Poland
David Nice
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more than twice that long, but it's worth every riveting or disconcerting minute thanks largely – but by no means exclusively – to the encyclopedic range of Isabelle Huppert."Star vehicle" may be a term at odds with this sort of total ensemble theatre, but that's in part what it is for Huppert (pictured below). This is a triptych like no Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
We don’t hear much about composer Stanisław Moniuszko in the West, but in Poland he’s considered a key figure in the history of opera. Moniuszko’s statue stands at the entrance of the National Opera House in Warsaw, and inside he’s depicted by several busts and portraits. In the second week of May, the venue hosted not only the Ninth International Stanisław Moniuszko Vocal Competition but also – in its Moniuszko Auditorium – Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor), one of his most famous works.Straszny dwór, as presented here in a vibrant new staging from David Pountney (picutred below), Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After opening with a flurry of wobbly, woozy, Durutti Column-ish guitar, A Different Life travels through nine distant, foggy ruminations which suggest dissociation. Titles like “Far Apart”, “It’s Getting Better”, “Dive” and “Drive-by” posit Olivier Heim as a songwriter displaced from the day-to-day. And, atmospherically, his debut album reinforces the impression. With his sigh of a voice, it’s clear Heim’s music mirrors his moods. Indeed, on “Ocean”, he sings of a sleepy feeling he thought was left behind.A Different Life makes its case with sparse instrumentation: the treated guitar to the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dan Cruickshank, that enthusiastic architectural historian, who likes nothing better than some scaffolding he can clamber up to get a better look, revealed that as a child of seven he moved some 60 years ago to Warsaw with his family. His father, then a member of the Communist Party, was posted to the Polish capital by the Daily Worker as their correspondent.The young Cruickshank took to his adventure with alacrity. He precociously drew the view over Old Warsaw visible from his family’s apartment. Visiting his old home 60 years later, there was the view again to compare to his preserved Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lautari Vol 67: Live 2014 features Michael Zak on clarinet, flute and shawn, with bassist Marcin Pospieszalski, fiddle player Maciej Filipczuk and the prepared piano and accordion of Jacek Halas.That instrument list gives you an idea of the musical territory you’re travelling through. Just as Jabusz Prusinowski Kompania, of which Zak is a member, specialises in antique Polish styles, so Lautari set about blowing wind, striking keys and drawing bows across a musical landscape of angular and contemporary arrangements of deeply rural tunes and dances.Sonically, they shape-shift from antique Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a brilliantly sunny January afternoon amidst a general drama of rain at an industrial park outside Aix-en-Provence, and members of a production team are gathering for the first time in the back yard of the festival’s rehearsal studios. Some have met earlier, and three of the five singers who’ll be arriving shortly know each other thanks to the connections already made through the European Network of Opera Academies. But it’s a journey into the unknown with ENOA’s fifth anniversary co-production, which will only reach its proper beginning in tonight’s Aix premiere, and hopefully develop Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 testimonials will disappear into a past.So it was more than fitting that Touched by Auschwitz should see historian Laurence Rees (whose past films like The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are as authoritative as they come) following the lives of six survivors through to the present day, examining not least Read more ...
David Nice
If Brahms’s First Symphony has long been dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth”, then the 23-year-old Rachmaninov’s First merits the label of “Tchaikovsky’s Seventh” (a genuine candidate for that title, incidentally, turns out to be a poor reconstruction from Tchaikovsky’s sketches by one Bogatryryev). Yet unlike the other near-contemporary works in last night’s programme, Szymanowski’s Concert Overture and Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, it has a disturbing individuality, a heavy heart that is truly worn “inside out”, as Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long Rachmaninov festival with his London Philharmonic Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If you were to wander in off the streets and catch this band randomly you would be amazed to find such accomplished musicians. But this wasn’t any old gig, it was one of the masters of jazz, Tomasz Stanko. It should have been one of the highlights of the EFG London Jazz Festival and expectations were running high.Stanko is known for his lyrical trumpet playing, reminiscent of mid-period Miles Davis, and has been a towering figure in Polish jazz. For the uninitiated, Poland has been one the centres of jazz since the 1950s. “Jazz was freedom for us, the opposite of communism”, as Stanko pointed Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Pawel Pawlikowski took a leap into the unknown with Ida. The reasons for advance box office scepticism were clear: the film was black and white, made in an old-fashioned ratio, in Polish (until then the director had only worked in English), and more than bleak in subject. But the risks have more than paid off: as the highest grossing Polish-language film in the US ever, Ida has proved his most commercially successful work to date.And critically, too, a category I suspect Pawlikowski is much more concerned with. It’s on the shortlist for next month’s European Film Awards in both best film and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sometimes a film has you swooning from the very first frame, and Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's fifth narrative feature is one such film. The story of a nun's self-discovery is captured in delicate monochrome by cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski (Margaret) and Lukasz Zal, who render the often austere surroundings with great, gob-stopping imagination in a film whose beauty is enough to make you bow down and praise Jesus, whatever your religious proclivities.Agata Trzebuchowska (mesmerising in her acting debut) is Anna, a novice nun in early 1960s Poland preparing to take her vows. She's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble may well be the film that foretold the end of Communism in Poland. Its script gestation period lasted almost 14 years, starting from 1962, and though its official release in 1977 was kept to a minimal level by the authorities, even in that form it’s believed that almost a fifth of the nation’s population saw the work.Aleksander Scibor-Rylski’s script plays loosely with the Citizen Kane narrative device of hunting down the personal truth behind a past legend. In this case it’s a socialist hero bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, centre, main Read more ...