Since its inception, the NJO Music Summer has spread its wings. It started in 2001 as a summer course for music students who were allowed to work with internationally renowned musicians, composers and conductors. Since then, the NJO Music Summer has grown into an unmissable, audience-friendly festival, covering the entire province of Gelderland. On Friday 19 August, it takes a step across the border to Overijssel,...
Project Cloud, the latest experiential artwork by Bossche city artist Lucas de Man, may need a disclaimer. Anyone entering the seven-storey work had better not do so in the company of a solid existential crisis. The visitor before me did, and still needed a very good talk with a psychological counsellor afterwards. Who...
Austrian politician Jörg Haider labelled its work Weltkatzenmusik. When his far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs joined the government in 2000, it led to mass protests. At one such rally, Olga Neuwirth (Graz, 1968), under the title 'Ich lass mich nicht wegjodeln', denounced his anti-intellectual and anti-cultural agenda. The rest is history: Haider drove himself to pieces in 2008, Neuwirth...
We are all going to die! We already have that certainty in. And since the dawn of mankind, every new generation invariably knows that it is going to happen to them now. After all: their successors have never prospered anywhere like today's youth. Nice premise for a concert, thought German director Sebastian Nübling[hints]Nuling was a guest at the Holland Festival last year with an adaptation of Hebbel's play Nibelungen, read the review and a interview.[/hints], good idea to programme, thought the Holland Festival. I seriously wonder why.
Wie gaat vanavond naar huis met de C. Buddingh’-Prijs, de bekroning voor het beste Nederlandstalige dichtdebuut van het afgelopen jaar? Dat wordt vanavond bekendgemaakt op Poetry International. A Quattro Mani doet een voorspelling.
In his youth, Harrison Birtwistle (1934) was one of the Angry Young Men of English music, now elevated to the peerage and going through life as 'Sir Harry'. He trained as a clarinetist and composer at the Royal College of Music in Manchester, where he was annoyed by the conservative climate. Together with John Ogden,...
Champagne at BAK in Utrecht, deep disappointment at The New Institute in Rotterdam: the Council for Culture has spoken. Today, Thursday 19 May 2016, the first advice after the draconian art cuts by the first Rutte cabinet came out, and heads are rolling. Amsterdam loses prestigious presentation institution De Appel, in The Hague fellow institution Stroom has to redo its homework. The Orkest van het Oosten and the Gelders Orkest have to come up with merger plans within two years. In Utrecht, the city company Theater Utrecht will no longer receive funding despite artistic appreciation. Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven Tilburg must make new plans and Opera Zuid must quickly raise its artistic quality. These are the main conclusions of the Culture Council's opinion.
As dramatic as some of this may sound, the advice is actually not, when you look over the whole battlefield. Thanks in part to
Toneelschuur, Don Carlos (stage) Nina Spijkers brings Friedrich Schiller's classic play back to its essence. No lavish scenery depicting the Spanish court, but canvases peeled off layer by layer. playlist M31 Foundation, Nederlandse Reisopera, Theater na de Dam, Der Kaiser von Atlantis (opera) Forty years after its world premiere at Theater Bellevue, Victor Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis will be re...
Throughout the year, the public broadcaster spends a lot of time on sports. For World Cup, Tour or Games, cultural broadcasts are cancelled for weeks without pardon. If you can't beat them, join them, Paul Witteman must have thought, or perhaps the viewing figures were disappointing, because on 1 May he devoted an entire Podium Witteman broadcast to cycling. Don't. The reason for the cycling special is...
Imagine has been transforming for several years. When this festival was still going through the world under the name Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, its main focus was on genre cinema. The Fantatstic genre is an insidious term used as a catch-all for science fiction, fantasy and horror. In these postmodern times, fantatstic is harder to delineate. The festival therefore changed its name back in 2009,...
That there is an extremist magazine about burnings and beheadings, and that rich Britons have four-storey basements built under their houses for a private cinema or bowling alley - we learned a lot last night at the International Literature Festival Utrecht (ILFU). The programme of the Saturday night of the ILFU was as richly varied as that of the first evening. The...
The Cinéma Arabe festival (from 19 April) is showing a rich palette of new work from the Arab World. Interview with director Hany Abu-Assad who sets a new tone with The Idol. And he has plans for a film about William of Orange. 'That will be my parting gift to the Netherlands.'
1. Kwatta, Mariken (youth) The question was not whether Nijmegen youth theatre company Kwatta would ever venture into Mariken van Nieumeghen, but when. The bar was set high with successful previous book and film adaptations, but where the medieval Mariken needs two miracles, Jibbe Willems' adaptation is thrilling even without a fall from great heights and the miraculous release of iron rings...
On 30 January, choreographer Erik Kaiel was presented with the prestigious Victor Award at IPAY, an international youth theatre fair in Canada, for his performance Tetris. "It's a kind of Buchmesse for youth theatre. If you get picked up there, you go around the world" says Kaiel. Kaiel (1973) has been working in the Netherlands since 2003 and has so far produced his work at...
Festival director Bero Beyer found it difficult to choose eight films to nominate for the Hivos Tiger Award. After all, what makes a film special? According to Beyer, Elisabeth Subrin's film drama A Woman, a Part evokes a sense of nostalgia and is also outspoken, bold and above all human. The #IFFR check by Culture Press is that A Woman, a...
Every stage show, film, or concert has a scene that touches you. A moment that evokes emotion, amazement, or perhaps disgust. Even in director Sam Mendes' James Bond film Spectre, there is such a moment that stays with you. It concerns the excerpt in which classical music, namely the aria Cum dederit from Antonio Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus RV 608,...
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...
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...
He would have turned 91 on 26 March, but died Tuesday night, 5 January, in his hometown of Baden-Baden. Pierre Boulez was the last surviving composer of the group that reshaped the direction of music after WWII. His fellow maestros preceded him: Karlheinz Stockhausen died in 2007, Luciano Berio in 2003, Karel Goeyvaerts in 1993 and...
Propaganda is not just something that occurs in, say, Russia, but also in the West - more so than we ourselves realise. For example, is it widely believed today that the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan to capitulate and thus end World War II, nothing could be further from the truth. In that respect, Germany goes...
Last summer, the Britten Youth String Orchestra made its own Tour de France. It kicked off in Zwolle, where conductor Loes Visser founded the ensemble in 2007 to give young string players orchestral and stage experience. Interested parties are tested on things like intonation, bowing technique and musicality during a rigorous audition and those who are admitted must rehearse every week and participate in all concerts....
Although the supply has been declining for years, there are still more new shows than a person can see. So nobody sees everything, everybody misses a lot, which was the case in 2014. But these performances no one would have wanted to miss, even if two of them were not even seen in a theatre. And no dance, for that our partner was dance audiences this year too. #1...
Today it was announced that the Gijsbrecht tradition, revived since five years, will end again due to lack of subsidy. A shame, of course, although we don't have to mourn so hard the end of this Amsterdam custom, which has existed since 1638. After all, the play is totally unplayable, historically completely off the mark and all in all a rather pretentious representation of the history of...
As the new Star Wars is about to hit cinemas, we look back to 1977. How did the phenomenon take off and what did people think of it?
The National Opera, Hänsel und Gretel (opera) It is the best-known fairy tale opera of all time. Not surprisingly, as Humperdinck's adaptation of Hansel and Gretel is overtly rooted in folk music as in almost Wagnerian orchestration. It was bound to be a success. Richard Strauss conducted the world premiere; Amsterdam features International Opera Award Winner Lotte de Beer's version. She moves...
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