The Fellini, Jazz, and Co. concert wasperformed atthe Waldbuhne in Berlin. This is a famous outdoor theater for classicalmusicconcert performances. It is one of the most successful and largestvenues forsuch concerts in the entire world. Each concert has a huge gathering ofclassical music fans with audiences of 20,000 or more at these outdoorconcerts.The performance was done in collaboration with EuroArts and NHK.

This performance of the Fellini, Jazz, and Co.concertwas held on the 23rd of August in 2011 and was under conductor RiccardoChailly.This is a renowned conductor who is known for diverse selections inconcerts.This particular concert has an emphasis on film music with selectionsby filmcomposers...Read the entire review

Experimentum Mundi is an acclaimedcontemporary operacreated by Giorgio Battistelli. The work is considered a pivotal andimportantpiece in modern composition and is experimental with regards to styleand approach.The film version of this opera performance is directed by GiancarloMatcovich. Theoriginal performance of the Experimentum Mundi opera was firstperformedin the 1980's.

The whole concept of the opera is to focus on thesoundscreated by workers. The emphasis is entirely placed on workers who areusingtheir tools of craft and trade to make sounds. So the entire operaconsists ofa variety of professionals working with their tools to make interestingmusictogether.

The resul...Read the entire review

Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1927 musical play Show Boat is credited with switching Broadway musicals from revues and variety pieces to comedy dramas where the songs establish and support the characters and help tell the story. I learned some interesting things about this favorite reviewing the 1936 Universal film adaptation, a DVD I recommend to everyone not determined to hold out for a Blu-ray. Directed with impeccable taste by James Whale, that show featured the incomparable Irene Dunne, Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan, and pretty much marginalizes MGM's 1951 slimmed-down remake.

When I saw that an 'opera' version was being offered, I looked before I leaped. Some of the newer high-end productions of this kind can be glorified concerts that isolate the songs with a bi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Stéphanie Argerich has been making videos of her mother, famed classical pianist Martha Argerich, since she was a little kid in the '80s. This habit might explain the ease Martha has with Stéphanie's camera in the new documentary Bloody Daughter. Granted, Martha will frequently comment on the act of being videotaped by her daughter and sometimes pointedly suggests that it's often better to live a moment than to record it, but there is a distinct unguarded quality in her interactions with her daughter. In a couple of instances, Stéphanie is seen onscreen, being captured by another cameraperson. One of them is the opening of the film, where Martha is there for the birth of Stéphanie's second child. It is a boy, although Martha had hoped fo...Read the entire review

Pfitzner: Palestrina is Euroarts' release of Palestrina, an opera by Hans Pfitzner about the trials and tribulations of a depressed composer, that premiered in 1917. The language of the work is early 20th century couched in Romanticism. The usual review states that this is a romantic opera and that Pfitzner was against modern music. Careful listening will reveal many modern techniques amidst a backwash of Romantic harmony. At three and a half hours, this is also a heavy, often difficult piece of composition. Pfitzner is an excellent composer and wrote the libretto, obviously under the influence of Wagner, who also penned his libretti. This performance was captured at Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper in 2009. It is sung in German, and conducted by the Australian Simone Young.

Pfitzner based his work on the 16th century Itali...Read the entire review

Zubin Mehta - Los Angeles Philharmonic is a concert film with excellent sound and a chance to own a high quality video recording of historical importance. Zubin Mehta conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in works by Dvorak, Mozart, and Bartok. With Mehta at the helm the LA Phil metamorphosed the group into a world-class orchestra. Taped over three days in January of 1977, (one year before Mehta chose to become the conductor for the New York Philharmonic), the disc shows the virtuosity of the orchestra beautifully. The viewer experiences the power, elegance, and subtlety of this group from the first moments of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto, through the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, to the end of Dvorak's Slavonic Dance. For Mehta fans, the disc is a must buy as it reveals a great conductor in his early forties, full of style, grace, ...Read the entire review

Blu-ray has shifted the classical music video into a new realm, as is evidenced by the ready availability of opera recitals, soloists and orchestra concerts of every kind on various (usually European) labels. Videotaped in beautiful music halls, these performances reflect the tastes and desires of the musicians and conductors involved, reaching far afield of the classic pop concerts put on in venues like the Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl.

