Germany
DVD: FuryFriday, 20 February 2015
"Blood Brothers" is the title of the featurette included with this DVD. It tells how Brad Pitt and his fellow cast-members learned what it felt like to be the crew of a World War Two tank – Fury is the name painted on the gun of their battle-scarred... Read more... |
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, English National OperaSunday, 08 February 2015
After seven glorious Welsh National Opera performances in the summer of 2010, it looked like curtains for Richard Jones’s Mastersingers (or Meistersinger, as it then was, sung in German): no DVD, no co-productions. The director seemed happy with... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: Pop Art, BBC FourSaturday, 31 January 2015
Some documentaries can feel like trying to view a desert landscape through a telescope. The need for tight focus on too large a subject can leave you constantly aware that there’s important stuff going on out of eyeshot. The stuff you can’t see... Read more... |
Touched by Auschwitz, BBC TwoWednesday, 28 January 2015
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person... Read more... |
Taken at Midnight, Theatre Royal HaymarketTuesday, 27 January 2015
The mother, so often a sentimental figure in art, can be as tenacious and bold as any animal when protecting her young. Mark Hayhurst's play about Irmgard Litten, mother of Hans, a lawyer who cross-examined Hitler – and won – in 1931,... Read more... |
Holocaust: Night Will Fall, Channel 4Sunday, 25 January 2015
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was... Read more... |
Surviving the Holocaust - Freddie Knoller's War, BBC TwoFriday, 23 January 2015
First-hand testimonial is surely the building block of history. Whether it’s in the form of written diaries or the television memory, it allows us to go back to the very basics as we, the reader-viewer, effectively re-experience the life of the... Read more... |
DVD: A Most Wanted ManTuesday, 13 January 2015
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a... Read more... |
Das Paradies und die Peri, LSO, Rattle, BarbicanMonday, 12 January 2015
Sir Simon Rattle wants you to hear Das Paradies und die Peri. He is convinced that Schumann’s oratorio is one of the great undiscovered masterpieces of the Romantic era. To that end, he has led performances with the Berlin Philharmonic and an... Read more... |
The Grand Tour, Finborough TheatreThursday, 08 January 2015
Everything about this little-known and largely forgotten show suggests epic, starting with the title: multiple locations, ambitious concept, big ideas. But like so much of Jerry Herman's work - and the received wisdom on it is invariably wide of the... Read more... |
Best of 2014: ArtTuesday, 30 December 2014
We commemorated the centenary of the start of the First World War and we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year also marked a 70th anniversary for the D-Day landings. So it was oddly fitting that the London art... Read more... |
Bach B minor Mass, Trinity College Choir, OAE, Layton, St John's Smith SquareTuesday, 23 December 2014
While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally... Read more... |
