This hard-edged series probes behind the hype for the true story of country music in America. “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” investigates why new and exciting Dale Watson and established 70s star Willie Nelson just can’t cut a record deal, whilst the MCA Records marketing machine gets to work on singer-songwriter Keith Harling.
Naked Nashville – I Won’t Die for any Man
This hard-edged series probes behind the hype for the true story of country music in America. I Won’t Die For Any Man follows three generations of Nashville women – Mindy McCredy, Reba McEntire and legend Tammy Wynette (whose last interview before her death finds her still having to work for a living).
Naked Nashville – Hillbilly Hollywood
This hard-edged series probes behind the hype for the true story of country music in America. Hillbilly Hollywood meets some of the hundreds of aspiring songwriters attending the 1997 annual Nashville Songwriters Seminar, who are looking to find future success without any heartache.
Perlman in Russia
This documentary follows Itzhak Perlman when he travelled to Russia for the first time in 1991, accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. Perlman describes his experiences with wit and warmth, and speaks movingly of what it means to him, as a Jew, to perform in Russia with a Jewish orchestra.
Judas Tree
Kenneth MacMillan choreographed his last ballet, The Judas Tree, especially for Irek Mukhamedov who takes the lead in this striking production. On a building site in dockland wastes, thirteen workmen, led by their Foreman, react to the vampish behaviour of a woman who has arrived in their midst. In the heated confusion of the group, one man stands alone in the tenderness of his response. Gradually the dark underside of male sexuality and the power of peer pressure are exposed as the ballet sucks us into a web of betrayal, loss and terror.
Double Life of Franz Schubert – A dramatisation of Schubert’s last years
This is a dramatic exploration of the life and works of Franz Schubert. Featuring excerpts from many of his compositions, the central narrative occurs during Schubert’s hospitalization for syphilis, the contraction of which was both a consequence of his darker inclinations and a spur to some of his greatest work. As the doctors diagnose Schubert’s symptoms, identify their cause and administer treatment, the composer conducts his own internal imaginative examination, a sometimes delirious and dreamlike evocation of the moments and music from his past life. The characters he recalls are his maverick friend and ‘Svengali’, Franz von Schober, his authoritarian father, his illustrious but conformist patron Michael Vogl and his unfulfilled love Karoline Esterhazy.
Tangos Among Friends – Presented by Daniel Barenboim
In this personal pilgrimage, world-renowned pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim, travels to Buenos Aires to rediscover his home town, the magic of tango and the legend of its greatest pioneer, Carlos Gardel. Interviews and fabulous archive footage evoke the glamorous and optimistic spirit of Buenos Aires in the early 20th century, and provide a framework for investigating the forces which brought such material and artistic wealth to its impoverished, immigrant communities. Barenboim demonstrates tango styles and techniques, and brings the music of Gardel, Salgán, Píazzolla and Ginastera to life in performances with Rodolfo Mederos and Hector Console, and in a thrilling partnership with Placido Domingo.
Modern Masterworks: John Cage
Few figures of 20th-century music were as innovative, iconoclastic and controversial as John Cage, a composer who asked fundamental about the nature of music and art. When he died in 1992, a festival of his music scheduled in Frankfurt took on the character of a celebration of his life and art. The performances featured here are drawn from that festival, with David Tudor – Cage’s friend and musical partner for over 40 years – performing two of the composer’s major concert works, accompanied by Ensemble Modern and conductor Ingo Metzmacher. The performances are preceded by an introduction to Cage and his work by Michael Nupen.
Pierre Boulez conducts Messiaen
Pierre Boulez was Olivier Messiaen’s student, and while his creative life followed a very different course, something very special happened whenever Boulez conducted Messiaen’s music in concert. That was certainly the case in Frankfurt in 1990, when Boulez directed the superb young players of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in the dazzling Chronochromie, and joined another supreme Messiaen interpreter – pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard – to perform Oiseaux Exotiques with his own Ensemble Intercontemporain. No one understood Messiaen’s music more profoundly than Boulez, and a documentary-style introduction from musicologist Michael Nupen sets the context for this uniquely authoritative celebration of two of France’s greatest postwar composers.
Pierre Boulez conducts Varèse
“I dream of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds,” said Edgard Varèse, and what better interpreter of his astonishing, genre-defying soundscapes than Pierre Boulez – arguably his spiritual successor, and perhaps the only figure in postwar French music whose sonic imagination matched Varèse’s own? In this 1990 concert from Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, Boulez conducts the youthful virtuosi of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in the shattering Amériques and directs Ensemble Intercontemporain in near-definitive accounts of Ionisation, Offrandes and Octandre. First, though, musicologist Michael Nupen offers an expert introduction to this most innovative of 20th-century musical minds.