The Euroarts label has released a new disc called Achúcarro & Rattle: Nights in the Gardens of Spain. The disc combines two concerts from 2010. On September 7 of that year the Englishman Sir Simon Rattle conducted pianist Joaquín Achúcarro and the Berliner Harmoniker at the Berliner Philharmonie. Exactly one month later the pianist gave a longer solo concert at t...Read the entire review

A well-intentioned but not very good documentary about Venezuela's ambitious classical music programs for the nation's poor, El Sistema (2009) plays like an upbeat, impassioned pledge drive. Its founders and administrators are all saintly and selfless, the students are adorable and talented, the teachers hard-working and inspiring - but there's no story, no one to latch onto. It's a movie about large crowds instead of individuals.

Though presented in 1080i, El Sistema ("The System") looks great, with the densely-packed urban Venezuelan landscape contrasted with seas of children's smiling faces playing their various instruments in concert halls, where the 5.1 DTS-HD audio of the performances undeniably blasts impressively.

The Fundación del Estado ...Read the entire review

In the summer of 2007, after a concert of very un-Viennese Spanish zarzuelas with soprano Ana María Martínez, the regional government of Salzburg awarded a gold medal to the Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo. I was made curious by Medici Arts' Blu-ray disc of Amor, Vida de Mi Vida: Zarzuelas by Plácido Domingo and Ana María Martínez because I've been hearing about zarzuelas off and on for thirty years. A relative once sang them on Ecuadorian radio, and we still have full rack of rare old LPs from Madrid. This was a chance to get a real answer to the question, "What is a zarzuela?

Zarzuelas began in the 17th century in Spain as sort of an answer to Italy's opera buffa, operas with dialogue between songs. They're mostly musical romances, sometimes with...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The old adage "it's not what you know, it's who you know" could not find a better example than Max Lorenz, the famous Wagnerian Heldentenor who personified Bayreuth during the Nazi regime. As Max Lorenz: Wagner's Mastersinger - Hitler's Siegfried makes clear, had Lorenz not had the protection of Winifred Wagner, his career most certainly would have perished at the very hands of the movement for which he became a symbol. Lorenz, as was actually more or less known at the time, was gay, though as so many notable gay people did, he entered a marriage of convenience to a Jewish woman (his manager Lotte Appel). Both his sexual orientation and his wife's religion could have spelled certain death under different personal circumstances, but Lorenz' celebrity and connections to the Nazi "in crowd" instead catapulted him to the heights of German stardom during its most notori...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Well, sometimes even the jaded low expectations of your at times not-so-humble critic are upended and he is left wondering how he ever could have doubted in the first place. When I initially got this DVD of a 2003 "reworking" of Igor Stravinsky's monumental ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, I asked myself how anyone could have messed with the original conception, famously choreographed by Nijinsky under the overall direction of Diaghilev (putting aside for a moment the fact that Nijinsky's choreography was never notated to any great degree, leaving historians to ponder what that production might have really looked like). The 1913 premiere of the work notoriously ended with the audience rioting (and not in a good way), even as Nijinsky stood in the wings screaming out beats to the wildly fluctuating time signatures and tempi as his dancers sought to keep up with the primal musi...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Do any of you readers share a surname with someone famous? Does it ever irk you if you're assumed to be related? I grew up with a girl with the last name of Hitler and let's just say that, kids being what they can be, things were not always easy for the lass. I have to think that that same irksome quality nettled Richard Strauss, no relation to either of the "Waltz Kings," Johann Strauss pere et fils. In fact ever since my first exposure to Richard Strauss' monumental Der Rosenkavalier I have imagined the legendary composer locked away in his studio, pounding out gorgeous 3/4 melody after melody whilst declaiming in German, "I'll show those other Strauss whippersnappers how to write a waltz! This is how you write a waltz!" Of course, no such thing (probably) ever happened, and yet Der Rosenkavalier stands as the one operatic achievement of R...Read the entire review

