This fun DVD time capsule captures all of the sights and sounds of 1948, including noteworthy news footage, fashion, fads, comedy, dance and musical performances, commercials, sports, science and lifestyle commentary, interwoven into a charming, nostalgia-inducing collage, guaranteed to evoke familiar, perhaps forgotten memories of simpler times. Perfect for birthdays, anniversaries, reunions, retirement parties, and retro slumber parties.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD
Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 is an incomprehensible wonder of music history, rigorously peculiar, disturbingly new, and timelessly modern. “Wie ein Naturlaut” (Like a sound of nature) is indicated above the first notes of the symphony. It is both the prelude and the key to his symphonic cosmos as a whole. Mahler captures this music of the world, transforms it into a symphony in the old, comprehensive sense of the word and uses it to create his masterpiece of harmony. Composed over the course of just a few months at the beginning of 1888 in Leipzig, this symphony is a true musical awakening. Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig bring Mahler’s sounds of nature to life in a riveting performance. This production was recorded live in January 2015 at the Gewandhaus zu Leipzig. As a bonus, this release also includes an exclusive interview with Riccardo Chailly.

Filmed in North and South Korea, "Inbetween", a film by Maria Stodtmeier, explores whether music can overcome the boundaries of a divided country. There is one figure representing the two Koreas, a figure whose life in itself forms a bridge between both worlds: Korean composer Isang Yun is one of the very few people acknowledged on both sides. The film traces the course of a life that has been interpreted in different ways, examining the worlds of North and South Korean music, taking the viewer on an exciting journey through two political systems that Isang Yun spent his life trying to reconcile. Since the establishment of ACCENTUS Music, Maria Stodtmeier has been involved in the enterprise as author, director and producer. Ms. Stodtmeier was co-director with Paul Smaczny on the documentary "El Sistema" (Grand Prix Golden Prague. "A composer cannot view the world in which he lives with indifference... Where there is pain, where there is injustice, I want to have my say through my music." - Isang Yun, 1983

A sonic innovator or an expert on chance? This documentary by Oscar-winning director Allan Miller and Emmy-winner Paul Smaczny pays tribute to the most fascinating American avant-garde composer. Shot in America, Germany and Japan, 'Journeys in Sound ' premieres rare archival footage and features associates of.

The story of Shakespeare’s star crossed lovers has been adapted and retold by composers, librettists, playwrights, and choreographers for centuries. Since the Renaissance, everyone seems to have put their own spin on the story. This release features Vincenzo Bellini’s frequently overlooked gem “I Capuleti e i Montecchi.” This work is unique in that it is not simply a retelling of Shakespeare’s story set to music. Rather, the opera tells the account of the last 24 hours in Romeo and Juliet’s lives. Desperation and melancholy draw to a tragic cataclysm as the young lovers choose to end their lives. This production, directed by Christof Loy and conducted by Fabio Luisi, originates in Zurich, and was wonderfully received by both audiences and critics. Joyce DiDonato dazzles in the role of Romeo alongside Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska, who plays Giulietta.

A sonic innovator or an expert on chance? This documentary by Oscar-winning director Allan Miller and Emmy-winner Paul Smaczny pays tribute to the most fascinating American avant-garde composer. Shot in America, Germany and Japan, 'Journeys in Sound ' premieres rare archival footage and features associates of John Cage and contemporary artists.

The first edition of The Creation by Joseph Haydn from 1803 is not composed with the German version of the world premiere in 1797, but the English version of the text which served Baron Gottfried van Swieten as a master copy. The release features a concert by Musica Saeculorum under the direction of Philipp von Steinaecker in the Cathedral of Brixen who used this English version of The Creation.

This 2 DVD set delivers two documentary films of the city of Neuville's school, which was created in 1973 according to the principles and philosophy of Francoise Dolto. The school hosts forty students and ten adults to supervise them. It is meant to be an alternative to the traditional school system with an attention to the participation of the students and their emancipation as human beings. These documentaries - that one can watch as a proper fiction - have been made by Fabienne d’Ortoli and Michel Amram, one of the founders of this school. In French (NTSC System with English subtitles).

Released to coincide with the reopening of France's national Gustave Moreau Museum, this DVD release from Fr�meaux & Associ�s features Nelly Kaplan's film presentation of the masterpieces housed within the museum. The DVD also contains three short films in which she presents the graphical works of Victor Hugo and Rodolphe Bresdin together with the famous Walter-Guillaume Collection at the Orangerie Museum in Paris.

