This dance portrait celebrates the illustrious career of Canada’s prima ballerina, Karen Kain. Specially-filmed dance extracts from MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, Petit’s Proust, Bruhn’s Swan Lake and Feld’s solo, Echo, showcase her superb technique, and she recalls her life in dance and her favourite roles. There are also contributions from fellow dancers, choreographers and critics, including Rudolf Nureyev and Reid Anderson.
L’Histoire du soldat
Jirí Kylián feels a great affinity for Stravinsky, who, like himself, was forced to leave his homeland. He describes the composer’s music drama L’Histoire du soldat as a “”surrealistic fairy tale for grown-up children””. His version of the piece uses the original French version libretto by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. With scenery and costumes by John MacFarlane, this studio recording features Nacho Duato as the soldier who sells his soul to the Devil for wealth, but is forced to wander the world.
The onset of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 had drastic consequences for Stravinsky in his Swiss exile: his property was confiscated, and he thereby lost the rights to his works and the associated income, leaving him in a situation which isolated him as an artist. L’Histoire du soldat, with its diversity, its structure, the switching between narration, action, mime and dance, and its elements from tango, English Waltz and Ragtime, could not have been categorised under any genre which existed at the time. It was premiered on 28 September 1918 and in this version is brilliantly reinterpreted by the Nederlands Dans Theater.
The Tale of a Manor
This studio recording of Pär Isberg’s ballet, created specially for television, is danced by the Royal Swedish Ballet. The work is based on a romantic adventure story by the great nineteenth-century Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf. An original score has been composed by Jan Sandström and it is performed by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jonas Dominique. With lavish period sets and costumes, designed by Bo-R uben Hedwall, this large cast ballet, starring Johanna Björnson and Martin Leander, tells a gothic tale reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast. At the end of the 1880s, Selma Lagerlöf’s family had to move from Mårbacka, the house where she had lived during her childhood. This event had a profound influence on her life and writing and is one of the sources of inspiration for The Tale of a Manor …
The New World Symphony Orchestra
The New World Symphony, the USA’s first permanent national training orchestra, was the inspiration of the celebrated American conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas. It enables the country’s finest musical graduates to be part of a musical community that lives and works together before they find full-time professional positions. This film joined Tilson Thomas and the orchestra as they prepared for their second concert season.
Vincent – Back in Arles
This documentary forms a short companion-piece to the drama series By the Roadside, which tells the story of the painter van Gogh, through the eyes of some of the people who knew him and whose lives he touched and changed. Made during the last weeks of filming, when the crew was on location in Arles, this introduction is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how a period television drama is produced.
Orlando furioso
Certainly more than just the composer of the Four Seasons, Vivaldi also wrote hundreds of largely famous instrumental works, and his glorious church music is well known; but it wasn’t until recent decades that his operas – of which he is said to have written more than fifty – were resurrected. Orlando furioso occupies a central and very significant place among Vivaldi’s works. Not only does the whole score of this opera demonstrate its composer’s full, creative maturity, but its outstanding features are also an extraordinary musical beauty, an attractive recitative line, and a balance thus created between the various parts of the dramatic and musical whole. This exceptional musical achievement was no doubt partly due to the famous theme of the original story, as well as the literary and dramatic qualities of a first-rate libretto. Pier Luigi Pizzi’s 1979 production of Orlando furioso in Verona marked the beginning of contemporary international interest in Antonio Vivaldi’s operas. Ten years later the same director once more produced this work at the San Francisco Opera. A Californian public greeted the baroque magnificence of this production with great enthusiasm, and both the daily and specialist press outdid each other in eulogies of praise for the director, his new staging, the vocal casting of all the roles and the musical quality of the whole opera.
