“She doesn’t only play the piano,” wrote a critic who was present at this December 2000 recital by the French pianist Hélène Grimaud. “She feels it and she lives it. Every single note proves her devotion to perfection”. Grimaud was still a rising star when she gave this performance at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonie, but her very personal brand of artistry – her spontaneity, her sense of colour, her technical perfection – was already fully formed. Bach and Rachmaninoff frame sonatas by Brahms and Beethoven: a typically wide-ranging programme from a pianist whose technique is matched only by her imagination.
Herbert von Karajan: Portrait of the Conductor Legend
Herbert von Karajan was one of the 20th century’s most fascinating and complex musical personalities, a conductor who dominated the post-war classical music world like a colossus. This film reveals the phenomenon of the man and his music while touching on inspiring – but also controversial – aspects of his career. There are insights from musicians who worked with him, but also from Karajan himself, who, in archive interviews, discusses events in his life and relates them to his work as a conductor. The result is a fascinating portrait of an incomporable musician, whose work continues to resonate powerfully even decades after his death.
Enoch zu Guttenberg conducts Bach’s B Minor Mass
Any performance of Bach’s monumental Mass in B minor is a special occasion, and so it proves with this 1998 performance filmed in the magnificent setting of the Wieskirche, the pilgrimage church of Steingaden Abbey near Schongau in Bavaria, a dazzling example of the exuberance of the late German baroque. Enoch zu Guttenberg brings a lifetime of love and engagement with Bach with him to conduct the and the Neubeuern Choral Society and the Orchester der Klangverwaltung with a special combination of authority and passion, which extends to the outstanding line-up of soloists. The result is truly a peformance to treasure.
Helene Grimaud and Christoph Eschenbach at the Proms
There’s always a unique atmosphere at the BBC Proms: the summer music festival at which the world’s greatest artists perform before an audience of 5,000 in London’s colossal Royal Albert Hall. Some might say that it was Hélène Grimaud’s misfortune to make her debut there on the tragic date of 11 September 2001, but that only makes her achievement the more powerful – a fiercely intelligent, often dazzling performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. Eschenbach’s account of Symphonie Fantastique with this great French orchestra has the same life-affirming energy: delivered to a rapt crowd in an atmosphere of unmistakably heightened emotion
Gyorgy Kurtag: The Matchstick Man
“The structures stripped bare hold up the empty air”. György Kurtág is more than one of the most powerful creative voices in modern Europe. He created a new way of listening; forging a musical language in which silence can be as meaningful as sound and even the smallest gesture opens up new worlds. This award-winning 1996 documentary offers an unrivalled, often profoundly moving glimpse into his creative imagination, including interviews with the composer as well as rare performance and rehearsal footage plus contributions from György Ligeti, Claudio Abbado, pianist Zoltán Kocsis and the composer’s late wife (and artistic collaborator) Márta.
Helene Grimaud & Members of Orchestre de Paris play Schumann
Pianist Hélène Grimaud has been called “a renaissance woman”, and her painterly, passionate sensibility makes everything she plays glow with colour. She’s never more fully herself than when playing chamber music, and this beautifully filmed concert from 2001 captures that collaborative spirit in the round. Grimaud joins colleagues from the Orchestre de Paris at Paris’s Cité de la Musique to perform Schumann’s Piano Quintet and two gloriously poetic sets of miniatures. Together, they’re near-ideal interpreters of Schumann: a pianist-composer whose own imagination was never more potent than when (as here) the piano is merely first among equals in a world of high-Romantic emotion.