Robert Seethaler’s The Last Movement, translated by Charlotte Collins, is “a miniature portrait of a genius all at sea, both literally and metaphorically”—an ailing Gustav Mahler, on his last transatlantic crossing in 1911. (The Michigan Daily, 4/10/26; Financial Times, 5/4/26)
Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” turns 50, morphing over the decades “from elegiac melody to club banger and anti-nuclear clarion call.” (BBC, 5/12/26)
“What Kreator, Sodom, Destruction and Tankard—the ‘big four’ of German thrash metal—might have lacked in finesse and professional outlook, they made up for in sheer unbridled aggression.” (The Guardian, 3/18/26)
The Komische Oper staged Hans Werner Henze’s Raft of the Medusa on a giant swimming pool stage in a disused hangar of Berlin’s Tempelhof airport—not coincidentally, adjacent to refugee housing since 2015. (The New York Times, 9/14/23; Financial Times, 9/18/23)
Props to James Austin Smith, who presented “an unpredictably playful program of oboe music from the former East Germany” at a groovy performance space in Brooklyn. (The New Yorker, 11/13/23)
“The art of music,” writes Jeremy Eichler, “possesses a unique and often underappreciated power to burn through history’s cold storage.” Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance reflects on the work of Schoenberg, Strauss, Britten, and Shostakovich as musical memorials. (The New York Times, 9/2/23; Financial Times, 9/5/23; Here & Now, 10/13/23; Literary Review, 11/2023)