Matthias Wurz

“After a while we’d all turn in, and just as I was about to drift off to sleep I’d hear this...,”

The rolling sound of a marble was just audible, and the audience – immediately captivated by the intimate atmosphere – was following its course across the stage. “This happened every night.“

“In peace I have found my image, I have found myself,” Owen Wingrave exclaims at the climax of Benjamin Britten’s second-to-last opera. It’s a powerful aria, sung by British baritone Andrew Ashwin and the music for once leaves behind the darkness and overall oppressive atmosphere of the work.

About 30,000 people gathered in Hradcany Square at Prague Castle on Apr. 5 to hear U.S. President Barack Obama. The whole city seemed to have turned out to hear this most eloquent of politicians, waiting patiently in the chill morning.

Today, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Obama praised the role the Czechs had played through peaceful protest:

The plenary chamber of the Austrian parliament was packed by 9:00 on Apr. 21, just like the stands for the general public in anticipation of ÖVP Finance Minister Josef Pröll’s 63-minute presentation of the budget.

At 9:05, Pröll rose from his seat to deliver what was expected to be his most important speech of his career so far, presenting the budgets for 2009 and 2010, which was broadcasted live by ORF Austrian Television.

For the contemporary Chinese, according to Prof. Junhua Zhang, a political scientist of Zhejian University of Hangzhou City, the production of cheap consumer goods – colloquially referred to as ‘the China Price’ – is like “stinky tofu.”

As he paused, he glanced as his puzzled audience at the Danube University Krems on Mar. 23 with a disarming charming smile, before he continued, “it smells bad, but it tastes delicious.”

It was a cloudy Saturday, Feb. 21, when cineastes got a glimpse of the five films that were nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the 81st Annual Academy Awards. The legendary Samuel Goldwyn Theater at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, used by the Academy for the Oscar nominations each year, was host to the traditional Foreign Language Film Nominees Symposium, held for the 31st time.

Early June, I passed Stephansdom at about 9.30 pm, and I noticed that the cathedral gates were widely open. I stopped and had a look inside, and as soon as I passed the threshold, the view was out of this world. Heaven, in a cascade of bright and blue-dimmed lightning seemed to have descended to earth and taken a place inside.

In fact, the seating area except for services held, was fully accessible that night, and people wandered about, stood in amazement or just contemplated in the dimmed light. I entered the main nave and was immediately caught by the calm atmosphere, created by the partial illumination of statues and baroque side altars, to a background of medieval chant - as it turned out, not live, but from recordings played unobtrusively from speakers nearby.

The lavishly decorated interior of the Theater an der Wien, erected only a few years after Mozart's death by impresario and librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, is one of the most beautiful opera houses of Vienna. Smaller, though, it is at the same time far more intimate.

Therefore, operas that require large orchestral or vocal forces are a particular challenge for finding the right musical balance. This challenge was successfully met in Leoš Janácek's (1854 -- 1928) Kát'a Kabanová that premiered on Apr. 13.

When Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer (SPOe) announced a minor reWhen Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer (SPÖ) announced a minor reshuffling of the social democratic ministers on June 15, the political commentators were not particularly astonished. The announcement of a split between the positions of a Chancellor (Alfred Gusenbauer) and the SPÖ party leadership (Werner Faymann, to be appointed), however, was a major political development, for which Austria has almost no tradition.