Programming Mozart and Mahler in the same concert is the dream of many music lovers, since it represents a kind of compendium of the best Central European tradition, the expression of an ideal and idealized beauty

the explosion and exploitation of a salvific paradigm that reveals, still, the need to believe. Mozart is the melodic prodigy, king of the details and timbre dialogues that goes beyond the classical element -which culminates- to lean out of the properly romantic expression. Mahler, who adored Mozart, amplifies and transcends the expressiveness of romantic pathos, which still beats in him. As chief conductor of the Vienna opera he programmed with delight -for his person and for the audience- such important operas as ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, in which a whole world of emotional relationships is contained. As for his own symphonies, it has also been said that they are something like closed cosmoses. In the present concert two of the best works composed by both are gathered: the 'Piano Concerto no. 22' is the most extensive, ambitious and rich in resources, while Mahler's 'Seventh Symphony' is one of his best examples of monumentality, in which the possibilities of the instruments are taken to the limit and the genres are transformed, reversing a passionate way popular music and music, and in sum showing contributors to the same and unique reality. As if that were not enough, the interpreters who will make possible the confluence of those headlights of the composition -Mozart and Mahler, alpha and omega in inclusive tension- are none other than the pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, one of the most sensitive to the musicality of the games Mozartians and director Daniel Harding, who at the head of the Orchester de Paris promises to offer a memorable version of Mahler. A concert that is well worth a new visit to the city of light.

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Daniel Barenboim returns to the emblematic Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. Perhaps it would be better to specify that, in a sense, he has never left, since he has been musical director

since 1992. What is striking about the occasion is that he will not direct any of the Berlin ensembles, such as the Staatskapelle Berlin -with which he has made a great number of performances and recordings - but the no less historical Vienna Philharmonic. The program, at the height of the circumstances, composes the "Classic" Symphony of Prokofiev, dynamic and playful, as well as the first great composition of Gustav Mahler, in which the Bohemian traces a kind of biographical journey to collect the testimony of romanticism and elevate it to the maximum expression, fusing the internal nature with the external one.

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For the first time in Austria, the Kunsthistorisches Museum offers a unique exhibition dedicated to Mark Rothko, one of the fundamental names of Abstract Expressionism, which is recognized

above all for its large canvases, paintings with a predominance of a few colours, rich in nuances, being the space is distributed in rectangular forms, although without any aprioristic regularity. One of the strong points of the present exhibition, however, lies in the showing of the trajectory from a symbolic figurativism of the 1930s -which could be reminiscent of that of Fauvism- to the discovery of its own language, already in the 50s and 60s., with works already exempt from any hint of representation. As if it were large doors, windows or openings to another dimension, its colours allow the viewer confront feelings that underlie conscious life. In a letter addressed to Katharina Ku in 1954, Rothko noted one of the dangers inherent in his particular way of painting: " Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative". In the wonderful web with which the important art gallery presents this fundamental exhibition -until June 30- we can find all kinds of materials, which allow us to contextualize Rothko's creativity and understand its evolution and purposes. There, too, are extracts of an interview in which he expresses the intensity and spirituality of the creative and sacrificial experience, offered for the spectator's purposes with thaumaturgy. "I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions (…) The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!".

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The gaze of Diane Arbus has been celebrated for her keen ability to capture the psychological nuances of the individuals portrayed. Sneaking into the day to day of people, couples or groups, embodied the intimate life of their fellow citizens.

It was Arbus an essentially New York artist, and in fact the Metropolitan Museum is responsible for the present show. As the organizers explain, she "took most of her photographs in New York City, where she was born and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side and Coney Island. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and midtown shoppers, are among the most intimate, surprising and haunting works of art of the twentieth century". In this show, more than 100 photographs are exhibited, "the majority of which are vintage prints made by the artist, drawn from the Diane Arbus Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. More than two-thirds of these photographs -precisan- have never been seen before in the UK".

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