Info:
Duration: 59’ 34”
Narration by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1998
A film with the young Russian master pianist who has taken the classical music world by storm by the time he was twenty-five. Evgeny Kissin not only has dazzling virtuosity and unmistakable star-appeal, his meteoric rise to the top of the international concert circuit has seldom been equalled. There have not been many careers in music that have climbed so high, so fast.
Evgeny Igorevich Kissin was born in Moscow on the 10th of October 1971; his father an engineer and his mother a piano teacher. He started to play the piano at the age of two, as soon as he was tall enough to reach the keyboard, as he demonstrates in the film.
It soon became clear that his gift for music was exceptional and that it reached far beyond what is generally thought of as musical precocity. So, his parents took him, at the age of six, to the Moscow Gnessin School of Music for Gifted Children. It was there that he met Anna Pavlovna Kantor who was to have a profound effect on his development. She remained his mentor from the age of six until he had achieved maturity and world-wide fame and remains a guiding friend to this day. For a pupil-teacher relationship to remain so close for so long is probably unprecedented at this level.
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This was the first Prom in the 103-year history of the 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. A leading London manager described it as having generated more enthusiasm than any other London recital during the past fifty years.
The music is by Liszt, Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, Kissin, Schubert and Chopin, the composer for whom Kissin feels the closest affinity.
At the end of his Albert Hall recital Evgeny Kissin played the longest succession of encores in the history of the Proms, an extraordinary and historic event which we have made into a sequel film entitled EVGENY KISSIN AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL: THE ENCORES. The first is a portrait film, the second a performance film with the added element of historic occasion.
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 is a DVD about many things. It is about freedom and captivity, about emancipation, acculturation and assimilation; it is about the roles played by Moses and Felix Mendelssohn in the dream of fruitful, unproblematic integration of the Jews into German society after their liberation from the ghettos; it is about Richard Wagner, his essay Das Judenthum in der Musik (The Jews in Music) and his influence on the thinking of the Third Reich but, most of all, it is a DVD about how much music can mean to people, even in the direst of circumstances, or particularly in the direst circumstances.
The title, We Want the Light, is taken from a poem by a 12-year-old girl, Eva Pickova, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Her words provide both the title and the climax - in a setting for two choruses and orchestra by the American composer Franz Waxman, in his work The Song of Terezin. The DVD also contains music by Mahler, Bach, Schoenberg, Bruch, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schubert, Bloch and Brahms.
With the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne, the Cologne Opera Chorus, and the Cologne Cathedral Children's Choir, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
