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This week's cultural highlights: The Raid and Bath festival jazz weekend
Our critics' picks of this week's openings, plus your last chance to see and what to book now
• Which cultural events are in your diary this week? Tell us in the comments below
Wah! Wah! Girls
British musical meets Bollywood in new love-against-the-odds show set in the East End of London with a cast of 14, almost all British Asians and a Polish handyman. Peacock,London, Thursday to 23 June.
Posh
Laura Wade has updated her Royal Court hit to point the spotlight once again on the Oxbridge dining clubs that spawned the posh boys currently in power. Duke of Yorks theatre, London, until 4 August.
Betrayal
John Simm stars in Harold Pinter's semi-autobiographical play about an adulterous love affair. The power of the piece is that it works backwards from its bitter end to the moment the affair first sparked. Crucible, Sheffield, until 9 June.
The Raid (dir. Gareth Evans)
Brilliant martial arts bulletfest from Indonesia that puts western action movies to shame. Welsh director Evans orchestrates nail-biting sequences. Out now.
The Royal Ballet Ballo Della Regina and La Sylphide
Romantic illusion and virtuosity combine in this double bill of works by George Balanchine and August Bournonville. Royal Opera House, London, in rep from Monday until 15 June.
Emio Greco/PC: Rocco
Dance is reconfigured as a boxing match in this new work from Emio Greco and Pieter C Scholten, inspired by Visconti's film Rocco and His Brothers, about a prostitute who brings trouble to the siblings. Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London , Tuesday and Wednesday.
Caligula
The British premiere of Detlev Glanert's 2005 opera based upon the play by Albert Camus. Peter Coleman-Wright is the crazed Roman emperor in Benedict Andrews's production for ENO, with Ryan Wigglesworth conducting. Coliseum, London, Friday until 14 June.
Philip Glass at 75
The latest instalment of Glasgow survey of minimalism pays a birthday tribute to one of its founding fathers, including the British premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Kronos Quartet playing his film score to Bela Lugosi's Dracula, and the man himself giving a solo piano recital. Royal Concert Hall and City Halls, Glasgow (0141-353 8000), Thursday to Saturday.
Arve Henriksen/Trio Mediaeval
Norwegian trumpeter Henriksen has taken the ambiguous, muted sound of Miles Davis as adapted by his fellow-countryman Nils Petter Molvaer, and given it a unique contemporary spin with the help of ingenious electronics, and a world-music perspective that includes study of the ethereal Japanese shakuhachi flute. He lends his inimitable variations to the early-music vocals and plainsong of Trio Mediaeval. Sage, Gateshead, Monday. Then touring.
The Historical Box
Dissident American art created in the aftermath of Vietnam, 1960s performance and the feminist revolution – mangled things and angry things, from a time when art thought it could make a difference. Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly, London, Wednesday to 28 July.
Japandroids
The euphoric rock duo preview forthcoming album Celebration Rock up and down the UK. Cooler, Bristol, tonight. Then touring until 29 May.
Jay-Z and Kanye West
Superstar rappers bring their Watch the Throne collaboration to London as a forerunner for gigs in Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield next month. 02, London, tonight and tomorrow.
Making Noise Quietly
Robert Holman's exquisite triptych of mini-dramas that explores what it means to be human in a violent world. Just beautiful. Donmar, London, until Saturday.
Breathing (dir. Karl Markovics)
A tremendous social-realist drama from Austria directed by actor-turned-director Markovics. An orphaned teenage criminal tries to discover his mother's identity.
The Flying Dutchman
The end of the first run of ENO's new production, much praised for Edward Gardner's conducting, and for performances by James Cresswell, Orla Boylan and Stuart Skelton. Coliseum, London , until Wednesday.
Lynne Arriale/Benny Golson
Arriale, a quietly forceful Bill Evans-influenced American pianist with a knack for unusual interpretation and evocative composing invites legendary saxist/composer Golson (the bluesy acid-jazz favourite Killer Joe is his) into her regular Convergence Quartet. Ronnie Scott's, London, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Elizabeth Price
Fetishised objects, great music, scenes in galleries – and in a drowned container ship. These are digital video installations with a hardcore hi-tech sheen from the 2012 Turner prize contender. Baltic, Gateshead, until Sunday.
The Horrors
Southend-on-Sea's post-punkers conclude the UK leg of their seemingly endless world tour. Brixton Academy, Friday.
Fuerza Bruta
Return of the rave show from the people who brought us the legendary De La Guarda. This isn't in the same league, but if you're looking for excitement and sensation, this shouldn't disappoint.Roundhouse, London, 27 December to 26 January.
Ben Hur
An impossible feat: a stage version of the epic novel featuring sea battles, Roman orgies and chariot-racing, all on a stage the size of a postage stamp. A cast of four play 12,059 characters! Should be fun. Watermill, Newbury (01635 46044), 22 June to 28 July
Flawless and English National Ballet: Time Is of the Essence
Ballet, street dance and acrobatics test out their mutual chemistry in this new collaboration choreographed by Marlon Wallen and Jenna Lee. HMV Hammersmith Apollo, London, , 1-2 JuneThen touring.
Spitalfields summer festival
This year's associate artists are the Gabrieli Consort and Players, cellist Matthew Barley and composer Talvin Singh; plus there's a wide range of choral music, from the renaissance to the present day, with new works from Alec Roth, Huw Watkins and Nicola LeFanu. Various venues, London, 8-23 June.
