Poland
Roderic Dunnett
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 Bernstein, or Gergiev’s own Shostakovich and (increasingly) Prokofiev.The first point, and Gergiev himself is in no doubt about this, is that Szymanowski belongs right up there with the best of them. An uncredited introductory note (the others, pithy and perceptive, are by Polish-Russian specialist Adrian Thomas) rightly points out that Szymanowski Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
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 man who is arguably not just a musical but a socio-political force in his native country and music director of the most famous opera and ballet company in the world was down that morning at the Russian Embassy in London, promoting his plans for a whole new complex (Mariinsky 2), which from May next year will dramatically enhance the prospects of an Read more ...
judith.flanders
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, to "glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness" – was, said everyone at the time, the obvious source of the Transylvanian Undead aristo as he was created on the page in Dracula by Irving’s business-manager Bram Stoker.TR Warszawa, too, has a theatrical pedigree. In London the company appeared two years ago to acclaim in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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, leaving the competition behind. Twenty years on, this smart, book-bound reissue adds most of the tracks from contemporary EPs and teams the album with a DVD of a March 1992 Brixton Academy live show.In the liner notes, guitarist – and future Oasis bassist, and current Beady Eye member - Andy Bell admits Ride were initially an “an amalgamation of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No matter how many war films come out about unbelievable suffering or astonishing heroism (and there are several around just now), there will always be more stories untold, hidden unlikely saints, overshadowed because some bigger movie did the job already. Schindler’s List did sterling work to lionise a “good” German; Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness compellingly brings to light a Polish sewer-worker who concealed 10 Jews from the Germans for 14 months underground.Holland doesn’t put a halo around Leopold “Poldek” Socha - when we first see him he is burgling a house, his potato face hard and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the English-speaking world we know most about France's Ursuline possessions of the 1630s through Aldous Huxley’s 1952 The Devils of Loudun, and of course through Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils. But a decade before Russell’s scandalous work, Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz treated the same subject in his 1960 film Mother Joan of the Angels, now re-released from Second Run in a restored version.Kawalerowicz was at the height of his powers, heading up the Kadr state film unit, which was the effective central axis of the Polish film school, that took off from the mid 1950s as political Read more ...
simon.broughton
With the yelling and posturing, R.U.T.A. are clearly a punk band, but it’s like no punk band you’ve ever heard before. The lyrics are in Polish, for one thing, and there are no guitars, but Middle Eastern lutes, archaic fiddles and a battery of percussion. They only formed last year, but already R.U.T.A. – a jokey acronym for the Movement of Utopia, Transcendence and Anarchy - have stirred up controversy.The conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice) party, second largest in the Polish parliament, tried to get them banned at a festival for being “anti-Polish and anti-Catholic”. Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
In the cool, dim, municipal modernist interior of Hornsey Town Hall you’re confronted with a neon sign: And Europe Will be Stunned. It's the title of the trilogy of films at the heart of this Artangel-commissioned show by Israel-born Yael Bartana. The films are split in location around the building in an exhibition which includes neon slogans and posters which can be taken away, bearing manifestos in different languages.The first film, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007), sees a young politician walk into the derelict and virtually desolate Decennial Stadium to deliver a contentious speech Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Remember when the movies used to celebrate sex, be it Julie Christie diving under the table to service Warren Beatty in Shampoo or Kathleen Turner selling the sizzle in Body Heat? No longer. These days, celluloid sex is a soulless, dispiriting affair even when the bodies on view are beauts. And so it is that hot on the heels of Michael Fassbender's descent into the carnal abyss in Shame comes Juliette Binoche in the Franco-German-Polish collaboration Elles, a film that makes notably heavy weather of the heavy breathing with which it begins.So much for fun, eh? And that's before one has Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Human League: Dare (Deluxe Edition)Thomas H GreenLast year, when I interviewed The Human League for theartsdesk, singer Susan Sulley said of Leonard Cohen, “He’s got a personality voice. It’s not a voice that’s going to pass the auditions on The X Factor but you wouldn’t mistake him for anyone else on the radio.”You would never mistake The Human League for anyone else either, a unique band born of Sheffield, punk and a love of Kraftwerk. It’s hard to credit that their hugest song, “Don’t You Want Me”, and its massively successful parent album Dare, were put together with little Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't much like aspirational music-making. I like my classical classical and my pop pop. Give me Boulez over Bernstein, Britney over Radiohead, any day. Having said that, I'd heard a piece by Jonny Greenwood at Reverb last month that had gone some way to winning me over. For a brief moment, Greenwood dropped the avant-garde pose that he's adopted for most of his other classical compositions and indulged in a bit of tender-hearted Romanticism that was nothing if not charming. This kind of honesty was not much in evidence in his team up with Penderecki last night at the Barbican. It's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects."I had to develop some new techniques to produce this kind of sound, using different kids of vibrato," Penderecki explains, down the phone from Kraków. "Using the tailpiece to play on with the double basses and celli, also playing directly on the bridge using the highest Read more ...