DVD Videos

How can you combine the Liebeslieder-Walzer of Brahms with Pétrouchka, Stravinsky’s ballet music? Quite simple: you focus on the inherently representational character of these pieces and create a synesthetic conception, as producers Johannes Lederer and Gyula Rácz do on this DVD.

The music of Pétrouchka is illustrated, not as it usually is by ballet dancers, but by the musicians and the music itself. The movements of the performers, their piano- and drum-playing hands, the operating instruments, the hammers striking the strings, the pedals and the sledges are one part of the visualisation. In addition, there are colours and animations showing the precise musical development of the composition, generated by a special computer program.

While Pétrouchka is visualized with technical elements, the realization of Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer centers on nature and feeling. The lyrics and the emotion of the music are presented with paintings, impressions of nature and human portraits.

Essential Ballet comprises two contrasting gala performances, showcasing the great Russian principal dancers of our time in excerpts from the most popular ballets. The first was a glittering occasion in 1992 at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, where the Kirov Ballet and Opera were welcomed back to the West, in the presence of Princess Diana.

The second was an extraordinary open-air gala staged in the same year in Red Square itself, witnessed live by tens of thousands of Russian ballet fans and televised worldwide.

Produced in 1965, this is the definitive profile of the great Russian composer/conductor Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Over eighty years old at the time of filming, Stravinsky was full of the joy of life, with an alert memory for people and events in music, literature and art.

Viewers will be treated to Stravinsky reminiscing about his remarkable life, travelling with his wife aboard ship en route to Hamburg and conducting the CBC Symphony Orchestra and the Festival Singers of Toronto in a recording of his Symphony of Psalms. A rare glimpse of the master and his extraordinary life, throughout which moved such legendary figures as Rimsky-Korsakov, Picasso, Rodin, Debussy, and Dylan Thomas.