Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19.09.2006

Wolfgang Schreiber interviews conductor Kent Nagano, who will appear with the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich for the first time tonight in his new function as Music Director, after a six-year spell at the head of the Deutsche Symphonieorchester in Berlin. Asked which opera directors he likes to work with, Nagano tells of his first collaboration with Achim Freyer: "We met in Los Angeles, where we put on Berlioz' 'The Damnation of Faust.' There I met an unbelievable artistic spirit, with a real talent for seeing and hearing. His feeling for the music's timing, for the rhythm, is consummate. I've told the story often: When Freyer came to the first rehearsal we sat together on chairs and looked up at the stage. We just watched and thought, no one said a thing, not a word. Somehow I could feel everything. We looked at the set and the costumes, the orchestra rehearsal had just ended and the music was still in the air - and no one said a word for ten minutes. But I felt I'd communicated with him intensely. Then we said: 'OK, we're ready for the next rehearsal.' Communication without words, it was fantastic."

Johan Schloemann reports from the German Historians' Conference, which begins today in Konstanz: "In one section of this huge conference you can attend a lecture on the topic 'Glacier war or thaw? Soviet Alpinism and international mountain sports in the 1950s.' Another lecture treats the subject 'Smoke signals: trademark images as a sign of continuity and change in the German cigarette market.' Without wanting to insinuate too much about the lecturers' credentials, I surmise that if researchers of their calibre were asked to relate the main events and personalities involved in the fall of Constantinople, they'd have to pass."


Die Welt, 19.09.2006

Tonight Finnish electronic musician Jimi Tenor will open the Berlin pop music trade fair and festival Popkomm, at Berlin's Deutsche Oper theatre. In an interview he talks about his new CD "ReComposed", and explains why he takes a wide berth around modern composers in his work. "There's a lot of things we have to stay away from completely. Living composers loathe the idea that someone can just do what they like with their music. Their work is like their children. One said: remixing basically means putting your little daughter into the hands of a rapist."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19.09.2006

On the Media page, Heiner Kiesel portrays Islamic TV preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whose show on al Jazeera "ash-Shariah wal-Hayat" (Sharia and Life) has been watched by an estimated forty million people every Sunday night since 1997. "Before that he was Qtar's top Islam expert, a student at the famous al-Azhar university in Cairo and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (Wikipedia). He grew up in rural Egypt and is said to have learnt the Koran by heart at the age of ten. Despite his biography he is not simply a traditionally conservative Sheik ... He wants more women in the magistracy, and more women doing men's jobs in general. But his views on domestic violence have pitched the liberals against him. He wrote, for example, 'As head of the family, the man has a right to expect obedience from his wife and only when left with no other option should he admonish her using his hands." Al-Qaradawi was quick to condemn Pope Benedict's recent speech saying that Jihad was used in self-defence and not to force Islam onto others, quoting the Koran: "There is no compulsion in religion."