Info:
Duration: 58’ 52”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1999
Gidon Kremer is known to musicians the world over as a man who has new ideas, and good ones.
This film by Christopher Nupen looks at some of those ideas - in particular Gidon Kremer's very unusual and long-running Lockenhaus Festival and his most passionately held new idea, the Kremerata Baltica. It is an Allegro Film in a long tradition of intimate portraits of performing musicians, full of life, movement and very good music, almost all of it written in the twentieth century but all of it with immediate appeal.
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The locations are London, Gstaad, Lugano and the Lockenhaus festival which Gidon Kremer founded in 1981. A major feature of the film is the Kremerata Baltica. This recently-formed orchestra of young people (the average age is 22) from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania is Gidon Kremer's most intensely felt current project and he has already taken the orchestra on four highly successful international tours. The commitment of these young people is heartening and their music-making, under Gidon Kremer's guidance, is on a very high level indeed with a success story to match.
Another theme is Gidon Kremer's passionate advocacy of the music of Astor Piazzolla with which he has had so much success in recent years. His CD, Hommage à Piazzolla (with his Astor Quartet) reached the top of the classical charts in Germany, Austria and Japan within six weeks of its release and has gone on to achieve pop-record sales levels.
Kremer is widely known also as a very thoughtful musician and a convincing talker who has published several books. The film includes revealing interviews with him but its prime focus is on the work, the music and his young friends rather than on biographical details or critical reflections on music and music making.
Our Films on DVD
A film about the man who made himself the most talked about, the most famous, the most successful, the richest, and the most controversial classical soloist that the world of music has ever known.
The film on this DVD presents Paganini's music, filmed and edited in the style developed by Christopher Nupen and his colleagues for their prize winning DVDs about Sibelius, Schubert and Tchaikovsky and combines it with extracts from Paganini's letters and quotations from both his admirers and his many detractors.
While being hailed as the greatest performing musician of his time, Paganini was denounced again and again by knowledgeable critics as a charlatan in league with the devil and an avaricious man with scant respect for those who responded so enthusiastically to his unforgettable gift - and contributed so readily to his vast personal fortune.
In time this provoked envy and resentment and, finally, a pitiable isolation. By the time of his death, at the age of 57, his unbending quest for gold and for glory had robbed him slowly of almost everything else.
The bonus track is a sequence called Gidon Kremer, Perfectionism and the Thirteenth Caprice from Christopher Nupen's film Gidon Kremer: Man of Many Musics.
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 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.
