Christopher Nupen Films: A08CND

Itzhak Perlman - Virtuoso Violinist

This DVD contains three productions from Christopher Nupen’s famously comprehensive portraits of leading performers: the portrait film, Itzhak Perlman: Virtuoso Violinist (I know I played every note) and two memorable performances of Bach partitas shot live, on stage, at a concert in London where this polyfaceted artist is at his best. It also contains two sequences in which Itzhak Perlman looks back. The first of them, The Trout Remembered looks at the making of the film The Trout, probably the most frequently broadcast classical music film in the history of television and one which has become the lasting emblem of a great age in music. The second, made especially for this DVD, Jacqueline du Pré Remembered recalls a friend who was very close for many years, a colleague with whom he made chamber music in many places and an artist and personality for whom he has an unbounded admiration and an enduring affection. Itzhak Perlman is one of the world’s leading musical performers, famous all over the world not only as a virtuoso violinist of the highest rank but as a much loved television personality, an honoured guest at the White House and an extremely effective spokesman for the disabled, having been handicapped himself by polio since the age of 31/2. All of these things together, plus a famously lighthearted ebullience, have won him a particularly affectionate following.