Info
Duration: 60’ 43”
Narration by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1966
Contributors include:
Daniel Barenboim
Vladimir Ashkenazy
English Chamber Orchestra
-
The film showed aspects of music and music-making that had not previously been seen on television. It also announced the arrival of a new generation of performing musicians that would become more famous or more quickly famous than any other generation in history. They had a new attitude and a new kind of confidence. This gave them a kind of exuberance which seemed made for television and, to some extent, it was just that. It was also the time of a breakthrough in 16mm film technology with the advent of the self-blimped 16mm camera and all these factors together brought these performers a bigger and more intimately informed audience than had ever before been possible.
In other words, it was television, as much as the performers themselves, that created the revolution in classical music performance during the next ten years.
This film was shot in three days early in March 1966 and edited in three weeks. It was the first of its kind and there have been so many successors in the past thirty years that it can truthfully be described as epoch-making. It is probably still the most influential single television music programme so far made in the field of classical music.
The whole film was full of firsts. It was the first time that Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim appeared together in public; the first time that the English Chamber Orchestra promoted its own concert, the first time that Christopher Nupen (director) and David Findlay (lighting camera operator) worked together and it was Christopher Nupen’s first film.
Our Films on DVD
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.
There cannot be too many films made of our great performers, provided they are produced with an honest intention and true to the subject. Why? Because film remembers the artistic persona as nothing else can do in quite the same way. This is particularly true in the case of Jacqueline du Pré where so many myths have been invented to explain the unexplainable.
Happily, DVD does not need to explain, it can show the artist just as she was and in a way that was never possible before the invention of the first silent 16mm cameras in the 1960s - just in time for her. First, we present Jacqueline du Pré as seen through the eyes, the ears and the words of the people who knew her best - Who was Jacqueline du Pré? - and second, to present her through her music - Remembering Jacqueline du Pré.
Between those two films the DVD contains a montage of images of Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim in action, taken from our archives and accompanied by an audio recording, made by us, of the first movement of the Brahms E minor cello sonata (Interlude with Johannes Brahms) and an interview with Jacqueline du Pré, shot in 1980, which has never been previously released on television, nor on home video.
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.
