Germany
james.woodall
Another 400 films, another rush for seats, another biting wind from Vladivostock: the 61st Berlin Film Festival - the Berlinale - has packed ’em in in the centre of town at Potsdamer Platz (mainly) over the last 10 days and hoped to light up the inevitably gloomy middle of February, and almost succeeded. But boy were there some tedious competition films this year.2011's Golden Bear Jodaieye Nader az Simin ("Nader and Simin: A Separation", the lead actors Leila Hatami and Peyman Moadi pictured below) was a hot contender from the moment the Iranian film hit Berlin. Director Jafar Panahi, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The Detroit electro-techno duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald aka Drexciya never gave away their secrets easily. Almost completely anonymous and never photographed during their 10-year existence – which ended with Stinson's 2002 death after a long illness – they surrounded their music with a complex mythos and mischievous wit comprehensible only to a small, obsessive cult audience. Only now are they getting wider appreciation, with a new generation of electronic musicians like Rustie hugely influenced by their sparse electronic funk, and the art world being introduced to their Read more ...
fisun.guner
After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and while Parreno’s skills as a film-maker were pretty evident from that first UK solo exhibition, Gordon’s talents must surely lie elsewhere - that is, outside the frame. Neither technically ambitious nor visually seductive, his films are not even meant to be seen in their entirety, certainly not his 1993 24-hour Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. Last night’s opening of the Royal Opera’s revival of its jaunty 2008 production fielded in a splendid cast a tremendous Witch, Jane Henschel, the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Now that The X Factor's finally over, can we please get back to heaping opprobrium on the only Wagner that really deserves it? In the coming year opera houses around the world will be deciding whether to temporarily bankrupt themselves in 2013 to celebrate the composer's centenary. Opera Australia have announced a £10 million Ring Cycle. LA Opera and the Met are in the middle of new bank-busting cycles (£20 million and £15 million respectively). No doubt ours will want in some way to follow suit. Yet they would do well to steer clear. We cannot afford it. And we should not be encouraging this Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The last time I saw Wolfgang Holzmair in concert (at last year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, delivering one of the finest live performances of Winterreise I have heard) the silence that followed the cycle lasted almost 30 seconds – an absolute age where a fidgety post-concert audience is concerned. Last night’s programme of Schumann saw Holzmair finish and pause, hands raised prayerfully, holding his listeners’ attention like so many butterflies within his cupped palms. The release that followed was ecstatic, a spontaneous homage to the musical and narrative mastery of this extraordinary singer. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They have period names in the foreign country we call the past. In last night’s documentary about a brilliant wartime trick practised upon Hitler, we came across a coroner called Sir Bentley Purchase, a love interest called Peternel Hankins and a Welsh tramp with the stirringly patriotic if implausible name of Glyndwr Michael. Charles Cholmondeley, one of the authors of the deception, would even draw attention to the absurd discrepancy between the way his name looked and sounded. More or less the only person in this entire story who didn't sound like a character in a novel was Major Read more ...
fisun.guner
There is probably only one thing that Ann Widdecombe and I have ever agreed upon: we both think it might be a really good idea to stick William Wilberforce on the Fourth Plinth. Why not? It’s nice to have contemporary art in Trafalgar Square, of course, but surely there are few other reforming characters as worthy as the great abolitionist? And Wilberforce was many other things besides – though not all of them would necessarily impress the nation to quite the same degree.In his youth – which here means before the age of 25 when he had already spent a year as a Tory MP in the county of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
When Riccardo Chailly (b 1953) left the Royal Concertgebouw for the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Richard Morrison said it was as if Bill Gates had ditched Microsoft for Aeroflot. The Gewandhaus has since become one of the lustiest of orchestral beasts in the world. Chailly and his orchestra make a rare appearance at the Barbican next Thursday and like all his previous visits it's likely to be a pretty unmissable event.I met up with Chailly in 2008 in his vast Gewandhaus office that overlooks the square where the first stirrings of East German revolt were witnessed 20 years ago. Chailly became chief Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious Clytemnestra. Spare in story as they are, classical myths contain overwhelmingly strong capsules of emotion. It’s because Pina Bausch was so acute at extracting for dance-theatre the most piercing emotions that I find myself hostile to the frigidity of her dance-opera Iphigenie auf Tauris.Showing at Sadler’s Wells this week, Iphigenie - created a quarter- Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You can do that? With that! And you're going to stick that where?! We were an audience of gawpers and grimacers, smilers and starers. Who knew that so much could be done with the back of a violin? Or that the metallic screw at the heel of the bow could play little melodies Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country. Cuts in state subsidy do not end quality. They improve it. Last night's innovative and exquisite recital of early Romantic German Read more ...