The Baton, a documentary by Michael Wende, puts the conducting profession under the magnifying glass. In it, an animated character called the Baton-Designer follows twelve conductors who are participating in the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition. The film’s style, with its sharp cuts, tongue-in-cheek allusions and clever graphics, delivers humor and tension in equal measure. It is an entertaining and illuminating cinematic crash course on the conducting profession, featuring Herbert Feuerstein as the voice of the Baton-Designer.

65 Minutes
Dolby Digital 2.0 16:9
NTSC
Region 0
German & English

Directed by Anna Schmidt. Starring Julian Rachlin, Jonny Greenwood, Andrzej Wajda.

ABBA FOREVER: The Winner Takes It All is the multi-Gold Award-winning, definitive up-to-date telling of the ABBA story with all four members of the band in interviews and special sequences filmed with them, rare archive, and a feast of ABBA songs. It starts with their pre-Abba careers, then the inside story of how they conquered Eurovision (first in Swedish, then in English), and then how they've continued to conquer the world several times over. We see them in performance and even going into the sound studio to discover how the ABBA sound was created. We also explore Mamma Mia!, the stage hit, onstage and backstage. With Benny Andersson, Bj�rn Ulvaeus, Agnetha F�ltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Other guests include Bono (in interview and with U2 playing Dancing Queen onstage with Benny and Bj�rn), Donny Osmond, Barbara Dickson, Neil Sedaka, ABBA music engineer and wizard Michael Tretow (in interview and at the mixing board!), producer Pete Waterman, broadcaster Paul Gambaccini and more. ABBA and the guests illuminate how the songs came about, how they evolved, and what makes them so incredibly good. Songs include: Mamma Mia! Dancing Queen Super Trouper Waterloo SOS Fernando Ring Ring Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight) Does Your Mother Know Knowing Me, Knowing You The Winner Takes It All Thank You For The Music The Day Before You Came I Know Him So Well (from 'Chess') Money Money Money

In 1990, commissioned by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, veteran music film director Robert Mugge and renowned music scholar Robert Palmer ventured deep into the heart of the North Mississippi Hill Country and Mississippi Delta to seek out the best rural blues acts currently working. Starting on Beale Street in Memphis, they headed south to the juke joints, lounges, front porches, and parlors of Holly Springs, Greenville, Clarksdale, Bentonia, and Lexington. Along the way, they visited celebrated landmarks and documented talented artists cut off from the mainstream of the recording industry. The resulting film expresses reverence for the rich musical history of the region, spotlighting local performers, soon to be world-renowned, thanks in large part to the film, and demonstrating how the blues continues to thrive in new generations of gifted musicians.

This precursor to Monterey Pop and Woodstock is the granddaddy of all concert films, a chronicle of the 1958 Newport, Rhode Island Jazz Fest where music greats like Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Anita O'Day, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, George Shearing, Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, and Dinah Washington gave electrifying performances. Songs include "Blue Monk," "Sweet Georgia Brown," "Catch as Catch Can," "Tiger Rag," and more. 84 min. Standard; Soundtrack: English; audio commentary; bonus documentary "Bert Stern: Original Madman" (2011); more.

Jazz lovers everywhere couldn't wait for this 2019 documentary-and now, it comes to DVD. Many of the interviews featured here were conducted by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, a journalist who set out to write the definitive Billie Holiday biography but died under mysterious circumstances before it was completed. Linda's story intertwines with Billie's in intriguing fashion, joining interviews with Count Basie, Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett and more including FBI agents who trailed and arrested Holiday. You'll see rare footage of the jazz icon, too, newly restored and beautifully colorized. Greenwich Entertainment.

1956 was Elvis Presley's breakthrough year, and this program takes you back, including his early television performances on the Dorsey Brothers Show and the Ed Sullivan Show, and an entire hour of rare footage and performances captured during the amazing year when Elvis Presley became not only a star, but a phenomenon. So slip on your blue suede shoes, and step back to the beginning of an era, with rare, early recordings and never-before-seen footage. The reign of the King has just begun! Narrated by The Band's Levon Helm.

