Info:
Duration: 62’ 00”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1975
Award:
International Emmy Nomination, New York, 1976
When Pinchas Zukerman was twelve years old, it was already clear to Pablo Casals and Isaac Stern that he might become one of the greatest violinists of all time.
From this came the idea to make, for the first time ever, a film which deliberately sets out to document the development of a really great musical talent from its beginnings to early maturity.
This film was shot over a period of seven years in Italy, Israel, Denmark, Germany, London and New York. It includes sound recordings of Pinchas Zukerman’s playing from the age of nine and filmed performances from the age of nineteen.
It also traces the development of Zukerman’s relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra, which drew him into conducting for the first time. He is filmed live on stage during actual performances, including his official New York début recital at Hunter College and one of his first concerts as a conductor with the English Chamber Orchestra, which took place in the Herkules Saal in Münich and caused a good deal of excitement (expected and unexpected).
The film includes music by J S Bach, H Wieniawsky, Mozart, Beethoven, Telemann, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Vivaldi. The artists include the English Chamber Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Jacqueline du Pré, Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim, Walter Trampler and others.
Our Films on DVD
This DVD contains two of the most famous Schubert films — each entirely different from the other in style, content and spirit.
The first, The Trout, presents a youthful explosion of exuberant talent; starting with Schubert himself — who wrote his Trout Quintet when he was 22 years old. His lead is picked up and brought to life by five extravagantly gifted young musicians when they were barely older than Schubert had been when he wrote the piece. Their names: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré and Zubin Mehta.
The film was shot in a single week in August of 1969 and culminates with a performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet, filmed live on-stage at the new Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, in London.
The second film, The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow, looks at Schubert's astonishing achievements in the last 20 months of his life - after the death of his god, Beethoven. He asked the question, "Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven”? The answer, of course, was Franz Peter Schubert, in the music which he wrote after Beethoven's death.
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.
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.
