Berlin
joe.muggs
“I'm moving to Berlin.” In artistic circles and especially those that include electronic musicians, over the past few years such a threat has become so commonplace as to be cliché. It's not without reason, though. For one, despite gentrification, Berlin has endless space (and empty industrial artistic “spaces”) and its cost of living is about a two-hundredth that of London. And just as importantly, it is more soaked in electronic music than anywhere else on the planet.From the Weimar Republic, through West Berlin's defiant isolation, the city thrived on decadent nightlife; electronic Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's a piquant French perfume to our April round-up. DVD of the month is Olivier Assayas's magnificent family drama Summer Hours, reissued in the US with revealing extras (and available worldwide from Amazon). Maurice Pialat's work is considered at length and Séraphine and Rumba are among the new releases. We unearth an extraordinary Czech epic,The Valley of the Bees, and watch Ernst Lubitsch's delicious early Berlin comedies. Films covered previously, including New Moon, The White Ribbon, 2012 and Zombieland are noted in brief, with a link to the original review. Our critics are Anne Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since winning the Turner Prize in 1996 with Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) has lived in Germany, France, New York and Germany again. But in accent and attitude, he remains a Glaswegian. Those roots are being reaffirmed at the moment: as part of this year's Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, one of Gordon's most celebrated works is back on display in the city where it was first shown.24 Hour Psycho plays the entirety of Hitchcock's classic on a pair of screens, but reduced to two frames a second. First mounted at the Tramway in 1993, the work Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Who's the greatest living British exponent of the late Romantic repertoire? Many would say Edinburgh-born conductor Donald Runnicles (b. 1954). Runnicles has spent the last 30 years quietly forging a formidable name for himself abroad, first, as a repetiteur in Mannheim, then as an assistant to Sir Georg Solti at Bayreuth, as guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera and, for the past two decades, musical director of San Francisco Opera. In 2007 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra announced that Runnicles would return home to become their new chief conductor. This week he performs Strauss, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Purists would have it that punk rock was but a brief explosion in first New York then London, and was all but spent by the end of 1977. Irish photographer Niall O'Brien, however, was born in 1979 and has no truck with purism. Instead, taking the role of anthropologist for his exhibition Good Rats, he has befriended and spent time with groups of young punks, from skaters in Kingston-upon-Thames to homeless teens in Berlin and Tel Aviv, and documented the noise, chaos and sense of belonging that comes with the subculture more than three decades on from its inception. Click on the images below Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The returns queue gets longer and so does the wait – considerably longer than the 69 minutes of programmed music in this the second of the Daniel Barenboim Beethoven/Schoenberg series. But what a satisfying two–course meal it was: Schoenberg’s “transfigured night” of desire and confession, Verklärte Nacht, and Beethoven’s grandest piano concerto, No 5, “The Emperor”. Two perfect pieces in dramatic juxtaposition and the reassuring feeling that nobody on the planet knows them better or is more acutely aware of their importance in the greater scheme of things than the man whose hands were Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who can sell out four concerts of Beethoven and Schoenberg, even if it's only half-scary Schoenberg, surely looms large in the public imagination. Daniel Barenboim is a great humanitarian figure, and has been a thought-provoking interpreter of the classical and romantic piano repertoire for nearly 60 years, so it's not surprising that half of London wants to hear him in the Beethoven concertos. As a conductor, his natural element is earth; less so air, wind and fire. All four are vital to make a protean late-romantic orchestral monsterpiece like Schoenberg's Pelleas und Read more ...
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.See Wicked. This smart, feisty show is not just for teenage girls (though heaven knows they’ll thank you for taking them) but will tweak at the imagination and tickle the funny bone of anyone who’s ever contemplated the back-story of The Wizard of Oz. Stephen Schwartz’s zingy score is one of the best to have come out of Broadway in the last decade and you really Read more ...