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We have two splendid audiovisual releases this month. The first is a film by Jan Schmidt-Garre that features Francesco Piemontesi’s probing interviews with fellow international pianists about the hidden dimensions that inform their distinguished performances. And from the Royal Ballet there’s a 3-disc box set of outstanding productions by Wayne McGregor, the company’s renowned resident choreographer, including The Dante Project, hailed as ‘bold, beautiful, emotional and utterly engaging.’ (The Guardian ★★★★★)
The Alchemy of the Piano
A film by Jan Schmidt-Garre
with Francesco Piemontesi
Antonio Pappano, Maria João Pires, Pianos
Ermonela Jaho, Soprano
Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a ‘wonderful Mozartian’, has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists – their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world’s leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria João Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, its colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff’s Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.
Also available on Blu-ray Video (NBD0186V)
The Wayne McGregor Collection
The Dante Project • Woolf Works • Chroma • Infra • Limen
Royal Ballet & OperaIn a showcase for the genius of The Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer, this collection brings together some of Wayne McGregor’s most outstanding and internationally acclaimed works, comprising Chroma, Infra, Limen (recorded 2008), Woolf Works (2017) and The Dante Project (2021).
The diversity of Wayne McGregor’s astonishing invention is demonstrated first through Chroma, Infra and Limen. Intimate yet universal, both light and dark, vigorous and lyrical, these three ballets reveal McGregor’s passion for exploring the inner workings of the human body and mind, providing visual, sensual and kinaesthetic stimulus for the viewer. In Woolf Works, McGregor’s first full-length work for The Royal Ballet, the distinctive stream-of-consciousness writing of Virginia Woolf takes new form in a work of luminous beauty. Inspired by another celebrated literary figure, The Dante Project follows an epic journey through the afterlife, a monumental reinvention of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, by turns terrifying, poetic and dazzling.
McGregor’s gift for collaboration lies at the heart of his practice and is demonstrated here with an extraordinary team of trailblazing artistic minds, including Thomas Adès, Lucy Carter, Tacita Dean, Julian Opie, John Pawson, Max Richter and Kaija Saariaho.
This collection also affords viewers a prized opportunity to admire the remarkable artistry of Royal Ballet dancers past and present.
Also available on Blu-ray Video (OABD7318BD)