Hi everyone,
Time for another spotlight! I’ve mentioned that I have a lot of respect for pianist Sviatoslav Richter, and I thought I’d start this week by spotlight a great starting album to start exploring his playing. iTunes has his ‘Greatest Piano Works‘ for $4.99 (US)… With almost 5 hours of music, it’s a pretty insane deal :)
The album has bunch of piano concertos (Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and more) plus Schumann and Rachmaninov solo piano works. I know that a lot of countries can’t use the iTunes store, but if you can this is a great deal. The album also has Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, which segues nicely into the second item on today’s spotlight –
Vitus is a film by director Fredi Murer which tells the fictional story of Vitus, a child prodigy on the piano. Set in Switzerland (subtitles – mainly Swiss-German being spoken) and featuring a beautiful performance by Bruno Ganz as Vitus’ Grandfather, I don’t want to say too much about the story except to say you should definitely watch it.
What puts the film over the top for me, though, is that 12 year old Vitus is played by a real pianist, Teo Gheorghiu (12 at the time). So often in any film about music you have to suspend belief as [famous actor] pretends to play. So it’s a real treat to have the actor performing, and Teo knocks it out of the park with some beautiful playing.
One of the pieces heard throughout the movie is the Schumann concerto (aha!) – and a fun tidbit is that apparently they couldn’t afford to rent a hall, orchestra, and extras for the audience – so instead put on an actual concert, with paying audience, and not only got the shots they wanted, but turned a profit! :)
Again, highly recommended both for the story and the music.
And finally, a YouTube video of Anna Russell‘s iconic ‘Ring of the Nibelungen‘ talk. If you’ve never seen Anna Russell before, you definitely owe it to yourself to watch this. She was a comedic soprano who, well, just go listen!
That’s it for this week, see you next Sunday