The DVD I enjoyed most this month was Sony BMG Van Cliburn, Concert Pianist, a US TV film, narrated by Dan Rather, about the 1.93m Texan who in 1958 won the International Tchaikovsky Competition at the age of 23. It was the height of the Cold War, and a committee of commissars had tried to bar him from victory in favor of someone Russian. "Is he the best?" asked Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. "Then give it to him." He was presented the gold medal by Dmitri Shostakovich.
Van Cliburn's fame may have been partly political -- he played in the White House for every US president from Eisenhower to Reagan, and yet always said how much he loved both Russian culture and the Russian people. But what comes over on this film is his artistry, and how that preserved, even created, a lifeline between two great peoples when their hostility and rivalry could well have annihilated all life on the planet. This very moving DVD, which has the option of Japanese subtitles, comes with a CD of Cliburn playing in full some of the items featured in the movie.
Eight of the most famous pianists alive performing Richard Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries on eight Steinway grand pianos in a tent in the Swiss Alps is surely an unusual spectacle. It's surprisingly almost enjoyable as well, and definitely instructive with regard to the music's inner structure.
Martha Argerich, James Levine, Evgeny Kissin, Gidon Kremer, Mischa Maisky, Mikhail Pletnev, Emanuel Ax, Lang Lang and Sarah Chang -- the annual summer Verbier Festival manages to attract just about every classical celebrity. All of the above and more feature on the event's 10th Anniversary Piano Extravaganza, a DVD which has as its climax eight of them playing a Steinway piece simultaneously. As well as the Wagner, they also play a version of Gioachino Rossini's Semiradime overture and, just to show how serious the whole enterprise is, The Stars and Stripes Forever.
As Levine explains on the bonus feature, almost all the great composers created transcriptions for piano of their most popular orchestral works. These were made for domestic use by amateurs, but these days such things have fallen out of fashion. A few are resurrected here, however, and others were made specially to celebrate the festival's 10th birthday in 2003. And a line-up of some of the best-paid classical artists alive playing Happy Birthday to You is surely destined to become a popular track to accompany the cutting of the cake at many a birthday celebration.
There are times, it's true, when it seems as if the organizers have the Guinness Book of Records in mind rather than musical quality, and Levine himself refers to the problems of coordination in an eight-piano situation. But there are some serious items too. Martha Argerich (absent from the eight-pianist extravaganza) playing a Mozart piano sonata for four hands with Evgeny Kissin, and a JS Bach concerto for four pianos, are the musical highlights of this DVD.
For the rest, it's rather akin to a Three Tenors concert -- some of the participants must have been asking themselves why on earth they were doing it at all. Levine anticipates such skepticism by saying on camera that it was essentially fun to do, and hopes it was fun to listen to as well.
One of the advantages of the proliferation of DVDs featuring classical music is that you quickly get to know the major personalities of the music world. Figures who were merely names on CDs become recognizable people, albeit sometimes as they looked ten or more years ago. The reason for the time lapse is that there is a huge backlog of musical performances on video that are now being transferred onto the much more convenient DVD format.
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