Also available on standard DVD

Rossini wrote L’equivoco stravagante (‘The Curious Misunderstanding’), his first full-length opera, when he was only 19 years old. As its title suggests, the plot of this dramma giocoso offers a panoply of absurdist stagecraft with one character being led to believe that the work’s heroine is in fact a castrato trying to avoid military service. Full of his trademark buffo humour, melodious and musically buoyant, the opera ran foul of the censors and was swiftly banned, which accounts for its rarity in performances and recordings. The new edition of the score used in this production corrects numerous previous errors.

To this day, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is one of the most popular pieces of classical music in the world. But what is it about this global hit? The film charts the success of the symphony around the globe and encounters passionate amateur musicians and musical personalities. Watch as Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis works on Beethoven’s Ninth with his ensemble, MusicAeterna. Follow Chinese composer and Oscar winner Tan Dun as he creates a new composition inspired by the great Beethoven symphony. Experience the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as they play the Ninth. Visit a favela in Brazil, where Beethovens’s music helps people get off the streets. Be amazed as a choir of 10,000 in Japan sings the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with great enthusiasm. Learn how Paul Whittaker helps make Beethoven accessible for deaf people. And find out how British DJ Gabriel Prokofiev performs a symphonic remix of Beethoven’s Ninth.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra celebrates its 20th anniversary by giving a concert at the Berlin Philharmonie with world-renowned artists: Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-Yo Ma perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto together with Maestro Barenboim and the young musicians. Yo-Yo Ma, who played with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at their first concert 20 years ago, and Anne-Sophie Mutter, who made her debut with the orchestra only this year, were named as honorary members of the orchestra on the occasion of this event. “It is fascinating to experience how brilliant, concentrated and at the same time relaxed these three world stars make music together and listen to each other. A masterpiece of harmony“ (RBB24). The second part of the concert features Bruckner's 9th Symphony, transcendental music which the composer himself dedicated to “the dear God“. The symphony is unfinished not only because Bruckner died during the process of composition, but especially because it seems to perish in nothingness. The musicians of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are excellently prepared and play technically and tonal flawlessly. A magic moment.

Also available in Blu-ray!

Rameau’s first opera Hippolyte et Aricie delivered a lyrical tragedy of such extraordinary intensity it changed the course of French music, stunning and overwhelming its audiences. This breathtaking spectacle involves prince Hippolyte, who asks his mother-in-law Queen Phédre for help in wooing the beautiful Aricie, little knowing that Phèdre secretly wants Hippolyte for herself. In a single work Rameau re-invented tragédie en musique with dramatic expressiveness and shocking harmonic innovations. It is seen here in an acclaimed Opéra Comique production that personifies Rameau’s assertion that ‘music must speak to the soul, its true aim must be to express thoughts, feelings, and passions’.

“Dvořák's New World Symphony - A Lens on the American Experience of Race”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film one in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

The six documentary films in this series align with Joe Horowitz's new book 'Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music'. Like the book, they explore a “new paradigm” for the history of classical music in the United States. Why classical music in America “stayed white” is a central concern of Dvořák’s Prophecy." The films incorporate Naxos recordings as well as live performances, including William Sharp singing Ives, Kevin Deas singing Harry Burleigh, and Dennis Russell Davies conducting Harrison’s Piano Concerto. Participating commentators include critic Alex Ross, Black Classical Music pioneer George Shirley, music historians Bill Alves, Beth Levy, and Judith Tick, and the African-American conductors Roderick Cox and the late Michael Morgan.

 This first film in the series keys on Dvořák’s prophecy and explores its present-day pertinence. In New York City and Spillville, Iowa, Dvořák boldly chose to regard African-Americans and Native Americans as representative Americans. That decision was both acclaimed and ridiculed at the time. It remains inspirational. His New World Symphony, still the best known and best loved symphonic work conceived on American soil, is saturated with the influence of plantation song, and also with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. This act of appropriation, the film argues, was an act of empathy performed by a great humanitarian. The musical selections here are mainly taken from the Hiawatha Melodrama, which Joe Horowitz co-composed with the music historian Michael Beckerman with orchestrations by Angel Gil-Ordonez. It mates Dvorak with Longfellow. The participating commentators include the music historians Mark Clague and Lorenzo Candelaria, the literary historian Brian Yothers, the conductor JoAnn Falletta, faculty members from Howard University – and also (sagely commenting on cultural appropriation) the bass-baritone Kevin Deas, and the late Michael Morgan.

"Horowitz's six beautiful films reveal a compelling inclusive tradition in American classical music, open to influences from popular, Black, Native American, and world music, this music is deeply interwoven with American culture." – J. Peter Burkholder, author of A History of Western Music and Listening to Charles Ives.

“Beyond Psycho - The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film five in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Hollywood’s supreme film composer was a casualty of the standard narrative - as he himself was bitterly aware. Not only were his movie scores high creative accomplishments; Bernard Herrmann was a formidable- and formidably unfashionable- concert composer whose Clarinet Quintet may be the most beautiful chamber music by an American. His Psycho Narrative, which we also sample, surpasses the Psycho Suite we normally hear. He honed his gift for dramatizing the spoken word as the pre-eminent composer for a genre no longer remembered: the radio drama. This film samples Whitman (1944) – a Norman Corwin radio play that deserves to live as a concert work. It also exemplifies how radio, an unprecedented mass medium, once consolidated the American experience, its biggest star being Franklin D. Roosevelt. Participants include the Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, the critic Alex Ross, Murray Horwitz on radio lore, and William Sharp on playing Walt Whitman to music by Bernard Herrmann.

“Charles Ives' America”
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film two in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Steeped in nostalgia, in his Danbury childhood and the New England Transcendentalists with whom he profoundly identified, in the American experience of race which he absorbed from his Abolitionist grandparents, Ives used the past with consummate empathy and brave artistry. A musical Whitman or Melville, he embodies the American trope of the “self-made genius,” heeding Emerson’s call to cut the cultural umbilical cord with Europe, forging an original path. The music at hand here includes his Second Symphony (a milestone in culling the vernacular to set beside Huckleberry Finn), The Housatonic at Stockbridge (possibly the most sublime nature reverie in the American orchestral repertoire), and The St. Gaudens in Boston Common (a singular ghost dirge in tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Black Civil War regiment). We also hear portions of Ives’s Concord Sonata performed by Steven Mayer (an interpretation seasoned by a lifetime of advocacy) and half a dozen Ives songs peerlessly sung (in live performance with Paul Sanchez) by William Sharp. The commentators include the Ives scholar Peter Burkholder, James Sinclair, William Sharp and Judith Tick.

‘Charles Ives’ America may be the most important film ever produced about American music. Horowitz moves Ives from the fringes squarely to his position as the seminal composer of our country’ – JoAnn Falletta, Music Director, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.