The pianist, conductor and composer Lalo Schifrin is perhaps best-known for the award-winning film and television scores he has penned, such as Mission Impossible, Cool Hand Luke, Bullit and The Fox. This documentary includes clips from these screen classics and features extensive extracts from a concert Schifrin gave in Cannes, with the Lyon National Orchestra and guests, including Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown and Grady Tate (The Dizzy Gillespie Trio) and soprano Julia Migenes.
Hockey at the Tate
Since he burst on to the art scene in the mid-1960s, Hockney has become one of the most successful modern British painters and also a populär personality, known for his passionate and skilled advocacy of art. When London’s Tate Gallery staged a major retrospective of his work, Melvyn Bragg joined David Hockney for an exclusive private view of the exhibition and they were filmed discussing pictures from all stages of the artist’s remarkable career.
African Literature as Celebration
This lecture by Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost contemporary novelist, provides an eloquent introduction to the new and genuinely great world literature which has emerged from Africa in the past fifty years.
Robert Altman
This programme looks at the work of one of American cinema’s most individual and innovative film-makers. Altman is seen on location in Holland working on his film, Vincent and Theo, and talking about his distinctive style and working methods as well as his often difficult relationship with the American film industry. The programme also includes extracts from M.A.S.H., McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Secret Honour and Tanner ’88.
Martin Amis
Noted for his provocative, dark comedies, satirising the more grotesque aspects of modern urban life, Martin Amis is the leading British novelist of his generation. In this profile, he reads from his book, London Fields, and explains how the onset of what he describes as “early middle age” changed his outlook on tife and death.
Yuri Bashmet
The internationally-acclaimed Ukrainian viola virtuoso, whose dark good looks have earned him the nickname of ‘the Paganini of our age’, is seen giving the Russian premiere of Schnittke’s Monologue and performing with the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter in the Pushkin Museum. In his Moscow flat, he discusses social and musical issues with other Russian artists and improvises on the viola. It transpires that The Beatles were the catalyst to his musical success!
Velaquez
In return for immortalising the grotesquely in-bred court of the rapidly declining Spanish Hapsburgs, Philip IV admitted Velazquez (1599-1660) to the ranks of the nobility at a time when artists were considered no better than carpenters. Didier Baussy-Oulianoff’s resplendent portrait focuses on this special relationship between an artist and a king, and benefits from exclusive access to a major Velazquez exhibition mounted at the Prado in Madrid. The artist’s character is revealed through his work.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Colombian author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, is best-known for his novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, which have become phenomenal best-sellers world-wide. Less well known is his interest in, and work for, cinema. In this film, shot in Colombia and Cuba, Márquez gives a rare interview in which he talks about his involvement in Latin American cinema and the way in which this intermeshes with his writing.
Gran Partita – Serenade No. 10 in B flat
Mozart’s Gran Partita – the Serenade No. 10 in B flat K361 – is scored for twelve wind instruments (two oboes, two clarinets, two basset horns, four horns, two bassoons) and a double bass. The seven-part work is performed by woodwind players of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, specialists in authentic performances of the music of Mozart’s era.
Symphony No.7
This ballet, choreographed and designed by Toer van Schayk, is set to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Described by Wagner as a “grand apotheosis of the dance”, a celebration of man’s delight in his own physical energy, the symphony was composed in 1812, and van Schayk hears in the music the composer’s ecstatic longing for the sublime future he supposed would follow the Napoleonic Wars. 7th Symphony was recorded in studio and the music is played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink.