Info:
Duration: part one 22’ 30”
Narration by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 2011
On 17 July 1986, Nathan Milstein played his last public recital in the Berwaldhallen in Stockholm. The recital included the Bach Chaconne, one of the towering masterpieces of Western music and one of the most difficult to do justice to.
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This short film begins with Milstein listening to, and reflecting on, his performance of the Chaconne in the Berwaldhallen and on the piece in general, trying to decide whether his performance was good enough to be released.
He had woken, on the morning of the recital, with a painful first finger on his left hand — an essential ingredient in the equipment of every violinist. And so what did Nathan Milstein do? He spent the whole day revising his fingerings to spare his first finger — a feat way beyond the reach of most violinists. But he had been amazing orchestral musicians with his fingering changes, in mid-performance, all through his career. When the recital was over, he remarked, with some amusement, that some of what he had done was actually better for the changes.
The film ends with the complete performance, shot live, just as it happened on that memorable evening in 1986, with our 82-year-old hero further adapting his fingerings as he went along, and as can be seen in some of the close-ups.
That feat alone makes this an event worth remembering but the film does much more than that: it conserves musical virtues of a very high order. It is a beacon — an important audiovisual record of a great and historic musical event.
Our Films on DVD
This DVD portrait celebrates the miraculous gift of one of the finest violinists of the 20th century. Nathan Mironovich Milstein, universally respected by every international musician of his time and genuinely liked by almost all of them. His career spanned 73 years, one of the longest in Western music, and ended with his legendary last recital in Stockholm with Georges Pludermacher.
Nathan Milstein was 82 at the time and still playing as the grandest of Grand Masters and as probably no other violinist has ever played at 82.
The two-hour portrait film is built around that historic event and pays tribute to this ‘quiet magician’ who never sort the limelight and rarely appeared on camera. The DVD also includes both the Kreutzer Sonata and the Bach Chaconne from that same recital which took place on the 17th of July 1986.
This DVD is an intimate account of the formative years in the life and career of one of the leading violinists of our time.
Itzhak Perlman fell in love with the sounds of the violin at the age of 3½ but contracted polio a few months later and was soon to learn that it would be impossible, with his handicap, for him to pursue a high-level career as a violinist.
Not only has he succeeded in doing what the world thought quite impossible but he has done it on a level that few have matched. It is a heartening story of the spectacular triumph of talent, determination, character and tenacity over seemingly insurmountable odds, producing truly glorious results along the way.
The DVD contains the much-admired portrait film Itzhak Perlman: Virtuoso Violinist (I Know I Played Every Note) together with The Trout Remembered, Jacqueline du Pré Remembered (made especially for this DVD) and two complete Bach Partitas, E major and D minor, filmed live at a memorable recital at St John's, Smith Square, in London.
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.