Bath festival jazz weekend
This festival always features a wide-ranging jazz weekend: this year's includes saxophonist Jason Yarde's subtle duo with pianist Andrew McCormack, Courtney Pine's genre-bending Europa, pianists Stan Tracey, Tord Gustavsen, Gwilym Simcock and Zoe Rahman, along with Manchester's acclaimed young Beats & Pieces big band. Various venues, Bath, 2-4 June.
Wide Open School
A hundred artists lead courses, lectures and demonstrations open to the public. Get down and dirty with the Gelitin group, take a course in queer home economics, cook offal with Yto Barrada, learn about energy not quality with Thomas Hirschhorn. Hayward, London , 11 June-11 July.
Richard Hawley
The bequiffed son of Sheffield takes his latest album, Standing at the Sky's Edge, out for an autumn jaunt. Tour begins at Holmfirth Picture House, West Yorkshire, 16 September.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Magdalena Kožená/Mitsuko Uchida – review
Wigmore Hall, London
Now in her late 30s, the Czech mezzo Magdalena Kožená's voice is changing, growing in size and power, though losing some of its surface beauty in the process. In this lengthy and varied programme encompassing Mahler, Debussy and Messiaen, there were recurring problems higher up, with her tone hardening and occasionally developing a strident quality, though her middle register retained its freshness and warmth.
But Kožená was not always able to manage her increased sound without sacrificing subtleties along the way. The intimacy of Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis and Ariettes Oubliées, with their admissions of love and remembrances of evanescent emotion, was too often inundated with tone, extinguishing the delicacy of their texts and their minutely observed feelings. Messiaen's second book of Poèmes pour Mi went better, the individual songs' self-dramatised rhetoric more suited to Kožená's broad-brush-stroke approach.
The evening's real musical distinction belonged to the pianist, Mitsuko Uchida. Ironically, much of her material – the Messiaen group, the two songs sampled from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and all but one of his Five Rückert Lieder – is better known in its respective composers' own orchestrations. (Max Puttmann orchestrated Mahler's Liebst du um Schönheit.) Performing these songs on the piano often involves the near-impossible task of bringing out colours more fully explored in their orchestral versions; Mahler's own piano writing can sound ineffective.
Yet Uchida made it sound surprisingly idiomatic. Her infinitesimal attention to nuanced colours and textures in the Debussy was even more special – though admittedly his piano writing works, however difficult it may be to realise. Throughout she was fully supportive of her vocal partner, and seemed considerably more relaxed.
George Hallguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Bow Down – review
Old Municipal Market, Brighton
Bow Down remains one of Harrison Birtwistle's best kept secrets. It was conceived with the poet and playwright Tony Harrison , at the National theatre in 1977, for a small company of actors and instrumentalists. Based upon the traditional ballad of the Two Sisters, its spare fusion of music, text and ritual defies categorisation. But it perhaps comes closer to Birtwistle's idea of what music theatre in its broadest, rawest sense can be than any of his better-known large-scale operas.
The gruesome ballad exists in various forms across Europe and North America. Elements of many of them are woven into the rhyming couplets of Harrison's text, interspersed with snatches of folksong, and punctuated by piercing drones and dissonances from a flute and oboe, or underpinned with the regular pulses of claves or drums. Roles are shared and swapped, and the actors also combine in a chanting chorus, as the powerful story emerges piece by piece.
That Bow Down is so hard to pigeonhole explains, perhaps, why it has been rarely seen over the last three decades. But Frederic Wake-Walker has chosen it for his debut as Opera Group's artistic director. Flexibility appears to be an essential part of Harrison Birtwistle's concept – the work was originally devised in rehearsal – but the score is surprisingly prescriptive, and Wake-Walker's accomplished production turns out to be very similar to previous British stagings, if, in some respects, less ritualised than before. How it will fare in different venues remains to be seen, but the words might come across more clearly in some than they did in the boomy market acoustic in Brighton, where traffic noise, cooing pigeons and squawking gulls proved more distracting than atmospheric.
Andrew Clementsguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
World's youngest conductor? Boy, 14, to direct Venezuelan orchestra
José Ángel Salazar, part of the country's successful El Sistema music programme, is not old enough to earn a wage
For a professional conductor, José Ángel Salazar has a fresh-faced, youthful demeanour: he is quite short, with disproportionately large hands for his narrow frame and a face framed by a mass of dark curls. But if Salazar looks boyish then it's because he is in fact a boy. At 14, and recently appointed to direct a Venezuelan youth orchestra, he may well be the youngest conductor in the world.
"I am not sure I am the youngest. I don't know who said that," he told the Guardian. "Maybe there is a younger conductor in some small town somewhere else," he said, trying to brush aside a claim that has brought him more fame than he seems ready to handle.
Salazar has between 70 and 80 musicians in the Youth Orchestra of Nueva Esparta at his command, of whom more than half are older than he is.
"I've been invited to conduct other orchestras that are made up of adults and it's easier," he said. The shift in role, from friend and peer to leader, is a challenge Salazar must overcome not only for his own sake, but for that of the orchestra. Good conducting, he says, is in great part down to how the orchestra works as a whole, and a lot of the learning is through example.
"Conducting is a wordless language. I have to convey confidence to the musicians in order to get a confident performance back from them … I have to co-ordinate my body's movements with the music", he said. "I let the internal chanting that one as a director hones guide me, and that's what I try to transmit to the musicians."
But despite articulating feelings with a maturity that seems well beyond his years, Salazar can find his job daunting. "It's hard because I have to find the way to communicate, or sometimes tell off kids who are much older than me," he said. "I guess they are forcing me to be better".
The post is so recent, only a week old, that details are still being fine-tuned. Salazar is too young to earn a wage under Venezuelan law, so a scholarship or grant may be needed.
