Germany
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 ...
David Nice
Is the terrifying past of Germany in 1933 also our future? Having had nightmares about the brilliant dystopian TV soap opera Years and Years, which built like all the best of its kind on present fears, I wasn't expecting to be confronted so soon by another pertinent disaster drama. In a sequence of all too unforgettable theatrical images, Ivo van Hove finds the present and the future in the pith of Visconti's's discomfortingly luxurious 1969 fantasia about a family which turns into a 1930s House of Atreus under pressure from the newly ascendant Nazi party.Visconti's Italian title was La Read more ...
David Nice
With two German giants roaring - Brahms in leonine mode, Richard Strauss more with tongue in armour-plated cheek - it could have all been too much. Not in the eloquent hands of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Music Director Designate, Vasily Petrenko, or pianist Denis Kozhukhin, the most musically disciplined of Russians.Indeed, you felt this team could have gone on to give us from Brahms's First Piano Concerto to give us the equally titanic Second. I've heard that pairing work in concert with the magisterial Elisabeth Leonskaja, and there's no doubt that when Yefim Bronfman played the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The whole raison d’être of the Longborough Festival was always the performance of its founder Martin Graham’s beloved Wagner. So it’s perfectly natural that the twelfth anniversary of the start of the festival’s original Ring cycle should be marked by the inauguration of a completely new cycle, under, so to speak, new management: the Grahams’ daughter Polly, who took over as artistic director last year, and the Royal Opera’s Amy Lane, directing The Ring itself.Natural perhaps, but still an extraordinary achievement for a rural festival in a converted barn seating five hundred (in bucket seats Read more ...