Latest news with #EineKleineNachtmusik
Daily Mirror
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Gardeners urged to do one important thing this month to ensure great joy
It is the time of year for bird watchers to put down their binoculars and start listening, as the countryside starts to ring with birdsong Don't despair if International Dawn Chorus Day slipped by this morning without having a chance to immerse yourself in nature's great symphony. This annual celebration held on the first Sunday in May should be regarded as merely the introduction to a joyous season when birdwatchers rest their binoculars to become enthralled listeners. Over coming weeks, the countryside will throb to the songs of thrushes, chats and finches declaring territories under the rising sun. Baritone blackbirds and top tenor nightingales will stand out as virtuoso performers. Yet ask any birdsong purist and it is the orchestral manoeuvres of warblers in the semi darkness that bring the dawn chorus experience to a sensory crescendo. Spring walks through a tapestry of wetlands, woods and scrub can be accompanied by the songs of up to ten species of warbler, belying their dowdy plumages with golden voices. Some, like closely-related reed and sedge warblers, create identification challenges as they chatter away incessantly hour after hour as if on diets of fizzy sweets. Listen carefully and the repeated 'churrs' of the reed warbler help separate it from its jazzier cousin. In damp thickets, the explosive song of the Cetti's warbler is unmistakable and is said to have inspired Mozart to write the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Chiffchaff and willow warbler, along with common and lesser whitethroats, are species pairs found around woodland fringes that create visual identification puzzles, although their songs are strikingly different. The chiffchaff sings its name, while the willow warbler has a sweet, descending cadence. Scrub-loving common whitethroats produce a dry, scratchy warble compared to the plain rattle of its smaller relative. Grasshopper warblers have taken rattling to a new level by producing an insect-like trill that reminds you of a fishing reel. For me, the supreme choristers are two of the plainest members of the warbler clan. The blackcap has a thrush-like quality to its voice while the garden warbler's song is full of mimicked notes purloined during its travels between Europe and Africa. Blackbirds may sometimes sing in the dead of night but to be truly enchanted by their silvery voices then listen out as the sun rises. Of all the songbirds exulting International Dawn Chorus Day today, those baritone solos delivered by blackbirds from lofty perches backlit by the first morning rays will ring supreme. Individual males can have repertoires of more than 30 verses, each three or four seconds long and filled with melodious notes to declare his territory and sound reveille over suburbia. Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles all adopted the blackbird as a musical muse and, today, many regard its refrains a dependable alarm clock for an uplifting way to start the day. How to help blackbirds today Each year, the song becomes a little more subdued as blackbird populations in town and country recede. This year's RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch noted a 46% drop in mid-winter sightings since the nationwide survey began in 1979, a statistic mirrored by the 19% decline in breeding numbers over the past seven decades. Increasingly, I see gardens being concreted over for car parking spaces or turned into plasticised dead zones rather than tended lovingly for plants and wildlife. This must be having an impact on blackbird numbers. Another existential threat beckons from a new quarter – the arrival of a mosquito-borne virus that can be fatal to blackbirds. Usutu virus originates from South Africa but was detected in London in 2020 when blackbird numbers in the capital were already in decline The British Trust for Ornithology recently identified a national blackbird divide, noting how those in the north are faring better than their London counterparts. BTO scientists are asking nature lovers to help them explore the spread of Usutu virus by signing up for the Blackbirds in Gardens survey. This will help researchers understand how blackbirds use garden types differently as well as highlighting disease transmission risks. The study will also provide data on how successfully young blackbirds are raised at different levels in rural and urban gardens. For more details see
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Last Musician of Auschwitz review – an exceptionally moving film that will ring in your ears for years
