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With his novel The Eight Mountains, Italian writer Paolo Cognetti (42) broke through internationally in 2017. Without Reaching the Top again takes place at great heights. 'The mountains give me a lesson in humility every time.' Without Reaching the Top is the travelogue of Cognetti's mountain trek in late 2017 through a high plateau in Nepal near the...
A real estate agent once confided in me that a bookcase in the living room saves thousands of euros in the resale value of a house. In a negative sense. This fact always does well at parties, and book lovers (my network is full of them) grudge it. On a tour of Manchester Central Library, the head librarian proudly told us that the café...
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was a composer, scientist, writer, doctor, mystic and founder of a convent. So a Catholic nun, but one who did explore female orgasm. The latter paradox resonates, Herman Finkers obviously realised when he wrote the screenplay for 'The Legs of St Hildegard'. Hildegard's description of orgasm read: 'When a woman makes love...
Travelling makes you a better person. Everyone thinks so, and it is a great favour to be able to travel. A privilege to be able to do it. If you go to England by train, the last few minutes before you disappear under the Channel at Calais, you see more and more fences appearing. And we are not talking about the average...
While I was walking around Manchester with some cultural sector leaders, minister Ingrid van Engelshoven sent a letter to the House, telling it how much it would cost to enable state-subsidised arts organisations to get fair pay at the current offer. So that letter contained quite a few omissions: the minister was silent on the role played by regional and...
When I tried to explain to secondary school students the other day how little the orchestra members who perform the musical surprise act at the Eurovision Song Contest were paid, they looked at me in bewilderment. After all, it was more than you earn as a 16-year-old as a stock boy at the average grocery store. So what was really the problem? So now let's do some other maths, thanks to the...
The great philosopher of the 1968 left-wing uprisings was untrustworthy both privately and in his philosophy. His muse Simone de Beauvoir was also a victim. In almost an hour and a half, theatre company OT Rotterdam unfolds the disenchantment of De Beauvoir in a brilliant role by José Kuipers, opposite Tim Linde as ex-student leader Benny Lévy and confidant of Sartre. Kabbala Piece...
"We are hopeful," is the reply when I speak to a colleague just before the start of the Berlin film festival. For curious as to how the choice of Carlo Chatrian as the new artistic director has fallen among German critics. Chatrian, previously director of the leading arthouse festival in Locarno, lies well, I understand. Whether this 70th Berlinale will see all that new momentum...
'I get up with you and I go to bed with you,' I said jokingly. We stood in his kitchenette, where he made coffee for himself and tea for me. Reinbert's big startled eyes told me that my ironic remark had landed in the barren soil of his deadly seriousness. - It was not the first and not the last
That government distrust of citizens in the Netherlands has reached bizarre proportions is proven by the hassle with benefits at the tax office and the state of affairs at the UWV. Or your average housing landlord where you want to report a leaky tap. Thanks to a politics influenced by false entrepreneurialism and rabid populism that treats citizens as fraudsters...
Short stories have been written by Esther Verhoef (51) for as long as she has been writing fiction - since she was seven. Whether they are 10 or 100 pages long, her stories are as dear to Verhoef as her novels and thrillers. 'Look,' says Esther Verhoef, unfolding the flaps of the cover of Labyrinth - the stories. On the inside are old, on...
Fascinating front-page news and headliners for all talk shows: Matthijs van Nieuwkerk quits DWDD after 15 years. Obviously a disaster of national proportions. The book industry proclaims the end of the world, bands can no longer break through, and the successor to De Correspondent can never again meet its crowdfunding target in six minutes. An institution disappears, and everyone panics. Who...
Emerging fascism is becoming increasingly parlous. Especially among young people, I discovered recently at a concert by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra at the Concertgebouw. A reading club of twenty-somethings said they enjoyed James MacMillan's Second Percussion Concerto. They joined me in denouncing the draconian cuts to culture. But suddenly it sounded carefree: 'We are all voting for Thierry.' When I was dismayed...
What. Have. We. Terrible. Much. Too. Learning. If there is 1 thing the musical Tina makes clear, it is that. Especially at the stormy premiere, Sunday 9 February, a few hours before storm Ciara blew the last bubbles out of the Utrecht champagne glasses. An almost completely white auditorium, in Black Tie, that is, with only a few people from...
'Had I not possessed three things unrelated to music, I would have perished early on from loneliness and disillusionment,' wrote Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) at 60. Those three things were: 'Iron health, a distinct fighting spirit and a modest but independent income.' Whereas women in the nineteenth century were condemned to compose
Dutch composer Bart Visman (1962) has already written many wonderful works of his own, but makes his debut with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra with an orchestration of 'Ondine'. This is the first movement from Maurice Ravel's three-part piano cycle Gaspard de la nuit. It is the prelude to an integral orchestration, to be premiered next season. 'I am of the same...
Those who want to be musicians have to bleed. Earlier, we reported that the highlight of the Dutch edition of the Eurovision Song Contest was going to be performed by professional musicians and conservatoire students who would receive 100 euros a day for it. Outrageously little, when you know that full days of work were going to be involved anyway, for eight days. Well: it's even worse than...
In April 2020, the Persgroep, now DPG Media because it smells better internationally, will stop regional art supplements in its newspapers. No more art reports and interviews, hardly any reviews. Local bookshops will lose their stage in all Dutch regions, as the publisher of Volkskrant, Trouw and AD has a regional monopoly. The message, brought by a reporter from the Eindhovens Dagblad, struck...
In the 1990s, BBC 2 was a reason for me to stay at home. For a while then, it was not about the episodes of Star Trek they kept broadcasting, while Dutch TV tried to shut out any kind of imagination. No, it had to do with The Late Show, a culture programme. At quarter...
Much has already been said about Almere, that it is ugly, for instance, or too car-oriented. There are also few cities in Europe where the four-lane roads extend as gloriously to the shopfront as in Almere. I'd like to add a note of praise. Coming from the station, walking across an artificial dune of car parks and fast-food chains, skimming past...
The new production of L'Orfeo by De Nederlandse Reisopera and Opera2Day is a form of total theatre in which Wagner would have licked his fingers. In her direction, Monique Wagemakers forges song, dance, music, costumes and scenery into an inseparable whole. The performance is compelling, poetic and enchanting and fits seamlessly with the stylised language with which Monteverdi in 1607 presented the...
'My love for opera is rooted in my youth. Emotions you feel as a young person become almost tangible in opera. While listening, I often experienced a catharsis.' Director Serge van Veggel zooms in on depression and delusion with the production Opera Melancholica. Starting point is Philip Glass's The Fall of the House of Usher, presented as a form of 'anatomical...
In the trailer for the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which kicks off on 22 January, film images crumble into abstract shapes and colour patterns. It has to do, I understand, with the wonder of the irrepressible urge to make stories. Once, a cave dweller put a painted hand on the rock face. In the digital age, we conjure stories with coloured pixels. The...
Singer, harpist and theatre-maker Ekaterina Levental (Tashkent, 1977) came to the Netherlands as a refugee in 1993, where she built a successful career. Together with her partner Chris Koolmees, she made the triptych De Weg, De Grens and Schoppenvrouw, in which she sings of her own difficult road to happiness. With her pocket performances, she holds up a mirror to us: 'We are quick to judge a...
Last December, we had no internet and no TV/netflix for a week. The Customer Disconnection Department of KPN, formerly XS4All, had not understood that a broken cable in our neighbourhood could have had anything to do with it. One of the funny effects of these fibre-less days was that I finished reading four books. Something I normally do only on...
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