Info
Duration: 60’ 00”
Narration by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1973
This is a filmed record of Pinchas Zukerman’s first concert in Munich as both soloist and conductor. This is the concert, which provided two sequences for the film Pinchas Zukerman: Here to Make Music.
Pinchas Zukerman was drawn into conducting by his exceptionally rewarding musical relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra. Their concert in Munich was one of the first in which he appeared in public as a conductor. As a consequence, this film shows both his vulnerability and his exceptional qualities as one of the greatest musicians of our time.
In the first part of the film, Pinchas Zukerman plays and directs Mozart’s Rondo in C, K373, and the Violin Concerto No 4 in D, K218.
The film has a brief introduction of about two minutes establishing time, place and the significance of the occasion and it is so constructed that any of the musical works can be dropped to fit the length of differing transmission slots. As a result of this, possible lengths of the film are approximately twenty-five minutes, thirty minutes, fifty minutes or one hour.
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 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.