Auschwitz was a site of incomparable horror; people arriving at the concentration camp knew it would be hell on earth. So it was a shock to be greeted by a band playing Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Was this some kind of breathtakingly sick joke? A demonstration of German cultural superiority? A suggestion that the camp 'cannot be that bad', as one survivor recalls hoping? Or was it a sign, as another remembers thinking, that the Nazis really were 'crazy'? The truth was complex and chilling, as Toby Trackman's exceptionally moving and intelligent documentary goes on to explore. The role of music in the Holocaust might initially seem a somewhat marginal topic. Is the fact there were orchestras at Auschwitz really that important in the grand scheme of things? Yes, as it turns out: because by examining the presence of music in the camp, The Last Musician of Auschwitz is able to give voice to a wealth of ideas about the function, value, inherent ambivalence and weaponisation of art and culture. This documentary is named in honour of 99-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the only surviving member of the women's orchestra at Auschwitz. She was sent to the concentration camp as a teenager and, on her first day, was asked by another prisoner about her prewar life. When she said she played the cello, a conductor was summoned immediately. 'Here I was, stark naked, and she was asking me: 'Who did you study with?'' She laughs joylessly. 'It was somehow rather incongruous.' The absurdity was impossible to ignore. As was the incomprehensible sadism: Lasker-Wallfisch was forced to play as her fellow prisoners were burned alive. While the orchestras were a lifeline for those who qualified, helping them avoid violence, starvation and the gas chambers, they also stripped music itself of meaning and feeling. When Lasker-Wallfisch was made to perform a piece by Schumann for the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele – infamous for conducting twisted experiments on prisoners – she 'didn't feel anything. I played it as fast as possible and thought: get out.' Elsewhere, there was something approaching logic. The Nazis wanted to annihilate Jews and other ethnic groups. They were also determined to turn Germany into an economic superpower. Music played into their repugnantly efficient combination of the two. Via the concentration camps, the Nazis had a valuable new resource; the slave labour of imprisoned Jews. In order to drill this free workforce with 'military-like efficiency', explains Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland in one of his many enlightening contributions, orchestras played marches as the prisoners walked to the factories where they were forced to toil. This film manages to weave in many other nauseating examples of how the Nazis financially optimised Auschwitz, including the selling of shorn hair and off-loading of charred human remains as fertiliser. In Auschwitz, music became synonymous with heinous acts. Yet it also provided untold comfort. This documentary features many archive interviews from the late 20th century with unidentified Auschwitz survivors; these men and women – elderly, often glamorous, animated yet viscerally haunted – recall singing in groups to provide a flicker of morale and some semblance of identity. We hear of the Roma victims who sang about their experiences in the camps, and the 'bright and optimistic' lullaby secretly written by the Polish composer and prisoner Adam Kopyciński. Music can make us feel human, but it is no guarantee of humanity. The German identity was tightly bound up with classical music, and German composers were a crucial source of national pride. An appreciation for high art is traditionally associated with civilised behaviour. Yet, observes Lasker-Wallfisch's son Raphael: 'There are many examples of these very cultured people doing the worst atrocities ever known to humankind.' In fact, German ethnocentrism informed their extermination of other cultures. As Freedland points out, the Holocaust didn't only kill millions: when it came to the European Jewry, the genocide decimated an entire cultural world. The Last Musician of Auschwitz saves its most devastating story for last. We had been following the life of the Jewish writer Ilse Weber, and heard the heartbreaking song she composed for her elder son Hanuš after sending him to England via Kindertransport. Later, Ilse is nursing ill children in the Theresienstadt ghetto, soothing them with lullabies. When she and her younger son are transported to Auschwitz alongside her patients, she is given advice at the gates: tell the children to sing when they enter the gas chamber, then they will die faster and avoid being trampled by the adults attempting to escape. Any worthwhile documentary about the Holocaust will force you to stare into the abyss; fewer are able to dig into cerebral ideas while unflinchingly documenting the atrocities carried out at the camps. This incredibly impressive programme does not let us forget about Auschwitz's corpse mountains or stench of burning bodies for a second, all the while posing questions about art and humanity that should ring in your ears for years to come. • The Last Musician of Auschwitz aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.
