Peter Phillips’s passion for the unaccompanied sacred choral music of the Renaissance period informed his mission to transform a talented amateur singing group into the polished, professional Tallis Scholars. This film shows off their accomplishments in performances of works by Cornyshe, Taverner, Tallis, Byrd, Desprès and Obrecht, among others. It charts Phillips’s personal odyssey and travels with him to Bruges, centre of the richly-coloured music of the fifteenth-century Low Countries.
August Wilson
One of the most important US playwrights to emerge since Arthur Miller, Wilson explores the same territory – the American Dream – but, as a black writer, his perspective is different. To show the background to his work, this film was made with Wilson in his home territory, The Hill district of Pittsburgh, a black ghetto shattered by unemployment and drug dealing. It centres on specially-staged extracts from his plays and a major interview.
Oscar Marzaroli
Oscar Marzaroli was a gifted photographer but worked as a director in the Scottish film industry. He left over one hundred thousand negatives when he died in 1988 and yet his arresting view and social history of Scotland – Glasgow in particular – was scarcely known. His obsession and his legacy are the subject of this film by acclaimed directors Bill Forsythe and Charlie Gormley, who pay unsentimental homage to the man they worked with when they started out in films.
Anne-Sophie Mutter
This portrait of the protégé of the late Herbert von Karajan – who, when she was only thirteen years old, proclaimed her “the greatest youthful musical talent since the young Menuhin” – shows her in performance, and talking in interview at her home in Kitzbühel about her life and her ideas on music. She is seen in concert at London’s Barbican Centre playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Op. 35, as well as sonatas by Ravel, Franck, Tartini, Sarasate and Beethoven.
Willard White
Singer Sir Willard White not only has a superb bass/baritone voice, but his acting talent has landed him leading roles in the theatre as well as on the operatic stage. Jamaican by birth, he now lives in England, but this programme takes him back to his homeland to tell the remarkable story of his success. He demonstrates his operatic skills in special recordings of some of his most celebrated roles, and is seen in rehearsals for an English National Opera production of Pelleas and Melisande.
The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner
Master of the music biopic, Ken Russell explores the psyche of Anton Bruckner (1824-96) and the extraordinary music he wrote, by focusing on his recovery from numeromania, an obsession with numbers. The onset of this mental illness began when the Austrian composer, on the brink of committing suicide by throwing himself off a bridge, instead began to count what he saw in the panorama below him. Subsequently, he entered a lunatic asylum and was cured in three months.
Sergei Rachmaninov
Fleeing Russia in 1917, Rachmaninov (1873-1943) was forced to set aside composing in order to support his family as a pianist. This film looks at his life in exile and at how this separation from his homeland affected his music. Filming centres on Senar, the villa by Lake Lucerne which Rachmaninov built as a conscious recreation of Ivanovka, his wife’s beloved estate in Russia. His grandson still lives there and, with his co-operation and that of Sofia Satin, his niece, the family archives have been used to piece together a picture of the composer’s life in both Russia and Europe.
Steve Martin
Comedian Steve Martin is a major box office draw. This programme looks at the development of his career in American entertainment and focuses on his work as the screenwriter and star of L. A. Story, a romantic comedy with a surrealistic Hollywood backdrop. Interviewed during filming, Martin is seen at work on the set, as well as in clips from his films, television appearances and stand-up routines.
Salman Rushdie
This exclusive interview with writer Salman Rushdie was the first television broadcast he made after going into hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy. It coincided with the publication of his novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his young son. He talks frankly about his experiences and about his life and work, which is illustrated with readings and dramatisations.
Roy Lichtenstein
Filmed in New York, this profile centres on a rare interview with the influential American artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), who became famous in the 1960s for his enormously enlarged frames from comic strips. It surveys the work he went on to produce, which confirmed his position as one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists, and shows him at work on a painting. The late Leo Castelli, the dealer who launched Lichtenstein’s career, is among the contributors to the programme.