The Promise of Music is a full-length feature film about the story of Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. The film documents Dudamel preparing his orchestra in Caracas for their upcoming concert at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, 2007. Following different young musicians in their day-to-day lives, the film shows how classical music has the capability of changing both the individual and their environment. A unique and deeply moving look behind the scenes of one of the most talked about phenomena in the musical world of today!
The Gambler (Der Spieler)
‘The Gambler’ is a dark study of human failings and the corruptive power of money. In this work, everyone gambles: the hero Alexey, the General and even the wealthy aunt Babulenka gamble with money; Blanche, the Marquis and Polina – who loves Alexey – gamble with their fellow human beings. The results are humiliation, ruin and self-delusion. But when the Staatskapelle Berlin under worldfamous conductor Daniel Barenboim provide the orchestral sound to the full, lustrous voices of Vladimir Ognovenko, Kristine Opolais, Misha Didyk, Stefania Toczyska and their colleagues, there is nothing even remotely dismal about the opera or its production. Directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, ‘the evening zips past entertainingly, yet leaves its traces in the listener’s mind: a stroke of genius like Prokofiev’s opera itself’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).
La Scala and the Magic of Gold
A Village: Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe)
Based on the novella “The People of Seldwyla” by Gottfried Keller, this opera was written in 1901 and first performed in German at Berlin’s Komische Oper on 21 February 1907. Its first English-language production was given in London on 22 February 1910. Frederick Delius (1862-1934) obtained his first successes in Germany. He numbers among the late-Romantic composers in the line of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. The dramatic weightiness and heroic sweep of these composers is, however, missing in Delius’s music, which is more dream-like and limpid, as in the well-known “Walk to Paradise Garden”, an intermezzo from the opera “A Village Romeo and Juliet”. Delius’s most important opera, it radiates a fairy-tale atmosphere similar to that found in Pfitzner and Humperdinck.
In memoriam Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
New Year’s Concert 1992
After this sensational, rousing concert, the most popular event of the year for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the entire Austrian media were unanimous: this was a one-of-a-kind sensation. Broadcast in 25 countries and reaching a potential viewership of a billion viewers and listeners, the concert carried the spirit of Vienna and its most popular son, Johann Strauss Jr., across the entire world. While the waltzes of Johann and Joseph Strauss (as well as an overture by Otto Nicolai) were certainly one reason for the concert’s enormous success, it could not have reached this level of peerlessness without Carlos Kleiber. Known rather as an introspective musician, Kleiber proved in the 1989 New Year’s Concert that he was a master of the light and bubbly as well. All of the works – from the Pizzicato Polka and the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka to the Blue Danube waltz and the Radetzky March – were played with such brilliance, virtuosity and overflowing good spirits that one Vienna daily titled the event “a miracle in 3/4 time.”
Die Schöpfung (The Creation) Hob.XXI:2
Haydn began writing the oratorio “Die Schöpfung” (The Creation) in 1795; it was given its first performance at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg in Vienna in 1798. Haydn’s life’s work reached its climax and its conclusion in The Creation and in the oratorio The Seasons, written in 1801. Shortly before his death in 1808, Haydn attended another gala performance of The Creation which was received by the audience with wild enthusiasm. Leonard Bernstein’s recording of this work was made at the Benedictine Abbey of Ottobeuren in 1986 with the chorus and Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio with soloists Judith Blegen, Thomas Moser, Kurt Moll, Lucia Popp and Kurt Ollmann. Bernstein himself said of The Creation: “In the beginning of this awesome musical version, Haydn created one of the supreme music dramatizations of all time: the depiction of chaos, as he entitled it – that pre-terrestrial chaos depicted in Genesis by the single line: ‘And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the Deep’. This musical depiction is of a beauty almost frightening in its chromatic and dissonant texture – something outside of Time, and certainly outside of the 1790s, when it was written. … Haydn’s The Creation gives us time to remember – and rejoice in – the purity and grace and fortitude of Nature, to saunter blissfully through that Garden of Gardens along with Adam and Eve; to restore our souls, to recover our moral strength, and to rediscover our power to praise.”
Monteverdi, Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin)
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) contributed more to the music of his time than any other composer: he perfected the art of the madrigal, gave decisive impulses to the young genre of the opera by his imaginative use of descriptive and dramatic effects and by giving each figure an individual character, and introduced the expressive language of secular music into the rigid sacred music of his time. In his “Marian Vespers,” composed in Mantua in 1610, Monteverdi combined elements from the traditional church music style with the new “stile concertato” and polychoral forms, but also boldly made use of Gregorian chant. Whether for solo voice and continuo, for chorus a cappella or for the mighty forces of the chorus and orchestra – Monteverdi cast each single piece in the Marian Vespers in its own mould, thereby obtaining an expressive diversity within a stylistically unified framework. Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Concentus musicus are the ideal interpreters of Monteverdi’s music. Their year-long specialization in the field of early music and original performance practice guarantees an authoritative and gripping interpretation. The concert was recorded at the Baroque Cathedral of Graz, Austria, in 1986.
Macbeth
With its relentless dramatic continuum, Macbeth, Verdi’s early masterpiece and his tenth opera (premiered in Florence on 14 March 1847) rescued the composer from a creative crisis. In Macbeth Verdi created a successful synthesis of music and drama on which he was to guide himself from now on. Director Claude d’Anna and conductor Riccardo Chailly chose the version which Verdi prepared for Paris and was premiered there on 21 April 1865. As to the apparitions and supernatural aspects of the work, d’Anna says that he always “tried to find theatrical rather than cinematic solutions. … Solutions had to result from the work’s own symbolic logic, not simply from technology.”