Favorites of the week: recommendations and discoveries of the SZ feuilleton – culture

Opportunity to fall in love: “Bob’s Burgers – The Movie”

If you haven’t met the wonderfully clumsy Belcher family and their burger joint after twelve seasons of the animated series, you now have the opportunity to fall in love with “Bob’s Burgers – The Movie” (on Disney Plus). First and foremost twelve-year-old Tina, a bespectacled phlegm on two legs who has always been just as fond of horses and zombies as she is of the son of the neighboring pizza competitor. She doesn’t like the fact that he’s starting to ask philosophical questions in her daydreams, even though she only wants to ride into the sunset with him. Until she has a solution to the dilemma, she drags herself towards summer vacation with her standard sigh. Who can blame her, desire and reality often have nothing to do with each other and that makes her groaning in the throat universally applicable: Uuuhh! Sofia Glasl

Aesthetic research work: The pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy

Almost ten years ago Decca released a CD edition by the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy. A smaller one, but one that also took the conductor into account. The current edition, which is now being published to mark his 85th birthday, is all about the pianist Ashkenazy, who is one of the best-known musicians of the second half of the 20th century. On 89 CDs you can now listen in detail to how he has mastered the entire spectrum of the German-Russian repertoire, from Bach to Scriabin, from Beethoven to Shostakovich. Even if he sometimes seems a bit friendly and generalizing, as in Franz Schubert’s B flat major Sonata, for example, he never makes music superficially, uninvolved, but rather gently introduces the listener to the work in order to explore it together, so to speak. He doesn’t take this aesthetic research work from the listener, who has to be there when it comes to letting the music work out of nothing, and therefore also to let it tell a story. Ashkenazy is a friend and knowledgeable companion, but not one who is emotionally patronizing.

That’s why his playing is rarely extroverted and never overdone. Even in Frédéric Chopin’s Études op. 10, which always tempts us to give a little too much in terms of expression and effect, so that the composition often seems musically under-complex for precisely this reason, Ashkenazy keeps his nerve and lets it sparkle as if it were the most natural thing. Others show the fiery virtuoso here, Ashkenazy rather the warm-hearted gentleman. This is not born out of necessity, simply not to be an extreme virtuoso, but that is also a basic musical understanding. In individual cases, this can mean that it sounds a bit downplayed, disparate, unbound. Like in Robert Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces, for example, where Ashkenazy is dryly reserved. But there is piano music where his opinion fits, for example for the sonatas by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, or Schubert’s G major sonata, which is played even less frequently than the one in B flat major. And that’s just as well. The opening, sustained sustained sounds alone require nerves and a musical sense of spacious tension that not all musicians have. Helmut Mauro

The most democratic place in town: Comic “Freibad”

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If you go to the open-air pool, you have to share the water, and swimming trunks or bikinis are hardly a good sign of class and possessions. The outdoor pool is one of the most democratic places in the city and a wonderful setting for a comedy. The director Doris Dörrie, whose film “Freibad” is set there, also saw it that way. This is the template for Paulina Stulin’s comic of the same name (Jaja-Verlag): In the book as well as in the film, visitors sunbathing topless in a women’s outdoor pool have to come to terms with fully veiled women in burkinis. This is not possible without very funny frictions and hits the nerve of our woken time. And because Paulina Stulin is a precise observer of everyday things and an equally great illustrator (“At home with me”), the comic was worthwhile even if you had already seen the film. However, it will only be released in cinemas at the end of the outdoor pool season at the beginning of September, while the book has already been published. It fits perfectly into the heat wave – so off to the water, the one on paper. Martina Knoben

Announcement from the boss: Salzburg Festival

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Announcements before the start of the performance are always a thing. One looks forward to art and its freedom, and then the authorities and regulations have the first word: Cell phones off! masks on! No photography allowed! Of course, this is put in a friendly way. Many fall back on orderly and ear-friendly standard announcements, with a standardized-sounding Alexa or GPS voice. All the more puzzled, yes: one listens more bewitched to them Salzburg Festival up and down. A quiet, soft male voice commands, no: recommends wearing an FFP2 mask and prohibits “any image and sound recordings”. She also asks to “reassure” us that our “mobile phones are turned off”. But the way she does it is so velvety, gentle and devoted, almost smiling and inviting, that all pores open: for what is permitted and forbidden as well as for the shared experience of art. Where do the people of Salzburg have this one? Smooth operator come from? It’s not a secret: the person speaking here is the festival director Markus Hinterhäuser. A musician and man of fine tones. Christine Dossel

The war diary of Hanns Cibulka

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Hanns Cibulka (1920 to 2004) was one of the great poets of the GDR and a diarist of Ernst Jiinger’s stature. The experiences of the day became for him books of thought and description, which he later carefully stylized, no less dense than poetry, best to be read slowly. His diary of the Second World War in the summer of 1943 in Sicily, which Cibulka witnessed as a signal soldier, was published in its final version in 1989 shortly before the end of the GDR, and which Cibulka witnessed as a signal soldier, is only now being published by the whole of Germany, in the beautiful series of “Naturkunden” by Matthes & Seitz (” Night watch. Diary from the war. Sicily 1943″). It is accompanied by a profound epilogue by Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Descriptions of the Sicilian landscape in midsummer, the soldiers’ everyday life, consisting above all of tense waiting, in a forest hiding place below Mount Etna, while silver planes are fighting air battles in the sky above, readings by Empedocles, Goethe and – yes – by Ernst Jiinger’s “On the Marble Cliffs” create an atmosphere of tense stillness similar to that in Dino Buzzati’s “Tatar Desert”, only more human.

The humanity of the text develops in the tension between calm and danger, in the secret of a war and dictatorship coolly analyzing consciousness, in the overwhelming beauty of the landscape. The book is also astonishing as a historical testimony to its origins, because the quotes from Ernst Jiinger could be directly related to the declining GDR. There is no aesthetic flirtation with the horror that makes Jiinger’s writing so ambiguous. Cibulka’s descriptions of officers and acts of war do without cronyism, without a raspy tone. His love for the people of the war-torn country is unbreakable. At the end, in July 1943, the pace picks up, the huge American and British fleets land in the south, Mussolini falls in Rome, the Germans have to flee, the original Wehrmacht reports, which the diary regularly inserts, panic. The diary writer relives the days of defeat in the fever of malaria infection. Hanns Cibulka survived in British captivity. Gustav Seibt