Theater: Shooting star Oskar Haag
The creature alternately stretches its arms upwards, rocks only slightly, indicates a prance and moves carefully, delicately and yet incredibly precisely. Lilac flounce suit, could also be a dress, what does that matter, blond curls, with your back to the audience. One has to say essence because at the time, when the curtain in Vienna’s Burgtheater has just risen, it is not yet clear who is moving skillfully and particularly on stage.
Finally, Oskar Haag turns around. The 17-year-old is a shooting star in Austria. With his song “Stargazing” he was discovered in 2021 at the Vienna Popfest when he was 15. For the first time he performed in front of 500 people in front of the Karlskirche. He composed his songs in the lockdown in the children’s room in Klagenfurt. And now he’s taking the stage in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and his music now fills the walls of the legendary castle. The idea for this came from director Tina Lanik, who not only left the musical accompaniment to her play to Haag, but also a small part of her own, the character Amien.
Haag’s melancholic guitar songs, which sound thoughtful and quite British, fit in wonderfully with the shrill pink back and forth between Rosalinde and Orlando, who are desperately looking for their great love. Great confusion, restlessness, anger, rage – then Amien stands with his guitar in front of the pink plastic horse and plays and sings: “Cause I go stargazin’/ Maybe I’ll go and chase him/ If I get one I’ll embrace it/ With all my love”.
He wants to chase stars in “Stargazing”, start to fly in “Black Dress” and it’s amazing how much love and suffering there is in the songs of this 17-year-old, how much pain and sensitivity there is in his fine voice. This talent is no coincidence, Haag’s father is him Naked lunch-Singer Oliver Welter, his role model Paul McCartney. Chasing stars, why not? But Oskar Haag, this young, wonderful singer-songwriter is still on the ground. His debut album “Teenage Lullabies” is scheduled for release in May – so the time until spring has to come with it his youtube channel be bypassed. Caroline Gasteiger
Music: brightness and noble sweetness
The violinist Dorothea Schupelius (born in 1996) and the pianist Jelizaveta Vasiljeva (born in 1995) show on this CD (ES DUR) a preference for wit, charm, light and air as well as rhythmic fun. None of the plays by Fritz Kreisler, Maurice Ravel, Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill or Ennio Morricone complain about the principle “always foot in front of foot makes German and difficult”. Rather, the violinist is characterized by a decidedly warm, in the best sense of the word, sweet tone. Both musicians have the sense for the wit and the suppleness of Kreisler’s amiability, Ravel’s sophistication, Toch’s new objectivity, Korngold’s light hand, Weill’s tango desire and Morricone’s longing. The two have managed to create an album of animating pleasure. Harold Eggebrecht
Picture book: “As it is” by Floris Tilanus
“How it is” by the Dutch artist Floris Tilanus (Lilienfeld Verlag) is a picture book for adults.
(Photo: Lilienfeld Verlag)
You can also talk your life into a nice one. Professor Joachim Schwarz, for example, meets “an old friend” in the park. A friend, as it is said, “who has risen to become one of the most successful authors of his time. They have long, intimate conversations about everything that moves them: life, art, world politics.” The professor can also be seen turning to a Goethe statue in the park. “How it is” contrasts such brief texts about the professor’s everyday life with detailed ink drawings on 36 double pages. When it says, for example, that the professor prefers to be with his daughter – “she makes him forget the time” – a cemetery can be seen. The little book by the Dutch artist Floris Tilanus (Lilienfeld Verlag) is a picture book for adults, the tone is melancholic and the title is borrowed from Samuel Beckett. As sobering as the drawings are, they also radiate sympathy for the professor – and a graphic wealth that stands in contrast to the material poverty of the main character revealed in them. A book about “truths” – in the plural. Martina Knoben
Photography: History of the “Leica”
Self-published photo history: “Phenomenon Leica”.
(Photo: Lagler)
Helmut Lagler’s book project on the “Leica Phenomenon” shows that cameras can exert a fascination that goes beyond measure. What the 81-year-old is doing with his project, which is set to last at least eight volumes, is nothing less than creating a Brockhaus for the Leica – a standard work that tells the history of the Leitz company, its countless products, its developers, employees, factories, brochures , opens up everything that has to do with the Leica. Lagler has already self-published four volumes, and the “prehistory” is particularly successful: the depiction of the years 1848 to 1929. Here the reader witnesses how a small microscope workshop in Wetzlar became the global company Leitz, which started producing the Leica has been writing photo history since 1925. A must for anyone who can’t get enough of the cult camera. Marc Hoch
Contemporary Music: Festival “Ultrasound”
In “Ultraschall” Muriel Razavi plays five pieces that trace the tragic life of an Iranian woman.
(Photo: Verena Brüning)
If a festival of contemporary art music has been campaigning for attention, i.e. audience, for years with the name “ultrasound”, then it must have ignored one fact – namely that the ultrasonic waves located in the high-frequency range are mainly heard by bats or dolphins. Such a “hypersound” is intended to provide the necessary orientation for music listeners at the festival, who have to live with the fact that processes in experimental contemporary music often sound cumbersome and that they are stretched out. The discovery of slowness thus becomes a mode of perception – and is possible via radio: two stations (rbb Kultur and Deutschlandfunk Kultur) broadcast the festival, which lasts until Sunday.
Such a music festival is of course “not a daily political commentary on current affairs”, say the two curators from Berliner Ultrasound: But politics lurks behind the sounds: On Saturday the Iranian-American violist Muriel Razavi presents her performance “with viola & visuals”, sounds, Poetry recitation and light dramaturgy (9 p.m. live on Deutschlandfunk Kultur). Her musical scene “ancient eve is once again offering apples” consists of five pieces by Iranian composers, which musically deepen the tragic life of an Iranian woman. Incidentally, Razavi’s concert project was created before the current uprisings in Iran.
Even more “ultrasound” on a political mission? Born in Moscow in 1972 and now based in Berlin, the composer Sergej Nevsky has bracketed his short piece “Steps of Ideas” with an eerily topical text by the poet Leo Tolstoy from 1900. Nevsky, who immediately protested against Putin’s Ukraine war, “set to music” Tolstoy’s condemnation of any kind of patriotism as a state structure that necessarily leads to the catastrophes of error, nationalism, and thus war. What a prophetic word! Jakob Diehl tremblingly recited such a lament, while the strings of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (conducted by Susanne Blumenthal) splintered the Tolstoian thoughts with many voices, fragile, tremblingly quiet polyphonic sounds – transmitted with passion by ultrasound. Wolfgang Schreiber