The Guardian
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Last Musician of Auschwitz review – an exceptionally moving film that will ring in your ears for years
Auschwitz was a site of incomparable horror; people arriving at the concentration camp knew it would be hell on earth. So it was a shock to be greeted by a band playing Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Was this some kind of breathtakingly sick joke? A demonstration of German cultural superiority? A suggestion that the camp 'cannot be that bad', as one survivor recalls hoping? Or was it a sign, as another remembers thinking, that the Nazis really were 'crazy'? The truth was complex and chilling, as Toby Trackman's exceptionally moving and intelligent documentary goes on to explore. The role of music in the Holocaust might initially seem a somewhat marginal topic. Is the fact there were orchestras at Auschwitz really that important in the grand scheme of things? Yes, as it turns out: because by examining the presence of music in the camp, The Last Musician of Auschwitz is able to give voice to a wealth of ideas about the function, value, inherent ambivalence and weaponisation of art and culture. This documentary is named in honour of 99-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the only surviving member of the women's orchestra at Auschwitz. She was sent to the concentration camp as a teenager and, on her first day, was asked by another prisoner about her prewar life. When she said she played the cello, a conductor was summoned immediately. 'Here I was, stark naked, and she was asking me: 'Who did you study with?'' She laughs joylessly. 'It was somehow rather incongruous.' The absurdity was impossible to ignore. As was the incomprehensible sadism: Lasker-Wallfisch was forced to play as her fellow prisoners were burned alive. While the orchestras were a lifeline for those who qualified, helping them avoid violence, starvation and the gas chambers, they also stripped music itself of meaning and feeling. When Lasker-Wallfisch was made to perform a piece by Schumann for the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele – infamous for conducting twisted experiments on prisoners – she 'didn't feel anything. I played it as fast as possible and thought: get out.' Elsewhere, there was something approaching logic. The Nazis wanted to annihilate Jews and other ethnic groups. They were also determined to turn Germany into an economic superpower. Music played into their repugnantly efficient combination of the two. Via the concentration camps, the Nazis had a valuable new resource; the slave labour of imprisoned Jews. In order to drill this free workforce with 'military-like efficiency', explains Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland in one of his many enlightening contributions, orchestras played marches as the prisoners walked to the factories where they were forced to toil. This film manages to weave in many other nauseating examples of how the Nazis financially optimised Auschwitz, including the selling of shorn hair and off-loading of charred human remains as fertiliser. In Auschwitz, music became synonymous with heinous acts. Yet it also provided untold comfort. This documentary features many archive interviews from the late 20th century with unidentified Auschwitz survivors; these men and women – elderly, often glamorous, animated yet viscerally haunted – recall singing in groups to provide a flicker of morale and some semblance of identity. We hear of the Roma victims who sang about their experiences in the camps, and the 'bright and optimistic' lullaby secretly written by the Polish composer and prisoner Adam Kopyciński. Music can make us feel human, but it is no guarantee of humanity. The German identity was tightly bound up with classical music, and German composers were a crucial source of national pride. An appreciation for high art is traditionally associated with civilised behaviour. Yet, observes Lasker-Wallfisch's son Raphael: 'There are many examples of these very cultured people doing the worst atrocities ever known to humankind.' In fact, German ethnocentrism informed their extermination of other cultures. As Freedland points out, the Holocaust didn't only kill millions: when it came to the European Jewry, the genocide decimated an entire cultural world. The Last Musician of Auschwitz saves its most devastating story for last. We had been following the life of the Jewish writer Ilse Weber, and heard the heartbreaking song she composed for her elder son Hanuš after sending him to England via Kindertransport. Later, Ilse is nursing ill children in the Theresienstadt ghetto, soothing them with lullabies. When she and her younger son are transported to Auschwitz alongside her patients, she is given advice at the gates: tell the children to sing when they enter the gas chamber, then they will die faster and avoid being trampled by the adults attempting to escape. Any worthwhile documentary about the Holocaust will force you to stare into the abyss; fewer are able to dig into cerebral ideas while unflinchingly documenting the atrocities carried out at the camps. This incredibly impressive programme does not let us forget about Auschwitz's corpse mountains or stench of burning bodies for a second, all the while posing questions about art and humanity that should ring in your ears for years to come. The Last Musician of Auschwitz aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.
