Mozart and His Music

The Arod Quartet: Ménage à 4

2023

Ten years of hard work have made the young Arod Quartet one of the most brilliant of its generation. For it takes years to blend together 4 individual talents into one. Their repertoire is ranging from Mozart to Bartok, Debussy to Kurtág.

Once Upon a Time Michel Legrand

2024

Michel Legrand, jazz musician and composer extraordinaire, has left his mark on the history of cinema, including the films of Jacques Demy, especially The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the 60th anniversary of which is being celebrated in Cannes. Using never-before-seen archives and personal accounts, the film looks back on a lifetime dedicated to music, and the career of a man who served it masterfully to the very end.

The Winners

1999

A searching, melancholy Dutch documentary about the lives of four classical musicians who won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, a victory that did not prove a guaranteed ticket to the top of the classical music world.

Famous Composers: Joseph Haydn

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Joseph Haydn is renowned for taking the established forms of the symphony and string quartet and shaping them into the powerful media for musical expression that they became thereafter. He brought symphonic traits to the piano sonata and was a master of chamber music. His masses and choral works also continue as standards in the concert repertory, and his operas are highly valued. These informative programs are a concise overview of the composer's life and times, filmed on location in the cities and places that influenced their works. Also included in a detailed list of each composer's most significant musical compositions.

Benjamin Britten and His Festival

1967

A behind-the-scenes look at the Aldeburgh Festival and the opening by The Queen of the new concert hall at Snape.

Hudba Svetozár Stračina

1982

The Italian Character: The Story of a Great Italian Orchestra

2013

The Italian Character: a film within music and about music. The Italian character is the story of one of the most renowned orchestras in the world, enriched by archive material of the last thirty years about the great conductors who have been performing on the most famous rostrum in Rome.

What Would Beethoven Do?

2016

Classical music doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being hip. For too long it’s been seen as a stuffy genre for the high cultured elite. WHAT WOULD BEETHOVEN DO? follows a number of renegades, from composers flirting with modern mediums, to young musicians dedicated to changing the narrative, to a man who’s bringing turntablists and orchestras together. Notable artists such as, Bobby McFerrin, Benjamin Zander and Eric Whitacre add their voices to the debate about why classical music is still relevant today.

Ode to Joy: Beethoven's Symphony No. 9

2016

Showcasing a musical masterpiece in a rare full-length television recording by the Vienna Chamber Orchestra with the Westminster Symphonic Choir, under the direction of conductor Mark Laycook. An introduction to the performance, narrated by actor John Lithgow, gives a unique perspective on music history.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphonie Nr. 9 - Leipzig, Paris, Mailand, Wien

2024

O, Fortuna! A portrait of the composer of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff

2011

Herbert von Karajan, Symphonie n°5 Beethoven

1967

The Bolero

1973

The first part of this Academy Award-winning short consists of a behind-the-scenes look at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra as it prepares to perform Ravel's "Bolero." Individual musicians offer their thoughts as workers set up chairs and music stands; there are also comments by conductor Zubin Mehta and scenes of Mehta and the orchestra rehearsing. The rest of the film features a complete performance of "Bolero" with striking images of the orchestra as the music relentlessly approaches its climax.

The Strauss Fantasy

1954

Johnny Green leads the MGM Symphony Orchestra in a medley of waltzes and other familiar pieces by three members of the Strauss family. Filmed in CinemaScope.

The Unanswered Question IV : The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity

1976

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Bernstein provides two distinct meanings of the term ambiguity. The first is "doubtful or uncertain" and the second, "capable of being understood in two or more possible senses"