Along with Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel and Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest musician to join the Berlin Philharmonic, Salazar is one of the success stories to come out of the Venezuelan orchestra system known as El Sistema.
Salazar was eight when he joined. The son of schoolteachers living in a house along with his grandparents, neither he nor anyone in his family had much exposure to classical music, let alone formal music training.
"I went to a brass concert with my dad and grandfather and I cried three times," he said. While most children his age would have wept from boredom, Salazar said he felt enraptured, as though he needed to be a part of what was going on. He dropped karate lessons and started learning the flute.
After the flute came the violin and thus his first encounter with Schubert, his favourite. "Certain pieces make me feel like I must surrender … I get goosebumps from just hearing the first three notes of Schubert's 5th."
Music has also swept Salazar's friends and family along. "My father now talks to me about symphonies and variations, something he knew nothing about four years ago," Salazar says. For him, the next big challenge is language. "I'll probably get a master's or doctorate in music but I'd also like to study languages. I don't want to go on tour and have to use a translator. Or if I am interpreting Mahler there are certain criteria, or feelings, that I'd have a better grasp of if I spoke German."
El SistemaEl Sistema was masterminded 37 years ago by José Antonio Abreu, a retired economist and politician who was also a conductor and pianist. Today he is know simply as Maestro and there are more than 285 child and youth orchestras in the country and an ambitious programme where more than 400 children are studying to become conductors. "Music has to be recognised as an agent of social development in the highest sense because it transmits the highest values of solidarity, harmony and mutual compassion," says Abreu. "I've sought to take music, which is usually a luxury item, and turn it into cultural patrimony accessible to all".
Virginia Lopezguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
L'Olympiade: the Opera – review
Venice Baroque Orchestra/Chryssicos
(Naive)
You might mistake this for a recording of Vivaldi's opera L'Olimpiade (The Olympic Games) which, after long neglect, and as a nod towards London 2012, is suddenly back enjoying UK premiere performances: on stage at Garsington next month and in concert at the Lufthansa festival last night. Instead, this is a "pasticcio", with music by 16 composers set to the same libretto by Metastasio in which, yes, the winner gets the girl. Vivaldi is represented by only one aria (Mentre dormi). The familiarity of the other names will depend on your passion for (mainly) Italian composers from the 1730s to 1800: Galuppi, Caldara, Jommelli, Cherubini and Piccini among them. Sung and played with freshness and spirit by the Venice Baroque and six youthful soloists, this disc – full of showpiece da capo arias and gleeful coloratura – may up your game on the obscure opera front.
Fiona Maddocksguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Falstaff; Tallis Scholars – review
Royal Opera House; Cadogan Hall, London
The boos came as a surprise. They were aimed at the production team who lolloped onstage awkwardly for their bow, as production teams invariably do, after a smart, well-choreographed company curtain call which seemed all the more crisp and stylish in comparison. Those forlorn catcalls, loud but isolated, left barely a dent in the wall of cheers which greeted cast, chorus and conductor Daniele Gatti in a new staging of Verdi's Falstaff at the Royal Opera House.
Had you warned me I might enjoy this latest project by the Canadian-born director Robert Carsen, I would have raised an eyebrow, being fairly neutral towards Carsen's work and even – avert your eyes, blasphemy ahead – to Verdi's last masterpiece. Written in old age with a final flourish of inspiration, the score bristles with complex counterpoint, rapid madrigal patter, wild humour and explosive, trill-laden orchestration. Yet this musical brilliance far outstrips the uncomfortable amalgam of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV Parts I and II, out of which Boito constructed a libretto.
All goes at a cracking pace until fat, preening Sir John Falstaff is tossed into the Thames by the merrily cruel wives, on this occasion causing a delayed tidal wave to pour through the window into the 1950s-style dream home of Mr and Mrs Ford. The problem is the sagging third act. Since few directors manage to maintain the pace here, it must in part – more sacrilege – be a weakness of the work itself. Sir John, outstandingly sung and acted by the in all respects enormous Italian baritone Ambrogio Maestri, mourns human wickedness in a long outpouring, never helped by having to stand in dripping long johns, a figure of folly and water-logged pathos.
The unravelling of the wives' deception takes place at midnight in Windsor Great Park, an interminable scene in which Falstaff is bullied and pinched black and blue by grown-ups pretending to be fairies or ghostly Herne huntsmen, here wearing identical antlers presumably borrowed, handily, from over their own fireplaces. Despite this treachery, Falstaff redeems the world from its universal cruelty by offering himself as the source of humour: witty, as well as "the cause of wit in others", but the moment is brief, the taste bitter.
Hunting was a key visual gag in Paul Steinberg's minutely detailed designs, all encased within huge, multi-purpose wooden walls – not so much Herne's oak as Herne's oak-panelling. Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costumes delight in tweeds, twinsets, hat pins, ruched gloves, pinched waists and big skirts. Yes, this will sound familiar to anyone who saw Richard Jones's matchless, similarly updated Glyndebourne staging, which immersed itself more in the suburban mock-Tudor of Joan Hunter Dunn than the stuffy shires of John Bull. At Covent Garden the opera opens with Sir John in bed in somewhere like the Connaught and ends at a hunt ball ripe for Jennifer's Diary.
