Culture tips and favorites of the week: Liam Neeson as Marlowe – Culture

Don’t stop travelers: “French Kiss” by Chilly Gonzales

Ultimately, the world can be happy that Chilly Gonzales was well-used during the years in which he had his main residence in Cologne: Gonzales released piano albums, set the Guinness World Record for the longest concert (27 pretty sweaty hours), and performed for a Daft Punk-Album adjusted the harmonies, for which he won a Grammy, transferred German Christmas songs from major to minor, Silent Night, Depressive Night, for his own Christmas record. Fortunately, what Chilly Gonzales didn’t do during his time on the Rhine was to record an album of Cologne songs in which he satirized the local patriotic hymns. Because with his talent as a musician and entertainer, Gonzales would have managed it so well in the end that another batch of swaying terror catchy tunes would have eaten its way through the world mercilessly.

Gonzales has now moved on to the Seine and, unlike in Cologne, there is no language barrier in the way of the man from Montreal in Paris. And so Gonzales has now thrown himself directly into the local musical tradition – because he seems to have time. At least on the cover of his new album he yawns wonderfully well-rested in the Parisian morning, with a cigarette or perhaps a slightly longer cigarette in bed, the pillow on his back, a baguette next to him.

Given its provenance, it is impossible that Gonzales would have recorded a chanson album with “French Kiss” without an ironic touch – the burning Notre Dame in the background of the cover makes this known before you listen to it for the first time. And then: In the title song, Gonzales makes fun of his Canadian accent, in which he speaks the language of Voltaire and Bangalter (Daft Punk), and in the accompanying video he uses his words from Slimfit President Emanuel Macron, right-wing activist Éric Zemmour and Shirtwide Open -Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, AI technology makes it possible. Speaking, because singing, is perhaps one of the few things that the multi-talented Chilly Gonzales can’t do so well – but that doesn’t detract from the eleven tracks on “French Kiss”, because he, his piano and his self-irony are played by well-chosen guests supports. Moritz Baumstieger

Maria Callas on 131 CDs

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Giuseppe Verdi composed quite vividly how the ambitious Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to murder his real or supposed opponents and competitors. Nevertheless, there is scope for individual role design, depicting the bloodthirsty person as a sheer monster or as a split personality that is dominated by spontaneous anger as well as uncontrollable hysteria. Maria Callas sets standards of expressive intensity and relentless sonic borderline experience that are hard to beat. Unless you also grant this monster a certain amount of capacity for love, even humanity, as Anna Netrebko, the greatest dramatic soprano of our time, understands this most convincingly. Callas, on the other hand, are also attracted by the ugliness, the almost vulgar tone of their voice, which comes to light again and again. She plays virtuoso with the two sides of her voice and thereby creates a tremendous tension that is actually based on this sound-aesthetic ambivalence.

It is not the first Callas edition, which is now being released by Warner on 131 CDs on the occasion of its 100th birthday on December 2nd. But it is the most extensive in terms of her repertoire. You can hear her in all her roles, including many very well remastered live recordings. There are not nearly as many recordings of today’s singers, and studio recordings of operas have become priceless. This edition also shows that they would be a useful addition to live performances, in which not everything is always perfect and rarely all roles are optimally cast. In these recordings, a number of now-forgotten singers form surprisingly homogeneous ensembles around the Callas. But of course it is Callas’ effective appearance with her unmistakable voice that immediately takes over the action. In the end, after years of conflicting audience reactions and critics’ assessments, Callas, like Anna Netrebko today, was the greatest singer of her time. The fact that she has retained her place in the “Opéra imaginaire” to this day is probably thanks to her numerous recordings. Helmut Mauro

Podcast “Scamanda”

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What makes a successful scam? Sure, the skill, the charm, the audacity of the fraudster. But of course also the fertility of the soil it encounters. In the podcast with the rather stupid name “Scamanda” (Scam like fraud and Amanda like the fraudster) you learn this quickly. In the posh surroundings of San Francisco, the good Christian and mother Amanda R. has been acting out her personal drama for years: she has cancer and there is no hope for her. Those around her think that how openly she reported her suffering in front of her church and in her blog was courageous. And how is the poor supposed to care for the children and pay the horrendous medical bills? There are many helpers in the Christian California of Silicon Valley. The podcast tells the story in eight episodes of how the big lie was only discovered years later. Aurelie by Blazekovic

Liam Neeson as Philip Marlowe

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This Marlowe is a block, without the graceful cunning of Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell. A foreign body in the glittering (and soon cocaine-addicted) world of Hollywood where he investigates. Just because Liam Neeson plays him, dressed in black and ascetic (DVD on EuroVideo, directed by Neil Jordan, screenplay by William Monahan, based on a Chandler homage by John Banville aka Benjamin Black, 2014). An Irish Marlowe, he experienced the First World War with the Royal Ulster Rifles, on the Somme (the film begins in October 1939, shortly after the start of the Second). When Mrs. Cavendish, an ex-film star (very smug: Jessica Lange), meticulously explains to a waiter how to make tea, Marlowe immediately realizes that it was stolen from Joyce: “When I makes tea I makes tea. And when I makes water I makes water.” “Joyce,” Cavendish murmurs, “shitty little man… Never worked a day in his life. Horrible little syphilitic.” Fritz Goettler

Theater: “Orlando” in Lucerne

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You don’t always have to conduct the gender debate apodictically; there is another way. Light as a feather. For this you need the right material – Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando”, in which the title character lives for centuries and changes her gender. And you need the right people to do it. The fine director Corinna von Rad has it at the Theater Lucerne. Jürg Kienberger makes wonderfully spun music in a lovingly decorated ambience, Ziad Nehme sings and plays, Robert Rožić plays and sings, and together with Wiebke Kayser, all four flit through centuries and gender roles, on stage and in a video that looks like a painting . They are woman, man, everything in between, and the big lesson from this: It doesn’t matter what gender you are, as long as you are human. And can enchant poetically. Egbert Tholl