Also available on Blu-ray

SOLTI – Journey of a Lifetime Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Sir Georg Solti A film by Georg Wübbolt

Featuring:
Valerie Solti
Valery Gergiev
Christoph von Dohnányi
Sir Peter Jonas
Clemens Hellsberg
Ewald Markl
and many more as interview partners as well as several musical excerpts conducted by Sir Georg Solti

Bonus:
Dmitry Shostakovich: Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10
Sergey Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25, “Classical”
Modest Mussorgsky: Khovanshchina: Prelude

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Georg Solti, conductor

R E V I E W:

SOLTI: JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME • Georg Solti, cond; Chicago SO • C-MAJOR 711708 (DVD: 106: 00) A film by Georg Wübbolt

MUSSORGSKY Khovanshchina: Prelude. PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 1, “Classical.” SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 1. Live: Chicago 1977

What is Georg Solti’s place in the pantheon of podium titans? He gained celebrity when he led the first complete recording of Wagner’s Ring to be issued. He created a comparable sensation when he took over the Chicago Symphony and led that orchestra in concerts and recordings that dazzled with their brilliance, virtuosity, and tonal splendor. In the 1970s Harold C. Schonberg, the influential chief music critic of the New York Times , pronounced Solti and Karajan the two most significant conductors of the age, characterizing Solti’s sonority as “molten gold,” in contrast to the “silvery” Karajan sound. As is usual, extravagant acclaim soon led detractors to weigh in, and Solti’s recordings began to be criticized as crude, unyielding, over-driven, excessively muscular, and lacking in nuance and refinement. Although he holds the record for the number of Grammy awards, his many recordings of standard symphonic repertoire rarely turn up today on lists of preferred versions, and he did not make BBC Music magazine ’s list of the 20 greatest conductors, as selected by a poll of 100 currently active conductors. (Nor, astonishingly, did Otto Klemperer or Bruno Walter.)

The centennial of Solti’s birth in 2012 saw the release on DVD of two documentaries about his life and career. The other one, which I have not seen, was reviewed by Lynn René Bayley in Fanfare 36:3. It is nearly three times as long as the one under review here and apparently more thorough and detailed, with a lengthier supplement of complete performances. The C Major release combines a 52-minute documentary with 54 minutes of performances by the Chicago Symphony. Filmmaker Georg Wübbolt was also responsible for a documentary on Carlos Kleiber that I reviewed in 35:1. As in that earlier effort, he follows the standard technique of interspersing commentary by those who knew the conductor, worked with him, or followed his career, with clips from rehearsals and performances. Solti himself is much more of a participant in the commentary than was Kleiber, who stopped giving interviews early in his career. Wübbolt also follows his earlier practice of shifting rapidly from one commentator to the next, which generates a fast-paced narrative but also leaves loose ends and unanswered questions. As in his earlier documentary, there are issues one would like to have discussed in greater detail. It is also sometimes hard to keep track of the identities of the commentators and their connection to Solti, since they are often not again identified when they reappear. They include Solti’s widow, Valerie, Christoph von Dohnányi, who served as his assistant in Frankfurt, Valery Gergiev, and the critic Norman Lebrecht, along with musicians and officials of the Chicago Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Frankfurt and Munich opera houses, the Bayreuth Festival, and others. Considering the importance of opera in Solti’s career, the absence of singers with whom he worked from the ranks of commentators is surprising and regrettable. The film is mostly in German, with English subtitles, although there is some narration and comment in English. Solti himself speaks in German.