Les Nuits Revolutionnaires
This 7-part drama series is based on the life and works of the French writer Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, nicknamed The Owl, because it was his custom to walk the streets of Paris at night during the Revolution. He recorded events, but so embroidered with his imagination that they form only a background to his fantastic stories. Charles Brabant’s dramatisation of Restif’s writing brings to life the characters he encountered and the turbulent arena of the city’s shadowy backwaters. To this is added the drama of The Owl’s own nocturnal life. Michel Aumont as Restif heads a fine cast of French actors, and magnificent sets reconstruct, in faithful detail, quartiers of eighteenth-century Paris.
Solti conducts Shostakovich & Tchaikovsky
Two very different Russian symphonies, each with a powerful story to tell. Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony was his final masterpiece, an impassioned outpouring of melody and sorrow whose very name means “full of emotion”. Shostakovich’s Ninth might seem like its polar opposite: crisp, playful and bristling with pitch-black humour. But in Stalin’s Russia, those were dangerous qualities. Few conductors felt the tug of history like Sir Georg Solti, and few drove more directly for a piece’s heart. This recording with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, captured live at Munich’s Philharmonie am Gasteig, finds both conductor and orchestra at their uncompromising best.
New Year’s Concert 1989
For the 30th anniversary of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s concerts, Carlos Kleiber appeared at the conductor’s podium to conduct his first Strauss family extravaganza. “What Carlos Kleiber presents here is the fulfillment of all waltz dreams,” wrote the trade magazine “Fono Forum.” All the beloved Viennese melodies such as the “Fledermaus” overture, the “Accelerationen” waltz, “Bei uns zu Haus,” “Csardas,” “Pizzicato Polka” and, of course, the “Blue Danube” waltz and the “Radetzky March” – all these Viennese warhorses took on an unexpected elegance, spirit and wit. Kleiber’s rubati and accelerandi, his sensitivity towards everything that is found between the staves of the music invest these pieces with a new urgency. Pieces that we thought were so overplayed as to be trite and meaningless assume a freshness and vitality that is nothing less than amazing. “There won’t be anything more beautiful this year,” gushed one of Vienna’s leading dailies – and it was probably right.
Hermann Prey – Portrait
The internationally acclaimed baritone Hermann Prey was born in Berlin in 1929. He made his breakthrough in 1956 as Figaro in the Vienna State Opera’s production of Rossini’s “Barber of Seville”. His resounding success as Figaro in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1969 staging of Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” at the Salzburg Festival stamped him as the Figaro of that era. Recorded a few years later by Unitel, this production has taken on an almost legendary status. Prey soon became a Mozart singer par excellence, portraying Guglielmo (“Così fan tutte”), Almaviva (“The Marriage of Figaro”), Papageno (“The Magic Flute”) and, of course, Figaro. His unforgettable interpretation of this role in Ponnelle’s production of “The Marriage of Figaro” is preserved for all times by Unitel in a 1976 recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa and Mirella Freni. Prey also enjoyed great popularity in the United States, appearing in operas in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Houston and New York. After his Met debut as Wolfram in “Tannhäuser” in 1960, he regularly sang at that house until 1995. In addition to Mozart and Rossini, Prey’s other favorite composers included Lortzing, Donizetti, Strauss and Wagner. Prey made his Bayreuth debut in 1965. It was there that he transformed the Meistersinger’s Beckmesser into a sympathetic figure, a poet tinged with melancholy, in Wolfgang Wagner’s early 1980s production. This performance is also preserved on film by Unitel. Hermann Prey was never exclusively an opera singer, however. His other specialty was the German song. As a kind of ambassador of the German lied, he filled concert halls all over the world. Prey sang Schubert and Schumann, Brahms and Mahler in a way that always emphasized naturalness and spontaneity over analytical profundity and scholarship. But his inquisitiveness also led him to explore the treasures of the German song from the Middle Ages to the present day. A special fondness for Schubert moved him to set up a Schubert festival in the Austrian town of Hohenems, where he planned to perform all of Schubert’s works. His interpretations of Schubert’s songs have – with those of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau – set standards for lieder singing in the 20th century. Unitel is proud to offer Prey’s recordings of Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin”, “Schwanengesang” and “Die Winterreise” on video, as well as lieder by Robert Schumann and Richard Strauss.