Stars: Colin Davies, Tamas Vasary, Gyorgy Sandor

Summary: Historic musical footage from selected archives featuring an insight on eighteen pianists including Rachmaninoff, Horowitz, Hess, Fischer, Arrau, Gould and Richter.

Using footage that was painstakingly collected over a two year period, THE ART OF PIANO features rare clips of eighteen amazingly talented pianists who reached career heights at the middle of the 20th century. Featuring legends like Rachmaninoff, Hofman, Horowitz, and Glenn Gould performing live and on film, the theme of the video is tied together through interviews and commentary by conductors including Sir Colin Davis and Daniel Barenboim.

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This is a feature-length, 106-minute documentary which presents in refreshingly straightforward fashion a portrait of 20th-century piano playing. The format is simple: short chapters on virtually all of the great pianists who have ever been captured on film, augmented by extracts from interviews, sometimes with the pianists themselves, or with later conductors and musicians of international stature, including specially filmed contributions from Daniel Barenboim, Sir Colin Davis, Egveny Kissin, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Tamás Vásáry. The narration by John Tusa offers an overview of piano music through the century, though the heart of the film is the great quantity of rare archive historic footage, with extracts from performances by Gould, Horowitz, Paderwski, Rachmaninov, Richter, Rubinstein and many others. The interviews are short, but offer considerable insight, while the film of so many revered pianists brought together is a literal eye-opener, especially for those who have previously only known these masters from LP and CD. This is, like the companion programme The Art of Singing, as close to definitive as can a single film can get, even going so far as to include footage from the "silent" era with sound from corresponding recordings.

On the DVD: There are no special features, though the booklet provides a useful, very detailed chapter breakdown, an overview of the film, photographs and short biographies of many of the pianists. Because all the archive footage was shot that way, the film is presented in 4:3 television ratio. The archive material varies considerably in picture and sound quality, ranging as it does from early black and white to colour television video footage, all in mono. The new interviews are letterboxed within the 4:3 frame and are in colour and stereo. --Gary S. Dalkin

Aspect Ratio:	4:3 Full Frame
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Audio Commentary - 1. English, 2. French, 3. German, Scene Access, Booklet
Subtitles:	English, French, German
Year:	2000
Release Date:	August 21, 2000
Runtime:	108 minutes
Certification:	Exempt.
Catalogue Number:	3984 29199 2
Label:	N V C Arts
Keywords:	Great, Art, Century, General, Entertainment, Piano, 20th, Documentaries, Biographies, Pianists
Genre:	Documentaries & Biographies