Four favorites of the week: Between your and my world – culture

Hear pictures, see music: Framed 2021

Nice innovation in the field of double albums: In one record pocket there is an LP, in the other art prints. The fine event space Framed in Berlin has always combined musicians with artists, concerts with exhibitions. Now, in cooperation with the equally fine label Low Swing, there is for the first time a sampler for the program (can be ordered at Framed.berlin). Not only do the jazz guitarist Lionel Loueke and the soprano Alma Sade meet, but also photography by Merav Maroody and painting by Katharina Arndt or Emili Theander. You hear the all-over pianist Omer Klein and look at a photo of Noga Shtainer until you think you hear the picture and see the music. Like reading along with lyrics, only nicer – and without lyrics. Peter Richter

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Yuri Pimenov Moscow

There are Russians who cry when they see Jurij Pimenov’s pictures, at least when they see his works from the sixties. Concrete pipes on a construction site, a couple in love, the first kiss. Or: A city is being built, a boardwalk, on it a bride and groom. In the sixties the horror of the world war was a thing of the past, Stalin was finally dead, the drought and infirmity of the late Soviet Union lay in the future. In this brief phase of sigh of relief, in the thaw, romance under cranes was the only romance available, and few conjured the golden light of transfiguration on it with such a light hand as the painter Yuri Pimenov, to whom the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow was a big Complete exhibition has given (until January 9th). It shows Pimenow’s late impressionist work, but also his early work, which is much more artistically interesting. Pimenow, born in 1903, had studied at Wchutemas, the Soviet Bauhaus counterpart, he threw himself into the arms of revolutionary ideology that wanted to create a new way of thinking, a new person – with the means of art. His early works are tempo exchange, dynamics with rapid diagonals and expressionist lines. In the temples of heavy industry, lean, elongated workers are hardened like steel in the fire. Athletes race against each other with airplanes. Pimenow’s best-known work stands between his early and late work – and at the same time one of the most eerie in art history. “New Moscow. 1937” shows an elegant blonde at the wheel of a car, a goddess of mobility from behind. With gloved fingers she steers her car through one of the most famous streets of Moscow, directly towards a large portrait of Stalin. 1937 was the height of the great terror, night after night people were deported or shot. But Pimenow lets a woman – his wife, who was pregnant with twins – glide through this horror like a summer meadow. According to the exhibition, he wanted to show humanity even in the darkest of times. But like a polygraph, his hand seems to have trembled, the contours are blurred, the image cannot be focused. As if art had known which abyss it was covering. Sonja Zekri

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Jean-Pierre Rampal’s magical flute art

Whether Mozart or Haydn, Bach, Vivaldi, Carulli, Yamanakabushi or Scott Joplin. The flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal could play anything, but above all: you wanted to hear it from him too. Rampal was one of those talents that can turn an instrument that has hardly been noticed in the concert business into a solo star. For as much as one likes to hear the flute solo interludes in orchestral pieces, the thought that a lonely flutist is at a concert seems strange. Rampal, who died eleven years ago, was able to do that, and his technical perfection is still impressive today, as is his infectious musical cheerfulness. The CD edition (Sony) released on his 100th birthday brings it to light, and it is not just the big concerts with orchestral accompaniment that are fascinating, but also a largely unknown corner of chamber music that Rampal is opening up to a wide audience here. For example the one solo sonata by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel. This is music in its purest form, so to speak, one looks into the workshop and into the heart of the composer as well as the performer. And there it shines the first time you listen, and especially when you immerse yourself a little in the work and at the same time hear the piece and yourself observing. It was also in the 1970s that Rampal’s steep career took off, a risk to put such extensive solo pieces on the program or to organize pure flute chamber music evenings. The fact that it still worked was not only due to the determination of the flautist, but also to the interaction of leading record labels such as Erato and CBS, and finally to the fact that at that time there was still real money to be made with records and the live concerts, from an economic point of view, a promotional by-product. Today it is exactly the opposite. Which is fine if you have the opportunity to attend concerts on a regular basis. If not, you are grateful for editions that open up a repertoire to music lovers that they would otherwise never be able to hear. For example those compositions with which Frederick the Great delighted his court company in the afternoons. You have to have heard it. Helmut Mauró

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Confusing hip loosener: New single from “Bilderbuch”

The indie alternative dream pop shapeshifter by Picture book are currently traveling in the USA. A support tour with Roosevelt (we have our own for the coming year). So there is a lot of water between their and our world and it is of course very clever of the Austrian Strizzis to release a single called: “Between your and my world”. Eighth guitars and basses, drums in double time, exactly the right tempo to hop up and down at festivals (the older ones will remember). Still really very confusing hip loosener. And again carried by one of those jittery fuzz guitar melodies. Which brings the opportunity for a long overdue declaration of love to Snacky Mike: No guitarist in this cultural area brings more sex, pose and sticky horniness to this instrument. Great! Jakob Biazza