The wives, in the score's most delicious, feather-light music, plot their duping in a smart hotel dining room: stiff napery, chandeliers and synchronised tureens. Alice Ford, sung with glee and esprit by Ana María Martínez, resembles the young Princess Margaret. Kai Rüütel's silver-voiced Meg Page is more muted, while Mistress Quickly, fearlessly and comically overplayed by Marie-Nicole Lemieux with fruity voice and un-shy cleavage, steals the show. No one else would get away with it. The Fords' shiny, well-equipped kitchen is the breezy setting for the linen-basket scene. Everything that can nest – spoons, ladles, saucepans, tumblers, tables, chairs – does nest. All this order is turned to chaos by a silent movie-style crowd of men in trilbies hunting the hard-to-hide knight. It's silly and well done.
Gatti coaxed superb colour from the orchestra, especially the ever-busy woodwind, and kept textures transparent to support the ensembles as they divided and reshaped in various contrapuntal patterns. With the exception of Maestri and Lemieux, no single singer stood out but mostly the ensemble was secure. The tenor Joel Prieto as Fenton and soprano Amanda Forsythe as Nannetta, the innocent young lovebird, were charming rather than exceptional, as was the Slovakian baritone Dalibor Jenis, whose Ford was under- or, if you prefer, over-characterised: he was dressed as an American cowboy. Despite these reservations, this was a buoyant and vivacious production, though given the mixed critical response some will regard it as a concept too far.
There was one misjudged distraction: the horse. A stuffed animal would have done just as well. Coming so soon after Ann Widdecombe's debut in La Fille du régiment, this quest for non-musical novelty begins to feel like clutching at straws. Bit between my teeth I rang the horse-hire company to check the price. Evidently business was brisk: there was no answer. I emailed the Royal Opera: how much was the horse? The official reply came: "It is our policy never to reveal the fees for artists." Artist? They obviously know their Catcher in the Rye. ("I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.") Taking a lead from the opera's own gesture of honour, the ROH should now donate the equivalent of this 15-year-old animal's fee, plus Maestri's single riding lesson, to the Musicians' Benevolent Fund.
The dying Falstaff, according to Shakespeare, though beyond the action of Verdi's drama, babbled "of green fields" on his death bed. Not so many years later, Henry VIII of England met Francis I of France on a more elevated pasture near Calais: the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a lavish prototype for the jamboree Euro-summits of today. A notable difference, apart from some 2,200 sheep being consumed, was the presence of at least two composers: Jean Mouton (1459-1522) in the French camp, William Cornysh (1465-1523) in the English.
As part of the Choral at Cadogan series, the formidable Tallis Scholars gave a thoughtfully constructed programme of works by these composers, including an Ave Maria from both and culminating in Cornysh's five-part Magnificat, one of the glories of the era. These a cappella meditations, interweaving plainchant and polyphony, sober canon and rhythmic surprise, take the listener as near extraterrestrial as you can get sitting in a concert hall. British musicians have cornered this area of repertoire.
Last week alone, as well as the Tallis singers you could hear Stile Antico (broadcast live from Oxford on Radio 3) on Monday or the Cardinall's Musick at Wigmore Hall on Thursday – three generations of vocal ensembles who excel in Renaissance music.
This style of singing may not attract the shouting headlines of opera stars but their virtuosity is equally exciting, their impact magical. If they want to whip up more interest with, say, a few onstage equine quadropeds, I could let them have the number of a reputable hire company who offer, as their promotional material says, the "complete package to suit the client", including anything from Tudor-style jousting to a rearing horse on set. At the risk of flogging a dead one, I'll stop there.
Fiona Maddocksguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Saint-Saëns, Loevendie, Ravel: Piano Trios – review
Van Baerle Trio
(Etcetera)
The Van Baerle Trio met by chance as students in Amsterdam. Eight years on and having won last year's Lyons International Chamber Music competition, pianist Hannes Minnaar, cellist Gideon den Herder and violinist Maria Milstein – all still in their 20s – have harnessed their diverse talents into a highly expressive unit, assisted by some tutoring from Menachem Presler, pianist of the fabled Beaux Arts Trio. This vital information helps explain the quality and insight of their playing in two hefty French works – the Saint-Saëns and that classic of the piano trio repertoire, the Ravel – and, as a novelty, the short, atmospheric Ackermusik by Dutch composer Theo Loevendie (b 1930). Worth discovering.
Fiona Maddocksguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Allegri: Missa in lectulo meo; Missa Christus resurgens; Miserere; Motets – review
Choir of King's College London/Trendell
(Delphian)
Best known for a piece he didn't really write – the famous Miserere is a decorated version of a chant setting which Mozart later wrote down from memory – Gregorio Allegri's other music is not much heard. The rich sonorities of the two eight-part masses, recorded here for the first time, place Allegri (1582-1652) directly in the Palestrina line of counter-reformation composers, and the word-setting is direct and expressive, rising to a wonderful climax at Et homo factus est in the credo of the first mass. The Easter mass is more concentrated, with some dancing triple-time sections: David Trendell's fine choir glows with warmth and commitment.
Nicholas Kenyonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
TV review: Maestro at the Opera
How many conductors can you fit into a single TV show?
We're into the finale of Maestro at the Opera (BBC2) already. Josie Lawrence and Trevor Nelson have been dispensed with, leaving Craig Revel Horwood and Marcus Du Sautoy to battle it out to get to the podium of the Royal Opera House.
So it's off to mentors Paul McGrath (the conductor, not the former footballer) and Michael Rosewell (another conductor) for some final coaching. Plus a few wise words and a demo from conductor Sir Mark Elder. Oh, hello: suddenly Craig and Marcus are off to Tuscany to spend a few days at a famous academy named after another conductor, Georg Solti. After some extra coaching from two more conductors, Jonathan Papp and Anthony Legge, it's back to Covent Garden and McGrath and Rosewell for some last-minute conducting revision, while Sir Mark looks on beknightedly (I know that's not really a word, but you know what I mean).
