DVD Videos

This new DVD marks the film debut of piano virtuoso, Vassily Primakov, performing the three Intermezzos, Op. 117 by Johannes Brahms, the four Ballades by Fryderyk Chopin, and the Sonata No. 4 by Alexandr Scriabin.

Vassily Primakov has been hailed as a pianist of world class significance, the New York Times trumpeting his “fiery intensity” and his “bold, expressive phrasing and dramatic commitment that brought the audience to its feet.”

The DVD includes the following special features: Vassily Primakov photo gallery, biographical information, Primakov discography and a digital Mp4 file, for easy copying to iPod or personal video devices.

Sound Format: 5.1 surround sound

DTS / Dolby Digital

Running Time: 68 minutes

Available worldwide

As a follow up to the Quintessence Saxophone Quartet’s Five Seasons on CD, CPO is releasing a special DVD of the live concert from 2008. The DVD showcases the Quartet’s build up to the concert, and the concert itself, plus bonus material featuring the Quartet play more jazz.

Sound format: Dolby Digital 5.1, Stereo

Region Code: 0

NTSC/PAL

Running Time: 97 Minutes

Total playing time: 135 mins.

System: NTSC 16:9

DVD format: DVD-9

Region 0 (worldwide)

Booklet in English, French, German, Italian

SOWETO STRINGS tells the extraordinary and moving story of an outstanding music project in Soweto. Established in 1997 by British viola player Rosemary Nalden, the Buskaid project, which gives local township children the opportunity to learn classical stringed instruments virtually free of charge, has transformed the lives of many youngsters and produced musicians of international quality. Under Rosemary Nalden’s direction, the Buskaid Ensemble has played in many of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, and its performance at the 2007 BBC Proms in London won it unanimous critical acclaim. In 2009 Gramophone magazine identified the Ensemble as one of the world’s ten most inspiring orchestras.

Award-winning filmmaker Mark Kidel followed the project’s work for over two years, focusing on a number of musicians at different stages of the journey towards the mastery of their instruments. He also highlights Rosemary Nalden’s phenomenal success at inspiring young musicians who have grown up in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

The documentary culminates in extracts from a breathtaking concert by the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble at Paris’s Cité de la Musique, where the French audience responded with a well-deserved standing ovation.

THE BUSKAID SOWETO STRING ENSEMBLE IN PERFORMANCE is a film of the 2007 Paris concert. The thrilling programme includes works by Mozart, Grieg, Rameau and Bartók as well as some popular encores, with vocals by the project’s young singers, and the Buskaid musicians’ own string arrangements of traditional South African township kwela.

In the sequence of Rameau dances, the orchestra is joined by a group of spirited African-inspired dancers from Cape Town’s community project Dance for All.

Tony Palmer’s 121 minute portrait of actor Richard Burton, featuring Sally Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Burton, Philip Burton, Lauren Bacall, Joe Mankiewicz, Mike Nichols, Robert Hardy, Sir John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Emlyn Williams and John Neville.

“With this film, Palmer has created a highly original form of dramatic biography, exploring an extraordinary potential for complexity in a medium commonly dismissed as essentially simplistic, a textbook demonstration also of how to create a compelling narrative from source material which varies from dull to sublime.” The Times

Subtitles: English, French, Italian

Anaïs & Olivier Spiro (film directors)

A wonderfully eerie and fantastical re-imagining of Mozart’s early oneact singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne, presented here on DVD in a film adaptation by acclaimed directors, Anaïs and Olivier Spiro.

Elizabeth Calleo and Martin Winkler triumph in Mozart’s timeless magical tale - filmed live at the Opéra de Rouen in March 2007, whilst acclaimed conductor Laurence Equilbey directs the Orchestre de Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie. ‘Bastien under Bastienne’ is a one-act comic opera composed in 1768 by the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then twelve years old. It was one of Mozart’s first operatic works and one in which the musical and dramatic genius of Mozart is already apparent.

‘Les Amours de Bastien et Bastienne’, a show devised by Laurence Equilbey and director Claude Buchvald, includes not only the opera proper but also other pieces by Mozart drawn from serenades, divertimenti, and dance. These musical inserts, composed around the same time of the opera, serve to illustrate fragments of the imagination, moments of fantasy, accompanying the magic of the forest and the emotions of the hero and heroine. “It is an initiatory tale which speaks to us of our fears, our dreams, our condition” – Claude Buchvald (director)

“Christopher Nupen: King of the music documentary.” Gramophone Magazine

How many people remain in good shape, both mentally and physically, at the age of 106? The answer is very few but Alice Sommer Herz is among those exceptional few. And how many have the gift of forgiveness? And how many are free of hatred? Gigi Sommer has both of those qualities. She was imprisoned, with her six-year-old son, in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and saw unspeakable atrocities. She lost both her mother and her husband in Nazi death camps but she does not hate her persecutors. That is not because they are anything other than monstrous criminals but because she has the wisdom to know that all hatred hurts the soul of the hater, not the hated and Gigi Sommer’s inspiring soul is among the things which she has kept intact and unblemished through her hundred and six years.

She was a pianist of distinction, played more than 100 concerts in the Theresienstadt camp and is in no doubt that music saved both her sanity and her life and the lives of many others in those unimaginable circumstances.

On this DVD Alice Sommer speaks with her quiet grace and wisdom about her life, her experiences and her beliefs. She also plays music by Schubert, Smetana and Beethoven in a manner that reminds us of her teacher Artur Schnabel and a bygone age in music making.

At the age of 104 she published a best-selling book, written in collaboration with her by two German writers, (A Garden of Eden in Hell), which has already been printed in seven different languages. That, and our film, We Want the Light of which she is the heroine, have made Gigi Sommer an international star.

Film remembers our artists in a way that not one of the other media is quite able to match and Gigi Sommer is an artist worth remembering.

Region: 0 (all regions)

Picture format: 16:9 FHA

Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo

Subtitles:

GB/DE/ES/FR/IT

Running time: 54 mins

90 minute film directed by the acclaimed, award-winning director Tony Palmer and starring Warren Mitchell.

“Deconstructing the myth and reconstructing a giant. A brilliant re-evaluation of Brahms, told in a breathtaking series of stunning images of aching tenderness.” Chicago Tribune

Brahms’ first musical experience had been playing an upright piano in the brothels of Hamburg; at the end he lived a bachelor in Vienna having his every need satisfied by the prostitutes of the city whom he always affectionately described as his ‘little singing girls’.