Info:
Duration: 01’ 50” or shorter variations
Year of production: 2002
On 9th of July 2001, Evgeny Kissin played a truly memorable piano recital in the old Roman theatre of Orange in the south of France, as part of the Chorégies d'Orange Summer Festival and although it rained, twice, in the two hours before it began, he nevertheless drew an audience of more than 4000 people and generated an extraordinary public enthusiasm.
Perhaps it had something to do with the antique Roman stones, which have been attracting the public for 2000 years, or the Mediterranean spirit of the French summer festivals. It certainly had to do with the fact that Kissin’s interpretations were becoming more and more penetrating. It is difficult to imagine a more telling performance of the Mussorgsky Pictures.
-
Full music repertoire:
Bach-Busoni - Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major BWV 564
Robert Schumann - Sonata No 1 in F sharp minor Opus 11
Modest Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition
Glinka / Balakirev: The Lark
Rimsky Korsakov / Rachmaninoff: The Flight of the Bumblebee
Alfred Grünfeld: Fantasy on themes from Strauss Waltzes
Alexander Scriabin: Etude - Opus 8 No 12
Franz Liszt: Paraphrase de concert - Rigoletto, (Bella figlia dell'amore)
Originally we produced a two-hour version for BBC television, which includes the entire recital, plus a sequence from our portrait film Evgeny Kissin: The Gift of Music and two shorter versions for the ARTE network in France and Germany: The Schumann sonata with the Glinka and Rimsky Korsakov encores (40’30”) and The Mussorgsky Pictures with the Grünfeld encore (40’).
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.
