Berlin
Nick Hasted
If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music’s psychological cost might have resulted. Ina Weisse’s film is more incremental and naturalistic, as violin teacher Anna (Nina Hoss) gives special attention to teenage protégé Alexander (Ilja Monti), to the jealous resentment of son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev), while nervously returning to the stage herself.Weisse starts with tableaus of music work at Anna’s Berlin conservatoire. When camera and characters get close-up, the trouble – and, sometimes, loving connection – starts. Because music is in Anna’s family’s bones, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The three Canadians Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Jason Beck (Chilly Gonzales) and Tiga Sontag (aka just Tiga, who exec produced this album) are each so laden with image and persona it is easy to forget they are musicians sometimes. Hawtin has since the early Nineties not only brought techno to mass audiences, but adorned it with all kinds of conceptual and design spectacle in arenas and galleries as much as in nighclubs. Sontag too, has turned dance music into theatre to huge success, albeit in a much more knowing, camp sense ever since the turn of the millennium electroclash era. And the Read more ...
David Nice
Has there ever been a Cabaret as dangerous as this one? Rebecca Frecknall’s disorienting take on the Kander and Ebb classic pulls you in and spits you out in a reinvention that pushes or dissolves boundaries at every twist and turn.Transforming a theatre into the Kit Kat Club, Berlin, early 1930s, is nothing new: the Edinburgh University Theatre Company did it in their Bedlam home 40 years ago (I was merely a singing waiter; others more centre-stage have gone on to great things). Nostalgia doesn't, however, blind me to the fact that what's been done to the Playhouse Theatre may well have led Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Ask someone in the early 2000s to predict which cities were going to be influential in electronic music in coming years, and it’s unlikely many would have picked Kampala, Uganda. But here we are. Across African countries, vernacular electronic forms and versions of DJ culture have been bubbling for a good while, but in Uganda, catalysed by two immigrants – Greek-Armenian Arlen Dilsizian and Belgian Derek Debru, founders of the Boutiq Electroniq club and Nyege Nyege festival and label – misfits from these various scenes, and indeed from none, have gathered, influencing one another and any Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s funny how the most high tech music can sound very traditional. In the case of producer / instrumentalist / occasional singer Ziúr, it’s the tradition of her hometown of Berlin that is expressed in her whirrs, clangs and mutated voices. Here – as on her previous records with British labels Planet Mu and Objects Limited and Canada’s Infinite machine, and like most of the roster of her new home, Berlin’s PAN – the sound palette is hyper-detailed: glistening, crackling and booming with the kind of abyssal vastness and obsessional detail that only today’s processing power can generate. But Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The term most often used about Berlin director Angela Schanelec’s filmmaking seems to be “elliptical”, and her latest film, I Was at Home, But..., which won the Best Director award at Berlinale 2019, is no exception. Approaching it is like an associative process – you absorb elusive hints, as much from visual elements as from any suggestion of story, trying to gradually assemble something, almost like creating a mosaic. Except that Schanelec determinedly avoids endorsing any final picture: links are left open, and narrative, such as it is, is very much secondary to mood.And the mood of I Read more ...
David Nice
There are so many good ideas, so much talented hard work from the singers of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and two dancers, such a cinematic use of the Royal Opera House, that Isabelle Kettle’s interweaving of two Brecht/Weill mini masterpieces ought to work better than it does. In jettisoning much about the fantastical scenarios of flawed human beings on quests to make or spend money in paradises that turn out to be hells, favouring instead the deconstruction of female and male archetypes, you need to be clear about your intentions, streamline their presentation. Too often here Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy – Christian Petzold’s optimistic romantic tragedy Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence. It seems, at first glance, a dismayingly insubstantial work for the maker of such discomfiting German cultural and political critiques as Yella (2007), Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018), but nothing could be further from the truth. Undine (Paula Beer) is an apparently self-sufficient Berlin freelance historian in her mid-twenties who lectures on the city's Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Bach: The English Suites Paolo Zanzu (harpsichord) (Musica Ficta)I’m a recent convert to Bach keyboard music played on harpsichord, having recently immersed myself in the Erato box set containing Zuzana Růžičková’s Bach recordings made in the 1970s. Her preferred instrument was an iron-framed modern harpsichord, whereas Paolo Zanzu uses a 1995 copy of a German original built in 1735. It makes a soft, warm sound, his readings of Bach’s six English Suites correspondingly friendly and intimate. With a piano it’s easier to concentrate on Bach’s harmonic arguments, but the harpsichord allows Read more ...
David Nice
It seems right that (arguably) the greatest orchestra in the world has (unarguably) the best livestreaming and archive service. Thanks to a vital musicians’ Covid testing set-up, the Berlin Philharmoniker is even more supreme online now that it can field a full team for a work as opulently hard-hitting as Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, without distancing – pairs of string players share stands – even if also, still, without a live audience. The programming has been uncommonly interesting lately, with a "Golden Twenties" series featuring rich and rare repertoire, but even a one-off guest Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Hot on the heels of her 2019 triumph Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature continues a perfect track record; this is yet another gorgeous and perceptive film, told from a determinedly female perspective but with a wisdom that is all-embracing. Having started her career with films about children (Water Lilies, Tomboy), before moving to teenagers (Girlhood) and then adults (Portrait), Sciamma now takes on three generations at once – a girl, her mother and grandmother – to consider the threads of memory, personality and time that connect them. Her approach is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Joerg and Anna Winger’s gripping drama of East Germany, a loose portrait set over the final decade of that country’s existence, has reached its culmination, and this first episode of Deutschland 89 landed us right in the unpredictable maelstrom of history. Following on from Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86, the thriller and espionage elements of those two predecessors have been folded with true aplomb into the real-life events that reached their unforeseen conclusion with crowds of East Germans breaking through the Berlin Wall – or the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, as it’s occasionally Read more ...