Anything for which people enter a stage.
In the Netherlands, this Thursday afternoon is sunny. Clothes stick to bodies. Hotpants everywhere. Boys take off their shirts in parks. This afternoon, Queens of the Stone Age's new single plops onto YouTube. The Way You Used to Do is sweaty and hot. Pleasure settled Queens of the Stone Age don't surprise. There's no need to. The band is grand...
I went to Amsterdam to face my social anxieties on the once infamous Mercatorplein. I saw a sunny square with a trendy bar and bakfiets mothers around a play fountain for white children (brrrr! gentrification), old veiled and un veiled women chatting on a bench (help! multiculture) and a performance in a converted bumper car tent (Waaaah! Holland Festival). What I didn't...
Some 25 years ago, 10 musicians got together in Innervillgraten. A hamlet in East Tyrol, to play funeral marches. A band formed: Franui. By making quirky arrangements of music such as by Schubert and Mahler, Franui gained international success. At the 2017 Holland Festival, they will perform a programme of music about life and impermanence. In collaboration with baritone Florian...
Herod has not yet uttered his cry "Kill this woman!" or his soldiers roughly lift Salome onto their shoulders and hurl her into hell. - The fancy drawing room, which had been turned into a ruin, was visible through a see-through hatch for almost the entire opera. Salome's blood-soaked dress seems to flare up for a moment, but then - pats! - the...
Among classical music-loving audiences, the two young pianists Lucas (1993) and Arthur (1996) Jussen need little introduction. For many years, the talented piano brothers have been filling halls like the Concertgebouw with four-handed or otherwise, interpretations of classics such as Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. With the avant-garde piece Mantra by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), to be performed as part of the Holland Festival,...
The Shadow of Ideas (De Umbris Idearum ... The Acousmatic Memory Palace) is the title of one of the pieces played by electronica duo Mouse on Mars with Ensemble Musikfabrik. The shadows are indeed shooting against the scrap of the Muziekgebouw. Ideas, however, have not yet formed. Nudges to do so roar loosely through the space. Transported elsewhere Akoesmatic music...
Flexing is a street dance style from Brooklyn, New York. Thirteen men, three women strong is the formation that has caused a furore in America in various guises (HyperActive, MainEventt, Ringmasters), from the local talent show Flex in Brooklyn to America's Best Dance Crew. Now the crew, led by pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, is on a world tour with a show, which they will perform with the...
The doors are closing and the society of spectacle, as described by Guy Debord, remains outside. George Crumb (1929) - in focus at this year's Holland Festival - unpacks contemporary man with his Metamorphoses, Book I (which has its European premiere Friday night). Gone, then, goes the shell of the ongoing pandemonium in which a diarrhoea of word, image and sound meet...
Endless chatting at the kitchen table. While cooking. That's all they do, the brother, the sister, the ex, the two daughters-in-law and the mother of the Gabriel family. About recipes, about the old piano. About Thomas, the brother who died of parkinson's, about his wife, who due to informal care had no time to renew her doctor's degree. All very casually, without...
The Orphanage of Dutch Music presents monthly 'forgotten Dutch masterpieces' at Amsterdam's Splendor stage. 'To discover the finer points', these are performed twice, interrupted by 'a short commentary or interview with special table guests'. On paper, a golden formula. Rightly so, the Holland Festival adopted three episodes. With the music, during the opening concert on Thursday, it was all in...
On Anton de Komplein, it is less cosy than on the roof of Parking 58 in Brussels, where I saw danse de nuit earlier. Above South-East, the moon is hidden behind a thick haze, the square feels big and empty so without the market. The performance by choreographer Boris Charmatz/Musée de la Danse, also today and tomorrow,...
Roaring programmers announce new compositions: "World premiere!" jubilate the posters. Superb, but in contemporary music practice, that primal performance is often immediately the last. The score goes into an archive folder. The notes fall silent; the roar falls silent. The Orphanage takes care of those forgotten works. Context David Dramm snatches such pieces from oblivion and presents them with context at the Orphanage
Do you write a review for people who are still going to the show, for people who have already been or for people who want to be informed? It is and remains an eternal dilemma. Vincent Macaigne's Holland Festival performance 'En Manque' will only be at the Compagnietheater on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 June. The chances of you, the reader,...
At last. The Nation, the hyperactual theatrical serial with which the revamped Nationale Toneel, sorry Theatre, presents itself to the country, feels like a refreshing splash of water on a soggy day. Newly appointed boss Eric de Vroedt lives up to his reputation by delivering a work that will no doubt draw new audiences into the theatres. An audience spoiled by...
Boris Charmatz has been a guest at many editions of the Holland Festival with impressive, provocative, socially engaged, finely composed and conceptually strong dance performances: Aatt enen tionon and Con forts fleuve (both in 2001); 50 years of dance (2010), Enfant (2011) and Manger (2015). His latest choreography, danse de nuit, premiered in Geneva last September. During the Holland Festival...
Traditionally, the AVROTROS Friday Concert marks the festive end of the season with a joint concert by the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Groot Omroepkoor. On 9 June, American star conductor David Robertson leads them through Maurice Ravel's compelling ballet Daphnis et Chloé in the final concert. In addition, the orchestral work L'Ascension by his compatriot Olivier Messiaen and a selection of...
A prologue, two dialogues and a long interlude. All clearly connected. In a performance by Romeo Castellucci - it doesn't have to get any crazier. Italian theatre maker Castellucci prefers to make theatre that is not easily or even misunderstood. He does not shy away from shock effects. Visually overwhelming, but a clear line is often hardly recognisable. So that promises...
It is just about the most beautiful music written. Claudio Monteverdi's Marian Vespers have enchanted even the most untrained listener since their premiere in 1610. Raphael Pichon is a young French conductor acclaimed for his shimmering yet refined musicality and more than absolute hearing. Everything director Pierre Audi touches usually turns to gold
'Everyone has an Apple. Everyone has a Corneille. Nobody has a Van Merwijk. So the question is whether Van Merwijk is any good. Nobody knows that. Then the challenge is for a few great people to buy a Van Merwijk. After that, everyone wants to have a Van Merwijk. When that happens, I'll go back to making other work, because I want...
Many dance students have a one-sided view of what a successful dance career entails. Namely: dancing with the dance company of your dreams, in a theatre, on a stage. This is what Ulrika Kinn Svensson, artistic advisor at the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg, tells Inclusive Dance Event. But because of the weak labour and income position, partly due to disappearing subsidies, that dream does not always come true. There is...
Roaring warriors, pomp and circumstance, a tough drama set against the historical background of the Viking era. That goes down like cake (or beer) with the Danes who see themselves as direct heirs of the Vikings, the organisers must have thought. And that is why the play Røde Orm is being presented as one of the highlights in...
You have punk. You have performance art. Best Gaap, because often little remains of that ferocious wildness that dominated the European scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Marina Abramovic we now see mainly as that silent lady on that chair opposite her long-lost lover. We have forgotten that she once offered her audience razors to cut her...
Culture Press is an indispensable addition to the cultural news in your newspaper, on the internet or on TV. Independent, quirky, rebellious and above all: useful. After all, there is already enough nonsense about art. You'll understand that we don't serve the millions of readers that the big publishers and their advertisers exist on. Which is why everyone else does so little about art....
Last year, a minor riot erupted when the Holland Festival announced it was mounting a large-scale project in 2019 around Karlheinz Stockhausen's opera Light. Modern-music haters screamed blue murder, because who is waiting for the German wordsmith's nasty squeak? Yet a run on the charts immediately ensued. Even after his death...
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