fri 11/10/2024

Switzerland

Q&A Special: Actor Bruno Ganz on playing Hitler

There is nothing quite like the Iffland-Ring in this country. The property of the Austrian state, for two centuries it has been awarded to the most important German-speaking actor of the age, who after a suitable period nominates his successor and...

Read more...

Hänsel und Gretel, Royal Opera review - not quite hungry enough

Once upon a time there was the terrible mouth of Richard Jones's Welsh National Opera/Met Hänsel und Gretel, finding an idiosyncratic equivalent to the original Engelbert Humperdinck's dark Wagnerian heart. Then came something very nasty in the...

Read more...

DVD: Mario

Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star...

Read more...

theartsdesk at the Lucerne Festival - all-Beethoven and all-Ravel concerts from the greatest

Like the Proms, but over a more concentrated time-span, in a much better concert hall and with a swankier audience paying a good deal more, the Lucerne Festival offers a summer parade of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors night after...

Read more...

Prom 45, Capuçon, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Nott - scintillating new era for Swiss magicians

Who is the greatest British conductor in charge of a major orchestra? It's subjective, but my answer is not what you might expect. Jonathan Nott has done all his major work so far on the continent. He left the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in excellent...

Read more...

theartsdesk at the Lucerne Easter Festival: Haitink, Schiff and an alternative Passion

Anyone passionate about great conducting would jump at the chance to hear 89-year-old Bernard Haitink giving three days of masterclasses with eight young practitioners of the art, his eighth and possibly last series in Lucerne (though he's not...

Read more...

Sonoro, Ferris, St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate review - intriguingly programmed launch concert

Launched into an already crowded choral scene in 2016, the professional choir Sonoro has marked its second birthday with the release of a debut CD. Last night was the launch concert, featuring items selected from the disc. On the evidence of both CD...

Read more...

Classical CDs Weekly: Diethelm, Grieg, Tippett

Diethelm: Symphonic Works Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Rainer Held (Guild)Swiss composers? There's Honegger, and Frank Martin… add to that list one Caspar Diethelm (1926-1997), a prolific musical polymath and teacher who also dabbled in...

Read more...

DVD/Blu-ray: My Life as a Courgette

Describe the plot of My Life as a Courgette to someone who’s not been lucky enough to see it and they'll find it hard to understand how a film with such a bleak premise can be so funny and emotionally involving. Swiss director Claude Barras’s...

Read more...

Mosquitoes, National Theatre review - Olivias Colman and Williams dazzle amid dramatic excess

There's enough plot for a dozen plays buzzing its way through Mosquitoes, Lucy Kirkwood's play that uses the backdrop of the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) to chronicle the multiple collisions within a family. Veering off now and then into discussion...

Read more...

Travesties, Apollo Theatre

Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this. Joyce was organising an expat amateur production of Wilde’s...

Read more...

Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory

Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which...

Read more...
Subscribe to Switzerland