DVD Videos

Choreography, sets and costumes by Pierre Lacotte. Conducted by Alberto Ventura. Bonuses: interviews with Mrs. Vittoria Ottolenghi (1984), Pierre Lacotte (2009)

Subtitles: English, French, Italian, Spanish

110 minutes

The extraordinary story of what happened to Felix Mendelssohn’s music and reputation under the Nazis, told by Sheila Hayman, award winning director and descendant of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny.

‘Writer-director Sheila Hayman’s articulate, radiantly intelligent film’ (Financial Times)

‘This entrancing film succeeded as a personal and justifiably proud celebration’ (Scotsman)

‘A tangled tale…presented absolutely compellingly by Sheila Hayman’ (Guardian)

‘A fascinating film that tells how, despite its best efforts, the Third Reich could not extinguish Germany’s love of Mendelssohn’s work’ (Observer)

Picture Format: 4:3, 1 DVD

Sound Format: Digital Stereo

Running Time: 59mins

Region Code: NTSC 0

Territory: Worldwide EXCEPT NORTH AMERICA

Bonus:

Short documentary about the Wihan Quartet filmed and edited by Alice Nellis

A rarely performed or recorded opera, Amica’s extravagant scenic and vocal demands contributed to the opera’s neglect until now.

Set in the Savoy mountains around 1900, Amica is a ‘dramatic poem in two acts’ involving two brothers, Giorgio and Rinaldo, whose love for the eponymous Amica culminates in tragedy.

While today numbering amongst his least performed works, Amica was initially a triumph, praised for its ‘passionate accent’ and ‘impulsive sincerity’ by a contemporary critic, and deemed ‘most worthy of re-revaluation’ according to the composer’s biographer.

All My Loving? The Films of Tony Palmer is the first book length study of a man who, in a career of over forty years, has directed and produced more than a hundred documentary and theatrical films, directed stage plays and operas, authored books and columns, hosted radio and television programs, and garnered dozens of awards, including multiple Italia Prizes (television’s most coveted award) - “the best director in television,” according to Ken Russell. Palmer takes us backstage to protest-and-acidfueled rock concerts with his friend John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, glittering Las Vegas shows with Michael Crawford, legendary ballet performances with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, memorable stage productions with Richard Burton and playwright John Osborne, politically-charged operas with John Adams and Peter Sellars, and music festivals with Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, Plácido Domingo in Salzburg, Yehudi Menuhin in London, Maria Callas in Paris and Valery Gergiev in St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre in Russia. Palmer knew them all.

In the words of renowned film critic and historian David Thomson “Palmer has made an absolutely unique contribution to films about art and music. A genius sitting in our own backyard.”

This 1990 programme can best be described as a musical journey through Baroque Europe in the company of Johann Sebastian Bach, as performed by Marie-Claire Alain. The legendary French organist Marie-Claire Alain plays some of the composer’s greatest organ music on the most magnificent and famous organs in Europe. As she plays she also gives a fascinating insight into their history, and shares her deep knowledge and passion for these instruments and the genius of Bach. Bach travelled little during his lifetime, but director Bruno Monsaingeon extends the geographical scope of Bach’s activities by including organs best suited to his music. The instruments featured here, at venues including Haarlem, Groningen, Rötha and Dresden, are ones which Bach himself would have played, or which were built to his specifications.

Approx Duration: 55 mins

Picture format: NTSC 4:3 FF

Colour

Region Code: 2,3,4,5

Audio: L-PCM Stereo

Programme language: French

Subtitles: English, French, German

The first complete recording of Xenakis' string quartets, recorded in surround sound with full video.This body of work represents one of the most important contributions to music for strings of the post-World War II era.

The first new recording of Xenakis' first three quartets since 1994.

The only available recording of Xenakis' last quartet, 'Ergma', from 1994.

The first commercial release by the JACK Quartet, a young New York/Boston based group that has been garnering high praise for their performances of complex and challenging new music.The members of the quartet met while attending the Eastman School of Music, New York.The quartet has since studied closely with the Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Muir String Quartet, and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Liner notes by James Harley.

Surround Sound: the studio recording process was dynamically captured by a multiple camera shoot. Each quartet is given its own visual treatment. Directed by Tim Chu

“ I would never have expected to see a crowd at a downtown nightclub erupting with whoops after performances of four hypercomplex, cutting-edge string quartets by Iannis Xenakis. But in this setting these dense and kinetic works came across to this open-minded audience as just more hip, wild, out-there contemporary music." The New York Times, Sunday, December 21, 2008

“A Little Nightmare Music” is a unique show, full of virtuosity, enchanting music and zany, outrageous humour. This show is sure to captivate you and crack you up whether you’re a classical music enthusiast or the type who runs for cover, at the mere mention of Mozart.

“The funniest show on music and the life of musicians since the great Victor Borge. I couldn’t stop crying of laughter for the whole evening. Go see these gifted musicians. What they show is life at its funniest side. It isn’t just entertaining, it is hilarious!” Gidon Kremer, violinist

The original 1971 (uncut) intimate study with and about the legendary actor which, as he later admitted, was “the only portrait which really understood me”. Banned by the BBC at the time, this devastating film reveals the full tragedy of a man who had everything, but believed he had nothing. With contributions from RINGO STARR, RAQUEL WELCH, LAURENCE HARVEY, YUL BRYNNER, HARVEY ORKIN, KENNETH TYNAN, GRAHAM STARK and especially SPIKE MILLIGAN and other friends who loved him.

“Palmer’s extraordinary films not only keep faith with their subjects, but they do something altogether more unusual these days. They take an argument about what makes great art and present it to a mass audience, and do so with a passion and conviction which could have belonged to the subjects themselves. They are therefore quite marvellous portraits, unequalled on television.” GILLIAN REYNOLDS – The DailyTelegraph

On May 8th 1956, Look Back in Anger changed theatrical history. It’s a fact. But why? And in what ways? And could it possibly be true that Osborne wrote very little else of consequence, as some of his harshest critics maintain? And what exactly did his outbursts against the world in which he found himself really represent?

Osborne believed in an England which he saw successive governments destroying, and saw himself as almost a lone voice screaming protest - it was as simple as that. But this protest was maintained at a terrible cost, to his wives, to his professional standing, to his health, to his pocket, and eventually to his own self-confidence. He made an epic journey from the most successful playwright of his generation, to a forlorn and almost forgotten figure, railing at those who preferred to ignore him. But what was really extraordinary was that throughout that journey, he never lost the fiery power of tongues.

A unique aspect of this two-hour film is the recent discovery of extracts from some of the original stage performances of Osborne’s most famous plays, material of great historical importance not seen for almost 40 years. – Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer; Albert Finney in Luther; Nicol Williamson in Inadmissable Evidence; Robert Stephens in Epitaph for George Dillon; Jill Bennett in A Patriot for Me, with a very young John Osborne as Reidl. Apart from a behind-the-scenes look at Osborne’s Oscar-winning film, Tom Jones, other contributions are from David Hare, Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, John Heilpern (Osborne’s authorized biographer), Peter Nichols, Christopher Hampton, Jocelyn Herbert, Claire Bloom, Charles Wood, Kenneth Tynan, Tony Richardson, Natasha Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Peter Bowles, Ben Walden, Terence Frisby, Bill Bryden, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Page and the late Helen Osborne, with extracts from other plays performed by Peter Egan and Tom Hollander.