John Cage: From Zero

BBC documentary exploring the dynamic relationship that developed between British composer Benjamin Britten and the BBC as they worked together to broadcast modern classical music further and wider. Through this collaboration, Britten's music reached television audiences, from elaborately staged studio operas to intimate duets featuring his partner Peter Pears to the massive Proms performance of his War Requiem. The programme features interviews with Britten's collaborators and singers as well as those working behind the scenes including Michael Crawford, David Attenborough, Humphrey Burton and soprano April Cantelo. James Naughtie narrates.

After the acclaimed Met premiere of Thomas Adès's "The Tempest" in 2012, the composer returned with another masterpiece, this time inspired by filmmaker Luis Buñuel's seminal surrealist classic "El Ángel Exterminador", during the 2017–18 season. As the opera opens, a group of elegant socialites gather for a lavish dinner party, but when it is time to leave for the night, no one is able to escape. Soon, their behavior becomes increasingly erratic and savage. The large ensemble cast tackles both the vocal and dramatic demands of Adès's opera with one riveting performance after another. Tom Cairns, who also penned the work's libretto, directs an engrossing and inventive production, using a towering wooden archway to trap the characters onstage. And Adès himself takes the podium to conduct the frenzied score, which features a host of unconventional instruments, including the eerie electronic ondes Martenot.

The film traces the career of some of the winners of this new generation nicknamed the "K-Classics Generation", including the 2 recent winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, the soprano Hwang Sumi and the violinist Lim Jiyoung. In Korea, where it all began, and in Germany where most of them have settled.

A documentary on the life and work of the composer Sofia Gubaidulina.

"Three Tales" is a video music work by American composer Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot. It is set in three "Acts", each depicting a technological advance of the 20th century and its negative implications on humanity: the dirigible airship Hindenburg and its explosion; the Atom Bomb and its testing on Bikini Atoll; and Dolly the sheep, first successful genetic cloning of a mammal.

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“Don’t ask me what I mean, ask me what I’ve made” – inspired by this motto, the documentary accompanies the American composer Alvin Lucier (1931 - 2021) on concert travels to The Hague (Netherlands) and Zug (Switzerland). Lucier explains and comments on his œuvre – from his early live electronics performances (MUSIC FOR SOLO PERFORMER,1965 and BIRD AND PERSON DYNING, 1975) up to the premiere of his ensemble piece PANORAMA 2 in 2011. One of Lucier’s key works, I AM SITTING IN A ROOM (1969), is introduced as a central structuring device in the film. At home in Middletown, Connecticut, Lucier offers rare insights into the beginnings of his pioneering works, his time as a member of the Sonic Arts Union, his relations with John Cage and David Tudor, as well as his teaching practice at Wesleyan University.

A cello piece A punt ride Thoughts about music and composition The eight lines of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s cello piece Sequenz 2 alternating with his thoughts about slowness, space, reduction, repetition, resonance, liveliness and emotion A cinematic continuum

Jo Kondo (*1947) is one of the most interesting composers of contemporary music in Japan. His music is composed intuitively and at the same time it is highly abstract. Without clear directionality and at the same time not without form. For a Japanese audience it sounds “Western” and in the West it is regarded “Japanese”. A music in between categories. Like Kondo’s music the film is shifting between places and directions: a concert in the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, an elaborate sushi bar in Tokyo, a CD-production in a Cologne radio station, the Zuisenji temple in Kondo’s neighborhood in Kamakura. Kondo wants his music to appear “normal”, without spectacular surface or narrative elements. A concept of “normality” you may also find in the films of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, who – like Kondo – spent most of his life in Kamakura.

Who gets the idea to write “Nine unfinished symphonies” - one of them perhaps the shortest Symphony in music history? Or "1001 sonatas’ - each lasting about a minute but in total being one of the longest pieces ever written? Like a postmodern Erik Satie the Belgium composer Boudewijn Buckinx is using music history as a playing field. The classical music audience is irritated, the avant-gardist wrinkles his nose... "Daisies in a Meadow" - that's how Buckinx described his "1001 Sonatas” for violin and piano, They play a leading role in our film, in the supporting roles the Spanish sun and the Belgian rain. The latter, however, did not show up at the set - just as you always have to be prepared for surprises with Boudewijn Buckinx. "Why is my music so simple? - Why is my music so complex?" With a wink, Buckinx gives various answers to these recurring questions. The portrait of an immensely productive artist who is radically taking his own path.

