Poland
theartsdesk preview: Tauron Nowa Muzyka Festival, Katowice, PolandWednesday, 24 July 2013
The city of Katowice in Upper Silesia, Poland, was once an epic industrial hub on the western edge of the Soviet bloc. It was a gigantic centre for coal and steel that was awesome in scale. Those days are long gone yet it seems fitting that one of... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Warsaw: A New Jewish MuseumSunday, 19 May 2013
The Ghetto Heroes Square in the Muranow district of Warsaw is a bleak place surrounded by drab apartment blocks. But at its centre there’s now a new building that attracted over 15,000 visitors in the first two days of its opening on 20 and 21 April... Read more... |
The Genius of Marie Curie, BBC TwoSaturday, 04 May 2013
Marie Curie must rank right up there among the world’s achievers of greatness. She certainly wasn’t one of those who had it “thrust upon ’em”. In fact, fate stacked the odds against her achieving the eminence she did in just about every way possible... Read more... |
Kinoteka: The Polish Film FestivalThursday, 14 March 2013
Over the last few years the Poles have been pumping money into the arts, partly as a way of branding the country (it works according to their research – many of us are now as likely to think of jazz musicians as plumbers when we think of the country... Read more... |
Mørk, Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen, Royal Festival HallFriday, 08 March 2013
Curious and curiouser. Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto, centrepiece of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s latest Philharmonia concert celebrating the Polish master’s centenary, adds ballast to the idea that the composer, like Schoenberg and Tippett, burrowed into a... Read more... |
DVD: Battle of WarsawFriday, 01 March 2013
Veteran director Jerzy Hoffman is a chronicler of Polish history on the widest possible scale - still going strong, he turned 80 just after the 2011 3D release of Battle of Warsaw. His 1999 film With Fire and Sword caught earlier national heroics,... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Memories of LutosławskiSaturday, 26 January 2013
While the history of 20th-century music is undoubtedly the history of the 20th century – from the decadent expressionism of fin-de-siècle Berlin to the imagined surrealist worlds of 1920s Paris – few composers lived or wrote the century quite as... Read more... |
Spies of Warsaw, BBC FourThursday, 10 January 2013
It’s rare for a wartime drama not to hide behind an elliptic or poetic title. Spies of Warsaw - a two-part adaptation of Alan Furst’s 2008 novel of the same name - misses out on a place in the canon by a couple of years, but the looming Second World... Read more... |
Kavakos, Matsuev, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, BarbicanThursday, 20 December 2012
Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard... Read more... |
London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican HallWednesday, 19 December 2012
Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo. Even before embarking on the latest tranche of his (slightly curious) pairing of Szymanowski and Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been principal conductor since 2007, at the Barbican, the... Read more... |
Nosferatu, TR Warszawa and Teatr Narodowy, Barbican TheatreThursday, 01 November 2012
The famous count could not have a more theatrical pedigree if he tried. The great actor-manager Henry Irving – tall, preternaturally thin, with a fixed glare (due, apparently, to extreme myopia) and a grand manner which gave way, said Bernard Shaw,... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Ride, Juliette Gréco, Krzysztof Komeda, Priscilla ParisSunday, 19 August 2012
Ride: Going Blank AgainKieron TylerWhen Oxfordshire’s Ride arrived in the shops via Creation Records, they were the sonic little brothers to label-mates My Bloody Valentine. But their second album, 1992’s Going Blank Again, ploughed its own path,... Read more... |
