Info:
Duration: 50’ 22”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1998
In the late 1990s there was s a wave of interest in the tango that rippled around the world but, sadly, little of it seemed to have lasting value. The music of Astor Piazzolla, by contrast, does have both of these qualities and the story of his quest is both touching and impressive.
This film is a tribute to a 20th century composer who, like many another before him in our musical history, suffered seriously from prejudice during his lifetime and became a best seller not long after his death. We feature Astor Piazzolla and his Quintet and Gidon Kremer and his Astor Quartet.
During his life Astor Piazzolla was attacked from both sides of the classical divide. Aficionados of the tango were so incensed by his efforts to give the tango something more contemporary to say that his life was threatened, his family was threatened and he was beaten in the street. All this for tampering with a popular form of music that lay deep in Argentine culture. At the same time the classical world underrated Piazzolla as a serious contemporary composer because he wrote in the idiom of the tango.
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What makes this story doubly telling is that Gidon Kremer is thought of by a great many musicians as the champion of contemporary music and musically the most adventurous violinist on the international concert platform today. He has certainly done more for contemporary composers than any other top level soloist in the past 25 years and it has delighted the musical world that his passionate advocacy of Piazzolla's music has achieved such extraordinary international success.
The film includes Piazzolla himself with his last and best quintet playing three of his best known pieces, (Escualo, Invierno Porteño and Tangata), plus Gidon Kremer and his friends, Vadim Sakharov, Per Arne Glorvigen and Alois Posch revelling in five of Piazzolla's pieces at an astonishing concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. It also includes a very appealing interview with Piazzolla.
The interview is in Spanish, broken up into short sections that are sub-titled.
Piazzolla began his musical career in the nightclubs of Buenos Aires playing the bandoneón but he had hopes of becoming a serious composer and, introduced by Artur Rubinstein, he studied with Alberto Ginastera and later with Nadia Boulanger. The great French pedagogue, for whom Piazzolla was to feel an enduring debt of gratitude, advised him to stay in the idiom of the tango with which he had grown up. He followed her advice, and for the rest of his days - with a success that is now seen to be unique.
These are tangos with a new and very real substance to them.
Our Films on DVD
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 contains two of the most famous Schubert films — each entirely different from the other in style, content and spirit.
The first, The Trout, presents a youthful explosion of exuberant talent; starting with Schubert himself — who wrote his Trout Quintet when he was 22 years old. His lead is picked up and brought to life by five extravagantly gifted young musicians when they were barely older than Schubert had been when he wrote the piece. Their names: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré and Zubin Mehta.
The film was shot in a single week in August of 1969 and culminates with a performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet, filmed live on-stage at the new Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, in London.
The second film, The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow, looks at Schubert's astonishing achievements in the last 20 months of his life - after the death of his god, Beethoven. He asked the question, "Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven”? The answer, of course, was Franz Peter Schubert, in the music which he wrote after Beethoven's death.
This DVD celebrates the musical quest of one of the great symphonists of the twentieth century; Jean Sibelius, as seen through his music, his letters and the words of his wife Aino, who was with him for more than sixty-four years. His quest was not an easy one. Living through the great turning point in Western music, many of his concerns were strikingly similar to those of Schoenberg and Stravinsky but each chose a different path.
Sibelius once said that while his colleagues were serving multicoloured cocktails, he offered only pure spring water. The metaphor is a good one but, as so often with artists who take an untrod path, critical opinion has fluctuated wildly. In 1935 Sibelius was voted the most popular composer of all time by the members of The New York Philharmonic Society, a view that was echoed by many of the leading critics and composers in England.
By the 1950s critical opinion had relegated Sibelius to a position of minor importance.
Views are changing again and the time seemed right for an intimate look at what Sibelius himself felt that he was trying to achieve. The film in two-parts on this DVD is an attempt to do just that.