The documentary provides a succinct overview of Solti’s career: his musical training in his native Budapest under Bartók, Ernö Dohnányi, and Leo Weiner; his 1937 visit to Salzburg, where he met Toscanini and was recruited to serve as a repetiteur; his second meeting with Toscanini in Lucerne in 1939, on the eve of World War II, which resulted in his being stranded in Switzerland for the duration of the conflict. In postwar Germany, he finally had the opportunity to begin a conducting career, since most German conductors were temporarily barred by the victorious Allies from performing. He first headed the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where life for him was very difficult. The opera orchestra (“all Nazis” according to Solti) did not take kindly to being led by a young Hungarian Jew and showed it. In 1951 he moved to the somewhat friendlier territory of Frankfurt. His career took a giant step forward when producer John Culshaw selected him for the Ring project over more senior and established figures, perceiving him as someone who was more amenable to the demands of the recording studio and capable of achieving the results Culshaw envisioned for this ground-breaking effort. The Decca Ring is said to have led to Solti’s appointment to head London’s Royal Opera, although most of Ring operas had not yet been released when this selection took place. After his successful although controversial tenure at Covent Garden (1961-71), where he brought the company to “the highest international standards,” he had had enough of presiding over opera houses and wished to devote himself to symphony orchestras. As music director of the Chicago Symphony (1969-91), he perhaps reached the peak of his career, bringing the orchestra to a level of world-wide acclaim it had never before approached. Not so successful was his brief tenure with the Orchestre de Paris (1972-75), described in the film as “a terrible orchestra” where “no one goes…except for the money.” Curiously, the documentary does not mention his involvement with the London Philharmonic, which he led in the years 1979-83 and with which he recorded Elgar’s symphonies and several Mozart operas, among other works. When Karajan died in 1989 prior to the Salzburg Festival, Solti was urgently requested to take over the production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, which he did with some reluctance. Up to then he had never been invited to conduct at Salzburg or at the Berlin Philharmonic. There was no love lost between the two conductors, but they did listen to each other’s recordings to find out how the other was approaching a work. In Solti’s final years, he renewed his ties with Munich in guest appearances with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and returned to his homeland to lead the recently founded Budapest Festival Orchestra in a recording of works by his three teachers.

When the commentators attempt to characterize Solti’s style as a conductor, words like energy, vitality, and fire crop up repeatedly and are underscored by images of his abrupt, even violent movements on the podium. These movements, according to one observer, provoked orchestras to play loudly, and he had difficulty getting them to play more softly. In addition to fire, according to Gergiev, he possessed “icy control.” Other commentators mention his perfectionism, focus on detail, and special concern for rhythm, which are reflected in his practice of singing, or rather chanting, a passage to demonstrate how it should go. The Vienna Philharmonic cellist Werner Resel emphasizes and, I think, exaggerates the role of recordings in establishing Solti’s reputation, arguing that Solti “didn’t make a career by conducting concerts and delighting audiences but by making records that turned out to be great.” This gentleman apparently missed the decades in which Solti was thrilling audiences with his Chicago Symphony concerts, in Europe as well as the U.S. Peter Schmidl, another VPO musician, makes the surprising and demonstrably false claim that “Solti’s great career as a conductor became possible only when Böhm had stopped conducting and Karajan had died…and when Bernstein was no longer around,” in other words, in the last seven years of Solti’s life. The same observer, however, expresses regret that Solti was not called earlier to Salzburg, where he could have achieved great results.

The concert performances included as a supplement are drawn from a 1977 telecast featuring Russian music. The Khovanshchina Prelude is performed in Rimsky-Korsakov’s smoothed-out and comparatively bland revision. In the Prokofiev “Classical” Symphony, Solti’s weighty approach and the massive sound of the Chicago Symphony are perhaps not the best fit for this light and frothy music, but the piece is brilliantly played and enjoyable to hear. The fast-paced, forceful, and once again brilliantly played Shostakovich is the most satisfying item on the program. As was his practice, Solti tends to set a tempo and stick to it, without much inflection for expressive purposes, and with the solid, steady rhythmic underpinning that was one of his hallmarks. Others may bring more mystery and sense of underlying menace to this work, but with Solti the menace is quite overt. The sound is free from distortion, brilliant in tutti, and wide in dynamic range, if a bit opaque and lacking in spaciousness.

Returning to the question I posed at the beginning of this review, I have no definitive answer. Solti’s Ring , which has just been reissued in an expensive, hefty “super deluxe” edition and is said to be by far the best-selling classical recording of all time, retains its status, as does his Mahler Eighth, although even they are not without their detractors, as witness Lynn René Bayley’s unfavorable comments in 36:3. Solti’s legacy as an opera conductor, in Wagner, Strauss, Verdi, and, somewhat surprisingly, Mozart, seems to me secure. Although he was never one of my favorite conductors, he was one who engaged my interest, and I have a good many of his recordings of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and others on my overburdened shelves. I will retain these performances as having enduring value, even if they would not necessarily be among my first choices for the works in question. Solti remains a worthy contributor to the almost infinite variety of performance that enriches our experience of music. For those interested in his life and career, the Wübbolt documentary, despite the shortcomings noted, offers a concise overview with many insights.

FANFARE: Daniel Morrison

1977 Video Production

Picture format: NTSC 16:9 (documentary) / 4:3 (bonus)
Sound format: PCM Stereo
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Languages: English, German
Subtitles: French, Spanish, Korean
Running time: 52 mins (documentary) + 55 mins (bonus)
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)

Also available on standard DVD

Note: This Blu-ray Disc is playable only on Blu-ray Disc players, and not compatible with standard DVD players.

