Germany
graham.rickson
Nightmarish images abound. There’s a giant plastic fish. There are several scary beards and the world’s most unconvincing bear costume. Often cited as one of the most unsettling of children’s entertainments, The Singing Ringing Tree is reissued by Network DVD along with The Tinderbox. Both were made in East Germany in 1957 and 1959 and became known when shown in serial form on BBC television in the 1960s.A naïve prince has to win the hand of a spoilt princess by obtaining said tree; into the mix come a malicious dwarf and a variety of helpful animals. There’s a lot of transformation going on Read more ...
David Nice
Ken Russell is, it seems, alive and well and directing Germans in Shakespeare. Actually, no, it's outgrown theatrical terrorist Thomas Ostermeier, but it might as well be our Ken to judge from the fitfully imaginative but repetitive images and the misappropriation of possibly fine actors. It seems old hat to us, but perhaps in two respects Londoners may strike Berliners as conservative. We still like our Hamlet in sequence - cut, usually, but with the expected beginning, middle and end. And we're still inclined to talk about Michael Sheen's Hamlet, or Rory Kinnear's, or Simon Russell Beale's Read more ...
David Nice
Theatregoers may be disappointed to read on and discover I mean Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, the only 19th-century Shakespeare-based opera in the German language to hold the stage. Which it did, and not just in Germany, until the arrival of Verdi's infinitely superior Falstaff. Is this that rare thing, German comedy in music between Beethoven's Eighth Symphony and Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel that's actually funny? Not really; Wagner's Die Meistersinger stands alone. But it's a piece which offers plenty of roles for student singers - with two leading sopranos, no Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having won early acclaim for his student feature film Under the Sun, Swiss-born but Germany-based director Baran bo Odar has taken a further leap forward with his commercial debut, The Silence. Based on a novel by Jan Costin Wagner, it's the story of the hunt for the killer of 13-year-old schoolgirl Sinikka Weghamm, whose disappearance uncannily mirrors that of 11-year-old Pia Lange 23 years earlier.Though the story is naturally concerned to some extent with police procedure, Odar's real interest is in the corrosive, unending effects of loss, loneliness, grief and guilt, which affect many of Read more ...
David Nice
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the one that can seem to whizz along under its own steam. At any rate, the impression Riccardo Chailly gave last night was of having fine-tuned his sleek Leipzig machine, turning on the engine and letting it fly. Only the extra stops I like to think a great conductor would usually have pulled out remained untouched.All of that was still enough for a packed and refreshingly diverse audience to stand and roar at the end, duly overwhelmed enough by the mighty engine that is the Seventh Symphony - straining at the leash 200 years on from its first Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Consequently, his first concert saw him throw out the Classical niceties and fill the hall with impish dash and boyish extremes.Beethoven's Second Symphony gained in stature. With a beefy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s obviously a coincidence. Backbeat, the story of The Beatles’ Hamburg days, their ill-fated bassist and John Lennon's art-school mate Stuart Sutcliffe hits the West End the same week that Martin Scorsese's George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World comes out. Even ignoring comparisons between the two, Backbeat is an incoherent mess.Sutcliffe’s story has become a perennial, not limited to Beatle book shelves. Granada TV’s Midnight Angel covered it in 1990. The BBC’s Stuart Sutcliffe - The Lost Beatle did so in 2005. The film Backbeat came out in 1994. It was directed by Iain Read more ...
fisun.guner
In recent years it seems we have seen an awful lot of Gerhard Richter. There have been three major exhibitions in London well within the last seven or eight years. One is hardly complaining, since there is always a demand to see “the world’s most influential living painter”, as he is often claimed to be (and not without some reason). But in each case these have, and with varied success, focused on one particular, narrow aspect of Richter’s output: portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, colour charts at the Serpentine, intimate “scrapbook” photos, many obscured with paint, at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Walls reclaim the soft-focus beats and keyboard wash that soundtracks the lounges of continental European hotels. The half-remembered chillout of their second album hazily drifts through a world where Ibiza, shoegazing and Krautrock travel on the same passport.Walls are Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis. Outside Walls, both have musical day jobs. Natalizia is the mainstay of the fuzzy, shoegazing-leaning Banjo or Freakout. Willis is a producer, and one of the people behind Allez-Allez, a regular dance podcast. Their first contact came in 2009, when Banjo or Freakout got the Allez-Allez remix Read more ...
David Nice
Does any city in the world, apart from Edinburgh or Venice, offer a better point of arrival by train than Cologne? There, above the steel and glass of the Hauptbahnhof, tower the twin spires of one of northern Europe’s noblest cathedrals. Walk across the square behind, past two excellent museums - another, the Wallraf-Richartz, is just down the street - and there’s the Philharmonie, one of the world’s best concert halls: its auditorium beneath Rhine level, the skateboarders on its roof silenced for the duration of each concert.I’m glad the 500-or-so-year-old Gürzenich-Orchestra of Cologne and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The clips as you load the DVD show women in extremis - women tied to the end of a rope, women being assaulted by mass male groping, women dancing on pointe with bleeding chunks of meat stuffed into their ballet shoes. Pina Bausch’s commentaries on women make her ballets disquieting viewing. Wim Wenders’ film, released as a 3D version in cinemas earlier this year, takes you into those deep, confused questions that Bausch’s dance works put.He had planned to make this film with Bausch, but her sudden death left him bereft. This film therefore became an elegy to her and her company, Tanztheater Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution intriguingly juggles the political and the personal. Their public stories are presented through the personal prisms of their surviving daughters, who recount, with some coolness and with very different perspectives, how their own lives were affected by the revolutionary choices that their mothers made.Children may open with Read more ...