Hungary
Maestro or Mephisto - The Real Georg Solti, BBC FourSaturday, 10 November 2012
The one thing you can rely on when a programme is billed as "The Real" something-or-other is that that is exactly what you won't get. This film, commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Hungarian conductor, did a thorough job of tracing... Read more... |
DVD: ConfidenceTuesday, 03 July 2012
Motives of secrecy and fear, set against the background of a totalitarian system, have been crucial elements in Hungarian director István Szabó’s work. Internationally he may be best known for his Oscar-nominated collaborations with Klaus Maria... Read more... |
The Turin HorseSunday, 03 June 2012
The Turin Horse begins with a prologue in which a novelistic male narrator, talking over a black screen, describes the probably apocryphal incident that caused Friedrich Nietzsche to suffer a terminal mental breakdown (the more likely reason being... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Budapest: Hay Goes to HungaryThursday, 10 May 2012
Four weeks ahead of its core event in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye the world’s leading festival of literature, ideas and the arts rolls into Budapest. Celebrating its 25th year and 15th location, this is the first time “the Woodstock of the... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Human League, The Leopard Lounge, Eastern Bloc Funk ExperienceSunday, 08 April 2012
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... Read more... |
2011: Tintin, Tallinn and a Year of SurprisesTuesday, 27 December 2011
The surprises linger longest. The things you’re not prepared for, the things of which you’ve got little foreknowledge. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes was amazing, and she was equally astonishing live, too. Fleet Foxes's Helplessness Blues was more than a... Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Saraste, Barbican HallSaturday, 17 December 2011
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages... Read more... |
DVDs for Christmas: Film and TVThursday, 15 December 2011
Over the year we have reviewed many a new film and television drama in theartsdesk's Disc of the Day slot. As our series of DVD recommendations comes round to the movies, we have chosen to concentrate not on individual titles but box sets. For... Read more... |
Louis Lortie, Wigmore HallMonday, 05 December 2011
It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the second half of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s even bigger all... Read more... |
Davies, London Symphony Orchestra, Zhang, Barbican HallThursday, 10 November 2011
Highly finished literary tales of doomed nixies, like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, seem to have prompted reams of bad art but plenty of mellifluous music. Not even all of that is on the same level. Viennese late-Romantic Zemlinsky's... Read more... |
DVD: Red PsalmThursday, 20 October 2011
They don’t make films like Red Psalm any more. They rarely made them then either. In Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó imagined a corner of a Hungarian field in 1898 in which the forces of revolution were pitted against the uniformed, armed and often... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Lazić, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer/ Audience Choice PromSaturday, 03 September 2011
"Don't expect polish," announced Ivan Fischer apologetically. "Things vill go rrrong. We may start pieces again." The tuba had been turned into a tombola. The percussionists were playing their buttocks. Someone else was blowing a Hungarian... Read more... |
