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Where realism takes the autonomous state to be an attribute of institutions of rule sui generis, Rosenberg reveals it to be a specific historical form. This feat, and it is in my view a considerable one, is achieved by demonstrating that the capitalist world economy and the system of sovereign states are internally related. Although this is not the task of The Empire of Civil Society, one major implication for concrete historical analysis is revealed. And yet in its depiction of the actual history of capitalist development it confronts a number of problems.

Consider, for example, the globalisation of the sovereign states-system. It was a process that reached its apogee in the last century, an era of successive waves of imperial implosion and decolonisation that stretched from the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires to that of the Portuguese. It was not, mark, a period dominated by the progressive separation of politics and economics but instead witnessed a staggered shift from the liberal regimes of the previous century to the age of autarky and statism of the s and subsequent decades.

The spread of the liberal world market and the sovereign states-system, it would seem, are not as interdependent as Rosenberg would have us believe. Whether these are sufficient explanations of the history of state intervention in the last century is a question that cannot be treated here. An aspect of the method can, however, be highlighted.

In defining the modern capitalist state strictly as external to the process of surplus extraction, Rosenberg is able to uphold his contention that modern sovereign states and the liberal world market developed in unison, but at the price of a dematerialised model of the capitalist state. It is a model to which certain contemporary polities may approximate — Bermuda and the Cayman Islands spring to mind.

But most, for better or worse, are far removed from this condition. Even if one leaves aside direct ownership, another form of surplus extraction, taxation, accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of national income in most OECD countries. However, in two signal aspects his account diverges.

The first is methodological. In other words, concepts specifying some new determination are introduced where it becomes necessary to analyze an aspect of the capitalist mode hitherto excluded from consideration. The heart of the accumulation process is the continuous extraction of surplus labour using ever new methods, a process fuelled by the competitive relations existing among the various centres or units of accumulation, and constantly resisted by those subjected to it. Those engaged in commodity exchange must reciprocally recognise rights to private ownership and to freedom and equality in exchange.

Property right, however, is simultaneously the right to exclude others. Because exchange depends upon the alienability of commodities, ownership must be, in principle at least, absolute, with others excluded from possession. If the division of property, both amongst owners of means of production and between these and non-owners, is to be maintained with any sort of stability, some sort of extra-economic force is required — for the potential for transgression of property rights is ever-present.

As Barker describes, 34 In Barker and Dale, Important explorations of the re-definition of property that prepared the way for and were reinforced by the development of capitalist society are C. Property came to acquire a new, narrower usage: See also Kay and Mott The process of accumulation, indeed, generates instability and undermines the grounds of its own existence. In short, commodity relations as a generalised form, and capital accumulation in particular, depend upon coercive power.

Force and violence, in this analysis, are connected at the very deepest level to the capitalist economy. Modern states typically administer uniform, standardised legal systems, giving legal form to the relations between capitals and between capital and labour. They enforce law — arbitrating disputes, enforcing contracts, and punishing breaches. They are the constitutors and guarantors of property rights. But the role of the state is more than juridic.

The juridical role alone requires the possession and use of means of violence. More recently, Barker has taken this analysis a step further, suggesting that it may illuminate not only the jurisprudential and political corollaries of capitalist production but also the economic aspects of state power. These are created and executed by institutions — laws being initiated by governments, drafted by civil servants, passed by parliaments, enforced by police and interpreted by magistrates. In the process the prerogatives of private property owners are qualified — even as their rights qualify the powers of the state.

They develop compelling interests of their own in the management of society in general and of economic organisation in particular. They may even assume the role of capitalist themselves. As economies become more sophisticated and global competition intensifies, some of these tasks — such as the provision of physical infrastructure and the supply, training, health and security, and management of the workforce — grow in importance. An index of this is the long-term rise in taxation over the course of the last century.

Government expenditure as percentage of GDP average of fourteen advanced industrialised economies. Intervention may act as a brake to accumulation. It may hasten accumulation in one period but fetter it another. But in the latter case, the state will see its ability to tax, and to project power, dwindle. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. The rise of new centres of capitalism was transforming the world economy and states-system. What were the interactions between them? To what extent did they involve a modification of the mechanisms of capitalist reproduction — did they enable competition to take a regulated rather than anarchic form?

Their answers to these questions have been pored over and debated down the ages, and there is no need to add to the literature here. Firstly, they were attentive, to a greater degree than their forebears, to the geopolitical mechanisms of the transmission of capitalism and to the active involvement of state apparatuses in restructuring pre- capitalist societies.

Market-driven growth had enabled England to achieve unprecedented military successes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: In the process these societies were transformed from a fragmented, semi- feudal or semi-colonial condition into centres of industrial capitalism. Surveying the bleakness of the Russian plains — sparsely populated, culturally benighted and technologically backward, producing only a feeble surplus upon which trade and industry could feed — he argued that although Russia was being dragged onto the tracks of capitalist development its relatively backward starting point could not but exert a profound influence upon its modernisation path.

An enormous, impoverished peasant population, a repressive labour regime, an undeveloped bourgeois class and an autocratic state: On the other hand, backwardness was not without advantages. Institutions and practices that are successful elsewhere can be emulated. Development in Germany, and even more so in Russia, involved the combination of different stages, producing amalgams of the archaic and the ultra-modern — pockets of advanced industry existed side by side with the mule-drawn wooden plough.

Their development evinced a complex, combined character both in terms of technologies utilised and social classes and institutions. Staffed with landlords and ingrained with absolutist traditions and values, the attempts of the Tsarist state to stimulate capitalist development in agriculture in order to swell the surplus available to industry were, for the most part, stumbling and half-hearted.

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And yet, driven by the exigencies of geopolitical competition — as highlighted by the humiliating military defeats of —5 and — the Tsarist autocracy, the class origins of its staff notwithstanding, abolished feudal serfdom and allowed top positions to be delegated to pro-capitalist 49 Marx, , p. We suffer, not only from the living, but from the dead. This is largely convincing but too stark.

It underestimates the considerable transformation of Russia — including rapid growth in both industrial and agricultural productivity — in the — period. For a more balanced assessment see Nove, , ch. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Horizontal integration permits greater control over output, price and markets while vertical integration may assure supplies, insure against the costs of fluctuating output and lower other risks associated with dealing with external agents such as breach of contract. Centralisation may simply be a defensive strategy: Hilferding and Bukharin in particular focused upon the implications of these developments for business organisation and its connections to the state.

For Hilferding, capital concentration, combined with the tying up of ever-greater sums in the form of fixed capital, was progressively undermining the mechanisms of inter-enterprise competition. With their long turnover times, investments in fixed capital make depreciation a greater hazard; risk avoidance becomes the name of the game. These processes, in turn, were stimulating the formation of cartels, and alliances between banks and industrial enterprises.

