Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 24.08.2007

As the season draws to a close, Eleonore Büning speaks with artistic director of the Salzburg festival Jürgen Flimm, who explains what bothers him about today's music industry. "Everything moves too fast these days. Very pretty and great voices, fresh out of the Juilliard School and already blessed with their first engagement at the Met, huge money, one performance after the next in the major houses. The career is shortened – it no longer moves up slowly from the Lübeck theater to Frankfurt to us. Which is why singers have no time to build up a broad repertoire. There's not time for experience to colour their singing. Life experience and art experience: books, landscapes, films, people, pictures..."

Frankfurter Rundschau 24.08.2007

Daland Selgler notes that it's the writers of screenplays and not books, who define our image the world today. "Regardless of how detailed writers describes a place, they simply can't compete with the colourful images with which we are bombarded by film and television. And they can use their grasp on the present for the past as well. The Barcelona of Manuel Vazquez Montalban's detective stories has long since become history. And who would want to go looking for Thomas Mann's Venice when they could, in the space of months, watch Commissario Brunetti at work among the spectacular sites of the sinking beauty? Screenwriters and their directors now occupy the place in our fantasies that used to belong to authors."


Die Tageszeitung, 24.08.2007

The most accessible entry into the world of Balkanpop is to be had with "Disko Partizani" by DJ Shantel and his Bucovina Club Orkestar. Daniel Bax writes: "For some Balkan lovers, it may seem a bit flat, geared to mass audiences. And you might question the merit of lyrics like 'Yabadabaduh, yabadabadey, I wanna be your Disco Boy' – which is nothing if not universally understandable. But the English spoken word is only there to facilitate listeners' access to the musical potpourri that awaits them: Turkish melodies, Greek top ten, irregular Balkan rhythms and Byzantine ornamentations with their four-tone scales. For the average pop consumer this is still quite new to the ear."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 24.08.2007

On the occasion of the 25th birthday of the CD, "S.B." asks how music has changed in the digital age and speculates that desire is growing for the good old record which disappeared when "music dissipated into the digital fluid, into the expanses of the Internet." And the identification with particular subcultures is becoming more difficult. "Digital music is available everywhere today but it's not accessible; every song is available immediately on the Net but the breadth of virtual musical offerings can't be comprehended. Huge music collections can be transported in a jean's pocket but you can no longer demonstrate your musical taste: white cables hang from all ears, but the head attached remains apparitional, unidentifiable – like the ads for Apple's iPod."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.08.2007

Kai Strittmatter meets up with the brilliant Turkish songwriter, director, writer and ex-politician Zülfü Livaneli for a cocktail and to listen to why he fears the gradual Islamisation of Turkish society. "Do you Europeans want to know why we're afraid? Because Islam is becoming ever more part of daily life. Moses was exiled. Jesus was outcast. Mohammed was different: he was rich and married. And when he died, he left behind him a state. That was a political system from the beginning."

Alexei Balabanov's new film "Cargo 200" is both unbelievably anti-Soviet and unbelievably good according to Sonja Zekri. "'Cargo 200' is the military code for the transport of a fallen soldier from Afghanistan. When Anjelika's groom is delivered in a zinc coffin and Schurov pins two orders on the dead man's chest and throws him down on Anjelika's bed, when the insects swarm the corpse and Schurov's mother complains, drooling: 'We have flies!" the film turns into something hallucinatory, a retro horror-trip through a Soviet Union that was not clean and orderly but stinking, sadistic and sick. Balabanov's Leninsk is a highly symbolic place, a national metaphor like Chekov's 'Ward 6'."