Hungary
theartsdesk at Budapest Wagner Days: Bayreuth on the DanubeSaturday, 01 July 2017
While Merkel's Germany has won back world leadership, Wagner's festival shrine at Bayreuth lost its post-war pre-eminence years ago. There hasn't been a strong Ring there since Kupfer's, which I was lucky enough to see in 1991, and things will only... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: My 20th CenturyTuesday, 06 June 2017
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s 1989 debut feature My 20th Century (Az én XX. Századom) opens on a grandiose scene depicting the first public demonstration of Thomas Edison’s electric light-bulb. We see the wonder of onlookers as they ... Read more... |
Sebestyén, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFHWednesday, 24 May 2017
This was a very fine concert indeed, plus a lot more. The first half was a very carefully planned series of unveilings around the theme of Béla Bartók and Hungarian folk music, the second an overwhelming performance of his Duke Bluebeard’s... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Beethoven, Rasmussen, Shostakovich, TchaikovskySaturday, 25 February 2017
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Op.110 and Op.111, with music by András Szöllösy and Gyula Csapó Gábor Csalog (piano) (BMC)Two Beethoven sonatas coupled with shorter pieces by a pair of contemporary Hungarian composers makes for an engaging mixture.... Read more... |
Unforgotten – Series 2 Finale, ITV / After Brexit: The Battle for Europe, BBC TwoFriday, 10 February 2017
From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and... Read more... |
Le Grand Macabre, LSO, Rattle, BarbicanSunday, 15 January 2017
The Big Mac – as in Ligeti's music-theatre fantasia on the possible death of Death – is here to stay. Back in 1990, three critics (I was one) were invited on to the BBC World Service to say which work from the previous decade we thought... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Budapest: Prophecy in the world's best concert hallSaturday, 10 December 2016
August 1914, September 2001, all of 2016: these are the dates Hungary's late, great writer Péter Esterházy served up for the non-linear narrative of his friend Péter Eötvös's Halleluja - Oratorium Balbulum. Its Hungarian premiere in one of the world... Read more... |
She Loves Me, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 08 December 2016
There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the... Read more... |
Prom 25: Gerhardt, Komlósi, Relyea, RPO, DutoitThursday, 04 August 2016
"Let the song speak, I pray," exhorts the Bard in the Prologue to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, "Listen in silence." This was a night for leaning in and listening closely, despite the large forces arrayed on stage for Dvořák’s Cello Concerto and Bartók’s... Read more... |
Cédric Tiberghien, Wigmore HallWednesday, 25 May 2016
This programme looked like a non-starter on paper, a long sequence of short Bartók dance settings, followed by a second half that was dominated by works for children from Bartók and Kurtág. But it worked, largely thanks to Cédric Tiberghien’s... Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFHWednesday, 11 May 2016
Sunlit golden mean or slightly hazy middle-of-the-road? Conductor-director Iván Fischer's fully costumed and imagined concert of The Magic Flute - or perhaps it would better have been titled Die ZauberFlute given its intelligent mix of sung German... Read more... |
Son of SaulFriday, 29 April 2016
In the world of the concentration camp, clothes or the lack of them sealed your fate. What you wore marked out your role; whether it was the blue-gray Waffen SS uniform, a doctor’s grubby white coat, the striped suits given to slave-workers, or your... Read more... |
