45th #IFFR: Restyling Rotterdam festival seems mostly cosmetic.
45th Film Festival Rotterdam, the first under new director Bero Beyer, gets off to a strong start with Beyond Sleep, after W.F. Hermans's Nooit meer slapen.
Singing Gustav Mahler and stammering Beat Furrer touch the soul
Mahler on a programme by Asko|Schönberg - the face of avant-garde atonality, is that possible? For regular guest conductor Etienne Siebens, this is no question: in his programmes, he likes to explore the boundaries between beloved classics and composers still alive. On Thursday, 4 February, he places the ensemble version of Mahler's romantically singing Fourth Symphony - performed with...
Upcoming round of grants will be disastrous for artists, but there is a solution
By March 1, every artist who wants government support must have submitted their application. Funds, municipalities and the state will then deliberate in committees. The quadrennial tombola will be even more dramatic this year than it was four years ago, when the massive cuts were made by CDA, PVV and VVD. Because virtually no money is being added now, and in fact, often more...
'TV has lost touch with reality'
"Let's have a Magna Carta of British Broadcasting." With those words, celebrated actor Idris Elba (Luther, The Wire) began his closing remarks in the British Parliament. For the past half hour, he has been speaking to the Lords and Ladies kindly yet persuasively about the need and opportunities for diversity in British television. The timing of this speech was perfect because...
Musicians pay to save their orchestra. TV programme Maestro helps a little.
The Orchestra of the East is cutting its coat of arms, focusing primarily on Overijssel and has applied for collective redundancy. This - and a whole lot more - can be read in the new business plan. It is enough for the province to release a one-off €1.1 million and make 3.5 tonnes of annual subsidy available again from now on. The...
Bussemaker's response to income alert on arts sector is totally wrong
The SER today confirmed what we already predicted in 2012: the income position of workers in the arts has been seriously weakened. Amid all the positive news about rising income and attendance figures, this is a harsh confrontation with the reality behind the numbers. Permanent staff have been replaced by freelancers to a much greater extent than in the rest of the business world. And.
Krzysztof Penderecki: 'In chamber music you can't gloss over anything'
In 1961, Krzysztof Penderecki (Dębica, 1933) put his name on the map in one fell swoop with Lament for the Victims of Hiroshima. This avant-garde, expressionist piece for string orchestra flogs the ears with heavily dissonant harmonies full of microtones. With this uncompromising orgy of sound, the Pole struck the mental and physical inferno caused by the atomic bomb on the Japanese city in 1945 in the...
Thank you, Ettore Scola, for never losing heart.
Ettore Scola, one of the greats of Italian cinema, died in Rome on Tuesday. His films, full of warmth, sharp humour and human and political commitment were always a treat.
Nominations for Dance Audience Award pour in
It is quite a unique prize, this Dance Audience Award. You see, as a spectator and enthusiast, you can nominate a dancer or dance piece yourself. No jury decides that for you. You nominate it yourself. And you can do so until 1 February. What nominations are already coming in? Dans Publieksprijs 2015 The Dans Publieksprijs is a sought-after prize among dancers and companies, and it provides...
The reviewer, for anyone whose flesh is occasionally weak
Anyone who wants to credibly transfer a historical play to the present had better be radical, director Theu Boermans must have thought. And anyone who sees his adaptation of Nikolaj Gogol's The Revisor at the Nationale Toneel cannot help but agree with him. With references to asylum seekers, cubicle snoopers, data espionage and subsidy fraud, the play seems written yesterday. Yet Boermans remains...
The Access. Winternachten chief guest Susan Neiman on David Bowie (among others) #wn16
The last bit is always the most exciting. After a nice conversation with festival presenter Francis Broekhuizen, chief guest Susan Neiman suddenly joined us. It was nearing twelve, quite a bit of wine had actually already been poured into presenter and guest, but still. Suddenly you find yourself talking to a great philosopher and writer about David Bowie. This was the last session at Winternachten....
A Saturday night with Connie Palmen, Adriaan van Dis and Socrates. #wu16, #wn16
Next time, there will be 10 people queuing for a hotseat, 100 online viewers and dozens of live spectators in the foyer. At least I hope so, because only then will experimenting with new forms, apps and devices make sense, of course. At the second Winternachten night, Saturday 16 January at the Theater aan het Spui, we had slightly fewer viewers than...
