Leaving Home - Orchestral Music in the 20th Century

December 2005

“The series was one of the last intelligent contributions to classical music by British television and, even by 1996, one suspects that only a musician of Rattle's stature and determination could have got it made… 'Colour' centres more on the French innovators from Debussy and Ravel to Messiaen and Takemitsu. Where Leonard Bernstein's famous Norton lectures juxtapose solid blocks of talk and music, Peter West's direction is more teasing: we get the M25 at night for Boulez's Notation I as well as the usual shots of men in big hats walking too quickly around turn-of-the-century cities beneath Rattle's narrative.”