Germany
Blu-ray: Werner Herzog - Radical DreamerTuesday, 13 February 2024
Weird, quirky Hollywood Werner can obscure the fierce visionary who warred with Kinski in the jungle. This is even true of many of his own features since moving to LA which, like his peer Wenders, usually pale next to his reverent, supernal... Read more... |
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024
The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+ review - painful and poignant account of the Eighth Air Force's bombing campaignThursday, 25 January 2024
“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German... Read more... |
Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer review - the visionary director's extraordinary careerFriday, 19 January 2024
“It’s an injustice of nature that I haven’t become an athlete and it’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” says German director Werner Herzog, aged 81, sounding characteristically intense.Who else, muses Wim Wenders, one of the many... Read more... |
Polyphony/OAE, Layton, St John's Smith Square review - truncated triumphSaturday, 23 December 2023
Prior to their Messiah, due this evening, Stephen Layton’s choir Polyphony brought a version of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio to the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square. You can of course slice and serve Bach’s majestic 1730s combination of... Read more... |
London Handel Players, Butterfield, Wigmore Hall review - Bach with bite for ChristmasTuesday, 19 December 2023
We think of the Wigmore Hall as a venue for intimate revelations, but in the right hands it can feel like a stadium. Last night’s all-Bach programme of festive music from the London Handel Players managed to embrace both moods.On a bill that began... Read more... |
Anselm review - post-war German reckonings in 3DSunday, 10 December 2023
Water glassily reflects in a bridal train, the sun moves between trees, giving way to metal book-leaves, and inside a warehouse so vast he cycles through it, stored cliffs of Anselm Kiefer’s work loom over him. Wim Wenders’ 3D cameras bring you... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Pandora's BoxSunday, 29 October 2023
The story has often been told of how GW Pabst cast the American starlet Louise Brooks in his Berlin-made Pandora’s Box (1929) and fashioned his version of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu plays” around her transfixing performance as the helpless pan-sexual... Read more... |
Frang, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Jurowski, Barbican review - on the summitTuesday, 19 September 2023
These days British orchestras count themselves lucky if they can see, and plan, five years ahead. In Bavaria they do things rather differently. As the ducal court ensemble, and later the house band of the Munich opera, the Bayerisches... Read more... |
First Person: the Bayerisches Staatsorchester's Managing Director Guido Gärtner on its 500th anniversaryTuesday, 19 September 2023
Nine cities in seven countries; all in all, eleven concerts, on top of that, an appearance at home in Munich. Celebrating its 500th anniversary, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is currently on an extended journey. We have been looking forward with... Read more... |
Afire review - a moral reckoning by the BalticWednesday, 16 August 2023
Experts in irony tend to see life as faintly absurd, relatively meaningless and usually circular. They’re too self-aware to be neurotic and live life in short bursts, letting out little private snorts of dry, amused exasperation at frequent... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Klar!80 - celebrating Düsseldorf’s early Eighties undergroundSunday, 06 August 2023
Düsseldorf’s most famous band is Kraftwerk. Neu!, La Düsseldorf, and, a little later, D.A.F also helped mark-out the west German city as the home of musical boundary pushers – folks doing their own thing. Fellow Düsseldorf residents Die Toten Hosen... Read more... |
