Austria
David Nice
Give me some air! Stop screaming at me! Those are not exclamations I'd have anticipated from the prospect of a Vienna Philharmonic Mahler Ninth Symphony, least of all under the purposeful control of Ádám Fischer. Less well known here than his younger brother Iván - both have been admirably outspoken critics of Orbán's regime - Ádám has impressed with his stunning Budapest Wagner and his masterful Mahler cycle as chief conductor of the little-known Düsseldorf Symphony. Maybe if he'd brought the Düsseldorfers here, there would have been more of a sense of inner feeling; maybe the Viennese are Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much has been made of Iceman’s characters speaking the ancient Rhaetic dialect, unsubtitled, but that’s never a problem: Felix Randau’s no-frills revenge thriller doesn’t need any words. The juiciest bits of dialogue are the various grunts and shrieks uttered by the protagonist Kelab (Juergen Vogel). His outbursts are something else: pained, guttural explosions of rage and terror – if there was a prize for best shouting in a film, Vogel would be a shoo-in. Kelab is based on Ötzi, the "Tyrolean iceman", whose frozen, mummified body was uncovered by a pair of German tourists in 1991: Iceman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hedy Lamarr really ought to be the poster girl for the Time's Up movement. “Any girl can look glamorous," she once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was the model for Catwoman and Disney's Snow White. It's less well known that she patented an invention which led to the creation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If she were alive now, she might be sitting on a £30 billion dollar fortune. As a star of the golden age of Hollywood, her story can be read as a lifelong laboratory experiment in the pros and cons of looking like a million dollars.That capacious narrative has been Read more ...
David Nice
You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young. To witness his performance with players from the Royal Swedish Opera in the beautiful, neo-Renaissance Grünewald Halll of the art deco Stockholm Konserthuset last November was, I imagine, a stroke of luck akin to seeing Mahler or Richard Strauss conduct Read more ...
graham.rickson
The John Adams Edition Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by John Adams, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Kirill Petrenko and Sir Simon Rattle (Berliner Philharmoniker)That the Berlin Philharmonic can release a lavish four-disc collection of music by a contemporary American composer is testament to how much the orchestra has evolved since the Karajan years. Claudio Abbado kickstarted the ensemble's rejuvenation, the process continuing under Rattle’s leadership. John Adams was the orchestra’s Composer in Residence during the 2016-2017 season, and conducts a winning reading of his vast, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times. For one thing, whatever sanity-altering toxin is affecting voters the world over recently burst over the Austrian skies to leave that country with a likely coalition between right and far-right parties, not just bonded by anti-Islamic and anti-migration sentiment, but leaving anyone with an interest in cultural funding fearing the worst. More than that, the sudden death in July of the Viennale’s charismatic, fiercely Read more ...
stephen.walsh
About The Magic Flute there’s a certain amount of domestic theatre and a great deal of pantomime. It calls for fun, sentiment, movement, a measure of spectacle, and plenty of direct communication with the audience. But like the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it needs no excuse, no big ideas.At Longborough, Thomas Guthrie flirts briefly with such things. A boy lies in bed reading, I suppose, a fairy-tale; Papageno appears brushing his teeth; Tamino and Pamina come on, inexplicably, as puppets (that return momentarily for the ordeals). But these are fleeting concepts, swiftly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.Word of the suicide of the famous writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte hastened as rapidly around the globe as any news could, Read more ...
David Nice
Restlessness in a good sense was the keynote of Elisabeth Leonskaja's latest revelatory recital. At 71, the Russian pianist, now an Austrian citizen, has all the supreme mastery it takes to make the volatility work: perfect weight and balance, miraculous rhythmic articulation, the right sense of space and freedom, and the ability to see where a line or a movement is going. Expect only the big, clear sound which is one of her trademarks - all-enveloping in the turbulent Capriccios of Brahms's Op. 116 set - and you can be startled by the kind of bounces and skips which made her Schubert a thing Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ebullient, prolific, loquacious and a charmingly enthusiastic historian both in print and for television, Simon Sebag Montefiore has turned his attention to the pivotal city of Vienna, nourished equally by the Danube and its central geographical position in Europe.Images, both interior and exterior, were punctuated by our intrepid explorer-historian, characteristically garbed in bright blue shirt, giving scale to street and landscape, and easily picked out by his trademark jaunty straw hat as he walked through imperial Vienna. It was history experienced on foot, matching intellectual and Read more ...
David Nice
"Because the world has outlived its own downfall, it nevertheless needs art." Paul Celan's words stand alongside Anselm Kiefer's Jacob's Dream, part of a stunning Surrealism-centric exhibition in the foyer of Salzburg's second and more amenable festival venue, the Haus für Mozart. What a meaningful motto it turned out to be for both of this year's major festival offerings, good and bad.That downfall must have seemed final to the 80-year-old Richard Strauss as bombing curtailed the world premiere of his penultimate opera, Die Liebe der Danae, in 1944. Yet this far from shallow "cheerful Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the album featuring Simple Minds’ first Top Twenty single, “Promised You a Miracle”, 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was aptly titled. After the success of the next single “Glittering Prize”, it hit number three in the album charts. Five albums in and three years after their first single, Simple Minds were indeed touching gold.Whether their breakthrough into the mainstream was a miracle or not depends on how the band is seen. The album preceding New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was actually issued as two separate records: Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call. Each featured a Read more ...