A film by Yosif Feyginberg

The date is May 2nd, 1957. Stalin died only four years before and perestroika is still a long way off. However, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who is just 24, arrives in Moscow for an exceptional tour: he is the first North American musician to play behind the iron curtain. This is the story that Glenn Gould in Russia tells by revealing documents from the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that had remained classified for years. Witness accounts from musicians such as Ashkenazy and Rostropovitch, parts of the original recordings of Gould’s concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, as well as a recording that had never been released before of his lecture-recital in Leningrad make this an invaluable documentary revealing an aspect of Glenn Gould’s artistry that few people are aware of.

DETAILS:

Picture format: 1080i High Definition
Sound format: PCM 2.0 (Historical material: Mono)
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, German, French, Korean
Running time: 60 mins
No. of Discs: 1 (Blu-ray)

In this biographical and musical road movie by Andy Sommer, Antoine Wagner heads to Switzerland on the trail of his great-great-grandfather, renowned composer Richard Wagner. In order to apprehend the composer's complex personality, Antoine Wagner returns to sites where his ancestor lived, meeting historians, musicologists, musicians, and enlightened amateurs, and exploring the landscapes that inspired Richard Wagner in one of his most artistically rich periods.

Also available on Blu-ray

A film by Yosif Feyginberg

The date is May 2nd, 1957. Stalin died only four years before and perestroika is still a long way off. However, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who is just 24, arrives in Moscow for an exceptional tour: he is the first North American musician to play behind the iron curtain. This is the story that Glenn Gould in Russia tells by revealing documents from the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that had remained classified for years. Witness accounts from musicians such as Ashkenazy and Rostropovitch, parts of the original recordings of Gould’s concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, as well as a recording that had never been released before of his lecture-recital in Leningrad make this an invaluable documentary revealing an aspect of Glenn Gould’s artistry that few people are aware of.

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM 2.0 (Historical material: Mono)
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, German, French, Korean
Running time: 60 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

R E V I E W:
GLENN GOULD: THE RUSSIAN JOURNEY • Glenn Gould (pn); various artists; Yosif Feyginberg (dir) • C MAJOR 714108 (DVD 56:00)

What could have easily been a dull and routine affair—after all, little film footage and few recordings exist of Gould’s historic May 1957 tour of the USSR—turns out to be a stunning and fascinating film that riveted my attention from first to last. Part of this documentary’s charm, and value, comes from the fact that Gould’s trip is explored in full detail, including his initial shock at not being able to sleep in a double bed and a postcard he sent back home to his dog! All of this, plus the warm reminiscences of the men and women who met him, acted as guides and/or translators, or heard him play, not to mention the actual voice of Gould himself recalling the ups and downs of his journey, adds layer upon layer to the story until you actually start to feel that you are watching a documentary made at the time, as if Glenn Gould himself had been able to participate in its making.

What caused such a furore? As this video tells us, part of it was the fact that Bach, so long a musical persona non grata in the Soviet Union for his strong association with religious works, came as a revelation to most of his Soviet audience. The hall for his first concert in Moscow—the complete Bach The Art of Fugue, a work most people had never even heard—was not even half full when he began. Partway through the first half, however, people ran out of the hall to pay phones and called friends, relatives, colleagues, and told them that they had to come down ASAP and hear this man. By the time the concert ended, the hall was packed, not only with breathless lay spectators but also with musicians, and the Russian audience went absolutely berserk. In ensuing performances, and there were several, Gould opened up his repertoire to include the other love of his life, composers of the Second Viennese School. He even gave a lecture-demonstration of their music before an audience of lay listeners, students, and even professors at the Conservatory. The entire Russian musical world seemed to want to absorb Glenn Gould like a sponge. As one of them put it, halfway through the concert-lecture on Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg, some of the students became restless; it was all a bit too new and foreign for them, and they begged him to play Bach. “We brought him back down,” the commentator said. But Gould responded positively to the rapt attention he received, and to a certain extent I think that it was upon his return to North American concert life that he became increasingly restless about performing in person because he felt that the majority of audience members were inattentive or only half-listening.

