the set of the noteworthy arts documents
Salvatore Accardo gave his first professional recital at the age of 13, in a program that included Paganini’s Capricci. At the age of 15, Accardo won the Geneva Competition and in 1958 he became the first winner of the Paganini Competition in Genoa. His vast repertoire ranges from pre-bach to post-Berg; composers such as Sciarrino,…
As a director, Pasolini presented a depressing reality through picaresque neorealism. A large number of people objected to such representations in works of art intended for general consumption. The 1962 film Mamma Roma, which starred Anna Magnani and told the tale of a prostitute and her kid, was offensive to the prevailing moral standards of…
In a career spanning more than 40 years, Alan Silvestri’s colorful musical compositions infused emotion and energy into dozens of successful feature films. Following his journeyman years composing music for a number of television series in the late-1970s, Silvestri began his movie career proper with “Romancing the Stone” (1984), the first in a series of…
His music continues to be used in films and recordings after his death. “Georgie’s Theme” from Herrmann’s score for the 1968 film Twisted Nerve is whistled by one-eyed nurse Elle Driver in the hospital corridor scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003). The opening theme from Vertigo was used in the prologue to…
In this video you can see some interesting shots of Marilyn Monroe: the actress goes in an open-top car and waves to the crowd, flies to Korea on a military plane to support the American soldiers, receives the Look Magazine award from Lauren Bacall, leaving footprints with Jane Russell . You can also see footage…
Like some other composers of the American stage, such as the famous Irving Berlin, Chaplin was an illiterate musician. There was even a term for “whistling composers”—they worked with secretaries. However, music played a essential role in the comedian’s life. He always created the score of his films using not only his own material. He…
On Antoine Riboud’s private jet, they landed at Tempelhof Airport. Rostropovich played Bach’s Suites while sitting close to the former “Checkpoint Charlie” after managing to find a chair anywhere. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Mstislav Rostropovich after he sheltered Alexander Solzhenitsyn at his house, watched the fall of the wall on TV in…
No matter what we may encounter on our life’s journey, let us keep our hearts light and our spirits free.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake
On 2 December 1889 Brahms recorded two pieces on an Edison cylinder: a short version of his Hungarian Dance no.1 and an extract from Josef Strauss’s Polka-Mazurka ‘Die Libelle’ (‘The Dragonfly’) Op.204. The voices of both Brahms and the engineer, Theo Wangemann, can be heard at the beginning of these recordings (as later documented by…
Dinner of Arthur Rubinstein, Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya in French Deauville. The action begins before the dessert with whipped cream. You’ll see how Rubinstein teaches Vishnevskaya to make smoke out of cigars – they talk in Russian. The verses of Mephistopheles, which sing a glorious trinity, where each – primus inter pares, first among…