Brahms composed trios throughout his life - these well-loved pieces contrast with the much rarer works of Hans Gal and the oboist Heinz Holliger, here exposed in his parallel career as a composer.
Brahms Piano Trios, Horn Trio, Clarinet Trio Soloists of Villa Musica (Covellio Classics)
Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on coercive measures. Few citizens today know about it.
I’m standing with my feet on peaks and my head in clouds, looking down steep Alps at the tiny chocolate-brown chalets of little Verbier way below on the green slopes. It’s ravishing up here on the top of Fontanet, and I tarry, gloating over the botanical riches around me of milky-blue gentians, royal-blue harebells, glistening edelweiss, dark little orchids and garnet-bright sedum, watching the trickling water of a brook, and replaying last night’s music in my head. And if you move quick you can do this yourself before next Sunday.
Being a choreographer is harder than it looks. Steps, movement, are just the beginning. On top of that you need to have a sense of theatricality, and then, even more, you need to be able to convey your ideas, through movement alone, to the audience. On these counts, Bern:Ballett’s visit to the Linbury fails to make the grade.
Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This is the indispensable clickable guide to a cultured break in Europe.
If you’re looking for a surprising and off-the-wall show this school holidays, I’ve no hesitation in hugely recommending Chouf Ouchouf, a brilliantly and theatrically inventive acrobat theatre show performed by the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, a troupe of Moroccan acrobats who learned their awesome skills on Tangier Beach. Through the wit and imagination of its Swiss theatre directors, the show manages to retain a lively street smell and yet pull off some deft theatrical effects, blurring the edges between normality and strangeness - one moment you feel you might be walking in a souk, the next you’ve been sucked into a darkling, ghostly world of surreal human balancing acts.
What’s not to like about this Swiss trio with an unquenchable love of the most obscure American roots music? As well as having the ability to evoke the spirit of early Cajun and rock’n’roll recordings without resorting to staid academic imitation, they are also clearly influenced by the likes of The Clash and the Velvet Underground. This means they’re as focused on producing a satisfyingly physically-present contemporary noise as they are in stimulating a revival of the French migrant/African-American music of deepest Louisiana.
Luxembourg's musical landscape has few claims to represent the Grand Duchy itself. Most of Luxembourg's Eurovision entries weren't actually from the Duchy, as there was little local music to draw on. So Belgium's cod punk-gone-blando Plastic Bertrand became 1987's entry (with “Amour, Amour”). In 1965 Luxembourg won Eurovision with France's France Gall's “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son”, a song written by her countryman Serge Gainsbourg.
Music, Wagner famously pronounced, is the art of transition. For the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, by contrast, music is “the art of punctuation”. On the one hand, how to get from one thing to the next; on the other hand, how to separate one thing from the next. But in the end the problem is much the same: how do we make sense of large chunks of time that contain nothing but music?