It is not an account of events in an artist’s life, nor is it a critical examination of his music, which speaks more eloquently for itself than any words might do. It is an attempt at using the medium of film to echo something of the spirit of…

Jacqueline du Pré had a very unusual and elevated relationship with the Elgar 'cello Concerto. For critics and public alike, her performances focused new attention on the inherent pathos in Elgar's melancholy masterpiece and had a ringing authority…

This live recording captures the memorable occasion when these two famous jazz pianists met for the first time in the Kongressaal during the Munich Klaviersommer 1983. On two pianos, they play an exciting version of Round Midnight.

A television film about a single work, Modest Mussorgski’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”. Written as a tribute to a lost friend, Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann, it is a strange and moving masterpiece which has become Mussorgski’s most popular work. It…

The three Sonatinas Opus 137 were written in 1816, one of Schubert’s happiest and most prolific years. He modelled them on the Sonatas of Mozart, but they are full of unmistakable Schubertian lyricism which was much admired by Brahms. The arpeggione…

At the close of the 19th century, Vienna presented to the world a picture of ordered elegance and dignified gaiety, but beneath the surface the corruption and hollowness of the late Hapsburg Empire produced widespread and deep-seated confusion and so…

A retrospective view of twenty years in the life of this Soviet-born master pianist who has lived in the West since 1963. We have been producing films and television programmes with Vladimir Ashkenazy since 1966 and this one spans the entire period…

This is the first of two films about the music of Tchaikovsky, written and directed by Christopher Nupen. It covers the period from the first tentative stirrings of Tchaikovsky's musical talent to the time of the composition of Eugene Onegin and the…

This is the second of Christopher Nupen's films about Tchaikovsky and it continues his examination of Tchaikovsky's preoccupation with the idea of fate as a governing force in our lives. The first film (Tchaikovsky's Women) focused on the young…

This is a film in two parts with one of the finest performing musicians of the 20th century; an artist whose career spanned 73 years and who won the admiration and respect of virtually every international musician of his time and their genuine…