Month: August 2012

Retribution (2011)

Royal Festival Hall (St. Paul’s Roof Pavillon), event supported by nfvf

After thirty years in the judiciary, a retired judge, at the prompting of his family, takes some time out to write his memoir in an isolated cabin in the mountains. One day the retired judge sees a lost hiker, out in the middle of nowhere.The judge invites him to his place. But this hiker is not really lost and this is no chance meeting. Slowly it’s revealed why he has come. Through one of the judge’s law books we read details of a mistrial that the judge presided over many years ago that let a killer free and who was then arrested a week later but only after he raped a twelve-year-old girl, the stranger’s daughter.

Brenda Masilela

Pontus Ljunghill: En Osynlig

Den utspelar sig i Stockholm 1928 och i Visby 1953, med ett par besök i 30- och 40-tal. På Djurgårdsvarvet hittas den åttaåriga Ingrid brutalt mördad. Varvet är nedlagt.

Den unge begåvade kommissarien Johan Stierna sätts på fallet som visar sig vara extremt svårlöst, och givetvis är detta före DNA och datoriserad rättsmedicin à la CSI. Stierna blir besatt av flickans tragiska öde och mötet med hennes mor får honom att brista. En liten begåvad flicka, utan närvarande far, som fått förtroende för mördaren som lockat med henne från Vasaparken med löfte om att hon skall få träffa just sin far. Allmänhetens intresse är stort och betydande resurser sätts in i utredningsarbetet. Stierna blir som så ofta sker i deckare gift med jobbet, fast utan magsår och alkoholproblem. Det påverkar djupt hans äktenskap som, märker man, sakta rinner bort. En personlig tragedi, vemodigt skildrad.

I varvade kapitel får vi både kriminalarnas synvinkel (främst Stiernas) och mördarens. Det är en isande kriminalintrig. Den hårt engagerade Stierna bryts på något sätt ned i sin yrkesroll av fallet.

SvD

Diamanda Galas: The Hour Will Come

Royal Festival Hall

Somewhere out there is a parallel universe in which Diamanda Galás has a perfectly conventional, dazzling career as a mezzo-soprano. And another in which she is a reasonably straightforward blues-rock star: Tina Turner and Patti Smith rolled into one. And, no doubt, another in which she is entirely unknown: too singular, too demanding for any record label or music venue to risk putting her before an audience.

The imperious woman shrouded in Stygian gloom at the Royal Festival Hall contains all these possibilities and myriad more. Her first song, a poem in Italian by Cesare Pavese, whose title translates as Death Will Come and Will Wear Your Eyes, gives some indication of her range: over piano notes that tilt and quiver as though alarmed by their proximity to each other, she shifts from a soprano at once airy and muddy, to a bass so fierce the acoustic cowers. At one point she begins to wail, and sounds like a procession of Greek women at a funeral.

What follows is a contemplation of death in Spanish, Greek, German, English and French, embellished with trills and shrieks and strangled cries, sensual moans and the cackles of hags. Of course she’s showing off – but mostly Galás puts that extraordinary vocal technique to the service of narrative. Without understanding the words, you can sense Nazi destruction in her setting of a poem by German writer-surgeon Gottfried Benn, appreciate that an entire life is splayed before you in Jacques Brel’s Fernand. Sometimes her performance feels too emotionally cool, then you remember that her subject is death, and understand that this isn’t coldness, it’s confrontation: a refusal to be either maudlin or scared. That alone is electrifying.

Maddy Costa in The Guardian

He lost him completely. And he now tries to find
his lips in the lips of each new lover,
he tries in the union with each new lover
to convince himself that it’s the same young man,
that it’s to him he gives himself.

He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
He wanted, his lover said, to save himself
from the tainted, unhealthy form of sexual pleasure,
the tainted, shameful form of sexual pleasure.
There was still time, he said, to save himself.

He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
Through fantasy, through hallucination,
he tries to find his lips in the lips of other young men,
he longs to feel his kind of love once more.

Constantine Cavafis
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard