Favorite of the week: Al Pacino at the Oscars and other highlights – Culture

Exhibition in Berlin: “Beirut and the Golden Sixties”

Paris of the Middle East. This phrase is not missing in any speech about Beirut. The exhibition “Beirut and the Golden Sixties” in the Gropius-Bau in Berlin shows that it is more than just a worn-out cliché. In it, Sam Bardaouil and Tim Fellrath revive a cultural heyday that began in the late 1950s and against which the art metropolises of Paris and New York suddenly pale: a fascinating juxtaposition of cosmopolitan lifestyle, aesthetic modernism and sexual libertinism. A short twenty years, then in 1975 a 15-year civil war transformed the “Switzerland of the Middle East” into a landscape of ruins similar to that of the Ukraine today. In the electrifying show, the creative energies of the time literally jump out at you. However, the two art historians do not want to glorify the “Golden Age” in a nostalgic way with their course of 200 exhibits, some of which have been specially restored for the show, ranging from paintings and historical posters to Op Art. Otherwise they would not have subtitled the exhibition “Manifesto of Fragility”. Khalil Zgaib’s oil painting from 1958 signaled right at the beginning: the art paradise of Beirut was a constant dance on the volcano. On the work, American warships cruise through the bright blue harbor. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige make the connection to the present. A dozen screens arranged in a circle show the moment, from the perspective of surveillance cameras at the private Sursock Museum, when the August 20, 2020 explosion in Beirut’s port destroyed two-thirds of the city. An installation like a current warning sign: Even the most magnificent cultural landscape can turn to rubble and ashes in seconds. The two curators, who love the periphery, were met with extreme skepticism when the outgoing Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters, surprisingly pushed them through at the end of last year, shortly before the change of government, as the director duo of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. After this curatorial tour de force, one is suddenly looking forward to their work in the bobbing “Museum of the Present” with extreme excitement. Ingo Arend

A Mission for Peace: Francis Ford Coppola at the Oscars

Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars also drowned out a major peace mission: Francis Ford Coppola, almost 84, ended one of Hollywood’s oldest feuds. On the occasion of 50 years of “The Godfather” the director thanked the author Mario Puzo for the 500,000th time – and for the first time ever Robert Evans. The film studio dandy had insisted in 1971 that the mafia masterpiece be renewed. He berated Coppola: “Schmock! You shot an epic and turned it into a trailer.” Because he put so much time into the film, Evans lost his wife, Ali MacGraw (to Steve McQueen), and Coppola consistently downplayed Evans’ role. (All of this can be read in Evan’s autobiography: “The final billing is final”.) Evans died in 2019. However, he has more of the truth than meets the eye. He himself knew what he had done. At least now the rest of the world knows too. Milan Pavlovic

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Stefanie Sargnagel and others: Impudent speeches by impudent women

That nice feeling of “nonetheless” is immediately there again when one thinks of the 1983 bestseller subtitled “Indignant Speeches of Indignant Women”. In it, the author Christine Brückner allowed women from literature and history who had been notoriously silenced to speak after all. In the magazine New review there are now “New impudent speeches of impudent women” by authors of today. And although there are now almost too many platforms on which everyone can say anything, one learns there which still keeps women from speaking: Shame has not been conquered by the internet, it has rather been coarsened. Men who drown out women are still around. On the other hand, humor also helps, as in the story of a sexual self-discovery by Stefanie Sargnagel in the tape, which turns the heroine “Nevertheless” into a grotesque weapon. Marie Schmidt

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Classical Music: An Excellent Edition by Kurt Masur

Kurt Masur, who came from Lower Silesia and was the son of an electrical engineer, himself a trained electrician, was drafted into the paratroopers in the last winter of the war. But it was already clear that the planned career as a pianist was obsolete due to an irreparable finger injury. Nevertheless, he studied piano in Leipzig from 1946, but broke off his studies. His desire to conduct remained, and in fact he managed to become head of the legendary Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He shaped this orchestra for three decades. The musical highlights that are now recorded in a comprehensive edition (Warner) took place there. The fact that he was appointed chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic after reunification as a symbol of freedom was more of a political issue. The New York Times would later praise his “unbroken belief in the signal power of music”. But his late second career was not that insignificant. Some recordings, such as Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony from 1991, provide evidence of this. Nevertheless, in a direct comparison, the high quality of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra is astonishing, which has to be given the lead in terms of sound quality, differentiation, precision and expressiveness. It’s not about extremes. Kurt Masur is more the man of simple clarity, but also of highly efficient drama. It is noticeable, both with Bruckner and with other great Romantics, that Masur never runs the risk of slowing down the tempo. Even when things get very quiet and other conductors give in to the urge to slow down. Another surprise of this edition is that Masur proves to be an excellent conductor of Tchaikovsky. In addition, one can also get to know the symphonist Franz Liszt, who is still somewhat on the sidelines, in a new and extensive way. Not only in his programmatic symphonies, fantasies and the two piano concertos, but above all in the 13 Weimar symphonic poems, which appear all the more vivid in the finely balanced sound design and rather reserved symphonic violence. Helmut Mauro

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The Museum of Lies in Radebeul: Does it really exist?

What is the nature of the exhibits? a museum of lies? Reinhard Zabka says he collects things in Radebeul that don’t even exist. A hole from Mozart’s Magic Flute, the “auditory picture of the lost Kyritzer Knatter”, also the original sound of the sinking ones titanic, but “20 minutes after”! Zabka is interested in stories between confusion and chaos, as a visitor you have to “create your own meaning”. Because the museum is characterized by an aesthetic that does not work with design, “the poor things are here as they are”. No lie, instead complicated and bureaucratic reality: the museum is because of an argument around the property housing it is threatened in its continued existence. On Friday it invited to the “World Lie Ball”, hopefully without a companion titanicorchestra. Cornelius Pollmer