Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more
In 2007 the rap duo Kinderzimmer Productions disbanded with rapper Henrik von Holtum, alias MC Textor, publishing a ranting manifesto against the rap scene in the Tageszeitung. But Kinderzimmer Productions is back with a new live recording of their old songs - with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Nina Apin from the taz talks with MC Textor about rap, classical music and the question of aging gracefully.
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Searching for new sounds to take the party to new highs, club music is turning to classical and new music. Prominent techno DJs such as Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer are working with the recordings of Deutsche Grammophon and ECM. Alexis Waltz samples some bewitchingly beautiful and psychedelically absurd results. Photo Ricardo Villalobos © Stefan Stern
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Designed to appeal to everyone over the age of six, Lady Gaga's new album "Born this Way" is basically funfair techno – with a dash of hilarious mock German. Diedrich Diederichsen explains why this is not how good pop music happens.
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This year's theatre festival in Bregrenz hosted the world premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Auschwitz opera "The Passenger" from 1968. His biographer David Fanning introduces the life and music of this incredibly prolific composer, whose work somehow failed to emerge from the shadows of the Iron Curtain.
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Robert Schumann was born 200 years ago on June 8. The conductor and composer Heinz Holliger, who has devoted his life to the study of Romantic master, talks to Claus Spahn about the his labyrinthine imagination, erudition and incredible modernity. He also dispels a string of clichees that have consigned so much of the Schumann's work to musical oblivion.
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Riding the retro wave, singers from across the spectrum of popular music have brought back falsetto with a vengeance. While this is mostly in homage to bygone styles and idols, it has also introduced new nuances of meaning. Ueli Bernays traces falsetto's high-pitched passage from expression to gimmick and back.
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In this, the Mendelssohn bicentennial year, Martin Geck looks at why the wealthy middle-class composer, who was Europe's most successful musician in the final decade of his life, brought out the very worst in Richard Wagner.
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At the New Year's concert in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt the audience's excitement was palpable. It was patently clear to all assembled that they were either about to witness the disgrace of one of the world's greatest living violinists, or the triumphant birth of a new piano virtuoso. By Arno Widmann
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Ligeti the gesamtkunstwerk, Ligeti the Socrates-Ligeti, Ligeti the volcano. Hungarian composer György Kurtág spoke at a memorial session of the Order Pour le Mérite in Berlin about his lifelong friend, György Ligeti, who died on June 12, 2006.
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Hans Werner Henze's fourteenth opera "Phaedra" almost cost him his life. Now the premiere has taken place in Berlin. Volker Hagedorn visited the eighty-one-year-old composer at his home above the Tiber valley, where he has lived and worked since 1953.
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Benjamin Biolay is France's new Serge Gainsbourg. He is pioneer of the "Nouvelle Chanson," even if he rejects the term. And basically he sings about one thing: love, nothing but love. By Elke Buhr (Photo © Bruce Weber, courtesy Virgin Records France / EMI)
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Probably never before has there been so much hype around a premiere at the Bayreuth Festival. Because the director of this "Mastersingers of Nuremberg" is Katharina Wagner, great granddaughter of Richard Wagner, who could one day take over as festival director. By Marianne Zelger-Vogt (Image: Katharina Wagner. © Enrico Nawrath, courtesy Bayreuther Festspiele)
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Thomas Mann was enchanted by German classical music but was also wary of its seductive powers. In his novels, he anticipates its instrumentalisation by the Nazis, who used it as the gateway to bourgeois German hearts and minds. By Wolfgang Schneider
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Conductor Riccardo Muti describes rummaging through Naples' venerable music archive, where he discovered a number of slumbering opera manuscripts, among them Domenico Cimarosa's "Il ritorno di Don Calandrino," which opens the Salzburg Whitsun Festival tonight.
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After brilliant beginnings, bodybuilding pianist Tzimon Barto's career crashed as spectacularly as it started. Now the bizarre mixture of rancher, writer and keyboard collossus is back, with a fabulous new recording of Ravel. By Kai Luehrs-Kaiser
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