Queues to the door for Knausgård at Winternachten #wu16 #wn16
Veel publiek en prachtige verhalen maakten de zaterdag van het literaire festival Winternachten tot een feestje. Voor het bezoek van de Noorse schrijver Karl Ove Knausgård ’s middags stonden de rijen van de zaal tot aan het voordeur van het Theater aan het Spui. Ook de avondprogrammering van het festival werd goed bezocht. Terwijl de Amerikaans-Duitse filosofe Susan Neiman in…
Storioni Festival: champagne bottle whose cork almost pops off
Thursday 21 January sees the start of the ninth edition of the Storioni Festival, dedicated to the five-hundredth anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death. Free after his famous triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, the musicians of the Storioni Trio and Frank Veenstra, artistic manager of Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, chose the theme 'Dreams and Demons'. Composer in residence is Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki, who became famous...
Forget Jinek. The conversation about art can go to a new dimension: blab.im at #wu16
On Friday 15 January, we conducted a first experiment with the platform 'blab.im'. During festival Winternachten, we reported live, via the internet. We did so in English, because most of the viewers we had were English-speaking. We could see that. That is already the most striking difference between something like Blab.im, and ordinary television. Blab.im in the Netherlands is still...
Winternachten: a fascinating and amusing evening of talking about Evil #wu16
Literature is not a means to bring about political change, but to change people. That is exactly what he aims for with his books, Egyptian writer Alaa al Aswani said yesterday at Winternachten, where his new novel The Automobile Club of Cairo was presented. That is probably how visitors to the literary festival at the end of the evening also came to...
On the sofa with The Signature Hunter, The Translator and Abdelkader Benali
Three and a half hours of streaming video from a seating area at The Hague's Winternachten festival. I won't blame you if you didn't follow everything. I wasn't quite there myself at the end. Still, it was a success. If only because it hasn't been done here in the country before. Blab is so new that...
#Winternachten Live
From around 19:30 on this page and via blab: Winternachten Live from The Hague. Drop by the Theater aan het Spui, or chat along via blab.
'Western writers are part of oppression'
The annual presentation of the International PEN Awards during the opening of Winternachten in The Hague is never a truly convivial affair. After all, every year at least one of the awardees is unable to receive the prize herself. Because she has been captured, because he is missing, or ill. This year, Thursday 14 January at the Theater aan het Spui, could...
Apple was not just messing around
Ten years after his death, Karel Appel turns out to be more timeless than you would think with only Cobra in mind. This can be seen at a large and impressive retrospective at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. It showcases the oeuvre of a highly versatile artist who continued to develop into an old age. An impression of the exhibition under construction. Drawings Next to...
Winternachten is about something
Hello Darkness is the theme of the international literary festival Winternachten, this coming weekend in The Hague. It takes guts, in a time when everything has to be fun and cosy and we prefer not to spend our free time dealing with misery or 'heavy topics'. That is why we love Winternachten, because that festival really goes...
Billy & Bowie
Since I can't put all my music musings about Bowie in the (already planned before his death) animation column in mid-March anyway, I'll just muse with the rest of the world now after B-day 10 01 2016. After all, see the cover of Heroes come up quite often in the media. That black-and-white picture where he's in some kind of puppet-like pose...
Ursula Mamlok: atonal music with heart
With the death of Pierre Boulez on 5 January, modernism seemingly came to an end, but the two-year-old Ursula Mamlok (1923) is still alive and kicking. Although the German-American Mamlok hopes to turn 93 on 1 February, she is steadily composing.# In 2009, she wrote Aphorisms II for two clarinets, in which, as in all her pieces, she manages to couple atonality with a warm-blooded...
Blackstar: Bowie gives lesson on ageing
Technically, of course, he has already risen from the dead once. After all, open heart surgery (2004) shuts down your heart. Before, you were then dead. Now you come back from anaesthesia with a new life. Not surprising, then, that 69-year-old pop culture phenomenon David Bowie hangs his current life on Lazarus: a musical theatre piece, a song, named after the biblical wanderer...
'The President' finally to be seen in the Netherlands
Movies that Matter is organising a screening of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 'The President' on 10 January with special guest -writer and journalist- Alexander Münninghoff (The Stamholder). In 'The President', a deposed dictator in an Eastern European country is confronted with his actions after he is forced to go into hiding with his grandson. In Mohsen Makhmalbaf's satire, the roles are briefly reversed and with it...
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