Info:
Duration: 48’ 04”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen and Andrés Segovia
Year of production: 1977
Awards:
Winner of the Prix du Public at the Besançon Festival, 1977
Andrés Segovia died on the 2nd June 1987 at the age of 94. His career was one of the longest and most distinguished in the history of music. He gave his first concert in Granada in 1909 at the age of 16 and his last in Miami 78 years later only a few weeks before he died.
His achievement is unique in the history of Western music. Many years ago Fritz Kreisler said that there were only two truly great performers in the 20th century, Pablo Casals and Andrés Segovia. As an instrumentalist, Segovia did for the guitar what Casals did for the cello, but he did it with an instrument that had never before been taken seriously on the concert platform. Within his own lifetime, Segovia taught himself, revolutionised the technique and elevated a folk instrument to the highest levels of the international concert platform. As a musician, he has come to be recognised as one of the most refined and profound artists of our time.
The Song of the Guitar is a tribute to the maestro by Christopher Nupen, who knew him intimately for more than twenty-five years. It is shot in the Palace of the Alhambra and in Granada, where Segovia spent his childhood and where, as he says in the film, “the Lord put the seed of music in my soul”.
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The Alhambra is one of the architectural wonders of the world and its visual splendours form an ideal setting in which Segovia plays pieces closely associated with his extraordinary career. These were filmed at night after the tourists had gone between midnight and four o’clock in the morning. As a teenager, Segovia often played to his friends in the Alhambra until the early hours of the morning and he returned regularly to perform at the Granada Festival. The setting is therefore as legitimate as it is glorious.
Between the pieces Segovia’s voice is heard out of vision recalling his childhood and the spirit in which he set out on his extraordinary quest.
The music is by Albeniz, Granados, Scarlatti, Rameau, Fernando Sor, Manuiel Ponce and Johann Sebastian Bach. Segovia ends the film with the traditional Catalan lullaby, El Noy de la Mare (The Song of the Mother).
Produced in three versions - Spanish, English and French with Segovia doing the narration in all three.
Our Films on DVD
The two very different films on this DVD celebrate, in different ways, the extraordinary quest of Andrés Segovia. He was an Andalusian, par excellence, who, in his childhood, fell in love with the beauties of the Alhambra and the melancholy voices of the Spanish guitar and, within the space of 20 years, had taught himself the instrument, revolutionised the technique and elevated the guitar to the highest levels of the international concert platform - an achievement unique in the history of Western music.
The titles of the films are, Segovia at Los Olivos, which we shot in his new home on the Costa del Sol in Andalucia when the Grand Master was 75 and, Andrés Segovia: The Song of the Guitar which we shot in Granada and the glorious Palaces of the Alhambra, when he was 84.
Near the end of his life Segovia said that the first of them was the best thing that he ever did for television. The second won the Prix du Public at the Besançon Festival in 1977.
Music by Bach, Granados, Torroba, Llobet, Tarrega, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Scarlatti, Ponce, Rameau, Sor, Aguado, Chopin and Albeniz.
A film about the man who made himself the most talked about, the most famous, the most successful, the richest, and the most controversial classical soloist that the world of music has ever known.
The film on this DVD presents Paganini's music, filmed and edited in the style developed by Christopher Nupen and his colleagues for their prize winning DVDs about Sibelius, Schubert and Tchaikovsky and combines it with extracts from Paganini's letters and quotations from both his admirers and his many detractors.
While being hailed as the greatest performing musician of his time, Paganini was denounced again and again by knowledgeable critics as a charlatan in league with the devil and an avaricious man with scant respect for those who responded so enthusiastically to his unforgettable gift - and contributed so readily to his vast personal fortune.
In time this provoked envy and resentment and, finally, a pitiable isolation. By the time of his death, at the age of 57, his unbending quest for gold and for glory had robbed him slowly of almost everything else.
The bonus track is a sequence called Gidon Kremer, Perfectionism and the Thirteenth Caprice from Christopher Nupen's film Gidon Kremer: Man of Many Musics.
This DVD is an intimate account of the formative years in the life and career of one of the leading violinists of our time.
Itzhak Perlman fell in love with the sounds of the violin at the age of 3½ but contracted polio a few months later and was soon to learn that it would be impossible, with his handicap, for him to pursue a high-level career as a violinist.
Not only has he succeeded in doing what the world thought quite impossible but he has done it on a level that few have matched. It is a heartening story of the spectacular triumph of talent, determination, character and tenacity over seemingly insurmountable odds, producing truly glorious results along the way.
The DVD contains the much-admired portrait film Itzhak Perlman: Virtuoso Violinist (I Know I Played Every Note) together with The Trout Remembered, Jacqueline du Pré Remembered (made especially for this DVD) and two complete Bach Partitas, E major and D minor, filmed live at a memorable recital at St John's, Smith Square, in London.