It was here that the multi-divisional enterprise was pioneered, in which a number of geographically dispersed plants and vertically related operations were integrated within one corporation, facilitating economies of scale and scope. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition. Yet he was also aware that competition underpins countervailing tendencies — to fragmentation and decentralisation.

See also Grossmann , p.

As Janos Kornai observes , p. But what of that other development of the late nineteenth century: It had been commonly thought in the mid-nineteenth century that, although protectionist strategies had been crucial to enabling firms based in Britain to gain leading positions on world markets, the general drift would be towards a liberal trade regime. By the turn of the century that illusion could no longer be harboured. Why did this unexpected turnaround occur? Was the rise and generalisation of protectionism in this period a consequence of the resurgent power of landowning classes and reactionary state officials?

Or were contingent historical factors, such as the revenue-gathering demands of states in times of war, to blame? On this meaning of private property see Chattopadhyay, Tariffs on industrial goods, he argued, now functioned less to protect old interests or even infant industries than to protect advanced sectors of industry, enabling them to raise prices on the domestic market — in effect imposing a tribute on domestic consumers — to subsidise export offensives on world markets.

A business in one country that is menaced by the protective tariffs of foreign countries now makes use of these tariffs for its own purposes by transferring part of its production abroad. Businesses and 72 Polanyi, , pp. Of the theorists of imperialism mentioned above it was Nikolai Bukharin, in his Imperialism and World Economy, who posed the question of the interaction between protectionism and the internationalisation of capital with the greatest clarity. For him, imperialism is best understood as a phase of capitalist development in which i the internationalisation of the productive forces tends to compel capitals to compete for markets, investment opportunities and raw materials at the global level; ii the concentration and centralisation of capital tends to lead to the integration of private monopoly capital and the state; and that the interaction between these two tendencies results in a marriage of interests between capitals and states such that the demands and affairs of businesses increasingly infuse military and political rivalries.

This is quite clearly the case with protectionism. As Bukharin described, Cartel tariffs and the dumping system practiced by the foremost countries provoke resistance on the part of the backward countries which raise their defensive tariffs; on the other hand the raising of tariffs by the backward countries serves as a further stimulus to raise the cartel duties that make dumping easier.

Needless to say that the same action and counteraction take place both among the foremost countries in relation to each other and among backward countries in their mutual relations. In this regard, Eric Hobsbawm identifies two key developments. The first was the industrialisation of warfare: For Lenin and Hilferding, although these divisions and redivisions, in both the economic and political spheres, occur peacefully and through cooperation between parties at certain times and places, their emphasis — especially for Lenin — was on the tendency of such processes to spill over into conflict and war.

For the received categories in which capitalism had been theorised by earlier generations bore only the slimmest relation to the actually existing capitalisms of the age. Already at the end of the nineteenth century Luxemburg was able to describe how the development of capitalism was modifying the nature of the state: The states of the warring countries actively intervened in the control of labour. They organised the importation and distribution of raw materials and foodstuffs, and ordered factories to produce certain goods. War Economies in a De-globalising World In the last chapter an argument was developed concerning the nature of competition and of the relations between states and businesses in capitalist society.

Against those who posit the economic and political as separate spheres of society it was argued that this institutional separation is a product of an underlying unity: This line of argument was introduced at an abstract level but was applied to the world economy and states system of the early twentieth century through an exposition of the views of a number of contemporaneous Marxist theorists. These drew attention to the impact of the concentration and centralisation of capital upon the structure of business, to the tendencies for market coordination to be supplemented by planned coordination, for trade and capital to internationalise and for states to involve themselves directly in economic relations domestic and international.

As a result of these developments, they proposed, economic competition and bargaining in the world economy was becoming increasingly bound up with inter-state competition and the structure of the world political order. Small firms and proprietorial ownership were being elbowed aside by joint stock companies with their enormous market power.

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Competitive capitalism within national boundaries was being supplemented and to some extent replaced by monopolies, cartels and coordination by banks and states. British hegemony and an international free-trade regime was being succeeded by resurgent protectionism within a multi-polar world order.

If the late nineteenth century saw the rapid evolution of a new and global stage of capitalism, however, the exigencies of competition were experienced in sharply divergent ways in different parts of the system. By binding ever more economically and culturally heterogeneous regions of the world into an integrated nexus of commercial and geopolitical competition, capitalism intensifies the experience of difference even as it connects. States and firms in different countries are compelled to refer to prevailing world conditions ever more closely and to tailor their strategies accordingly.

For our present purposes these debates are not relevant, but for a summary see Jessop, , esp. Rapid urbanisation around gigantic enterprises that employed tens of thousands of workers laid fertile soil for industrial conflict and radical political movements. State-led industrialisation, funded to a considerable degree from abroad, did not create propitious conditions for the bourgeoisie to exert hegemony. For its part, the repressive state, although able to clamp down on discontent in times of peace, proved too weak to simultaneously beat back military attack and hold down strikes and political protest.

Herein lies, of course, a familiar and much-discussed paradox of the Russian revolution: Given that the Bolsheviks in government were keenly aware of this paradoxical circumstance, what explains their belief that communist transformation — based upon the supposition that, in conditions of affluence, principles of direct democracy could be realised in all spheres of society — could grow from such stony soil?

At one extreme is the view that communist values were a convenient fiction, that the Bolsheviks recognised the recklessness of pursuing a socialist agenda prematurely. The classic text here is N. The power of a single isolated proletarian vanguard, though it was based on the confidence of millions of the masses, obliged the new government and the Bolsheviks themselves to perform tasks they knew to be beyond their strength. These perspectives are the dominant ones but they do not exhaust the field. The gamble was that workers in the West would rise up. Thus, just as Russian industry under the Tsar and the provisional 89 Volkogonov, , p.

The coordinates of revolution in western Europe, however, were rather different to those of Russia. Whereas in the latter, the paradox of the revolution was that the same material factors that enabled its occurrence also determined its weaknesses, the situation in western Europe was in crucial respects the other way about.

In December Lenin framed the issue in these terms: Knowing as we do that the Russian revolution remained isolated, these words can seem to have a utopian or even plaintive ring about them. Yet in the years —20, with revolutions toppling regimes from Vladivostok to the Rhine and radical movements breaking out across the globe, the hopes of the embattled Bolsheviks did not seem unrealistic.

A wave of mass political strikes and anti-war demon- strations swept central Europe, spreading via Budapest to Germany and culminating in the mutiny of the Austro-Hungarian navy. As the world-revolutionary wave ebbed over the course of the s, in part thanks to their actions, the inherent difficulties faced by a revolution in a backward country were crystallised and intensified.

