Over his long career – 23 novels, memoirs, his painfully believable narratives adapted into extraordinary films (10 for the big screen) and for television – John le Carré has created a world that has gripped readers and viewers alike.
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.
When a trail-blazing orchestra takes on a world-transforming work, it would be pointless to leave the staid old rules of concert etiquette intact. Not only did the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon stretch their repertoire of symphonies performed from memory to cover the epic expansiveness and ear-bending innovations of Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica.
“I would love it,” Lola (Barbara Sukowa) sighs, warned of a world without morality.
German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s light-touch 90-minute comedy is a chic satire on the slippery business of making art – and especially on the difficulty of assessing it. Whose judgement matters, after all?
Grange Park Opera is aiming big. The company is in a new venue, the grounds of West Horsley Place in Surrey, where they have built themselves a spectacular new opera house in less than a year. The building is not yet complete, but is close enough to stage a full summer season, including this new production of Die Walküre, the second opera of Wagner’s Ring cycle.
All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944.
Can the theatre be a courtroom? A good public place to debate morality and to arrive at profound decisions? You could answer this with a history lesson that ranges from the ancient Greeks to more recent tribunal plays in the 1960s and 1990s. But I’ll just concentrate on Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror, which premiered simultaneously in Berlin and Frankfurt in 2015 and now gets a British outing at the Lyric Hammersmith.
"Love is in the air," croons or rather bellows presenter Juri Tetzlaff, getting his audience of adults and children to bellow back the wordless refrain, arms swaying above their heads. Mezzo Sophie Rennert, dragged up as noble Lotario, and soprano Marie Lys as widowed princess Adelaide dance tenderly to the strains. They're not singing one of the most ravishing love duets in opera this morning because this is the one-hour family version of Handel's Lotario.
Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock, and anyone else listening.
If Kraftwerk were still in the business of creating music rather than laurel-resting, this might be where they'd choose to wander. Certainly “Car Car Car”, with its tick-tocking rhythm owes them a direct debt. “A car is a car/It drives you near or far/It transports us to all kinds of places,” run the heavily Vocodered lyrics. But that’s just the beginning of this tour de force. Two tunes later we hit “Army of Strangers” which comes on – convincingly - like an update of some offcut from one of Bowie’s Berlin albums. Then, later, “K House” appears to robot-channelling a film theme trapped in John Barry’s brainstem.
And what of the vocal sample-delic psychedelic Voodoo madness of “High Priestess of Hell”? Or the sitar techno with Albert Ayler-esque punk-bebop sax attack that is “Guede”? Or the ten minute bonus track, “Mantra”, which mutates the Buddhist “Om” into hypno-techno? Or "With u", a perfectly pared back electro-pop nugget featuring, of all people, The Stereo MCs? It’s an album that doesn’t quit for its 50 minutes-ish length, whether sleazing it up on the outright gay club whopper “I Want You” or recalling Bernard Herrmann’s “Taxi Driver” soundtrack on the slow, muzzy “2 Die 2 Sleep”.
Zukunftsmusik is utterly addictive. It does what a truly great album should: it astounds.
Overleaf: Watch the Video for "Car Car Car" by DJ Hell