The Movie:
North Korea may famously be part of a supposed "Axis of Evil," but I'll tell you one thing: they have the best dressed, most polite concert audience I have ever seen in my life. In fact, I thought the sound wasn't working when this Blu-ray, after some establishing shots, traveled inside the beautiful and mammoth concert hall in Pyongyang. There simply wasn't a sound to be heard. It wasn't until a hostess of sorts came out and gave some introductory comments about the New York Philharmonic that I realized this audience, unlike any I've ever experienced in either America or Europe, had been sitting there absolutely silently, waiting for the music to begin. Amazing (if slightly spooky).

This attempt to bridge cultural differences and introduce the isolated country to our softer, gentler side is an admirable idea. The New York Philharmonic taped this concert in February 2008, w...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Maybe once every couple of generations or so a figure emerges in one of the arts with such protean talents that he leaves pretty much all of his contemporaries, not to mention many who came before and most of whom come after, in his dust. Such a figure was undoubtedly Leonard Bernstein, a composer, pianist and conductor of such prodigious skill that he quickly achieved, and then easily maintained, iconic status in the not always as patrician as you might think world of classical music. This exemplary boxed set showcases Bernstein as a conductor (and pianist on one piece), giving a nice cross-section of material with the Maestro working with several different orchestras.

First up are two 1970s concerts with Bernstein's frequent collaborating orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic. Bernstein had famously gone to Israel to conduct during the war for independence, and his ties to the ...Read the entire review

The DVD:

For nearly half a century Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra enticed music lovers around the world with splendid performances. In a recently released by Euro Arts DVD the famous maestro is captured conducing works by Glinka (Ruslan and Lyudmila: Overture); Rimsky-Korsakov (Scheherazade, Op. 35), Handel (Concerto in D major, HWV 335a), Wolf-Ferrari (Il segreto di Susanna: Overture), and Straus (Der Rosenkavalier: Suite).

I hold in my hands a disc with five different performances that were recorded at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on June 24 - 26, 1977 and June 30 - July 1, 1978. The DVD is produced by a German team via Media Medici Arts.

The five pieces recorded for this disc provide a glimpse at the work of one of the most distinguished musical directors from the 20th century - Eugene Ormandy. Incredibly gifted, perfectionist, and impossible n...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Pity poor Anton Bruckner. This "simple" Austrian man, who wrote some of the most astoundingly modern music of the late Romantic period, had the misfortune not to be born with tyrannical tendencies or an ego the size of one of his symphonies. Frequently derided during at least his early compositional career as having a wild and harmonically senseless musical vocabulary, Bruckner later in life aligned himself with the Wagnerians, igniting the critical outrage of Eduard Hanslick, one of Vienna's most respected critics, and an avowed Brahmsian. So many people spent so much time giving Bruckner advice on how to "improve" his symphonies that the poor man spent decades revising and revising, leading to one of the oddest numbering systems ever for a major composer: Bruckner may be one of the few composers with a Symphony No. 0. Bruckner's spotty luck continued after his death, where a...Read the entire review

The Product:
Of all classical composers, he has the most symbolic storyline. As his work became more baroque and beautiful, scaling heights of epic sonic glory, the man's hearing slowing deteriorated. By the time of his last symphony, the glorious and moving No. 9, he was completely deaf. With his signature mop of hair and statutory clichés (his bust is always a representation of the artist as angry madman), he continues to cut a compelling figure. While films have been made of his life, cinematic records of his music are few and far between. Thankfully, countries like Germany have been presenting concerts of such seminal works, filming them for TV broadcast, and as a direct result, posterity. Thanks to DVD, we now have a chance to witness some of these shows - and the experience is unforgettable.

The Plot:
It contains the famous "Ode to Joy". It's represents the last completed...Read the entire review