Considered one of the most technically brilliant players in the history of the trumpet, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis is also a master of classical music and a fine composer.
Marsalis takes the cameras with him around New York, to his home town of New Orleans, and to his rehearsal studios where he and his assembled band of musicians are seen putting together the album Blood on the Fields. He also talks about his music and his way of working. Shot in both colour and black and white.
Balthus (1908-2001) was a master of figurative art. Self-taught and self-invented, he created a poetic but private universe, remaining faithful to a few themes: brooding landscapes, portraits that revealed the inner lives of their subjects, young girls and knowing cats. This profile centres on a rare interview with this enigmatic artist, filmed at his home in Switzerland, in which he talked about his long life, his approach to painting, his inspiration, his subject matter, the vicissitudes of ageing, and the modern world.
The work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg, one of America’s wittiest and most popular artists, is a celebration of the everyday. Making hard surfaces soft, soft edges hard, and small objects extra large, he creates visual paradoxes that defy our perceptions of commonplace objects and endow them with a new reality. This documentary surveys Oldenburg’s very varied output spanning four decades and he is seen installing a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Sir John Eliot Gardiner is one of the world’s most highly-regarded conductors of operatic and orchestral music. He first made his name in the field of Early Music, then, in 1990, he founded the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, a period instrument orchestra dedicated to playing classical and Romantic music. This programme focuses on Gardiner’s work with this orchestra, which brings a new and exciting perspective to some of the best-loved symphonic music.
Shot on location in Vancouver and Los Angeles, this intimate portrait charts k. d. lang’s journey from her childhood in Canada to superstardom. The vocalist gave the cameras unprecedented access to film her as she worked on her album All You Can Eat and she is seen with her long-time collaborator Ben Mink, laying down the type of multi-octave, soaring vocals that have earned her the reputation of being one of the most outstanding popular singers of her generation.
Featuring interviews with Aulis Sallinen, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Irene Dische and Okko Kamu, this documentary introduces The Palace and also shows the magnificent setting of the Savonlinna Opera Festival, which takes place each summer in the courtyard of the Olavinlinna castle, the best-preserved medieval fortification in the Nordic countries.
Directed by Jarmo Jääskelainen
Swedish trombonist Christian Lindberg has won new recognition for the trombone as a solo instrument and now commands an international following. His passion for his instrument and his natural exuberance radiate from his playing. At the centre of this lively documentary is a record of the genesis of Anders Hillborg’s composition Strange Dances and Singing Water, a trombone concerto written specially for Lindberg.
With some dozen books to his name, all shot through with his characteristic humour, powers of observation and capacity to end up way off the beaten track, Eric Newby is now one of the best-selling travel writers in the world. In this profile, he travels to South Australia to revisit places he went to on his first intrepid journey in 1938, and then continues into the Australian bush in search of some of the few truly remote places remaining in the world.
Featuring some of today’s leading conductors in rehearsal, this series gives a unique insight into the process of creating great music. The conductors’ very different styles and methods; the dialogue between an orchestra and an inspired interpreter; the intensity of the preparations for a concert performance; and the struggle towards perfection are captured in these revealing audio-visual records. Most episodes include a full run-through of the work rehearsed. All include interviews with the conductor who is seen at work. Zubin Mehta rehearses the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for a performance of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche Op. 28.
