thu 24/07/2025

Germany

Tannhäuser, Bayreuth Festival

'Tannhäuser' at Bayreuth: replaces Wagner’s 13th-century troubadour castle on the Wartburg with an AVL biogas plant

In 1981, when I last came to Bayreuth, the festival still seemed to be a battleground between the German Left and Right, between the blame faction and the guilt faction, between the commie East and the fat-cat West. Plus ça change. Without quite...

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Thomas Struth: Photography 1978-2010

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DVD: Dancing Dreams

Youngsters' contact: a sweet, beguiling and genuinely enlightening film about the pull of theatre

This is the one DVD of all the recent issues of dance on film that will show you simply and honestly the rigour and the beguilement of how people are drawn to dance, and what dance draws out of them. A straight documentary about the dance-theatre...

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Sylvie Guillem, 6000 Miles Away, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance...

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Milking classical music in Dortmund

What does it take to get the masses into the concert hall? Here's an ingenious marketing campaign which is both mad and clever (though hardly an enticement if you're lactose intolerant). All I can say is, lucky cows, being force-fed Philippe...

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Luise Miller, Donmar Warehouse

Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784...

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theartsdesk in Göttingen: Handel With an Umlaut

Georg Friedrich Händel of Halle probably never came here. Other great men certainly did: long after the official foundation of Göttingen's Georg August University in 1734 - the year in which the composer wrote a masterpiece, Ariodante, in another...

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DVD: Speer and Hitler: The Devil's Architect

Albert Speer was Hitler’s most high-ranking war minister, but just how much was he complicit in Nazi atrocities? Thirty years after his death, and 16 after Gitta Sereny’s controversial biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Speer remains a...

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Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Nuremberg's beloved Hans Sachs (Gerald Finley) addresses the midsummer crowds

So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year...

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Perspectives: Hugh Laurie Down by the River, ITV1/ Operation Crossbow, BBC Two

America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster...

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The Damnation of Faust, English National Opera

Anything goes in the wacky world of Berlioz’s Faust story. It’s a heaven and hell of a lot better than Gounod’s, but it isn’t an opera, it isn’t an oratorio and it certainly isn’t the gospel according to Goethe. So Terry Gilliam, ENO’s latest wild-...

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Werther, Royal Opera

We all knew about the throat problems and the vocal-cord-threatening surgery. But Rolando Villazón's post-operation return to the Royal Opera House last night appeared to reveal heart issues too. At least that was the only way I could explain the...

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