The first experimental dance film from Croatia, which pays homage to the pioneer of experimental and dance film Maya Deren and her "Study in Choreography for Camera" from 1945. The theme of the film is inspired by a composition by Ivo Malec "Miniatures for Lewis Carroll", and the dance is performed by the members of the Studio for Contemporary Dance who, in black suits and white surroundings, seem to float in the space captured by the eye of the camera.

The Opening of the Wells with music by the Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinu was supposed to be part of Laterna Magika II.: Tour programme in 1960. However, it was banned by the communist committee tasked with judging the performance from “a politically correct” point of view. The committee claimed that Radok’s manners and morals were behind the times, and that the director did not show the ultra-modern techniques of Czechoslovakian agriculture. The premiere was postponed and Radok was fired from the Laterna Magika Theatre. His young colleagues (including Milos Forman) were officially asked to finish the rehearsals without the controversial part, and to make other minor changes in other scenes (these changes were made). Alfred Radok considered this to an unforgivable betrayal, as he expected them to leave the theatre to support him.

Shot over the course of a year, this intimate portrait of provocative composer John Adams presents scenes of the artist at work and at play against the backdrop of dramatic American landscapes that reflect the themes of his music. Though he has a number of credits to his name, Adams is best known for his unconventional opera "Nixon in China," which explores the former U.S. president's meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.

Insatiable lust reigned over senseless flesh. Like august flies, trying to escape certain death, people before the apocalypse started to copulate, until every single one was completely exhausted. Only two people remained untouched. Having merged, like Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, in music that gave them eternal life, they wander timeless, empty spaces. Their destiny - to save humanity. But humanity means nothing to them. Main characters of the movie, Kirill Shirokov and Sasha Elina, are real musicians and founders of 'the same' ensemble, specialized in performing quite music related to certain space and time. During the film they perform music from ‘every day melodies’ series composed by Kirill Shirokov. The movie is the first part of mini-series discovering the territory of contemporary art music.

He is the most performed contemporary composer in the world. And yet he rarely ventures out in public, prefers to keep quiet about his music, feels at home in the forests of Estonia and generates therewith - perhaps involuntarily - the impression of a recluse, which is attributed to him again and again: Arvo Part. In The Lost Paradise, we follow him over a period of one year in his native Estonia, to Japan and the Vatican. The documentary is framed by the stage production of Adam's Passion, a music theater piece based on the Biblical story of the fall of Adam featuring three key works by Arvo Part. The world-renowned director Robert Wilson has brought this work to the stage in a former submarine factory in Tallinn. Tracing their creative process, the film offers rare and personal insights into the worlds of two of the most fascinating personalities in the international arts and music scene.

Like many of John Adams’ operas, Doctor Atomic is based on recent world historical events—here, the effusive Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” anxiously awaits the bomb’s first test in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Adams adapted the work into a symphony, comprising its three main acts. In the second half of the program, Adams conducts his 2015 violin concerto, Scheherazade.2, which restages the tale of the One Thousand and One Nights heroine as a strong woman navigating a patriarchial society, incarnated by the solo violin part. The work was composed specifically for Canadian-American virtuoso Leila Josefowicz and co-commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, who perform it to perfection. The evening then closes out with Tromba Lontana, an orchestral fanfare written to mark the 150th anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836.

This seminal work of avant-garde opera from composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson arrives full-circle, coming to France, the site of its 1976 Avignon Festival world premiere, at the tail end of this 2014 revival tour for a landmark Theâtre du Châtelet production and a first ever filming by award-winning arts filmmaker Don Kent. Eschewing conventional narrative, the opera revolves loosely around pacifist Einstein’s relationship to the creation of the atomic bomb.

An opera based on the life of celebrity and actress Anna Nicole Smith.

Composer Nico Muhly unveils his second new opera for the Met with this gripping reimagining of Winston Graham’s novel, set in the 1950s, about a beautiful, mysterious young woman who assumes multiple identities. Director Michael Mayer and his creative team have devised a fast-moving, cinematic world for this exhilarating story of denial and deceit, which also inspired a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard sings the enigmatic Marnie, and baritone Christopher Maltman is the man who pursues her—with disastrous results. Robert Spano conducts.

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