Military invasion, economic embargo, and capital flight combined with the consequences of civil war to reduce economic output to less than one third of its pre-war level. A governing party based within what had in any case been a relatively small working class could now but look on as the industrial workforce slumped.

Taking the 94 Lenin, , vol. Had one of the several revolutionary situations that occurred elsewhere in this period been carried to a socialist conclusion, the strategy of holding power in order to preserve the republic as a beacon and organising centre of worldwide revolution would have received vindication. It could, ultimately, have represented a practical test of the Marxist argument that the spread of socialist revolution would enable alternative, non-national structures to replace capitalism and its states system.

As it was, the curtain slowly fell on prospects of revolution abroad, the final acts being the stabilisation of Germany from and the crushing of communist-led uprisings in China of —7. The dilemma that Lenin had posed in did not disappear but grew ever starker: We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to live alongside the imperialist states for any length of time. One or other must triumph in the end.

In the initial post-revolutionary years, the Soviet economy can be described in terms of its inherited material conditions and social relations, as overdetermined by two major phenomena. One of these was war. Production plummeted as a result of the destruction wreaked upon the population and industry, not to mention territorial losses, in the wars of — Economic policy was indistinguishable from the state- led drive to requisition every available resource for the military effort.

The second was revolution. At one level the revolutions of and the policies that issued from them comprised a series of measures that were not in themselves socialist: A case has been made, by Charles Bettelheim and his co-thinkers notably Paresh Chattopadhyay that the social content of the revolution did in fact amount to little more than the replacement of one form of capitalism by another.

A recent book that 98 According to estimates in Haynes, , p. Lenin and Trotsky argued that the labour armies were an indispensable feature of socialism. Similarly, Bukharin extolled the runaway inflation and devaluation of money as a precursor of a true communist economy without money. The series of war measures — egalitarianism, a result of general destitution — as well as the suppression of the market and the strengthening of militarisation in the economy and society, were described as measures of the direct transition to real communism.

But it did not transform the way those enterprises organized the production, appropriation, and distribution of their surplus labor. The Soviet state […] delegated state officials to replace both private individual capitalists and private corporate boards of directors. Beyond winning the wars they faced and achieving basic survival, the Bolsheviks also sought to achieve a successful socialism. Three indices of success dominated their thinking: For, although it is undeniable that the exigencies of war and economic collapse placed immense obstacles in the path of socialist reforms — the shutting down of experiments in factory control and of militia structures in the army are among the many examples that testify to this — an acceptance and to a certain extent internalisation of the exigencies of war nevertheless co-existed with a commitment to egalitarian values that was reflected at the policy level in the prioritisation of improving the living standards of workers and the poor.

Resnick and Wolff themselves concede, for example, that it became nigh impossible for the Bolsheviks to purchase less of food and raw materials for state capitalist industry. To have done so would have compromised one or more of their socialist success indices: The prospect of imminent war The story of the degeneration of the Russian revolution has been told many times, and need only be summarised here.

Suffice to say, war, disease, poverty, and famine did their worst; the economy collapsed and the working class dwindled; the democracy of the soviets expired, giving way to a one-party state; and ever greater decision-making power was concentrated in the state and party bureaucracies. Not only was its economy a shambles at the beginning of the NEP in , but its cities were depleted, its bourgeoisie destroyed, and […] the working class was severely weakened. As the working class was whittled away, the ranks of the party were swelled by the officials upon whom it increasingly relied.

It was not just the case that the old Bolsheviks were in a situation where the combined strength of hostile class forces and bureaucratic inertness made their socialist aspirations difficult to realise. These aspirations themselves could not remain forever uncorrupted by the hostile environment. Its policies centred on spreading the revolution internationally, criticizing bureaucratisation, promoting industrialisation to be funded by taxation of those layers, rural and urban, that had benefited disproportionately under the NEP , and participating more intensively in the world economy.

Its supporters, however, found themselves ousted from senior positions in party and state as the decade drew to a close. It was a redefinition that signalled a new policy agenda: Whereas economies elsewhere had recovered from the First World War, invested and grown over the course of the s, in the USSR the consequences of civil war and revolution had produced an extremely adverse set of circumstances for accumulation. Revolution and the large-scale seizure of land by peasants, within an overall context of scarcity, had resulted in a relative equalisation of incomes, a high rate of consumption and a meagre savings ratio.

The Communist Party had, in short, been swept to power by social movements that had since dissolved away but whose legacy was a land unfit for accumulation. The prospect was of further relative decline or even military invasion by a stronger power. The crises of that year occurred in several different fields: The panic buying and hoarding that the war scare provoked served to exacerbate food shortages that were in any case approaching crisis proportions as government procurements of grain dwindled.

By the end of the year the country was sliding rapidly into a deep economic crisis. This, in turn, adversely affected all layers of the population. Workers and the unemployed saw their wages and benefits fall. Severe social tensions ensued, and found a variety of expressions: Policymakers were reduced to reacting to dire problems with short-term expedients. Nonetheless, the measures taken in this period indicate in their general direction a very clear set of underlying priorities. The first and most important of these was the assumption that external invasion threatened once again.

In contrast to the —20 period, however, these fears occurred within an international context marked by a string of defeats suffered by parties of the Comintern, most recently in China. Even in —8 the pace of industrialisation, measured against the meagre surplus released from agriculture, was intense — or even, as Bukharin saw it, excessive.

By the unbending yardsticks of modern warfare, however, its level remained totally inadequate. The growing conviction of sections of the Communist Party around Stalin that rapid industrialisation was required at any cost explains why resort was made, in — 8, to forced procurements of grain, and why brute repression was meted out to those who resisted and, notoriously, to many who did not as well.

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By way of these haphazard responses to short-term crises, the faction around Stalin stumbled upon what became their defining cause: It required, therefore, the sidelining and eventual routing of those political forces that championed the interests of private agriculture and the working class, notably the left and right oppositions within the Communist Party. It was here, in the concatenation of repressive moves that flowed from the imperative to industrialise, that the distinctive structures of Stalinist rule began to take shape.

There comes into being something like a united front from Chamberlain to Reiman, , chs. On the revival of the left opposition see also Ciliga, , p. Groups that resisted were branded enemies of the state. Myths were concocted in order to threaten and cajole, to turn the population against the enemy within: Intellectual freedoms were withdrawn, uncontrolled initiatives and dissent suppressed; all spheres of life were subordinated to the centralised party-state authority.

With the opposition factions suppressed, and their leaders pressed to capitulate to Stalin or driven into exile, the Communist Party became a monolithic organisation, headed by an absolute leader around whom a cult of personality was built. For one thing, the introduction of the first five-year plan led to soaring demands for funds to invest in industry and feed the growing urban workforce.