And then we're in the final contest: Craig v Marcus. And Craig's the winner. Eh? We're still only 25 minutes into an hour-long show. Ah, I see, the rest is about Craig's prize, conducting an act of La Bohème in front of an audience. That means further practice and coaching – from McGrath (or is it Rosewell?) with advice from Sir Mark and artistic director John Copley, plus a few words of encouragement from Sir Someone-or-other (Semyon Bychkov in fact).
God, it's a mess isn't it? As television. Far too baggy and unstructured. There's no sense of excitement about the competition. And there are way too many bloody conductors. It's like they thought: "Who shall we get on our show about conducting? So hard to choose. Oh to hell with it, let's just have them all on, shall we?" Well done Craig, though. I think he does act two of La Bohème rather well. (Ha, like I know!)
Best line in Episodes (BBC2)? Stephen Mangan suggests that perhaps the gift of an Infiniti (Nissan's luxury brand) from Matt LeBlanc isn't enough to forgive him for sleeping with his wife. "What d'you want, a Bentley?" says LeBlanc. "It's not like I fucking killed your wife."
Sam Wollastonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Ian Bostridge: 'Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a titanic figure'
The tenor pays tribute to the legendary baritone, who died on Friday aged 86
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a titanic figure and a mirror of his age. Hearing of his death today at the age of 86 it was the singing I thought of, of course, and the little of it I managed to hear live. Recitals on the Southbank in the 80s – a Meeresstille (Becalmed at Sea) of Schubert, so whispered that every member of the audience leant imperceptibly forward to catch the thread of sound he so miraculously spun. The most terrifying Erlkönig I have ever heard or, indeed, seen. A War Requiem that called to mind the circumstances of its premiere in Coventry when he struggled with the weight of his memories at the end of the piece, barely able to move.
He lived the 20th century in all its bleakness – a brother murdered by the Nazis, his first Winterreise performed as an American prisoner of war in Italy. His singing of the whole body of German song – from Mozart to Henze via his touchstone, Schubert – showed the world a new Germany, as significant in its way as the Wirtschaftswunder. He was profiled several times in Time magazine ("by all odds the world's finest lieder singer") and was one of the first German artists to sing in Israel. Personal memories abound, and his affectionate warmth will linger with me, he was never the grandee. But so too will the recordings I listened to again and again as a teenager, and still listen to today.
He was a great opera singer of course – a brilliant but atypical Iago, a seminal Wozzeck, never routine, ever surprising. He inspired a wealth of new music – Auden's monstrous creation, Mittenhofer, in Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers, Reimann's King Lear.
But now I have in my mind's ear Goethe's magical - but almost untranslatable - poem Grenzen der Menschheit, set to music by Hugo Wolf, and incomparably brought to life in all its grandeur and mysterious humility by Fischer-Dieskau and his companion on so many journeys, the pianist Gerald Moore:
Ein kleiner Ring
Begränzt unser Leben
Und viele Geschlechter
Reihen sich dauernd
An ihres Daseins
Unendliche Kette.
(A small ring
Is the boundary of our life,
And many generations
Form a constant procession
In the endless chain of being.)
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Olympic Flame to touch down on UK soil today
The Olympic Flame is now on its way to the UK, on board a flight from Athens, Greece, for the start of the 2012 Torch Relay.
The Olympic Flame is now on its way to the UK, on board a flight from Athens, Greece, for the start of the 2012 Torch Relay.
The flame is due to arrive in Cornwall at Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose at approximately 7.25pm this evening.
Accompanying its transportation is a UK delegation party including Chair of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), Sebastian Coe and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The delegation is being led by HRH The Princess Royal.
The flame will be taken to Land's End tomorrow morning for the start of the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay. It will then travel an estimated 8,000 miles around the UK reaching thousands of communities and individuals.
The journey will be taking place against the vibrant backdrop of the Cultural Olympiad, of which the Arts Council is proud to be a principal funder.
Key projects include Artists taking the lead, comprising 12 artist commissions, Unlimited, a unique programme commissioning work by disabled and deaf artists and the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad featuring more than 1,000 events with an estimated audience of three million people.
We are also running a number of projects that showcase innovation and excellence in museums, libraries and archives to a worldwide audience including Stories of the World and Our sporting life.
Our involvement in the Cultural Olympiad aims to increase participation in the arts, heighten the profile of our artists on the world stage, as well as forge new collaborations that push boundaries.
For further information about our involvement and for details about the projects we are leading , please read our London 2012 pages.
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about/copyright/RLPO/Rivas – review
Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
Venezuela continues, it would seem, to turn out young musicians with astonishing potential. We are, of course, already familiar with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra.
We now, however, have the phenomenon of Ilyich Rivas, 19 this year and already making a name for himself as a conductor. Unlike Dudamel and the Bolívars, Rivas is not – despite assumptions and the occasional statement to the contrary – a product of El Sistema: he was coached by his father, also a conductor, before training in the US. On the strength of his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic debut, he is strikingly, almost disconcertingly good.
The evening's first half, if rather curiously programmed, displayed his fierce energy and fine sense of colour and dynamics. Brahms's Academic Festival Overture progressed from stately opening to rabble-rousing finale with terrific momentum. Glazunov's incomplete, low-key Ninth Symphony – we only have the first movement – was touching in its refined melancholy, while Respighi's Fountains of Rome, if occasionally unyielding, was beautifully shaded, exquisitely detailed and, during the climactic depiction of the Trevi fountain at midday, overpoweringly majestic and thrillingly loud.
