Every weekend NRC makes a selection from…

The Podium Klassiek season kicks off with two Masterclasses. Presenter Floris Kortie welcomes pianist Wibi Soerjadi and baritone Thomas Oliemans. They will each teach three up-and-coming talents the tricks of their trade. Soerjadi will first perform the Intermezzo from Sergei Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Then, three young talents whom Soerjadi will accompany will be featured. Yuewen Yin (15) from Capelle aan den IJssel will choose the same composer and will play Rachmaninoff's majestic Prelude No. 5. Next, Ukrainian Sofia Dorosh (17) will perform Fantaisie-Impromptu by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. For David Kooi (16), it's a home run. He won the Princess Christina Competition as a thirteen-year-old, studies in Amsterdam, and performs Franz Liszt's arrangement of Robert Schumann's Liebeslied.

Strong series with Mark Ruffalo

The epic crime series Task Op comes from the mind of screenwriter Brad Ingelsby, who previously created the acclaimed Mare of Easttown . Task Op centers on two men on a collision course: Tom, an FBI agent who was a priest in a former life (played by Mark Ruffalo), and Robbie, a garbage man who robs drug houses in his spare time (Tom Pelphrey). Tom is struggling and underemployed until his FBI boss (Martha Plimton) forces him—there's no one else—to head a new "task force." He's assigned a trio of young agents and a dilapidated house in the woods as his headquarters, and tasked with uncovering the robbers disguised in Halloween masks who are robbing the houses. This compelling series follows people you, as a viewer, will come to care about, despite their flaws.

Impressive and difficult

For seven years, the three-person Australian team Cherry worked on Silksong , the sequel to their acclaimed indie game Hollow Knight . A game in which you explore a hand-drawn world full of insects, searching for your previous captors. The result is beautiful: Silksong is full of hand-drawn characters and environments, accompanied by fairytale music—sometimes even sung by characters you encounter. This allows a technically relatively unassuming game to leave an exceptionally deep impression. This is offset by a sky-high difficulty level: one wrong move can result in a random enemy killing you or landing you in a spike pit. It's a game that demands patience, but that precisely adds to the experience: the danger of that world is essential to the story the creators hope to tell.

Cultural landscape

In the radio program Panorama Zondag, a guest talks about their 'cultural landscape' based on works of art that they themselves propose.

This Sunday, Jeroen van Kan speaks with Syrian-Dutch actor George Tobal (born in Aleppo, 1986). He fled to the Netherlands with his family at the age of twelve. He and his theater company are currently performing "Dressing for the Bleeding ," a musical tragicomic play that gives the audience a glimpse into the world of poverty, homelessness, and the absurdity thereof. The suffering of the homeless Willem is translated into a story aimed at improving his situation. But is it ethical to exhibit this poverty, or does it compromise the dignity of those whose stories are told?