Rose Sellars is a middle-aged woman who falls in love with a widower. However, his children believe that their father is too old to start a new relationship.
This autobiographical film about the most important and influential composer of the 20th century includes documents, photographs and film never seen publicly before. Stravinsky's three surviving children talk about their father and there are contributions from the late Madame Vera Stravinsky, his...
O Thou Transcendent: The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams
02007HD
Award-winning filmmaker Tony Palmer directs this riveting documentary on the life and times of influential English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. With archived performances by conductor Sir Adrian Boult and stirring musical passages from "The Tallis Fantasia" and "The Lark Ascending," among...
Toward the Unknown Region: Malcolm Arnold - A Story of Survival
02004HD
A documentary portrait of composer Malcolm Arnold. Broadcast in two parts on The South Bank Show but premiered in its entirety at the Royal Festival Hall
A biographical look at the career of the acclaimed Margot Fonteyn. As a little girl called Peggy Hookham growing up in Shanghai, she told her mother she would one day become the greatest dancer in the world. Still performing at the age of 67 despite being almost unable to walk, hers is a story of...
Documentary covering the famous Wigan Casino northern soul venue and the working class kids who spend all their money not on alcohol but on records and dancing all night.
Explores the life and career of American soprano Renée Fleming. Share an intimate visit with Renée behind the scenes, at home and on stage as she rehearses and performs in Verdi’s Otello and Requiem, and sings Strauss, Mozart, Dvorák, Korngold, Ellington, Gershwin, Puccini, Massenet, and...
The great composer of The Planets, Gustav Holst also taught himself Sanskrit, lived in a street of brothels in Algiers, cycled into the Sahara Desert, and allied himself during the First World War with a ‘red priest' who pinned on the door of his church "prayers at noon for the victims of...
This emotional film by the award-winning director Tony Palmer includes a performance of the “Third Symphony” by The London Sinfonietta alongside powerful footage of Górecki at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
This is Palmer's highly controversial portrait of Brahms - a film that exploded the familiar image of 'stodgy old bearded Brahms' - a man whose first musical experience had been playing an upright piano in the brothels of Hamburg where he had grown up, and who at the end of his life lived a...
There's no doubt that Richard Wagner who built it was the most influential composer in the whole of the 19th Century. But his family has survived a mixture of lies, deception, fraud and dangerous political alliances.
