Info:
Duration: 45’ 00”
Year of production: 1978
Music:
Johannes Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77
1. Allegro non troppo
2. Adagio
3. Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace
Itzhak Perlman plays the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, conducted by Lawrence Foster.
This was shot as a pair with the Beethoven Concerto, but, in order to present another side of Itzhak Perlman’s many-faceted musical personality, it is shot at a public concert in true concert conditions where this musician is at his best and his most revealing.
The Philharmonia has been one of London’s leading orchestras since it was founded more than thirty years ago, by Walter Legge as a recording orchestra for EMI, and it has remained a leader in the field since that time.
The American conductor Lawrence Foster has an international reputation, both in the concert hall and the opera house. He is Musical Director of L’Orchestre National de Monte Carlo, General Music Director of the Duisburg Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Dusseldorf Opera. He has had a close association with Itzhak Perlman for many years.
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When he was thirteen, his family took him to New York to study at the Juilliard School with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay. He made his first Carnegie Hall appearance in 1963, won the Leventritt Award in 1964, which is America’s premier musical award and, during the following ten years, established himself as one of the world’s great violinists.
Our Films on DVD
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.
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.
This DVD contains a re-release of two of our most cherished Jacqueline du Pré films. The first is a portrait film which was epoch-making when it premiered; the second is a performance film which was described by the French opera and film director Jean-Pierre Ponelle as the most successful translation of musical performance onto the screen that he had ever seen. Both were pioneering films, made possible by the newly invented lightweight, silent 16mm film cameras.
We were lucky to be there in the right place, at the right time, and with the right relationship with Jacqueline du Pré to preserve something of her magic on film. There is an aura which radiates from the great performers and when it comes to remembering the artistic persona, the camera sees things which the other media do not see and it remembers them with an intimacy which nothing else can equal.
The titles of the two films are Jacqueline du Pré and the Elgar cello Concerto, which contains a complete filmed performance of the work with the new Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and The Ghost, which is a filmed performance of Beethoven's piano Trio Opus 70 No. 1 played by Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman and Jacqueline du Pré.
