Info
Duration: 59’ 17”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 2015
Awards
Winner: Award of Merit, Accolade Global Film Competition, 2015
Silver Medal winner at the New York Film and Television Festival, 2015
The astonishing musical gifts of Daniil Trifonov have to be seen and heard to be believed. How many have won both the Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky competitions in the same year — at the age of 20 — and then played a hundred and ten concerts in the following 12 months? Knowledgeable critics and leading musicians are saying that the world has not seen his like in more than fifty years.
Martha Argerich, one of the most difficult to please, has this to say: “What he does with his hands is technically incredible … and then there is his touch — so gifted with tenderness and, at the same time, he has the demonic element. I have never heard anything like this before.”
Trifonov is immensely appealing. In addition to his astonishing musical gifts — as both pianist and composer — he is modest and unassuming, highly intelligent, generously co-operative and a pleasure to work with. An ideal subject for an intimate portrait film at the start of his career — a genre which we have employed with such happy results several times in the past with artists who were soon to become world famous. The films contributed a great deal to that.
Our cameras are all close to Trifonov on the stage — even in the live concert performances — which involves the viewer and adds a dramatic quality that is seldom achieved in television relays.
The films include five minutes which we shot at the Cleveland Institute in Ohio, during the first performance of Trifonov’s recently-composed first piano concerto — a work of considerable charm, which enjoyed a touching success with both the public and the critics at the premiere. There is something heartening about seeing super talented youth finding its audience. The first film also includes complete, live performances of several Chopin preludes and extracts of works by Ravel, together with a sequence with Trifonov playing a composition of his own in public, in Moscow, at the age of eight.
As we have done before we have made an associated performance film, Daniil Trifonov at Castelfranco Veneto, to give more time to the music which includes works by Scriabin, Chopin, Johann Strauss/arranged Trifonov and Sergei Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Opus 22 — a rarely-heard work — which has immediate appeal and the authentic Rachmaninov voice.
Our Films on DVD
Evgeny Igorevich Kissin was born in Moscow on the 10th of October 1971.
He started to play the piano at the age of two, as soon as he was tall enough to reach the keyboard and he has not looked back from that day to this. His is a very rare story of continued success that has had the simultaneous blessing of critics, the public and musicians alike.
The Gift of Music is a film which shows Kissin in preparation, interview, rehearsal and performance, with several dazzling performances shot live on stage, in true concert conditions. It also contains all the encores from Kissin's memorable Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in August 1997.
This was the first Prom in the 103-year history of the celebrated Promenade Concerts to be given by a solo recitalist and it attracted the biggest audience in all of those 103 years; very nearly six thousand people.
The music is by Liszt, Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Paganini, Kissin himself and Chopin, the composer for whom Kissin feels the closest affinity.
This DVD presents Vladimir Ashkenazy as pianist, conductor, musical guide and master musician - an intimate and engaging view of one of the world's most quietly successful musicians.
It contains the portrait film Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices Are Russian, shot in 1968 when Ashkenazy moved with his wife and son from London to Iceland, an important turning point in his life and career.
Since that film was made, Ashkenazy the pianist (possibly the most frequently recorded pianist in history, his discography runs to 56 pages), has also become an international conductor of the highest rank and we include a montage of sequences from our composer films with Ashkenazy as conductor. It also contains a short interview with Ashkenazy who talks, in his modest but penetrating way, about musical gifts and their origins.
The DVD ends with a film about Rachmaninov's Corelli Variations. In it Ashkenazy discusses the piece at length, with great affection and some telling musical insights. It ends with a complete performance of the piece, filmed at a public concert in Lugano.
This DVD contains both a portrait film and an associated performance film offering an intimate view of the artist and his hardly-believable gifts. In conversation, he talks revealingly about his musical concerns but his modesty prevents him from saying anything at all about his extraordinary technique, "I am just playing the piano", he says. "There are people doing even more crazy things".
Danill Trifonov started to play the piano at the age of five, not because he wanted to play the piano but because he wanted to compose. That was unusual enough but it was only the beginning of a musical quest which led to his winning both the Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein competitions at the age of 20. The films contain a number of performances shot live on stage with cameras unusually close to the artist which adds considerably to the power of the images.
In the portrait film Trifonov plays music by Chopin, Ravel and Trifonov himself: part of his first piano Concerto, filmed at the world premiere performance which took place at the Cleveland Institute, in the United States, in April 2014.
In the performance film he plays music by Chopin, Scriabin, Johann Strauss (arranged Trifonov) and Rachmaninov - a performance of the rarely heard Variations on a Theme of Chopin, in the elegant Teatro Academico in Castelfranco Veneto, near Venice in Italy.
