Info:
Duration: 89’ 00”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1973
Featuring:
Regina Resnik — Stage director
Huguette Tourangeau — Mezzo-soprano (Carmen)
Plácido Domingo - Tenor (Don José)
Hamburg State Opera Orchestra conducted by Alain Lombard
Arbit Blatas — Set designer
Marina Krilovici — Soprano (Micaëla)
Tom Krause — Baritone (Escamillo)
David Findlay — Lighting
A film about Georges Bizet and his ill-starred masterpiece.
This film has two themes: first the substance and narrative of Bizet's perennially popular opera and second the story of its disastrous première, which had such a dramatic effect on Bizet and hastened his death exactly three months later. It is a sad story of a great artist who died young without ever knowing that the work into which he had poured his life's blood, and which failed so miserably at its première, would become one of the most popular operas of all time.
It is one of the great stories in the history of Western music. Bizet, with his librettists, Meilhac and Halevy, elevated Prosper Merimée's novel to the level of Shakespearean tragedy and the work drew from Bizet his most inspired music with a depth and a power way beyond his years.
The film is based on the preparations for a new production at the Hamburg State Opera in which Regina Resnik, a famous Carmen herself, was directing an opera for the first time in her career.
Carmen is sung by Huguette Tourangeau, Don José by Placido Domingo, Escamillo by Tom Krause and Micaela by Marina Krilovici. The orchestra and chorus of the Hamburg State Opera are conducted by Alain Lombard. The sets and costumes are by Arbit Blatas.
In addition to telling our two stories the film tries to present opera to the television audience at something closer to normal television tempo than is usually possible while avoiding the damaging predictability of presenting a string of operatic highlights. The film juxtaposes the two stories and binds them together with Bizet’s music shot at rehearsals and performances of the opera.
There is no playback in this film. All the singing is shot live which contributes a great deal to the narrative.
Our Films on DVD
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.
The two pioneering films on this DVD do not use actors to represent the composer but are made entirely of Tchaikovsky's own words and music, plus the words of a few of his closest companions. The result gives an exceptionally intimate picture of the inner landscape of Tchaikovsky's work and artistic preoccupations. Scrupulously well researched, the films are a treasure trove for the enquiring Tchaikovsky fan.
The first film, Tchaikovsky's Women (70' 15"), looks at the women both in his private life and in his music. In his early years, almost all of his best work was inspired by a deep identification with the plight of his suffering young heroines, an identification so complete that it spilled over repeatedly into his personal life with dramatic consequences.
The second film, Fate (85' 35"), looks at Tchaikovsky's strange relationship with Nadezhda von Meck which was to become the most important attachment of his life, after his mother. It also follows Tchaikovsky's shift from the fate of his young heroines to his increasing concern with the idea of fate as a controlling influence in his own life and as a motivating force in his later symphonies. The progression is inexorable and nowhere more evident than in the fatal message within the last movement of the sixth symphony, his final and greatest masterpiece.
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.