After the interval came Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto with Stephen Hough as soloist, a big-boned interpretation, immensely exciting in its grandeur and sweep. Hough was formidable in it, darkly intense and intelligent, and confronting its extreme technical demands with exceptional power and dexterity. Rivas's conducting, meanwhile, was all grand passion without sentimentality, which is well-nigh ideal in Rachmaninov.
Teenage prodigies do not, of course, always mature into greatness, and it remains to be seen how Rivas will develop. But on this showing, the auspices are good, and we need to keep our eyes on him.
Tim Ashleyguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau - in pictures
The celebrated German singer died on Friday aged 86. Here, we look back on his distinguished career
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: a guide in clips
The great German baritone has died at the age of 86. Watch these six examples of his performing, and tell us your thoughts
Schubert's An die MusikThough he's slightly more formal in the television studio, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau had one of the most relaxed platform manners I have ever witnessed, perfectly putting the audience at their collective ease. The German Lieder repertory was his natural territory and Gerald Moore ("the unashamed accompanist") one of his most notable equal partners. Moore wrote of him: "His freedom and elasticity are not only influenced by the words he is singing but by a poignancy of feeling for the music itself. He understands what the composer felt, and is able to reveal and express it so piercingly that it goes to the heart."
The Brahms RequiemIn this comparatively late (1989) performance of the Brahms Requiem, Fischer-Dieskau holds (rather dramatically) though never refers to his score. The occasional signs of fragility in his tone at this period are exploited as an expressive device rather than apologised for as a fault. The words (Brahms made his own selection from the Lutheran Bible for his highly individual Requiem) are: "Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am." Significantly, perhaps, Fischer-Dieskau's father had been a Lutheran pastor.
As Mandryka in Richard Strauss's ArabellaIn grainy old black and white, here is the entire Richard Strauss/Hugo von Hofmannsthal opera that provided Fischer-Dieskau with an ideal role as Mandryka, the widowed countryman from Croatia who comes to Vienna to woo a woman he does not know but with whose portrait he has fallen in love with. Alongside him are Lisa Della Casa as Arabella (the pre-eminent interpreter of her role, too) and Anneliese Rothenberger as Arabella's sister Zdenka; Joseph Keilberth conducts. When Fischer-Dieskau made his debut at Covent Garden in the role in 1965, Harold Rosenthal, then editor of Opera magazine, wrote, "One cannot imagine that the role has ever been better sung or acted." In this film he enters at 38.20.
With Peter Pears in the final movement of Britten's War RequiemComposed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Britten's War Requiem was a unique conception, quickly accepted as a choral masterpiece and one of the most notable of Fischer-Dieskau's many creations. The three soloists (originally to have included – as here – Galina Vishnevskaya and Peter Pears alongside Fischer-Dieskau, though Vishnevskaya was not allowed by the Russians to take part in the premiere) were intended by the pacifist Britten to be representatives of three countries heavily involved in the conflict of the second world war. The standard words of the Latin Mass of the Dead are interspersed with poetry from the first world war by Wilfred Owen. Here an English soldier and a German soldier confront one another after death and are reconciled. A fine linguist, Fischer-Dieskau is able to make as much of the text as Pears.
In Puccini's Il Tabarro with Júlia VáradySung in German translation, this extract from Puccini's dark psychological thriller showcases the baritone alongside his soprano wife Júlia Várady – another great artist. Fischer-Dieskau was a searching, intelligent actor, and here presents the Parisian barge-owner whose marriage has fallen apart following the death of his and his wife's child, and who here vainly and pathetically tries to breathe life back into their broken relationship. There's no operatic acting-by-numbers; instead a complex, troubled character is revealed expertly by vocal and physical means. The hatred of his final line – "Du Hure!" – is chilling.
In Strauss's song MorgenNo apologies for returning to Lieder – Fischer-Dieskau was widely regarded as the greatest exponent of the genre of his time, with a breathtakingly vast repertoire at his disposal, or to Richard Strauss, whose piano accompaniment is wonderfully realised here by Strauss specialist Wolfgang Sawallisch. In this setting of the Scottish-born, gay German anarchist John Henry Mackay, Fischer-Dieskau's ability to bind words and music into a single statement is finely displayed. However many times he must have sung this famous song – hundreds, surely – it is as if he is creating it for the first time and by himself, both as poet and composer; and in a real sense he is.
George Hallguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Photographers’ Gallery reopens to the public
Arts Council National portfolio organisation The Photographers' Gallery opens its new home for international and British photography in the heart of London's Soho tomorrow, Saturday 19 May.
Arts Council National portfolio organisation The Photographers' Gallery opens its new home for international and British photography in the heart of London's Soho tomorrow, Saturday 19 May.
Designed by award-winning Irish architects O'Donnell + Tuomey, the new building has been made possible by a £8.9 million capital campaign supported by Arts Council Lottery funding as well as through trusts, foundations and corporate and individual donors.
The transformed building features a two storey extension that doubles the size of the Photographers' Gallery's previous exhibition space, enhancing their ability to showcase established and emerging photographic talent from the UK and around the world.
Opening Programme
Also launching tomorrow are the new gallery's first exhibitions, featuring works by renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and New Delhi based Raqs Media Collective.
The major solo exhibition of Edward Burtynsky's photographs will showcase over thirty large-scale images from his widely acclaimed series Burtynsky: OIL. Raqs Media Collective will display a silent, looped video projection titled An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale (2011) featuring a series of subtle alterations to an early 20th century photograph depicting a surveyors' room in colonial Calcutta.
The exhibitions will run until 1 July 2012.
