Monday 26 September, 2005

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26.09.2005

Reinhard J. Brembeck applauds Michael Gielen, the conductor of Stefan Herheim's staging of Verdi's "The power of fate" at Berlin's Staatsoper. "Inexorably alert, the great old conductor rises above the orchestra pit, confining himself to a few gestures. But his looks, they must be horrifying. The musicians have unquestioning faith in him, and Gielen's interpretation pays less respect to the easy-listening strictures of the Italian Hm-ta-ta tradition than to his own uncompromisingly modern approach. Verdi seems to him a precursor of Gustav Mahler, someone who passionately, yearningly, unifies the banal, disintegrating world. A radical approach which - of course – provoked many boos."


Die Tageszeitung, 26.09.2005

In 1989, the Chinese rock star Cui Jian provided the soundtrack for the student protest in Tienanmen. He recently gave his first big public concert following years of being banned from performing. George Blume was there and met many fellow former protesters. "Shen Fang is already a bit drunk. He is wearing the red shirt that he wore at Tiananmen. On it are the words of Cui Jian: 'You ask me what I think. I'll tell you: Let's go at it together!' Shen listens to Cui Jian playing at Tiananmen. He had to give up his studies in order to partake in the protests. 'I would have become a mandarin. Now I have a piston factory.'"


Die Welt, 26.09.2005

Reinhard Wengierek reports of two "decimations of Shakespeare" in Berlin: Robert Wilson's "The Winter's Tale" at the Berliner Ensemble and Tina Lanik's "The Merchant of Venice" at the Deutsches Theater. Yet again, Wengierek writes, Wilson takes the classic as an opportunity "to celebrate himself and his own manias, using images that are nearly frozen, that contain barely enough life to illustrate the fiery drama." Meanwhile, Wengierek credits Lanik, 32 years Wilson's junior, with at least enough intelligence to give her lead actor Ulrich Matthes free rein as Shylock. But "Matthes plays the stubborn insistence on the pound of flesh from his antagonist as a kind of emancipatory act: finally he bares his teeth to those who have beating on him for so long. Which would be all very natural if the others would show their teeth in return. If they were all to stem from this inhumane world. But the Venetian Christians are mere shadows of themselves, making this staging in this supposed 'theatre of the year' superfluous."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 26.09.2005

Friedrich Schirmer's first production as artistic director at Hamburg's Deutsche Schauspielhaus is wide of the mark, writes Peter Michalzik, who has nothing good to say about Jacqueline Kornmüller's "beyond-the-pale" staging of Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea". The performance "is at least as platitudinous, insensitive, embarrassing and clodhoppping as Ellida Wangel, the play's central figure, is supposed to be. Almost every sentence is not only wrongly conceived, it is also wrongly felt. What the Schauspielhaus dishes up for Hamburg audiences is a series of stencilled emotions, ready-made to produce a sort of operatic fervour, or the kind of cheap laugh you can get best by denouncing the central figure. It's difficult to accept that at one point or another this all does not just become too silly for everyone concerned."


Saturday 24 September, 2005

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24.09.2005

After the speeches opening the retrospective of works by Jörg Immendorff at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, Niklas Maak had a walk around the room and saw Immendorff's famous painting Cafe Deutschland, but this time in action: "The painter Daniel Richter got excited in a discussion with a theorist of the conservative camp, defending chancellor Gerhard Schröder's over-buoyant television appearance on election night a week ago (more here). Veronica Ferres, who did a lot to promote the financing of the exhibition, walked by the 1984 painting 'Anbetung des Inhalts' (adoration of content) which depicts a person with abstract strokes of colour, and said that much of what Immendorff paints is a vivid painted commentary on the question of form in painting. Then, later in the evening, the chancellor himself smiled as he strolled by a huge flag bearing the words: 'L'autre, c'est moi'. Immendorff succeeded once more in creating a surreal commentary on the state of the nation."


Die Tageszeitung, 24.09.2005

A few days prior to the 15th anniversary of the German Unification on October 3, Uwe Rada takes stock in sombre terms: "Anyone who does not fear losing votes will admit: the unification is washed-up, and an 'Aufschwung Ost' – or 'Eastern Recovery' – will never happen." His suggestion: The founding of an "Eastern Special Welfare Zone", with both social security and economic deregulation: "Such a mixture of welfare state and free economic zone would be a signal that, given the failed Eastern Recovery, people are now ready - after 15 years of united Germany - to try out new ideas, and take the concept of a social laboratory seriously."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 24.09.2005

Angelika Timm reports on a controversial art exhibition in the Tel Aviv Museum called "Group and Kibbutz in the Collective Israeli Consciousness": "The exhibition's main statement is that Kibbutz members are not socialised to learn a true collective spirit, but rather to become a homogeneous grey mass. This reflects the contemporary opinion in Israel that the socialist experiment has failed, here as elsewhere. But today's critique of the Kibbutz is not only aimed at extreme elements of the movement, for example the 'Kinderhaus' daycare system, which are indeed worthy of criticism. The vision of equal coexistence is fundamentally opposed to a world characterised by consumerism, media manipulation and egotism of all kinds, in which the incantation of individuality ultimately, even more than in the Kibbutz, creates a conformist and uniform mass."