For another, forced procurements were a highly inefficient means of taxing the peasantry.

A perfectly logical response for the muzhik was to sow less grain, or to use it as fodder for animals — for animal products fetched better prices than grain. Despite the almost militaristic methods used to raise tribute from the land, therefore, grain procurements in —9 were actually down on —8, which had itself been an emergency year. During the crisis rippled through all sectors of the economy. Renewed signs of economic crisis, as Lewin describes, Reiman, , p. The first five-year plan, with its ambitious targets and insatiable pressures for ever more investment resources, had just been launched and was becoming a huge national effort on an unprecedented scale.

The countryside, if not properly controlled and mastered, could wreck the whole effort: For industrial production to be maximised, one of two agrarian transformations was therefore required. Either a functioning market economy would commodify agrarian relations, give rise to a differentiated class structure, and thereby encourage richer peasants to improve productivity, hire labourers, and exchange surplus crops for goods produced in the towns, or the state would have to take over the ownership and control of the land.

The former was barely viable, as the crises of the NEP had demonstrated. Rapid modernisation in backward Russia could not be accomplished by market mechanisms. Instead, Stalin began to implement the latter, historically unprecedented, course. In the limited and short-term expedient of forcible requisitioning gave way to a much-expanded and long-term goal: With the destruction came the creation of new patterns, which, although they emerged very rapidly, became permanent. Stalin famously appealed Lewin, , p. We must catch up this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we go under.

The collectivisation of agriculture involved an extreme projection of political power into the economic realm to enable the expropriation by the state of all major means of agricultural production. A traditional agricultural arrangement consisting largely of petty production — involving market relations but a considerable element of self-sufficiency — was, within a matter of years, subordinated to a single landlord.

This was no feudal fusion of economics and politics. Rather, it involved the sundering of peasants and their means of production into absolute property, on the one hand, and a proletariat, on the other. Rather, it inserted itself between the means of production and the agricultural labour force, declaring itself owner of the former, very much in the capitalist manner. The peasantry, for its part, was thrust en masse onto the labour market or into the Gulag. Collectivisation formed the centrepiece of a transformation of the Soviet economy, society and state that is stupefying in its dimensions.

Whereas in individual peasant farmers comprised over 75 per cent of the population, a decade later that figure had been slashed to 2. In — 32 agricultural output declined, as peasants cut down their sowing and slaughtered livestock for their own consumption or due to lack of fodder, and yet deliveries for industry and the urban population in the same period were doubled, and sales of grain on foreign markets grew fifty-six fold.

During the first five-year plan alone, the population of the cities exploded by 44 per cent, almost as much as in the far longer span of — Historians of the Soviet working class, however, show that, if anything, it was workers who bore the brunt of the industrialisation drive. But neither can it be easily construed as an acceleration of what had been an incipient socialist transformation of For thinkers as diverse as Marx and Walras the nationalisation of land, within a context of capitalist competition, actually strengthens the hold of capitalist relations.

Given the new lease of life received by traditional cultural phenomena such as superstition and quasi-religious political ritual; the resuscitation of reactionary traditions of anti-Semitism, Great Russian nationalism, and the manifold other varieties of chauvinism; and the limited development of the rule of law, it does not readily fit the description of Chattopadhyay, , p.

There is a wealth of evidence to buttress the claim that a dramatic shift from a mixed set of priorities in the —27 period to an exclusive concentration upon accumulation thereafter took place, but this need not detailed here. The party cells now became brokers in the service of their branch of the economy, sometimes even of just one enterprise.

On earlier theories of state capitalism see Ciliga, ; Callinicos, ; Fernandez, It underpinned the programmes of forced industrialisation, collectivisation, as well as the extreme repression that these called for. In terms of Communist ideology, much of the road from socialism to a modernising corporate conservatism had already been travelled by This would explain the fact that Stalinist ideas were not simply justifications of the post status quo but embodied a number of core conservative traits: Social order, for most currents of conservatism, including Stalinism, is built upon the family unit, the bonds of the nation, and a strong paternalistic state.

As with any conservatism, the Stalinist brand incorporates certain values from liberal and socialist traditions. Meritocracy is one such that Barrington Moore has emphasised; a rationalist philosophy is another. See especially Harris, a, Haynes, , pp. Larry Ray , p. In the third, a low propensity to save combined with a high demand for investment produces a contradiction to which coercion typically offers a solution: Capital controls were instituted and protectionist barriers raised in an attempt to shut out the fluctuations of world prices and secure domestic markets for domestic firms.

For earlier treatments of state capitalism as war economy and vice versa, see Bukharin, ; Cliff, In conditions of crisis, in which capital cannot be profitably employed in the civilian sector, all the greater is the attraction of directing it to the production of arms for prising open markets elsewhere. The state took over the savings bank and imposed strict supervision over commercial banks.

These, together with the stock market, largely lost their ability to direct the flow of capital. The state, moreover, regulated industry and encouraged cartelisation. It signed long-term contracts with industrial groups to buy their output at fixed prices, and set quotas for many industrial goods, especially in the heavy industry and energy sectors. Industrial firms were forced to deposit all profits above a certain level with the state. Prices were kept constant, depriving profits of their allocative role.

Much of central and southern Europe and Latin America knew similar systems in the same period. In Poland, to give but one example, most major industries were state owned, and all were organised into officially registered cartels that were tightly controlled by the Ministry of Industry. So profound was the transformation of the world economy that towards the end of the s E.

See Luxemburg, , ch. Third, the USSR, being a vast territory endowed with abundant natural resources, was relatively well equipped for autarky. The extreme form taken by autarkic state capitalism in the USSR can be attributed largely to these factors, together with the legacy of tsarist state capitalism. Its peculiarity, however, the wholesale nationalisation of industry and agriculture, partly reflected the perceived need to tax the countryside to the limit, but also resulted from a fourth factor: Of its characteristic structures several stand out. First of these was the role of the Communist Party.

Steep-ascent industrialisation, as discussed above, was achieved through the centralised mobilisation of resources combined with a repressive strategy designed to yoke a muzzled workforce to the accumulation of the national capital. It strove to lash various social groups By the state was responsible for 90 per cent of all investment in the USA. Economic policy consistently favoured the producer goods sector, for example by keeping prices for producer goods artificially low.

As discussed above, the share of consumer goods branches in total production declined sharply after the introduction of the five-year plans. One need not enter the lists on the question of whether coal, iron and arms production and the processes of conquest and colonisation that these enabled were the prime causes of the industrial revolution to appreciate that they were important factors fuelling that transformation which, from the eighteenth century onwards, opened up the economic gap between Western Europe and its appendages and the rest of the world.

