theartsdesk Q&A: Meeting Pina Bausch

EDITORS' PICK: MEETING PINA BAUSCH An interview with the late great iconoclast of dance-theatre in her hometown Wuppertal

An interview with the late great iconoclast of dance-theatre in her hometown Wuppertal

This week the world-renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch arrives in London - for the first time, without its towering creator. Last summer the German choreographer died at the age of 68. The company intends to continue, despite the dodgy track record for troupes formed around one singular giant vision to survive long without that magnet at the core.

Interview: Alex Hogg of Minima on scoring The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The sound of silents: finding the music for a creepy classic

Before Shutter Island - long, long before - there was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. First released in 1920, Robert Wiene's hallucinogenic film descends, like that of Martin Scorsese who cites it as a major influence, into the creepy shadowlands between sanity and madness. This spring Caligari goes on national tour (details below) spruced up with a musical accompaniment by Minima, a four-strong rock group which specialises in supplying the sound for silents. The group consists of drums (Mick Frangou), bass (Andy Taylor), cello (Greg Hall) and guitar (Alex Hogg). Here, Hogg talks about Minima's work in a Q&A followed by a mini-masterclass on scoring a key scene from the movie.

Wolfgang Rihm Day, Barbican

Wolfgang Rihm: 'Sod the Hadron Collidor. You want a decent particle-smasher? Look no further than Wolfgang Rihm's brain.'

Isserlis performs a winning new cello concerto from the German master

It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen to his prolifically combustible music, the million and one ideas hurtling about with the energy of a school playground and the intensity of a burning sun, and you soon realise that all that cranial space is probably quite necessary.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jansons, RFH

The mighty Latvian returns to sing and dance through Shostakovich

Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.

theartsdesk in Berlin: The 60th Berlinale

The 60th Berlinale turns up tales from far and wide

The Palme d'Or at Cannes makes headlines. The Golden Bear in Berlin tends not to, and few films that win in competition at the German capital's annual film festival, the Berlinale, go on to command global clout, though that's no general reflection on the quality of entries.

Phaedra, Barbican

An overly clean, efficient and, at times, vulgar, take from Henze on this lusty old story

In 2005, having completed the first act of his opera Phaedra and killed off his lead Hippolyte, Hans Werner Henze contracted a mystery illness. No one understood it or saw a way out of it. He stopped eating, then speaking. His eyes began to fail him. He fell into a coma. The musical world began to fly out to his Italian village outside Rome to pay their last respects and prepare for his funeral. Then, two inert months into the grief and the start of the obsequies, Henze "just stood up", and went back to work on the second act of Phaedra, in which Hippolyte returns from the dead.

theartsdesk in the Ruhr: The European Film Awards

Ken Loach accepts the EFA's Lifetime Achievement Award from one of his own characters

The EU impersonates the Oscars - in Germany's industrial heartland

The 22nd European Film Awards closed last night with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon winning Best Director, Screenwriter and Film. Tahar Rahim was Best Actor for his breakthrough performance as a French-Algerian initiate into a prison’s brutal underworld in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, while the absent Kate Winslet won Best Actress for The Reader. Eric Cantona provided the night’s real star-power as he presented a visibly overcome Ken Loach with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, BBC Four

The long, strange saga of Germany's avant-garde electronic pioneers

It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)

Wolfgang Voigt as Gas, Barbican

Frankfurter's audiovisual extravaganza unsettles mightily

It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.

Mother Courage and Her Children, National Theatre

A much-anticipated Warner-Shaw collaboration on Brecht's most famous play misses bullseye

Bertolt Brecht was probably made for them: Deborah Warner directing Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage and her Children is as desirable a coupling, surely, as the Warner-Shaw Richard II or Happy Days, both immensely satisfying showcases for the director's imaginative reach and the actress's fabled versatility.