Sabine Kupferberg is a remarkable dancer. At an age when most dancers hang up their shoes, leading dance-makers, including van Manen, Forsythe and Ek, continue to create exciting new pieces for her and her colleagues at Nederlands Dans Theater 3. This company for the over-forties was founded by her partner, the internationally-acclaimed choreographer Jirí Kylián. Her collaboration with Kylián comes into focus in this dance-filled profile which showcases her distinctive talent in a wealth of performance extracts.
David Bowie
Ever since he burst on to the music scene in the early 1970s, David Bowie has been one of rock’s most consistently inventive performers. Driven by manic creativity and restless energy he has constantly assumed new roles, each signalling a change of personal and musical direction. In a wide-ranging interview Bowie talks about his many reinventions of himself and his music, and these remarkable changes are charted in memorable performance extracts and archive film.
Gergiev conducts Debussy, Prokofiev and Stravinsky
The energy and excitement of performances under the baton of maestro Valéry Gergiev are thrilling. This concert, with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, was recorded live at the city’s Doelen Hall. The programme includes Debussy’s Fragments Symphoniques for D’Annunzio’s mystery play Le Martyre de St Sébastien, Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, Stravinsky’s Fireworks and his Piano Concerto. The soloist for the concerto is the Georgian virtuoso Alexander Toradze, a singularly imposing figure at the keyboard.
Robert Rauschenberg
One of the most important American artists of the twentieth century, since the mid-1950s Rauschenberg has continued to pioneer new approaches to an extraordinarily diverse range of media. The many aspects of his prolific creativity are explored in this film, which draws on the ideal resource of a major retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. At his studio on the island of Captiva, Rauschenberg gives a relaxed and candid interview and is seen at work.
William Hogarth
Hogarth’s penetrating vision and ferocious satirical style are seen most famously in his narrative cycles The Rake’s Progress and The Harlot’s Progress. His work opens a fascinating and disturbing window on to life in eighteenth-century London. Visiting Hogarth’s London as it survives today, this absorbing exploration of his life and work charts his progress from an impoverished childhood to being one of the first British artists to earn his living independent of patronage.
Schwarz auf Weiss
Heiner Goebbels has a genius for creating truly theatrical musical events. Made under studio conditions, this recording features members of the internationally-acclaimed Ensemble Modern, with whom he developed Black on White. They are both the players and performers in the highly original piece, a tribute to the playwright and director Heiner Müller, who died in 1995. At its heart is a recording of Müller reading Poe’s ‘parable of death’, Shadow. Around this, Goebbels creates a striking web of interlocking musical episodes.
Pierre Soulages
Since 1979, the French painter Soulages has limited his palette to black, yet he creates pieces which are as alike and unalike as one day is to another. Soulages and his work are the sole protagonists in this visually striking film, for which he chose some eighty canvases to sign the development of his art. A charismatic man, his reflections on his life and work enhance an appreciation of the elemental and enigmatic beauty of his paintings.
Bryn Terfel
Bryn Terfel is one of the world’s most sought-after bass-baritones. It is the burly Welshman’s ability to express and colour words in a way that moves even the coldest of hearts that has established his ascendancy in the most illustrious vocal company. This profile charts his rise to fame and focuses on his development of various roles in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He is seen preparing the role of the Don himself with Sir Georg Solti.
Parsifal – Search for the Holy Grail
The Grail – the cup which Jesus Christ used at the Last Supper, and which subsequently collected His blood as He bled on the Cross – is one of the most powerful symbols in the last two thousand years of Western culture.
Parsifal, Wagner’ three-act opera, is the most famous work to celebrate the Search for the Grail. First performed in 1882, and written especially for the composer’s revolutionary theatre in Bayreuth, Parsifal has towered above twentieth-century culture, in so far as it became a principal source of inspiration for Hitler.
Tony Palmer’s film centres round a performance of Parsifal, with the unmistakable Placido Domingo in the title role, and conducted by the distinguished Valery Gergiev. The striking documentary, narrated by Domingo himself, offers a description of the plot and explores theories about Parsifal’s origins and considerable sphere of influence.
The music was recorded at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and in the gardens of the Villa Rufolo in Ravello, Italy, which had been a principal source of inspiration for Wagner.
This powerful and controversial film provides an invaluable oppurtanity to explore Wagner and his most intense opera.
Stories my Country told me
In today’s shrinking world the differences between one place and another appear to be rapidly diminishing yet never have so many peoples struggled to establish their own separate nation states. Resulting tensions have often become bloody and horrifying. What is the future of the nation-state in a world of multi-nationals and global communications? In this series, questions concerning identity and belonging are addressed by four world-famous writers and thinkers: Eric Hobsbawm, Desmond Tutu, Eqbal Ahmad and Maxine Hong Kingston.