Nigel Harris has expressed this point with his customary acuity: The arms race becomes a powerful factor defining the entirety of domestic activity — the more so, the more backward a country is. For the Soviet Union, contesting world supremacy with the most powerful single national State, the United States, from a position of relative economic weakness, the imperative becomes very powerful indeed, shaping all other subsidiary decisions down to how much investment should be devoted to agriculture. Plans were not drawn up according to the procedure of assessing actual economic activity followed by a projection of possible growth rates to form the basis for setting targets.

Rather, the reverse was closer to the truth. High targets were set, especially in the producer goods and military sectors, with the aim of forcing up growth rates. In a more developed version of this argument, Robert Kurz pp. As this phenomenon indicates, resources were not simply distributed according to bureaucratically-allotted prices. Equally important were the reactions of economic agents to shortages.

It would be misleading to conceive of soft budget constraints as unique to STEs. Even in contemporary neo-liberal capitalism — in which the norm of financial discipline is accorded an elevated status — banks commonly tolerate bad debts, especially of major companies, on the grounds that they would themselves suffer badly if the debtor were to become insolvent. States still commonly step in with rescue packages for ailing companies, while the tendency to lower the penalties that bankruptcy incurs softens the budget constraints for small businesses too.

Investment risk has ceased. In response to signals of impending crisis, planners would be forced to put many projects on hold in order to free resources for priority investments usually in the capital goods sector. Severe bottlenecks would result, as enterprises and retail outlets suffered from the absence of allocated goods.

Once prioritised projects began production, however, more resources would be released, and economic downturn would give way once more to boom. In turn, plan targets would be forced up, and the cycle resumed. They resulted from a combination of three underlying characteristics: Without an undue need to worry about the relation of costs to revenues, managers were able to counter unrealisable targets and unreliable supplies by disguising figures, inflating requirements, and hoarding resources including raw materials, components and employees.

This leads to wastage, and hence lack of supplies and increased pressures from above [ The STEs scored As used here it does not include non-productive expenditure on the military or for the luxury consumption of the nomenklatura even though there are good reasons to define such spending as wasted. In East Germany the institution responsible employed around , Each ministry or conglomerate tended to become a separate empire, producing most of its own components while others produced similar parts at similarly small production volumes.

The pricing system, geared to maximising output growth, encouraged resource waste by setting low prices for raw materials, energy and labour. Large enterprises tended to produce on a surprisingly small scale, with correspondingly unsophisticated technology and unspecialised labour, exacerbating the phenomenon of underspecialisation that was in any case a characteristic of import substitution on the macro level.

This particular vicious circle could, furthermore, strengthen as economies grew more complex. As Berliner explains, as a consequence of technological advance, products contain many more components manufactured by other enterprises. Ministry and enterprise are therefore more vulnerable to the deficiencies of the supply system and have stronger motivation to produce their own principal components and supplies. An affirmative answer could well contain an element of truth. Caution, however, is warranted.

For one thing, these forms of inefficiency are classic symptoms of the war-economic form, and abounded in rapidly growing Western war economies such as the USA in the s. The command framework in particular meant that many of the uncertainties that hinder investment under laissez-faire conditions were abolished and production maximised. As Alec Nove put it, with all its defects the system had an overwhelming advantage: One can see how this process, in its terrible grandeur, might have impressed eyewitnesses — such as the young Erich Honecker who worked there in the s. Honecker and others like him would carry the lessons back to the central and eastern Kemp, , p.

As Robin Okey has observed , p. The equivalent figures for Spain were 28, 31, See Bairoch, , p. In the USSR and East Germany, particularly in the era of Stalin, Khrushchev and Ulbricht, major and usually successful shifts of investment into high-tech sectors such as aerospace, petrochemicals, electronics and data processing occurred. Noteworthy technological advances were charted not simply in traditional areas but also in cutting-edge fields such as laser technology and space optics, and not only through the import and emulation of technology and technique but also by way of indigenous invention and innovation.

By the inter-war period businesses throughout the world were typically organised on the national scale. Leading firms were rarely run by proprietors, more normally by teams of managers. Relations between businesses and states were intensive, particularly in times of war; state capitalism had become the norm. The Soviet Union was, equally, unusual in the degree of nationalisation. This, it was argued above, although in part reflecting the legacy of the Tsars, the revolution and civil war, came about primarily as a consequence of the multiple crises of the late s.

The Communist Party leadership responded to the threat of war with more advanced capitalist states by adopting a strategy of forced industrialisation and collectivisation. It was at this juncture that the characteristic structures of the Soviet model were laid. If the main roots of the Soviet model can be found in a particular constellation of economic backwardness, geopolitical threat, and the economic and social crises of the late s, why then were the same structures transferred in the postwar period to societies that in some cases, notably East Germany, were already economically advanced and in other respects quite unlike the Russia that Stalin had set out to industrialise?

The case of East Germany, as shall be argued in the next chapter, looks into this claim. Quoted in Haynes, On the Asian tigers as state capitalisms, see Harris, Soviet foreign policy and the Division of Germany Although a great deal more is now known than was the case before the opening of archives in East Berlin and Moscow, debate continues to surround questions concerning the division of Germany.

Such questions are related to wider contested issues concerning the origins of the Cold War. Here, debate no longer rages in quite the same way as it did in the s, between traditionalists and revisionists, and yet consensus is, despite the availability of new archival sources, as far from reach as ever. With a conquering army under its control and committed to spreading revolution the Soviet leadership could hardly be expected to demonstrate the kind of pragmatism associated with traditional statecraft, above all the willingness to compromise.

Their single-minded dedication to expansion would inevitably result in the imposition of Communist social structures and ideology upon the countries of Eastern Europe and beyond. The origins of the Cold War therefore lay not in geopolitical rivalries but in an ideological antagonism, one in which the revolutionary camp showed scant regard for the established norms of international behaviour.

For surveys of interpretations of the origins of the Cold War, see Walker, ; Leffler, b. These views reflected the position of senior US officials in the Truman Administration, and that of the British Foreign Office from early For the latter, as Anne Deighton has revealed , p. The extent to which these arguments make sense of the division of Germany will be examined below, but before so doing, let us briefly consider some of the major criticisms that have been levelled against traditionalist approaches. Until the early s the USSR could scarcely be designated a superpower, given its lack of either global reach or nuclear capability.

Its population and economy had been devastated by war. The USA, by contrast, possessed a monopoly of, and from overwhelming superiority in, atomic weapons as well as a proven willingness to use them — to fearsome military and considerable diplomatic effect. It possessed a global system of bases and an unmatched ability to project military power; its leaders and policymakers were, from the s onwards, explicitly committed to translating that capability into global influence. Due to close historical ties between these two liberal powers, not least the bonds formed during the war itself, due to their influence over France, and due to the close connections of these three allies to other states and colonies across the globe, the cooling of relations that occurred in the first post-war years was not between two superpowers but between a regional power, on the one hand, and the sole superpower flanked by major European allies, on the other.

