Stars, we don't really do that in the Netherlands. Our ground level does not allow diva behaviour. In our lowlands, you get a plus if you have stayed so nicely ordinary despite your success. Even if you stand in the Arena with your songs, like the Toppers, this weekend. How different it is in Istanbul. There, you are allowed to be shamelessly famous. Like.
Bring 50 distinguished and cross-disciplinary artists together and things will crackle tremendously. That will be the thinking behind the new Academy of Arts. The installation of 16 new, high-profile members already gave a taste of this. Actor Gijs Scholten van Aschat (board member) and visual artist Barbara Visser (president) expressed themselves a little cautiously a while ago about what the Akademie...
#1 Salzburger Festspiele / Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz / Katie Mitchell, The forbidden zone (theatre/performance) - Dutch premiere 11 February, Stadsschouwburg AmsterdamThe British director Katie Mitchell is this month's 'arsonist' at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg. With performances that are as scintillating as they are transgressive. The forbidden zone is about areas long off-limits to women: wete... You can log in now to continue...
It's raining annual lists and we're merrily joining in. As subjective as anyone, after all, no one sees everything, and opinions on taste can always differ. Of course, also in this list many performances in or from the Randstad, but half of them were not yet shown there. And all genres mixed together. As long as it is theatre. With the only limitation: no repeats, apologies Ring and Lohengrin (DNO), St John Passion (NRO). And no dance, because for that our partner dance audience.
It is the most shameless and therefore ultimate tearjerker in operatic history: Puccini's La bohème. If the opera is performed even half right, by the end of the evening the entire audience leaves the hall with wet eyes and red cheeks, resistance is futile.
The Holland Festival got a completely unknown new director in the person of Britain's Ruth Mackenzie. At least, to us. The flamboyant, artistically exceptional opera director Pierre Audi makes way for a woman who has presented herself mainly as a manager of festivals and cultural institutions, but whose ideas are anyone's guess. When she was presented, none of the...
More than a century we had to wait, but at last Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder also to be seen. Surprisingly, it is not. Reportedly, the composer was against it, as it concerns a cantata. However, director Pierre Audi and conductor Marc Albrecht show very convincingly with this scenic world premiere that Gurre-Lieder hid an opera that yearned for the stage light.
Even before the Holland Festival had begun properly, all tickets for the three performances of Handel's Orlando sold. What a crisis. However, it is not hard to guess why.
It seems like a statement, opening the latest Holland Festival under Pierre Audi's direction with 'Vortex Temporum'. The collaboration between the two top Belgian ensembles Rosas and Ictus does everything that is scarce in the present day.
"The only one who still dares to go for the elite". On the way to the car park under the Passengers Terminal Amsterdam, the retired newspaper reviewer who once had a page on music sighed at the feeling of his part of society. It was after the press conference where the programme of Holland Festival 2014 was presented. He was talking, as we sank deeper and deeper, about Pierre Audi, the artistic director of that Holland Festival, who this year announced his last - and most glorious - programme ever.
It would have been so nice: The National Ballet together with The National Opera at The National Theatre, like you have in the capital of any self-respecting country. But so that didn't happen. The home of our National Opera and Ballet clubs is now called 'Nationale Opera en Ballet'. The National Theatre made sure of that, which, like the Nederlands Dans Theater, is not in our capital Amsterdam, but in its residence in The Hague.
69,500 visitors, at least 5,000 fewer than previous editions, but the halls were fuller. With 82% audience occupancy, the Holland Festival organisers are satisfied with the 2013 festival. Whether that higher occupancy rate, apart from the smaller number of performances (14 fewer than last year) is also due to smaller halls, is impossible to find out from here, but the fact that the large Theater Carré, with its many unsellable low-visibility seats, was also hardly used this year will certainly have helped.
Holland Festival
,,The special thing about Quartett is that an intimate story between two people is blown up to impressive proportions. The characters find themselves in a room, which seems to float. In this seclusion, an isolated game between a man and a woman plays out. Giant video projections
The final applause after the premiere of Götterdämmerung stormy, is an understatement. It seemed as if the completely sold-out auditorium wanted to surpass the primal forces extracted from the Gelders Orkest by Ed Spanjaard. History was made here: on stage, by the soloists and choir, in the orchestra pit and behind the scenes, for six hours and 20 minutes.
Imagine Arjan Robben. The much-troubled frontman of the Dutch national team has just seen a brilliant move rewarded with a penalty and he is ready to take it. Out comes a field hand with a new set of adhesive letters for his shirt because the numbers are no longer legible from the stands. Lots of lashing, shirt off, seconds glue. Circumstances, in short. After two minutes, the fielder is gone, the number readable and the referee's whistle sounds. Then try to hit the target.
On 28 February, Pierre Audi will present the programme of the 2012 Holland Festival at the City Theatre. As in 2010 and 2011, we will follow that festival closely with our online festival daily newspaper at www.dedodo.nl. That daily newspaper has now proven its right to exist, as more and more festivals want to collaborate with the Cultural Press Agency on this unique initiative. To the 'product-range'...
We are not big on copying press releases directly, but this one accidentally slipped in. For those who didn't know it yet, but tout art is going loopy on Sunday and Monday for the preservation of sanity in the Netherlands. Although that will have no effect on the architect of the cut, PVV member Martin Bosma. Even the cultural sector in Limburg (Geert...
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