In 1962, the British pianist John Ogdon won the Tchaikovsky Competition along with Ashkenazy and embarked on a successful international career. Ten years later he was struck by a crippling mental illness from which he took many years to recover. This programme was made with Ogdon shortly before his tragic death in 1989, as his musical genius was beginning to reassert itself. It focuses on his overriding love for music and concludes with him improvising a new work at the piano.
Great Arias
This on-going series of ten-minute programmes introduces some of opera’s finest
moments, performed and presented by some of the greatest singers of our day, Dame Joan
Sutherland, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Eva Marton, Marilyn Home, Anne Sofie von Otter, Roberto Alagna,
Philip Langridge, René Kollo and Yuri Marusin among them. Their performances are drawn from
recent live recordings of acclaimed productions of key works in the operatic repertoire and
include such high-spots as Vissi d’arte from Puccini’s Tosca, the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor, Elektra’s murderous confrontation with her mother in Strauss’s Elektra, and
Leonora’s D’amor sull’ali rosee from the final act of Puccini’s Tosca.
Titjan
Titian is one of the most celebrated names in art history. This film travels to Venice, Rome, Madrid and Vienna to consider his life, work and legacy. It explores his manoeuvres to become Venice’s offical artist, his greed and ambition, fuelled by polemicist Aretino, his expedient flattery of his illustrious Clients, as well as his sublime use of colour and his supreme skill as an artist, which find full expression in the passionate paintings of his old age.
Kazimir Malevich
One of the post-Revolution Russian Avant-garde, Malevich (1878-1935) had the misfortune to die in official disfavour. With perestroika, his work resurfaced from storage and the first major retrospective of his work since his death was held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. With film of this exhibition, Barrie Gavin fills the screen with his paintings and uses Malevich’s own vivid writings to tell his story and analyse his art.
Swansong
Christopher Bruce’s ballet uses an inventive choreographic language to enact the horrors of a brutal interrogation. Two uniformed guards (Matz Skoog and Kevin Richmond) conjure up a terrifying music-hall double act, smiling maliciously as they torture their victim (Koen Onzia) who, in moments of respite, expresses his longing for freedom in passages of lyrical beauty. The piece is set to an original electronic score by Philip Chambon. This production was recorded in studio.
Steven Berkoff
The maverick playwright, director and actor talks about his life and work in the typically graphic language which characterises his radical and controversial plays – theatre which, in his words, “opens the skull and puts on the stage a writhing can of worms”. The programme includes extracts from Berkoff’s Salome, Greek, East, Metamorphosis and Decadence, and features contributions from Roman Polanski, Mikhail Baryshnikov and the late Joe Papp.
David Bailey
Photographer David Bailey made his name in the early 1960s when his pictures, his image and his lifestyle epitomised ‘Swinging London’. More recently he has turned to film-making. In this programme, he talks in interview and is seen behind the camera as well as in front of it. The full range of his work is explored and there are contributions from some of his famous subjects, including Jean Shrimpton, Marie Helvin and Terence Stamp.
Ben Elton
Ben Elton is one of Britain’s most prolific purveyors of TV comedy both as a performer and as a writer, with series such as Blackadder and The Young Ones to his credit. In interview, Elton talks about his career, examining the influences and motivations which drive his writing. The programme includes clips from his comedy shows and his to-camera routines, as well as dramatised extracts from his first novel, Stark.
Toulouse-Lautrec
A major exhibition of the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) at London’s Royal Academy is the starting point for a programme on one of the most colourful figures in late nineteenth-century art, famous for his pictures of Parisian dance halls and cabarets. Artists, scholars and admirers are invited to comment on their choice of work from the exhibition.
The Sundance Institute
Sundance is a unique film development unit founded and run by Redford at his ski resort in the Utah mountains, an area he is striving to conserve. Each year, young film-makers are invited to work with professionals in an environment which encourages experiment and is free of the commercial pressures of Hollywood. This programme follows two film-makers during their time at Sundance and shows prime-mover Redford taking part in proceedings as ‘Ordinary Bob’.