Democracies, in this view, generally favour negotiated compromise within a multilateral order, while totalitarian regimes are hardwired for expansion — whether because a ruthless monomaniac has commandeered the ship of state, as a result of the unbalanced influence of military interests within the state apparatus, as a strategy for coping with or overcoming the economic constraints of autarky, or as a desparate means of diverting the attention of domestic audiences from internal Schroeder, Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.

This thesis, although influential, does not stand up well under scrutiny. They did not begin until , nor did an offensive strategic orientation receive clear and enduring support from a majority of the political elite. Although the rhetoric of the former continued into the latter period, actual similarities between the two phases are difficult to find. In the earlier phase, socialist revolution abroad was to be inspired and Snyder, In the later phase the opposite is found: Although the hope, the belief even, that Europe would turn socialist within three or five decades was retained by Kremlin policymakers, the route to and nature of that socialist society was redefined.

Working class-led revolution was no longer seen as its necessary basis. From the bourgeois world, as from his political entourage in the world of communism, Stalin wanted only one thing: This was not at all identical with revolution. An important section of opinion in Washington was fiercely opposed to revolution but was perfectly content to cooperate with their Soviet counterparts, who were perceived as being interested primarily in establishing a buffer zone in Eastern Europe.

As Richard Day has shown, socialist construction was envisaged in this period as achievable with two different toolkits. One, obviously, was that of sovietisation by fiat. Alongside this another possibility was outlined: It was, moreover, opposed by prominent Bolshevik leaders such as Trotsky.

See Cliff, , ch. By the s the coordinates that guided Soviet foreign policy were formed by the Triple Entente alliance with Britain and France and Rapallo alliance with Germany , and were complemented by rapprochement with the League of Nations. Revolutionary uprisings elsewhere threatened these arrangements and were opposed and in some cases suppressed by Communist parties, most notoriously in Catalonia.

Selected Papers of Red Sea Project VII

Communist parties were encouraged to subordinate themselves to mainstream nationalist movements such as the Guomindang in China. But no prominent figure in the Kremlin advocated this strategy. In Europe, where Communist-led forces were on the point of taking power, as in Greece in , it was only pressure from Moscow that enforced restraint. During this period, Isaac Deutscher reminds us , p. See also Mastny, And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible. On the extent of control over Greece exerted by the Communist-led resistance in —4, see Woodhouse, , esp.

At all times, however, the Stalinist approach to security issues proceeded along power-political lines, either in multilateralist guise or in overtly imperialist form. More is now known about disagreements amongst policymakers of the respective powers, as well as of dissonances between strategic policy set in capital cities and the details of its implementation by local officials. Reflecting internal differences as well as evolving contradictions between them, the policies of all four Allies, it is now generally held, were erratic and contingent. He possessed no distinct strategy on how to pursue his ambitions Bialer, , p.

Some confusion exists on this point, given the puzzling proclivity of sovietologists to equate ideology with Marxism. This very confusion, I would argue, is itself ideological in a richer sense of the term: See also Pleshakov, , pp. Die Sprechstimme ist lyrisch und weich. Besuch am Stadttheater Baden. So inszeniert sich Khatia Buniatishvili heute.

Dass es auch anders geht, beweist Simone Kermes. Sie sieht auch ohne Pfunde so frisch und jung aus wie ihre Stimme klingt. Das ist abwechslungsreicher und man setzt sich keinem direkten Vergleich aus. Bei Zwillingen allerdings sieht die Sache anders aus. Im selben Jahr schrieb Haydn die Sinfonie Nr. Sie ist unangepasst und unberechenbar, gilt als stachelig und eigensinnig: Dieser Drehschwindel machte ganz Wien beschwipst.

So sehr sich die vier Lied- und Arienrecitals, die ich Ihnen dieses Mal vorstelle, in Repertoire und Stimmlage unterscheiden, haben sie doch eines gemeinsam: Jon Frederic West sowieso. Jonas Kaufmann dagegen bietet eine mediterran gelockte Version an der man seine Herkunft aus dem italienischen Repertoire ablesen kann. Klaus Florian Vogt schon gar nicht! Doch um seine neue Aufnahme mit Bach-Kantaten — der ersten seit — bibberte nicht nur er.

Als Pubertierender wollte er Rockstar werden. Kurz darauf sprach Dirigent Mariss Jansons in St. Beide haben gerade ihr erstes Soloalbum als Sopranistin vorgelegt. Damals unter Leitung von Arturo Toscanini. Kommt jetzt das Album zum Opernbesuch mit der Mutter? Keineswegs, verriet sie Peter Ueling, und auch, warum die Triangel das wichtigste Instrument der Oper ist. Sie war schon immer schnell und ist nicht nur deshalb eine famose Mrs. Guido Fischer stellt das Originalgenie mit Weltraumerfahrung vor.

Piano Classics bringt noch einmal drei Bildnisse namhafter Lisztianer. Dementsprechend wird man auch mit besinnlichen Klangerzeugnissen reich beschenkt. Da treffen zwei aufeinander: Lang Lang spielt Liszt. Und was die Selbstvermarktung angeht, da scheint Liszt in Lang Lang seinen einzig wahren Adepten gefunden zu haben. Doch versteht es der heutige Superstar Lang, den Kompositionen des seinerzeit als Virtuosen gefeierten Liszt auch eine Seele zu geben?

Blinde Gier nach Macht, Geld und Sex: Die Polin Aleksandra Kurzak will hoch hinaus. Doch kann man den Jubilar eigentlich noch neu entdecken? Was wenig bekannt ist: Bei drei der vier hier vorgestellten Opern handelt es sich um Ersteinspielungen. Es ist eine wahre Sisyphus-Arbeit, die Matthias Kornemann auf sich genommen hat: Gleichzeitig hat dieser ungemein verzwickte Torso aber immer auch zu Mythen und esoterisch angehauchten Deutungen verleitet.

Was sich auch in etlichen Gesamtaufnahmen niedergeschlagen hat. Was passiert eigentlich im Aufnahmestudio? Welchen Anteil am Gelingen einer Einspielung hat der Tonmeister? Hilary Hahn begann ihre Karriere als Wunderkind. Lyrische Eleganz und noble Leidenschaft — das sind die Markenzeichen der jungen Amerikanerin, deren Vorfahren aus der Pfalz stammen. Der italienische Maestro Riccardo Chailly hat sich in saftigen Worten von der Berufsauffassung heutiger Gesangsstars distanziert.