The opening of the gallery also sees the relaunch of its education programme and an innovative digital programme which will respond to recent trends to raise questions concerning the changing status and circulation of photography in today's digital culture. As part of this, social media channels, mobile devices and the gallery's website will all be explored as alternative platforms for exhibitions.
Arts Council investment
Moira Sinclair, London Executive Director of Arts Council England, said: 'The Photographers' Gallery is nationally and internationally significant, presenting and developing the very best contemporary art and artists and playing its part in our city's reputation for great artistic experiences and visitor attractions.
'Our support for this project is an investment in the ambitions and aspirations of the gallery; giving it more space to share the work of exciting new and established photographers and putting education, literally, at the heart of the gallery's work. Like many, I'm really looking forward to the reopening of this fabulous institution.'
For more information and to view a full programme of events, visit the Photographers' Gallery website.
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about/copyright/German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau dies
Tributes for artist regarded as finest lieder singer of his generation and titan of classical music
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the hugely influential baritone and a man regarded by many as the greatest lieder singer of the 20th century, has died at his home in Bavaria, aged 86.
Fischer-Dieskau was a true giant of opera, once described by the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as "a born god who has it all".
His wife, Julia Varady, said he had died on Friday just 10 days short of his 87th birthday.
The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley tweeted: "Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: made it seem effortless and natural. To hear him live was greatest thrill and inspiration."
Fischer-Dieskau retired from singing in 1992 after an astonishing 50-year career with numerous highlights including, at Benjamin Britten's invitation, singing in the world premier of War Requiem at the newly built Coventry Cathedral in 1962.
He was perhaps most famous for his interpretations of lieder, the German art songs written for solo voice and piano, which he recorded on a regular basis.
His name will always be linked to his performances of Schubert's song cycle Winterreise, which he performed publicly for the first time in 1943, aged 17.
In an interview with the Guardian's Martin Kettle in 2005, he recalled how RAF bombs interrupted his performance. "We had a terrible bombing of the city that day and the whole audience of 200 people and myself had to go into the cellar for two and a half hours. Then when the raid was over we came back up and resumed."
Fischer-Dieskau performed only three times at the Royal Opera House, twice as Mandryka in Strauss's Arabella in 1965 and 1967, and once in the title role of Falstaff in 1967.
Mark Brownguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau obituary
Inspirational, distinguished German baritone and a proselytiser for the art of lieder
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the distinguished German baritone, has died aged 86. His protean career was surely unique, as he sang and recorded more vocal music than any who came before. In particular, he broached more lieder (German songs) than any of his predecessors of the genre, his recordings running into the hundreds. Many of these songs he recorded several times over: for instance, he made no fewer than eight recordings of Schubert's Winterreise.
This truly incredible output was the result of an inquiring mind, an insatiable desire to tackle any and every song he could find, and to be a proselytiser for the art of lieder and singing in general, all these underlined by an instinctive wish to achieve perfection in his craft. More than that, he was an inspiration to the vast number of singers who have followed his example in this field, and made the singing of lieder a common experience. He also created an audience for this kind of music-making. Look at the concert and radio listings, look at the myriad discs of songs released in the CD age, and you will hear the benefits of his pioneering effort.
Fischer-Dieskau was born in Berlin and studied there with the veteran lieder artist Georg Walter, then after the second world war with Hermann Weissenborn, who partnered him at the piano in early recitals. But many of his first successes were in opera in Berlin. He made his stage debut there in 1948, as Posa in Don Carlos at the City Opera, where he would go on to be heard in most of the major baritone roles, Italian and German. From 1949 onwards he was appearing regularly at the Vienna State Opera and at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He also sang at the Bayreuth festival from 1954 to 1956 as the Herald (Lohengrin), Wolfram (Tannhäuser), Kothner (Meistersinger) and Amfortas (Parsifal).
In 1961 he created, magnificently, the ego-mad Mittenhofer in Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers at the Schwetzingen festival and in 1978 the title role in Aribert Reimann's Lear at Munich, an overwhelming portrayal. His Covent Garden debut came in 1965 when he created an immense impression as the impassioned Mandryka in a new production of Richard Strauss's Arabella under Georg Solti. He returned later to portray Verdi's Falstaff, a large-scale but somewhat unidiomatic reading.
Tall, with expressive features, Fischer-Dieskau was a riveting figure on stage and a not inconsiderable actor. Nobody who caught him as Mandryka, Hindemith's Mathis or Wolfram is likely to forget the experience. Among other outstanding roles which he recorded for posterity are Count Almaviva, Don Giovanni, the Flying Dutchman, Telramund in Rudolf Kempe's classic set of Lohengrin, Busoni's Faust, Barak in Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, and both Oliver and the Count in the same composer's Capriccio.
One of Fischer-Dieskau's first and most moving portrayals on disc was as Kurwenal in Wilhelm Furtwängler's legendary 1952 recording of Tristan und Isolde. Another classic recording with the German conductor was of Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen. He twice recorded the same composer's Das Lied von der Erde, first under Paul Kletzki, then with Leonard Bernstein, taking the three movements usually sung by a mezzo-soprano and making them very much his own.
His enormous repertory also included many choral works. Besides recording many of Bach's cantatas, he was a sympathetic Christ in both that composer's Passions, an imposing Elijah in Mendelssohn and one of the original soloists in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, the baritone contributions written specifically for him. Britten in 1965 composed his Songs and Proverbs of William Blake for Fischer-Dieskau, just one of the many commissions his singing inspired.
Yet it was with his lieder that he achieved his greatest deeds. He recorded all the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Strauss suitable for a male voice. He worked on them first with Gerald Moore, doyen of pure accompanists, and then was partnered by a host of distinguished solo pianists and the conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, each of whom inspired him to refreshingly new insights.
