 | From the very beginning, cinematographers - including the makers of silent movies - have had an oddly close relationship with music: one of the more paradoxical examples is the vogue for filming operas, without sound, which began in the 1910s. Much later, in the 1950s, the infant television channels made programmes which would enable their viewers to "see" concert performances or, conversely, invited musicians into the studio to play their favourite pieces.
Initially filmed in 16 and 35 mm, then (from the late 1960s) in the earliest video formats, these often outstanding recordings of studio and live musical performances were perhaps the purest expression of the cultural remit of the public-service broadcasters of the day.
In France, these programmes occupied an essential place in broadcasting schedules from 1958 to 1974, with titles such as Les Chemins de la Musique, Les Grands Interprètes, Jeunesses Musicales de France, Initiation à la Musique, La Musique et la Vie, Les Grands Maîtres de la Musique, Musique pour Vous, Presto, Au Coeur de la Musique and Les Secrets de l'Orchestre. They offered an entire generation the chance to get to know the greatest works and performers of classical music of the twentieth century.
On the other side of the Channel, BBC programmes from the same period such as Celebrity Recital, International Concert Hall, Sunday Night, Omnibus, Concert Hour and Gerald Moore Introduces... are still household names amongst British music-lovers.
In addition to these regular programmes, there were countless one-off productions, to which public-service broadcasters were willing, in those days, to devote every means at their disposal and which resulted in television landmarks such as the United Nations Day Concert (1958), the Monte Carlo Eurovision Gala Evening (1964) and Beethoven Year (1970), as well as broadcasts of filmed concerts at festivals such as Musique en Aix and the Royal Edinburgh Festival.
In all, this corpus comprises over a thousand hours of music programmes.
The artists featured include Yehudi Menuhin, David Oïstrakh, Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Gyorgy Cziffra, Arthur Rubinstein, Régine Crespin, Carlo-Maria Giulini and Nathan Milstein.
Having noticed that, over the years, the magnetic tapes on which these uniquely precious moments were stored and which were doomed to slow physical deterioration, were consigned to archives and rarely inventoried, in 1999 Idéale Audience embarked on the production of the television series Classic Archive, in partnership with INA and the BBC and with support from the CNC, with the aim of preserving this artistic and audiovisual heritage. Approximately 70 hours of restored sound and pictures were resurrected in the form of a television series of seventy-eight 52-minute programmes.
The publication of a video collection was a natural extension: most classical music enthusiasts, and in particular the DVD generation of young music-lovers, had only glimpsed the numerous cast of legendary performers on record-sleeves or in television documentaries consisting of brief extracts from archives interspersed with interviews and commentaries.
Classic Archive offered them whole pieces, wherever possible, and restored films which pre-dated the temptation of video to use multiple cameras (aside from a few effects on the most recent films, the direction is generally unobtrusive, allowing the viewer to concentrate on music and performer, sight and sound).
Published by Idéale Audience International and IMG Artists and sold widely all over the world under a distribution agreement with the EMI Classics label, the Classic Archive DVD Collection is proud to present musicians relegated to so-called "archive" records (but regularly republished nonetheless), great figures of the 1950s-1980s, and a number of living grand masters who continue to be revered.
The collection currently contains 51 titles consisting entirely of musical performances, made up for the most part of films from the television series on which the collection is based, in different combinations from the broadcast programmes. Each DVD is structured around recordings by one or, less frequently, several artists. To make the collection more substantial, several pieces have been specially restored for the DVD collection and each title includes bonus pieces. The films have had to undergo an additional process of restoration for the DVD, as the technical requirements of DVD are different from those of television.
The series also includes eight documentaries: the first revolves around Bruno Monsaingeon's invaluable 155-minute film Glenn Gould - The Alchemist (ORTF - 1974) and was specially compiled in association with INA to make it possible to include the Canadian pianist in the Collection; the second, Conversations with Maria Callas, is a portrait of this most idolised of opera-singers based on a two-hour film from the BBC's British archive, supplemented with extracts from French programmes; the November 2004 releases further enriched the Classic Archive collection with a documentary based on archive films about the Russian conductor Yevgeni Mravinsky. Latest addition are Bruno Monsaingeon's Violin Of The Century</i< on Yehudi Menuhin, Paul Tortelier, Julia Varady and the second volume of <i>Conversations with Maria Callas. Batch 7 is expected for a fall 2007 release. |
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