Czech
joe.muggs
A few of the things that are made to seem intensely erotic in this film: glue, bread, nails, carp, a satchel, a lift door, the death of a hen, the postal service, and in one particularly discombobulating scene, giant multi-headed shaving brushes. The Czech director Jan Švankmajer's allegiances couldn't be clearer: in the credits, he references Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, Freud, Buñuel, Max Ernst and 1930s Czech surrealist, psychoanalyst and author of Autosexualismus a Psycherotismus, Bohuslav Brouk. The almost-silent movie Conspirators of Pleasure (or, to give it its original title, Spiklenci Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In Rock’n’Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermit. The other, Václav Havel, gave up the life of an internationally acclaimed, domestically banned playwright to become a head of state. Only one of them was in the audience for the premiere at the Royal Court. And it wasn’t the hermit.A few days later, I had the great privilege of interviewing the dissident playwright who took the Czech Republic into NATO. The accidental president cut an unpresidential figure Read more ...
David Nice
When telling a complex musical story, handle with care. Interpreters need have no fear of composers who find selective, tone-friendly angles in their literary sources, like Janáček with Gogol’s Taras Bulba in last night’s searing finale, or Zemlinsky with Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the saturated climax of the previous evening. But what about Dvořák in oddball, potentially enriching mode, setting every jot and tittle of a folk ballad without actually using words or voices? Don’t, whatever you do, chop off the arms and legs, the fate that befalls the pretty maiden of The Golden Spinning Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Pavel Novák is a composer I know something about because he has been much played by the Schubert Ensemble, who were for a time resident at Cardiff University, where I teach. But broadly speaking his music is virtually unknown in the UK. When William Howard played these 24 Preludes and Fugues in St Giles' Cripplegate four years ago, hardly anyone came to hear them – perhaps not surprisingly. Obscure Czech piano music in a chilly City church in December is hardly the most enticing prospect. But now that Howard has made a brilliant, compelling recording of this 75-minute cycle, its composer’s Read more ...
David Nice
Here we are again. Marvel as you enter at the aptly gaudy lighting of Albert's colosseum, but know that unless your place is with the Prommers towards the front of the arena, the musicians will often sound as if they're in another galaxy - maybe one hinted at in the George Herbert words, if hardly the Judith Weir music, of the opening BBC commission, Stars, Night, Music and Light. Though spattered with Messiaenic orchestral paint - not to mention the obbligato sniffalong from my annoying neighbour - it felt like a very tame, rather olde-British gambit. Not so the great blazes and catastrophes Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week’s reviews include a generous Liszt anthology played by one of the 20th century’s most fondly remembered pianists. There’s a reissued box of Beethoven symphonies performed on modern instruments by one of the classiest European orchestras. Heading further north, we've a repackaged set of Sibelius symphonies with some essential extras.
Beethoven: The Symphonies Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus/Kletzki (Supraphon)
This lovely box set feels naughtily indulgent after the bracing, clean textures of Emanuel Krivine’s recent period-instrument Beethoven cycle. Paul Kletzki, born in Read more ...
David Nice
Its little-mermaid legend is enough to make the angels weep, given the bewitching gravity of Dvořák's masterpiece: a water nymph, caught between the human and supernatural worlds, condemns herself to eternal limbo for the sake of her erring princely lover.Heartstrings snapped two years ago in Melly Still's Glyndebourne production, due for a revival imminently; here at Grange Park, with another magical lake in sight but this time out of bounds, sympathies are engaged, and the eye drawn to designer-director Anthony McDonald's staging, but more fitfully. You come away smiling rather than wrung Read more ...
fisun.guner
This remarkable 1988 adaptation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice addressing the audience. “This is a story for children,” she tells us, before adding a teasing note: “Perhaps.” And that “perhaps” is worth noting, for Jan Švankmajer’s Surrealist Alice is full of cruel and violent incident.Paring the story down and dispensing with many of its most memorable characters – the Duchess, the Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat among them – the story becomes a disturbing duel between Alice and the White Rabbit. We first encounter the creature not hurrying across the lawn, Read more ...
David Nice
What a relief, for half of last night's semi-staged concert performance, to have left behind Britten's claustrophobic wood at English National Opera and to seek refuge in Smetana's Bohemian village inn of good cheer. Czech music's national comic treasure isn't an opera I feel the need to see in the opera house again; its dramaturgy is thinly spread, its vocal rewards second best to instrumental pleasures. So it was a joy to see a carefully reduced BBC Symphony Orchestra at the heart of things, hypersensitive to doyen JiříBělohlávek's canny interchange of village band and Wagnerian sounds. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Omid Djalili is a funny man with a funny provenance. There are not many stand-ups about who speak the languages of Presidents Havel and Ahmedinejad, who have played both Muslims and Jews without being either one or the other, whose CV includes stints performing Berkoff in Slovak and playing Whoopi Goldberg’s sidekick on NBC. In fact none. Djalili is by his own admission an accidental comedian. Though born (in 1965) in the United Kingdom, his Iranian roots made him an intriguing curiosity when he ditched acting for telling jokes. Then the War on Terror turned his comedy into a timely window on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Czech New Wave sprouted out of a fertile collaboration between film and fiction. Milan Kundera started out as a lecturer in film, lest we forget; one of his pupils was Miloš Forman. Both flew the communist nest to live and create abroad, which is why their names reverberate down the decades much more than those of the director Jiří Menzel and novelist Bohumil Hrabal, whose collaboration on Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967. They followed it with the delightful Larks on a String but, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia having put an end to the Prague Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Miloš Forman’s second feature, from 1965, catches the absurd atmosphere of the director’s native Czechoslovakia with both quiet desperation and raw tenderness. Heroine Andula (Hana Brejchová) works in a shoe factory in a town where women outnumber men by 16 times – until it is announced that an army division is to be relocated there, to the excitement of the local girls. But it turns out they are reservists and considerably older and plumper than expected. Forman excels himself in the dance-party sequence which shows the clumsiness and vulnerability of both the would-be seducers and their Read more ...