DVD Videos

‘San Francisco Symphony at 100’ celebrates the orchestra’s centenary in style.

With Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas at the helm and featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman, the DVD also includes vignettes documenting the orchestra's origins and its first 100 years.

San Francisco Symphony at 100 documents the glorious festivities of the orchestra’s centenary year, celebrated at the orchestra’s extravagant 2011-12 season opening night gala concert. With Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas at the helm, the evening symbolised the orchestra’s heritage, its importance in the life of the city as well as the American and international musical landscape, and highlighted supreme American musicians as well as the virtuosic members of the orchestra. The programme opens and closes with two American compositional giants - Aaron Copland and John Adams. The great violinist Itzhak Perlman unleashes his virtuosity on Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and the orchestra members shine in Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

Interspersed are documentary vignettes - hosted by Amy Tan (author of the famed Joy Luck Club) - tracing the history of the Symphony which like a phoenix rose out of the ashes of the city’s devastating earthquake in 1906, revitalised San Francisco’s cultural life and quickly set the orchestra on the world’s musical stage.

Special Features

Documentary vignettes tracing the San Francisco Symphony’s history. Narrated by Amy Tan. Produced by Janette Gitler.

DVD specifications

Region: 0 (All Regions)

Rating: E (Exempt)

Picture Format: NTSC (all regions), widescreen, HD video

Sound format: Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1

Run time: 2:26:30

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is best known and loved for the hugely popular compositions he wrote 1936-49, such as Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo. He was one of the first to capture the essence of American life in sound. Together with Gershwin, Ives and Bernstein, he created music that mirrored the world in which he lived.

This documentary looks at how a sassy New Yorker of Russian-Jewish background came to write the infectious and accessible music that established a distinctive American idiom.

“Fanfare for America” surveys his life and career with archive fi lm and specially-shot footage as well as music extracts from his works. An interview with Copland is included and his biographer, Howard Pollack, and American conductor Hugh Wolff, a leading exponent of his music, both contribute to the programme. The film shows a clip of Benny Goodman playing the Clarinet Concerto he commissioned from the composer, as well as footage of Leonard Bernstein conducting the patriotic Lincoln Portrait for speaker and orchestra, and of Martha Graham dancing in Appalachian Spring.

Andreas Skip cinematic approach to documentary making gives this profile of Aaron Copland great style and visual appeal.

“Whether nervy or calm, harsh or homely, Copland’s scores bounce, ring, vibrate and shine like nobody else’s.” BBC Music Magazine

“It is futile to say: may he live forever! Of course he will.” Leonard Bernstein

Made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair (“The World of Tomorrow”), The City is a seminal documentary film distinguished for the organic integration of narration (scripted by city planner Lewis Mumford), cinematography (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke), and music (Aaron Copland).

The score, arguably Copland’s highest achievement in film, was also his ticket to Hollywood; it has been called “an astonishing missing link not only in the genesis of Copland’s Americana style but in American music and cinema” Mark Swed, The Los Angeles Times

As the film contains no dialogue, it is possible to create a fresh soundtrack and discover musical riches inaudible on the original monaural recording.

As Copland created no suite from The City, the present DVD at the same time marks the first recording of this music in its entirety other than the original film.

Special Features include:

- The City with the original soundtrack (1939) featuring Morris Carnovsky (narrator) and an orchestra conducted by Max Goberman

- Which Playground for your Child: Greenbelt or Gutter (a documentary film from the Greenbelt Museum featuring interviews with three Greenbelt “pioneers”

- George Stoney in Conversation with Joseph Horowitz (2007) a legendary documentary film-maker revisits The City

Recorded at Dekelboum Concert Hall, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, 15 October 2007

Aaron Copland's music reflects the transformation of the American experience that took place during his lifetime. Born in 1900 in Brooklyn, he witnessed the wild confidence of the Jazz Age, the fears of the Great Depression, and the rallying of the nation as it entered World War II. His ideal was to write music that would express how it felt to live those experiences.

Copland wrote classical music in his own special way. He transformed it to capture the energy of American's bustling cities and the vast quiet of its empty plains. He created a musical style that evoked the diversity of the American people. The sounds of Jewish music, African-American jazz, folk songs, cowboy ballads, and Latin American dances all played their parts in his compositions, which he hoped would bring people together in times of crises.

Today, Copland's music seems comforting and celebratory. Sixty years ago it was a wake-up call that gave Americans a critical sense of their own identity.

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony explore the music of Copland and the cityscapes, landscapes, and social and political developments that shaped it.

Though Marilyn Horne is known mostly for her virtuosic operatic roles, she is a superb recitalist who can scale her powerful voice down to the more intimate requirements of the recital stage. In 1981, she appeared at Milan’s La Scala opera house in a recital consisting of music by Italian, German, Spanish, French and American composers. Horne was in particularly superb form that evening, partnered brilliantly by Martin Katz at the piano. 93 minutes, color, mono.

The 2005 Miami International Piano Festival featured the Festival debut of a thirteen-year-old pianist who not only sailed through a demanding program, but also proved herself capable of music-making on an exalted level. VAI is proud to present Ms. Cheung’s recital, taped 14th April, 2005, at the Amaturo Theater, Broward Center for the Performing Arts. Color, stereo, 76 minutes.