Germany
Adam Sweeting
We last encountered Stephen Poliakoff on TV in 2013's Dancing on the Edge, which provoked mixed reactions (not least on theartsdesk). That was the story of a black jazz band in 1930s London, who played gigs at swanky hotels. Close to the Enemy (★) is set in London just after the end of World War Two, and happens to feature a jazz band with a black singer who perform in a once-swanky hotel somewhat gone to seed.Many have pondered over the way the BBC likes to shovel hefty chunks of the licence fee in Poliakoff's direction, and their doubts may not be assuaged by Close to the Enemy, on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has never been afraid of tackling weighty, often philosophical issues head on, and his latest film Francofonia is as pioneering – and, some might say, unnecessarily uncompromising – as ever. It’s nothing less than a meditation on civilisation, its potential for preservation or destruction, and history, seen through the prism of Paris's Louvre. Stretching, and evading, the conventions of both documentary and fiction, it’s perhaps best considered as an art project in itself.Sokurov’s cinematic fascination with the museum as a concept stretches back to his Read more ...
David Nice
After a day of sheer pain, would it be endless night or cathartic relief at ENO? Both, must be the answer, and much more, all at once. Iconoclastic Frank Wedekind's "earth-spirit" Lulu, exploited as a street-child but now able to turn the tables for a while on male bourgeois weakness, lives through one horrible situation after another before dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper, but Alban Berg's never merely atonal score gives such transcendent warmth to the spell she casts just by being.Has it ever sounded more grounded in its beauty, or more closely connected with the stage shenanigans, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems morbid, and perhaps even in dubious taste, to create a TV drama franchise focusing on the hideous fate of abducted children and the repercussions this has on their family and friends. Still, ratings are their own reward, and the first series of The Missing (a collaboration between the BBC and the US network Starz) was a critical and commercial success.So welcome to series two, now starring Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey in place of series one's James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor (they call this an "anthology series"). Our new protagonists are Gemma and Sam Webster. Thanks to Sam's Read more ...
Steven Isserlis
All musicians have particular musical passions, composers, styles or genres to which they are irresistibly drawn. I have many – almost too many at times; but among the most enduring is my love for the music, writing and personality of Robert Schumann. Another important aspect of my musical life – another passion, in fact - is the work I get to do with young musicians.Writing (co-writing) this book has given me an opportunity to combine these passions/pleasures, by taking Schumann’s own invaluable advice for the young musicians of his day, and updating it in order to render it more accessible Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.There is no expressionist horror like 1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens nor intense romantic drama akin to Murnau’s first American film, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Instead, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
You know what they say about men with big hands. Christian Thielemann has them, that’s for sure. Massive, meat-cleaving clappers, carving through the air. They give a pretty heavy upbeat too, and a generalissimo’s point and jab for a cue. If you’re a back-desk violinist in the Dresden Staatskapelle, you know when you’ve been Thielemanned.Those hands were also joined in a sweaty fanboy’s applause for Nikolaj Znaider at the end of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The violinist returned the love by dedicating his Bach encore to the conductor and orchestra. Such a concerto does not play itself, he Read more ...
David Nice
Soft power in the shape of cultural ambassadors can go a long way. With a little help from its big guns in banking and industry, Germany has given this year's Proms no less than four of its major orchestras – from Leipzig, two from Berlin, and now from Dresden: all the more reason to wave those EU flags on a typically international Last Night in three days' time.There's even been co-ordination this week in the shape of Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies three nights running, first from Barenboim and now from Christian Thielemann. A failsafe interpreter of the Austro-German Read more ...
David Nice
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts Read more ...
David Nice
They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a livescreening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers might be reacting out there, but there was no interval in the two-and-three-quarter-hour Das Rheingold to go and test the waters. I'm hoping that Tolkein lovers enjoyed the mythological gimmicks of the tetralogy's "preliminary evening" opera even if it offers the driest speech-song and the least knock-out impact of the four in terms of human emotion Read more ...
David Nice
All 23 of Massenet's mature operas boast memorably melodious quarters of an hour and fastidious orchestration, so why Werther’s special status as a repertoire staple? Three or four great arias may have been enough to clinch it. There’s also the fact that the source, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, confers a highbrow status the opera, a pale shadow of the original, doesn't really deserve. At any rate it came over last night as no more than an after-dinner mint to a dark day's dining on scorpions.The chief reason for going to this third revival of Benoît Jacquot‘s under-nuanced Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An old subversive Soviet joke has Karl Marx coming back from hell, facing enormous crowds of very unhappy people and telling them, "Oh I'm so sorry – it was only an idea." But what an idea and ideas, as Bettany Hughes's film reminded us. She took us on a very brisk canter through Marx’s life (1818-1883) and times, first visiting Trier where he was born into a bourgeois Jewish family, although his rather radical father had converted to Lutheranism to make his professional life easier under the Prussians. Evidently the young Marx was dashing, dapper and privileged – with a portrait to Read more ...