Yet his impact on the Russians, and theirs on them, went much further than just playing and talking to them. Sviatoslav Richter, at the time (as Gould relates) practically unknown in the West, went up to him after a concert, congratulated him, and invited him to one of his own. Mstislav Rostropovich then later recalls something that Richter had told him: “I can play Bach as well as Gould, but I won’t do it because it would take me too much time to rehearse it and too much concentration!”

Nowadays, there is a counter-reaction to Gould’s Bach. Once viewed as ultra-modern, crisp and unbelievably lucid in the revealing of the inner voices, it is now sometimes thought of as willfully distorted: the slow sections are played too fast, the fast sections even faster or too slow. Yet for others, Gould’s architectonic approach to the music remains miraculous simply because, for all its clarity and consistent tempo, it lives and breathes. It has feeling despite, not because, of its rapid pace. And that is what is often missing in the playing of modern-day pianists who approach Bach; yet all of them should be thankful to Gould for making it acceptable to play Bach on the piano and not only or always on the harpsichord or clavichord. The crisp, staccato sound of his particular Steinway model is forever etched in the minds of his listeners.

After Gould returned to Canada he was unable to go back to the USSR again; after 1964, the welcoming window of opportunity closed for a very long time. But he continued to talk about the Russians on his CBC television programs, to play their music (the video includes clips of him performing the Shostakovich Piano Quintet and a Prokofiev sonata), and to talk about the difficulties the Russian people faced under the Soviet system. He sent his recordings to them to be reproduced on the Melodiya label and continued to receive warm letters from those he had met and some he had not. It was, in short, a very cathartic experience for him, even if he did beg his doctor for “those little yellow pills” (valium) that calmed him down so he could take them on his trip.

This is a fascinating and extraordinarily well-put-together documentary of an exceptional trip, and time, in the life and career of an exceptional pianist. I highly recommend it.

FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Three masterworks by Kader Belarbi shine in these stunning Ballet du Capitole productions. Hailed by Le Figaro as ''simply magnificent: a miracle in two acts'', Le Corsaire is a bold reinvention of a 19th-century classic. La Bete et la Belle - a compelling reimagining of the classic fiary tale Beauty and the Beast - had its place affirmed among hte best of modern ballets by Belarbi's much-lauded production for Theatre du Capitole. La Reine morte, based on Montherlant's play of the same name and set to an enchanting score by Tchaikovsky, tells the tragic story of King Peter I of Portugal's devotion to his beloved Ines.

Classical Music

Also available on Blu-ray

Two unforgettable evenings showcase the artistry of Renée Fleming alongside Christian Thielemann’s mastery of the Austro-German Romantic idiom, as the Salzburg Festival honours one of its founding fathers, Richard Strauss, and the Staatskapelle Dresden draws on the deep well of its living Bruckner tradition. The mixed vocal and symphonic programmes feature five lieder by the prolific Austrian songsmith Hugo Wolf in addition to four of Strauss’s finest and an opera scene featuring Fleming in one of her career-defining roles, Arabella. At Dresden’s Semperoper, the Staatskapelle’s then newly appointed music director leads them in Bruckner’s lyric Seventh in which the composer mourns the death of Wagner, whereas in Salzburg, Thielemann helms the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for the spectacular mountain journey of Strauss’s titanic Alpine Symphony. Filmed in High Definition and recorded in true Surround Sound. "Thielemann, whose reading is satisfyingly spacious, reveals the work's structural mastery in intermingling and transforming its many themes. The excellent video director Michael Beyer expertly lays out the orchestra in front of us, following the music sensibly so that we can relish Strauss's detailed scoring...[Fleming] sings gloriously and the result is ravishing " (Gramophone)

This fascinating release of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 stands apart from any other recording of the work. This is the first time that the magnificent piece has been recorded in HD and 5.0 surround sound, offering the most outstanding sound quality available today. Christian Thielemann leads the Wiener Philharmoniker in this moving interpretation. “Thielemann’s reading of the Beethoven symphonies stands heads and shoulders above the countless and mostly undistinguishable versions on offer.” (Die Presse) This performance is accompanied by an hour-long documentary featuring the conductor and Germany’s foremost music critic, Professor Joachim Kaiser. The film provides insights into Beethoven’s thinking, as well as interpretal comparisons from conductors like Karajan, Bernstein, and Jarvi.

This is the definitive video biography of rock 'n roll legend Buddy Holly. Produced and hosted by former Beatle, Paul McCartney.