DVD Videos

The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, held every year for two weeks in September, is renowned for an exceptional repertoire as well as unique meetings with first ranking soloists who do not usually meet each other on one stage in other frameworks.The Festival has achieved incredible success among Israeli audiences with concerts performed to packed halls. Medici Arts presents the highlights of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival 2008. Elena Bashkirova, the artistic director, says: "Our festival has grown into an internationally acclaimed event".

Bonus: Documentary about the Festival behind the scenes

Bonus - Pierre-Laurent Aimard in conversation with Jan Schmidt-Garre.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard was born in Lyon in 1957 and studied in Paris with Yvonne Loriod, wife of Olivier Messiaen, to whose music he is particularly close. Pierre Boulez appointed him as solo pianist to the Ensemble InterContemporain when he was 19 and he worked closely with Györgi Ligeti, who chose him to record his entire piano works. This extensive portrait-cum-concert DVD features Pierre-Laurent Aimard in conversation with renowned music filmmaker Jan Schmidt-Garre under the telling title Not Just One Truth. Recorded live at the Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich in spring 2008, the concert includes important and influential piano music from the Art of the Fugue and Beethoven's second last Piano Sonata No.31, written in 1822, along with works by the grand seigneur of American composers, Elliott Carter (*1908) and of George Benjamin (*1960), who studied under Olivier Messiaen. In the introductory portrait, scholar Christoph Wolff and composer Elliott Carter speak about music and Aimard's readings of it.Thus, the viewer is truly immersed in Pierre-Laurent Aimard's art of piano playing and comes to know one of the greatest contemporary pianists in concert, interview and documentary portrait.

"His technical facility is astonishing…Mr.Aimard's performance was lucid, subtle and delicate." New York Times