Educational work
How much could have gone wrong here! The Netflix series “Sex Education” negotiates sexual identities, diversity and gender issues. And while in reality adults lead such debates partly as a culture war, the students at Moordale High show that it is possible to deal with what can be going on in the heart and pants in a much more casual manner. The enlightened attitude is mainly thanks to Otis, the son of a sex therapist – and has to be defended against a new school director in the third season. All of this is funny and not staged in a subtle way, but it remains suitable for young people. And so the series also provides clarification where such debates are not even tense, but not at all: in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, for example, as Netflix founder Reed Hastings was pleased. Moritz Baumstieger
Fairy dance
Corona has hit rising musical talents particularly hard. Dates collapsed en masse, appearing in front of a real audience was no longer possible. This is what happened to the brilliant cellist Raphaela Gromes. But she made a virtue out of the slowdown and put together an enjoyable, highly virtuoso elves and trolls of elegant romantic pieces and released them on CD (Sony). Including cello classics like David Popper’s “Elfentanz”. Or delightful arrangements that her piano partner Julian Riem has arranged, such as Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral” for saxophone quartet, cello and piano or Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” music. In addition – that shouldn’t be missing – hits from the film music for “Lord of the Rings” by Howard Shore and “Star Wars” by John Williams. Harald Eggebrecht
Lively: Sepp Bierbichler in the film “Töchter” by Nana Neul.
(Photo: Warner)
Die the Heming-way
The film is called “Daughters”, but it is largely about the fathers. One of them is dead, supposedly, another is not yet. Alexandra Maria Lara and Birgit Minichmayr are the two daughters, Martha and Betty, Josef Bierbichler plays the father Kurt. He tricked his daughter Martha. He needs her money and her car, because she is supposed to take him to Switzerland, to a clinic, to die. He has lung cancer. After an accident, Martha is no longer able to expose herself to the traffic behind the wheel, so her best friend Betty has to break off her vacation and go on the tour. Transit Germany can be very uncomfortable and ugly when crossing, and actually the father wants to go back to Lake Maggiore first, so there is a detour to Stresa. His old lover awaits him there, and father and daughters go their separate ways there. Kurt stays, the girls continue to drive through Italy. Another father is wanted, Betty wants to go to her stepfather’s grave.
“Töchter” was an extremely successful novel, the author Lucy Fricke also wrote the screenplay for the film, together with director Nana Neul. Martha and Betty finally have a bit of fun on the journey, deadlocks loosen, solidarity is tested – no, they are of course not Thelma & Louise, but they finally dare to do the unexpected, the unheard of. So they happily jack up their car on a wall in a narrow alley.
Bierbichler is a foreign body in a film that is located on the German side between Dortmund and Berlin. He’s really stuck in the south. A tired, unshaven face. Deep circles under the eyes. But his smoky voice still sounds with the same menacing gentleness. Contradiction rather impossible. You can still feel in him the daring, self-assured, poaching young fellow that he was in Herbert Achternbusch’s films. A child’s head, a child who doesn’t want to grow up. The daughters’ adventures are often sympathetically awkward, whereas Bierbichler’s are sovereign. He demonstrates that sophistication of the old, white, incontinent man. Quite correct to bring Hemingway into conversation in this context. He was also happy to be in Stresa. Fritz Goettler
Elon Musk, who either changed his diet or was processed with the Wombo app.
(Photo: @ wombo @ elonsmusk)
Deepfakes for everyone
Deepfakes are videos or sound recordings that use artificial intelligence to put words into people’s mouths that they have never spoken – or terribly silly songs like “Barbie Girl”, “Baby Shark” or Rick Astley’s meme evergreen “Never Gonna Give You Up “. the Wombo app is currently a party fun that makes deepfakes literally child’s play. You take a selfie, click on a song (there are also current hits by Drake or Lizzo or oldies by Frankie Vallie or Green Day) and the artificial intelligence animates the portrait into a singing, rocking mini music video. Of course, you can also load photos of friends, pets or celebrities into the app. As a party fun you get astonished laughs. However, Wombo is not the only deepfake app for everyone. There is still Avatarify or Reface. The forgeries can still be recognized at first glance. On the other hand, one thing is clear: deepfakes are now ready for the market. Andrian Kreye
Recording art
Sometimes what he says about music, and how he says it, sounds just as exciting, straightforward and yet subtle as his music recordings. Wilhelm Furtwängler is without question one of the greatest conductors of all time. His understanding of music continues to fascinate today. For him, every question always has two levels, he once said, a fundamental and a practical one. And this dialectic of pragmatism seems to be a very stable basis for what goes beyond that in the tonal result. Whether it is about the function of a general pause or about the absolute tone of Bruckner’s work – unlike many other formulation artists, you can immediately listen to see whether he means what he is saying.
To promote this, Warner Classics has now released “The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record”. An amazing company that bans all studio recordings and also live recordings across all labels on 55 CDs. The spectrum ranges from Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz overture from 1926 to Richard Wagner’s “Walküre” and Siegfried’s funeral march from “Götterdämmerung” in 1954, the year Furtwängler died. Of course, the German repertoire from Joseph Haydn to Richard Strauss dominates, but César Franck, Peter Tschaikowsky and Béla Bartók are also represented.
Given the magnitude of the musical achievement, one sometimes overlooks the development of recording and playback technology. From the problematic beginnings, the first microphone recordings, which were cut directly onto wax matrices of a maximum of five minutes in length in 1949. Only then was the tape used, which made the work easier, made safer and significantly improved the quality. For this edition, the most original possible sources were used, the recording tapes, wax plates, metal matrices and, if necessary, the best pressings to be found. For the CD edition, errors have been corrected, missing measures added, pitches of the page transitions of the 78 records have been adjusted and much more. But all of this is a story in itself, and one can only be amazed at how flawless the old recordings sometimes sound. A lot has changed in the art of remastering over the past 30 years. Helmut Mauró