Fischer-Dieskau had a full, firm and resonant baritone, which could be honed down to the most delicate mezza voce. It was used with the utmost care in managing and projecting the text. He could on occasion be too emphatic in his treatment of words and was sometimes accused of overloading climaxes, but these were only the downside of a singer who was totally immersed in everything he undertook. An excellent linguist, he was almost as happy singing in Italian, French and English as in his native tongue, and he spoke English with virtually no accent.
In a career lasting more than 40 years, there was, as the years went by, inevitably some deterioration in his tone, but he compensated for the decline with a new lightness of approach and an even deeper penetration into the meaning of each song, as his 1986 recording of Winterreise with Alfred Brendel reveals. After he had retired from singing in 1992, Fischer-Dieskau took up another career reciting literary texts, often associated with song. He was also willing to give private lessons to carefully chosen singers to whom he imparted his immense experience as an interpreter.
He published a book of memoirs, Nachklang, in 1987, translated into English as Echoes of a Lifetime. It was an unusual autobiography in showing a man who, for all his many achievements, was uncertain of himself. That reflected the impression made when you met him. He was initially shy, but you always felt that behind the quizzical, sly, humorous eye and manner lay a man of philosophical bent, perhaps amazed himself at what his genius had led him to achieve.
He is survived by his fourth wife, the soprano Júlia Várady, whom he married in 1977, and three sons by his first wife, the cellist Irmgard Poppen, who died in 1963.
• Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone singer, born 28 May 1925; died 18 May 2012
Alan Blyth died in 2007
Read an interview with Fischer-Dieskau by Martin Kettle, published in the Guardian in 2005
Alan Blythguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Museums in a changing world: celebrating International Museum Day 2012
Museums across the world are today celebrating the 35th annual International Museum Day.
Museums across the world are today celebrating the 35th annual International Museum Day.
Organised by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), this annual event garnered record breaking participation last year with almost 30,000 museums hosting events in more than 120 countries.
International Museum Day was established in 1977 to encourage public awareness of museums.
Museums in a Changing World. New Challenges, New inspirations is the theme of this year's International Museum Day. Museums have been invited to celebrate their work and show the public the challenges and opportunities faced by museums in the 21st century such as climate change and new digital media.
Visitors to any of the participating museums across the world will also be able to celebrate and explore the value of museums in modern society, and see how they are looking to the future.
Find out more
To find out more about International Museum Day visit to the website.
To find out how we support museums go to the Supporting museums section of our website.
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about/copyright/Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival
The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad is a nationwide programme of the UK's best arts and culture, running alongside the Games. With more than 10 million free opportunities to get involved, it is the largest cultural celebration in history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic movement. The programme, which has been running since 2008, culminates in London 2012 Festival, a spectacular celebration which will run from 21 September to 9 June 2012.
The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad is a nationwide programme of the UK's best arts and culture, running alongside the Games. With more than 10 million free opportunities to get involved, it is the largest cultural celebration in history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic movement. The programme, which has been running since 2008, culminates in London 2012 Festival, a spectacular celebration which will run from 21 September to 9 June 2012.
To find out what is happening in Yorkshire and the Humber download the brochure from this page
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about/copyright/Beethoven's 10th? Now there's a thought …
The composer had plans to create 'a new gravitional force' in his 10th symphony. What wonders might he have written?
I'm just reading Gerhard von Breuning's Memories of Beethoven (originally published as From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards), there's an account of Beethoven talking to Von Breuning's father, who was a close friend of the composer, about pieces he was planning to write near the end of his life. Gerhard was a child at the time, but he remembers Beethoven and his father Stephan regularly discussing "the artistic and financial success of his last two major works, the 9th Symphony and the Mass in D [the Missa Solemnis], plans for future compositions" – and get ready for those spines to tingle if, like me, you haven't come across this quote before! – "especially the form that he should give the 10th symphony he had in mind, [as Beethoven said] 'in order to create in it a new gravitational force,' this time without a chorus."
Boom. A new gravitational force? That's a truly mind-numbing idea. Even for a composer whose every previous symphony had taken music to places it had never gone before, the Einstein-prefiguring attempt to create a new kind of physical force in music is completely astonishing. It suggests that Beethoven realised, having in his Ninth represented in music humanity's entire history, from sonic chaos to an idealised realisation of universal brotherhood, he had to turn again to the substance, the time- and space-bending potential, of instrumental music in what would have been his 10th. Forget Barry Cooper's realisation of the sketches he left for this symphony, which cannot hope to reveal what Beethoven would actually have done in writing this piece, and imagine, instead what new regions Beethoven might have found. It could have been a synthesis of the new tonal territories and heightened discourse he was exploring in his last string quartets, but projected on a vaster, symphonic scale, or it could have been an extension of the visionary realms of the final piano sonatas, or – well, something else that only Ludwig van could conceive.
A couple of resonant connections across later centuries: Anton Bruckner was trying to find something similar in his 9th Symphony, and left much more of the finale than is usually supposed before his death in 1896. Simon Rattle has recorded the latest version of the finale with the Berliner Philharmoniker, revealing the gigantic structure that Bruckner found for what we should now think of as his most ambitious symphony; and talking of "new gravitational forces" reminds me of the kinds of polarities between pitches and textures that composers such as Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Boulez have created, and which Thomas Adès is exploring at the moment, as in his recent orchestral piece, Polaris, which is built on the magnetic forces he hears between notes and chords. But Beethoven would probably have gone further than any of them, if he had lived to finish his 10th. What a thought.
Tom Serviceguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