Premiere nach Jahren: Wenn schon ein Studiotermin in der alten Heimat ansteht, dann muss es nicht nur russisches Repertoire sein. Tschaikowskis Erstes und Rachmaninows Drittes. So jung und schon weltweit gefragt: Den Werdegang des bayerischen Schwaben skizziert Christoph Braun. Doch ihre Karriere ist nicht immer geradlinig verlaufen. Michael Wersin hat sie getroffen. Thomas Quasthoff hat sein zweites Jazz-Studioalbum aufgenommen. Was will dieser Mann bei den Berliner Philharmonikern? Und was wollen die Berliner Philharmoniker von ihm? Von deutschen Konzerthaus-Baustellen Hamburg kann man nur neidvoll nach Finnland blicken.

Robert Fraunholzer hatte jetzt schon Gelegenheit, sich den Prachtbau anzusehen. Die Sentenz ist vielzitiert. Und doch kommt man bisweilen nicht umhin, sie sich wieder in Erinnerung zu rufen, wenn der Anlass danach verlangt. So ist das normalerweise: Man besinnt sich wieder auf eine Zeit, als die Orgel noch nicht die heutige sakrale Aura hatte. Im Kongo gibt es das wohl einzige schwarze Orchester der Welt. Seine musikalische Eigenart bezieht er ganz aus innerer Ruhe und Besonnenheit. Es wird Zeit, dass wir ihn entdecken, findet Robert Fraunholzer. Seit Orpheus, dem Urahn der Spezies, wissen wir, dass eine Arie immer auch gerade dazu dienlich war.

Der Philosoph Peter Sloterdijk spitzte dieses Wissen zu. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau wird 85 Jahre alt. In Japan, wo er der Fernsehnation klassische Musik vermittelt, kennt ihn schon jedes Kind. Und bald steht er am Pult der Berliner Philharmoniker. Otto Schenk, Urgestein opulenter Opernregie, feiert im Juni seinen Nun steht die zweite CD des Erfolgspaares ins Haus.

Mozart, Mendelssohn und jetzt Brahms: Anne- Sophie Mutter macht sich daran, die vor vielen Jahren aufgenommenen Werke noch einmal einzuspielen. Hat sie etwas Neues zu sagen? Was treibt sie an? Der dritte im Bunde ist der Franzose Antoine Tamestit. Josef Engels stellt sie vor. Seither ist sie weltweit gefragt als Solistin wie als Kammermusikpartnerin — und will doch von ihrer Orchesterstelle bei Radio France nicht lassen. Die Kunst des barocken Ziergesangs hat Hochkonjunktur: Aus Anlass von Harnoncourts Nun ist Blechacz seinem Landsmann Chopin erneut auf der Spur.

Geburtstag spendiert er ihm, sich und seinem Publikum die beiden Klavierkonzerte. Das Lied zum Film oder der Film zum Lied? Heute wollen wir an dieser Stelle aus gegebenem Anlass einmal kurz das Politische streifen. Alle Musik sei politisch, hat Luigi Nono postuliert. Der Pianist Helmut Deutsch kann selbst ein Lied davon singen. Nicht immer ganz einfach, vor allem, wenn ihnen dabei ein kanadisches Filmteam auf die flinken Finger schaut. Und der liegt jetzt auch auf CD vor. Er hat es selbst bewirkt: Robert Fraunholzer sprach mit dem neugierig und entspannt desillusioniert wirkenden Wunderknaben, dessen klarer und analytisch offener Bratschenton ebenso mitteilsam wirkt wie er selbst.

In kurzer Zeit hat das Internet unser modernes Leben revolutioniert. Moderne Zeiten anno ? Das junge und aufregend andere Kammerorchester lebt nicht in einem Elfenbeinturm. Seltsame Zeiten sind das. Kaum ein Lebensfeld betreten wir, ohne nicht offenkundig und meist sehr offensiv mit Superlativen konfrontiert zu werden. Der Erfolg gibt ihm recht: Der Dirigent, die wunderliche Gattung. Bachs Orgelmusik kann so sexy sein: Michael Wersin hat ihn gesprochen. Die Trennung war beschlossene Sache, und dieses Album sollte ihr letztes sein: Fangen wir an der Themse an.

Bei der Premiere am 6. Es hat seinen Ursprung in Rom. Mit Christian Thielemann hat sie eben ein neues Straussalbum aufgenommen. Sie stammt aus Moldawien. Sie ging in die Schweiz und studierte Komposition. Das Kuschelige an der Klassik aber behagt ihr nicht. Und das Angepasste schon gleich gar nicht.

Das Problem an der Sache ist nur: Die meisten Menschen kennen nur eines von beiden. Doch auch weltweit umjubelter, viel geliebter und viel beneideter Opernstar zu sein, ist nicht immer einfach. Anna Netrebko kann ein Lied davon singen: Grund genug, sich einmal bei unseren polnischen Nachbarn umzuschauen.

Denn die Stadt an der Weichsel hat noch mehr zu bieten. Mittlerweile ist sie durchgestartet. Ihr Terminkalender ist voll: Gewichtig stand die Frage im Raum: Warum hat es der Liedgesang heutzutage so schwer? Die Antworten aber kamen leicht. Offensichtlich kommt Klassik, die sich als Pop ausgibt, beim Publikum besser an. Immer auf der Reise zwischen verschiedenen musikalischen Welten: Sollen wir uns erinnern? Salzburg, das war ein Erlebnis in diesem Sommer. Bryn Terfel wird immer wieder mit Meat Loaf verwechselt.

Bachs Cellosuiten, egal ob mit dem Parnass oder dem Mount Everest verglichen, sind und bleiben eine offene Frage. Ab zieht Hamburgs kleinstes Sinfonieorchester in die historische Musikhalle ein. Ja, so war es. Von der Liebe sprachen wir und von Paris, der Stadt der Liebe. Der Name stammt nicht vom Komponisten, sondern vom Verleger, aber zuerst einmal darf er als Parameter der Kritik dienen: Man sagt das so: Paris, das sei die Stadt der Liebe. Denn sie verweigert dem Operngourmet konsequent alles, was er am Genre so liebt: Marc Minkowski gilt als Feuerwerker unter den Orchesterchefs.

Seine Frau Eliette hat zu diesem Anlass ihre wenig ergiebigen Memoiren herausgebracht. Manches hat das Leipziger Vokalquintett amarcord bei den 68ern aus England gelernt. Carsten Niemann hat beide Truppen belauscht und zu ihrer Kunst befragt. Er engagiert sich gegen Krieg und Diktatur. Interviews gibt er nur wenige. Walzer im Film — da denkt man an Ballszenen oder zumindest an Heimat- oder Historiengenres. Die internationale Tenorszene hat — wenn man so will — in letzter Zeit ein wenig Latinoschlagseite.

