The British stage and screen actor Albert Finney’s credits include Oscar nominations for his performances in Tom Jones, The Dresser, Under the Volcano and Murder on the Orient Express. He is eloquent about his craft and, over a convivial lunch with writer Melvyn Bragg, he looks back on his career. Finney’s remarkable talent is demonstrated in clips of some of his memorable performances and he is seen at work on Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, Dennis Potter’s last television plays.
Michael Collins
Norman Mailer on Picasso
In his book, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, Norman Mailer set out to capture an intimate sense of the character of the artist’s genius. At his Cape Cod home, the leading American writer talks in interview about Picasso, demonstrating his great talent for understanding the activity of the most enigmatic and protean of minds. Illustrated with many examples of the artist’s work, this engrossing programme reveals the obsessions shared by Picasso and Mailer: sex and mortality.
John Mills
John Mills is a veteran of more than eighty films, including Ice Cold in Alex and Great Expectations. He received an Oscar for his portrayal of Michael in David Lean’s Ryan’s
Daughter. He has also had an illustrious stage career which began in the musical theatre of the 1930s. This popular actor talks about his life and work and his story is illustrated with film clips, archive material and extracts from his anecdotal autobiographical one-man show.
Gesualdo
The last decade of the twentieth century alone spawned three operas based on the life of the “principe die musici”: Alfred Schnittke’s Gesualdo was premiered in 1995 at the Vienna State Opera; then the following year came Franz Hummel’s opera of the same name, a commission from the city of Kaiserslautern; and in 1998 Salvatore Sciarrino wrote an opera for the Schwetzingen Festival entitled Luci mie traditrici, after a sixteenth century drama about a prince who murders his wife.
So Gesualdo was already the focus of a good deal of interest when the Munich-based director and film producer Werner Herzog also developed an interest in the composer at about this time. Herzog seemed somehow predestined for the job. His preference for eccentric protagonists, amply attested to in films such as Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo starring Klaus Kinski, went hand in hand with a musical streak that has won him a great deal of admiration since the mid 1980s with regular opera productions at the Bayreuth Festival, the Opera Bastille in Paris and La Scala, Milan. Of course, one was never to expect a creative artist of Herzog’s talents to produce a conventional documentary film.
Jonathan Raban
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) is often described as the greatest Hollywood star of all time. On screen he was the cynical tough guy in the trench coat, the flawed hero. Off screen his life was the stuff of legends. Stephen Bogart guides viewers through this revealing account of his father’s life and examines Bogie’s screen performances in the light of his own intimate knowledge. Lauren Bacall – Bogart’s fourth wife – is among the contributors to the programme.
Leaving Home – Orchestral Music in the Twentieth Century
Written and presented by Sir Simon Rattle, the foremost British conductor of our day, this series forms a fascinating introduction to, and overview of, the music of the twentieth century. Each of the seven programmes feature over thirty minutes of specially-shot music in performance, with Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Simon Rattle leads viewers on an exhilarating journey through the music of our time, explaining the chief musical developments from Mahler to the present day. Each programme is illustrated with evocative imagery, archive film and photographs and the featured music is set within the broader context of artistic and social change.
Why “Leaving Home”? The story of twentieth-century music is one of leave-takings in many ways. As a wealth of talented composers searched for new creative responses to the world around them, many made departures from the solid ‘home’ foundations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music – tonal harmony, melody, regular rhythm and metre. Many had to literally leave home, displaced by political uphevals. A remarkable diversity of expression developed – not all of the difficult or discordant variety commonly associated with modern music. The range is wide and this series samples the work of over thirty composers, discovering new and challenging sounds as well as some unexpectedly familiar music. It presents an extraordinary kaleidoscope of orchestral images, full of contrasts and surprises.
The first episode in the series describes a great musical culture in decline in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Vienna. From that decline erupted a musical revolution whose reverberations have continued to this day. The names of Schönberg, Webern and Berg still strike terror into the hearts of many concert-goers, but with Simon Rattle we hear in this music’s brooding power not only the collapse of the old Austro-German order and the rise of Facism, but also the portents of the music to come in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Rake’s Progress
From the Salzburg Festival 1996: This striking Salzburg Festival production is the result of a collaboration between director Peter Mussbach and the leading German artist Jörg Immendorff, whose spectacular, self-referential and humorous designs were hailed as a triumph. Their fascinating and complex interpretation of the moral tale has Tom Rakewell as an artist in search of his aesthetic position. An exceptionally fine musical performance features Jerry Hadley as Tom, Dawn Upshaw as Anne, and Monte Pederson as Nick Shadow. Sylvain Cambreling conducts the Camerata Academica. (Sung in English)
Three Colours Cézanne
Widely acknowledged to be the ‘father’ of Modern Art, Cézanne (1839-1906) did not find critical or public success in his lifetime. Given access to the most comprehensive gathering of Cézanne’s paintings for over sixty years, provided by a major touring exhibition, this documentary analyses and re-assesses his achievements. A fascinating study of the artist’s life and work, it reveals an emotional turbulence that runs throughout his oeuvre and invites observations from a wide range of commentators.