Info:
Durations:
Part one: 26’ 42”
Part two: 34’ 52”
Part three: 34’54”
Total: 96’ 28”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1983
A television film about a single work, Modest Mussorgski’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”.
Written as a tribute to a lost friend, Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann, it is a strange and moving masterpiece which has become Mussorgski’s most popular work. It is also probably the most frequently orchestrated piano piece of all time. It is nevertheless largely misunderstood, perhaps precisely because it is so widely known in other composers’ arrangements, in particular the orchestration by Maurice Ravel which, in the opinion of Vladimir Ashkenazy, is very far-removed from the spirit of Mussorgski’s original for the piano. He insists that it is not an entertainment piece, nor an attempt to describe or illustrate Hartmann’s drawings in music. He sees it as a profoundly-felt expression of Mussorgski’s view of life.
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Part 1
Introduction by Vladimir Ashkenazy and Christopher Nupen.
Who was Mussorgski? Who was Hartmann? How did the work come to be written? And why has it been so frequently orchestrated? What was Mussorgski trying to achieve? To what extent did Ravel misunderstand or disregard the original?
Vladimir Ashkenazy is uniquely qualified to guide us to the heart of Mussorgski’s strange masterpiece. He is a Russian-born and Russian-trained musician, capable both of playing the original piano work as well as anybody on the concert platform today and conducting the orchestral version by Leo Funtek.
Part 2
“Pictures at an Exhibition” orchestrated by Leo Funtek with the Swedish Radio Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
There are more than 12 published orchestrations of this work. We have chosen the version by Leo Funtek, written in 1922 a few months before the appearance of the orchestration by Maurice Ravel, because we believe that it is truest to the spirit of Mussorgski’s original. This is a straight performance shot in the Berwaldhallen in Stockholm with ten synchronous film cameras. The orchestral filming techniques are a development of the style which we evolved in Elegies for the Deaths of Three Spanish Poets, which won the International Emmy Award and the British Academy International Award in 1979 and the RAI Prize at the Prix Italia in 1980, a style that was further developed in Ottorino Respighi – A Dream of Italy, which received an International Emmy Award nomination in 1982.
Part 3
Mussorgski’s Original Piano Work played by Vladimir Ashkenazy at a public concert in the Barbican Centre in London
It is probably true to say that there is no pianist on the concert platform today better able to give an authentic performance of Mussorgski’s original. The whole idea to make this film springs from Ashkenazy’s unique ability to play and conduct this work and from the conviction that in Ashkenazy’s hands the piano version has much more to offer than is generally recognised. This becomes dramatically clear in a very interesting way when Ashkenazy’s performance is heard in close proximity to any orchestral version.
Our Films on DVD
This DVD portrait celebrates the miraculous gift of one of the finest violinists of the 20th century. Nathan Mironovich Milstein, universally respected by every international musician of his time and genuinely liked by almost all of them. His career spanned 73 years, one of the longest in Western music, and ended with his legendary last recital in Stockholm with Georges Pludermacher.
Nathan Milstein was 82 at the time and still playing as the grandest of Grand Masters and as probably no other violinist has ever played at 82.
The two-hour portrait film is built around that historic event and pays tribute to this ‘quiet magician’ who never sort the limelight and rarely appeared on camera. The DVD also includes both the Kreutzer Sonata and the Bach Chaconne from that same recital which took place on the 17th of July 1986.
This DVD presents Vladimir Ashkenazy as pianist, conductor, musical guide and master musician - an intimate and engaging view of one of the world's most quietly successful musicians.
It contains the portrait film Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices Are Russian, shot in 1968 when Ashkenazy moved with his wife and son from London to Iceland, an important turning point in his life and career.
Since that film was made, Ashkenazy the pianist (possibly the most frequently recorded pianist in history, his discography runs to 56 pages), has also become an international conductor of the highest rank and we include a montage of sequences from our composer films with Ashkenazy as conductor. It also contains a short interview with Ashkenazy who talks, in his modest but penetrating way, about musical gifts and their origins.
The DVD ends with a film about Rachmaninov's Corelli Variations. In it Ashkenazy discusses the piece at length, with great affection and some telling musical insights. It ends with a complete performance of the piece, filmed at a public concert in Lugano.
This is a DVD about many things. It is about freedom and captivity, about emancipation, acculturation and assimilation; it is about the roles played by Moses and Felix Mendelssohn in the dream of fruitful, unproblematic integration of the Jews into German society after their liberation from the ghettos; it is about Richard Wagner, his essay Das Judenthum in der Musik (The Jews in Music) and his influence on the thinking of the Third Reich but, most of all, it is a DVD about how much music can mean to people, even in the direst of circumstances, or particularly in the direst circumstances.
The title, We Want the Light, is taken from a poem by a 12-year-old girl, Eva Pickova, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Her words provide both the title and the climax - in a setting for two choruses and orchestra by the American composer Franz Waxman, in his work The Song of Terezin. The DVD also contains music by Mahler, Bach, Schoenberg, Bruch, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schubert, Bloch and Brahms.
With the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne, the Cologne Opera Chorus, and the Cologne Cathedral Children's Choir, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