Dreimal Bach mit Fritz Wunderlich in Wieder- bzw. Einmal muss die Frage gestellt sein. Alfred Brendel beendet seine Karriere. Im ziemlich dicht besetzten Feld hervorragender Geiger hat sich Vadim Repin in die vorderste Reihe gespielt. Frank Sinatra schwor auf ihn — und dennoch wollte Harry Connick jr. Die Wiege des Regietheaters steht in Berlin: Was ist das Komische an der Komischen Oper? Wir trafen die Weltklasseklarinettistin mit dirigierendem Ehemann und bratschendem Bruder zur Aufnahmesession in Warschau. Altmeister Pierre Boulez vollendet seinen vielbeachteten Mahlerzyklus mit der Neueinspielung der 8.

Das Buxtehudejahr neigt sich dem Ende entgegen. Evgeny Kissin 36 gilt als einer der wichtigsten Pianisten der Gegenwart — aber auch als einer der schwierigsten. Mit ihrem ersten, selbst konzipierten Album ist ihr nicht nur ein optischer Coup gelungen: Robert Fraunholzer stand sie Rede und Antwort. Dies ist die Geschichte einer wunderbaren Geige und ihrer sonderbaren Reise durch die Zeiten. Eigentlich ist es ja ein bisschen paradox: Es muss ja nicht immer Bayreuth sein oder Salzburg. Und wer singen konnte, konnte alles singen. Humor und Jazz — geht das zusammen? Geburtstag ist, wenn man Geburtstag feiert!

Die Queen macht es vor. Mit seinem Elektrokontrabass hat er einen faszinierend eigenen Sound entwickelt. Sie sind wie die Sonne und der Mond ihres Ensembles: Robert Fraunholzer traf den blonden Russen nach Aufnahmesitzungen in Berlin. Ihre Songs hat die Schwedin Fredrika Stahl selbst geschrieben. Sie pendeln zwischen erdenschwer pulsierendem Souljazz und klassischem Swing. Thomas Quasthoff will nun doch wieder Oper singen. Doch die lettische Pianistin Lauma Skride geht selbstbewusst ihren eigenen Weg.

Sergey Khachatryan 21 fummelt privat an Autos rum und malt armenische Kirchen. Robert Fraunholzer traf den Geigenmann in Berlin. Gidon Kremer feiert seinen Das Mozartjahr ist zu Ende, und es gibt nichts zu feiern? Wir sind ja jetzt im Hellmesbergerjahr! Der hochdenkende Theodor W.

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Kein ernstzunehmender Zeitgenosse hat sich jedoch diesem Urteil angeschlossen. Er ist es gewohnt, genauer hinzusehen als andere. Und einer, dessen Charme man ohne Weiteres erliegen kann. Der Weltraum, unendliche Weiten! Wenn sie spielt, geht die Sonne auf. Wie riecht der perfekte Duft? Und wie klingt die richtige Musik dazu? Wer originell sein will, muss sein Geheimnis haben — und bewahren.

Ein Wunderkind muss sich mit vielerlei herumschlagen: Kann die Staatsoper Stuttgart auch nicht bieten. Aber sie ist relativ nahe dran. Nun legt sie ihre erste Solo-CD vor. Sie hat den Tango im Blut. Davon zeugt nicht nur ihre neueste CD mit argentinischen Liedern. Und das mit Bravour! Robert Fraunholzer traute seinen Augen nicht. Jetzt begeben sich die 12 Cellisten der Berliner Philharmoniker auf himmlische Abwege Ein Rundblick von Guido Fischer.

Ihr Repertoire reicht vom Soundtrack bis zu Boulez. Geburtstag des Komponisten Dmitri Schostakowitsch wirft seine Schatten voraus. Was an alter Musik auf uns gekommen ist, zeigt nur die halbe Wahrheit. Was die Barockmeister hinzu improvisierten, steht nicht in den Noten. Es begann mit Werbespots.

Millionen von Menschen rund um die Welt erinnern sich heute jedoch nicht mehr daran, was in den Filmen angepriesen wurde. Die eine wurde ein Sternchen am herrlich bunten Pophimmel, die andere aber folgte ihrem Papa und griff zur Sitar. Und tat es doch auf ganz andere Weise. Kein Geringerer als Simon Rattle hat sie dazu inspiriert. Boris Berezovsky liebt den Nervenkitzel. Ob am Roulettetisch oder auf dem Klavierhocker. Darf eine Diva das? War es Freundschaft, Zuneigung, Liebe?

Nun ist sie eingeweiht, die neue Orgel der Dresdner Frauenkirche, und die Reaktionen auf ihr erstes Erklingen tendieren insgesamt stark ins Positive — nach endlosen Querelen im Vorfeld: Der norwegische Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes hat etwas zu sagen — durch sein exzellentes Klavierspiel ohnehin. Doch im kommenden Jahr stehen gleich zwei neue Herausforderungen an: Durch beste Kontakte zu russischen Radiostationen kommt man inzwischen selbst an historische Aufnahmen von Musik-Titanen wie Richter, Oistrach und Rostropowitsch heran.

Was macht auch noch die morscheste Oper lebendig? Sie festigt aber weiter seine Anwartschaft auf Hancocks Jazzklavierthron. Eine CD-Neuheit lockt mit dieser Headline. Und schon klingt der vertraute Evergreen ein bisschen anders. Letztes lebendes Mysterium der Opernwelt. Und weil der Vatikan im Eine erinnert an die Weiten Neu- Mexikos. Zu Jarretts Sechzigstem bekennen wir: Als elektrisierendsten Sound seit Charlie Parker hat J. Was hat Golfen mit Singen zu tun?

Die dritte Episode sollte die letzte sein: Aber es gibt Trost: Immerhin ist der Originalsoundtrack bereits am 2. Nur mit ein bisschen mehr Glanz vielleicht. Und doch Schauplatz spannender Fernsehsendungen. Dieser Ruf haftet dem Streichquartett seit Haydns Zeiten an. Das Brodsky Quartet beweist, dass dem nicht so sein muss.

Das findet man auch in den USA lecker. Nur mit Klavier, Violine und Cello. Die Fragen stellte Oliver Buslau. Jahrhunderts … seien Hitler und Karajan gewesen. Wir wussten es schon immer: Bis zu seinem Tod lief er stramm der alten Zeit hinterher. Bevor aber am Diese Courage muss man erst einmal besitzen: Wenn Nikolaus Harnoncourt am Pult mal wieder seine Augen weit aufgerissen und diesen fordernden Laser-Blick aufgesetzt hatte, sollte nichts mehr so klingen wie bisher.

Geburtstag von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Da hatte sich die