhirl when it comes to the multiple plotlines sown early on in Season Four.It starts on the eve of 1931, and the components include desperate street children, suppression of free press, the increasingly deluded exploits of a mad industrialist family, fratricidal urges, a vicious secret court, bent coppers, gangsters, the theft of a valuable jewel, connecting high Read more ...
David Nice
It’s dangerous to claim a sense of absolute rightness about a musical performance; that could mean no more than responding to an interpretation which happens to chime with your own subjective expectations. Yet I’m happy to stick my neck out and say that the partnership of septuagenarian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja with the young Staatskapelle Quartet of Berlin felt absolutely right in works by Brahms that cry out in every bar for authentic musicianship (★★★★★).Maybe that’s true of all the great chamber works. But Brahms draws on a unique wellspring of original melody and rhythmic ingenuity in Read more ...
David Nice
In its three weeks of world-class events, Muskfest Berlin has managed to be all things to all people – like a mini-Proms distilling the aspects of top international visitors alongside home-grown excellence, and of a focus on at least one relatively unfamiliar 20th century/contemporary work per concert. The Berliners deserved the cornucopia of very special guests, but to justify my visit, I went for the local – Berlin Phiharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Berlin choirs on a par with very distinguished counterparts from the UK and Georgia.It was disappointing that my third train on the Read more ...
David Nice
Epic-lyric magician Brahms wears a very adaptable garment for certain masterpieces: black on the outside with fur trimming, reversible to show its exquisitely wrought, variegated silk patterns on the inside.For the celebrated G minor Piano Quartet and the First Piano Concerto – which Elisabeth Leonskaja has featured so impressively in concert with its successor – the darkness predominates, but the colours flash too. In the Second Concerto and Quartet, the bright reverse takes the lead. There can surely be no team more adaptable to all the miracles than Leonskaja and members of the Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Kuhle Wampe is a fascinating curio, a blend of documentary, social realist drama and political debate which so bothered the German authorities upon its release in 1932 that they promptly banned it. The censorship board’s justification condemned the film as one “which shakes the foundations of the state”, most pointedly in its depiction of official indifference to poverty and the search for work.Written by Bertholt Brecht and mostly directed by Slatan Dudow, the film opens with a montage of newspaper headlines charting rising unemployment statistics. There’s little dialogue; the well- Read more ...