A talent scout, record producer, impresario, jazz critic and civil rights activist, John Hammond, who died in 1987, was a driving force in popular American music, bringing to prominence such outstanding artists as Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bob Dylan. This rich and vibrant portrait features film of Hammond reminiscing about his life and career and talking with many of the artists who worked with him. The contributors include Count Basie, Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
Iannis Xenakis – Something Rich and Strange
The life story of Xenakis (1922-2001) is that of a genius who triumphed over adversity to become, not only a leading composer, but also an architect of renown. His music is rooted in a sub-soil of mathematics, architecture, science and the drama of his personal history. Filmed on the Greek island where he grew up and in his Paris studio, Xenakis is seen talking about his life and his music, which, not only speaks for itself in specially-recorded performances, but is linked to the other sources of his creativity by an inventive use of images.
Maria Joao Pires
The Portuguese pianist’s return to the concert platform in the mid-1980s, after a break due to ill health, was a triumph. This programme shows her pursuing her professional career with renewed vigour and talking with great frankness and intensity about her life and work. Performances of works by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Poulenc and Chopin are featured.
In Rehearsal: Esa-Pekka Salonen
Featuring some of today’s leading conductors in rehearsal, this series gives a unique insight into the process of creating great music. The conductors’ very different styles and methods; the dialogue between an orchestra and an inspired interpreter; the intensity of the preparations for a concert performance; and the struggle towards perfection are captured in these revealing audio-visual records. Most episodes include a full run-through of the work rehearsed. All include interviews with the conductor who is seen at work. Esa-Pekka Salonen rehearses and performs Debussy’s impressionistic orchestral piece, La Mer, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Directed
by Peter Berggren 56′
Russell on Russell
Ken Russell’s tongue-in-cheek biopic – entitled Portrait of an Enfant Terrible – is his critique of his own career. The controversial film-maker traces his own life, covering his beginnings as an infant prodigy, his finest hours in the Battle of Britain and his life in entertainment. Lavishly illustrated with clips, the programme displays all the idiosyncracies viewers have come to expect from Russell: irreverence, theatricality and an ever-surprising visual inventiveness.
Vivienne Westwood
Once Queen of Punk, Vivienne Westwood has gone on to be the toast of the Paris cat-walks. This Programme looks at the career of one of Britain’s most innovative and idiosyncratic fashion designers and examines the way in which she draws on history, fetishism and street culture for her inspiration.
Dance Crazy in Hollywood
Hermes Pan began choreographing Hollywood musicals in 1933, when he embarked on a long-running collaboration with Fred Astaire. For over three decades he was the man who made the stars dance – Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse, Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse and many others. In this, the last programme he made before his death in 1990, Pan introduces a dance extravaganza which takes viewers back to the days when musicals were all the rage on the silver screen.
Raymond Carver
On his death in 1988, the American writer Carver was mourned as a national literary figure. Only ten years before he had been a chronic alcoholic, abandoned by his wife and family. From these experiences he produced stories and poems of profound humanity about the downside of the American Dream. This film portrait includes interviews with his second wife, his close friends and members of his family, as well as dramatisations of two of his most famous stories.
Joseph Brodsky
In this profile the dynamic and provocative Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and a United States citizen until his death in 1996, talks at length about his poetry and recollects growing up in Russia. His account of his creative life there is illustrated with documentary and archive footage, and friends and colleagues from both his native and adopted homelands contribute. Brodsky’s poems are read by Igor Panich.
David Lean and Robert Bolt
Film director David Lean (1908-91) and screen-writer Robert Bolt (1924-95) collaborated on some of the cinema’s greatest successes, including Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor
Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter. This film was made in 1989 when Bolt, having recovered from a massive heart attack, was working with Lean to develop a feature based on Conrad’s Nostromo. They talk frankly about their working relationship and their friendship, which survived the strains of thirty years in the film business.