Art of Piano: Amazon.ca: Various Artists (Collections): DVD

Product Description

From Amazon.com

The Art of the Piano is a feature-length, 106-minute documentary that presents in refreshingly straightforward fashion a portrait of 20th-century piano playing. The format is simple: short segments 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, Evgeny Kissin, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, and 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, Rachmaninoff, 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 program The Art of Singing, as close to definitive as a single film can get, even going so far as to include footage from the "silent" era with sound from corresponding recordings. --Gary S. Dalkin, Amazon.co.uk

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Customer Reviews

22 Reviews

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

Average Customer Review

4.1 out of 5 stars (22 customer reviews)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Nice!, July 4 2004

By

vikingtraider "vikingtraider" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art of Piano (DVD)

This DVD is definitely cool!

Let's have a look at the great stuff:

- nice commentary and interviews from many 'greats'
- unbelievable amounts of cool ancient footage which I haven't seen before (admittedly, I'm not widely knowledgeable in this area)
- pretty nice editing.. good mix of enjoyable music with commentary...

Negatives? I don't know.. maybe...

- the limitations (in detail particularly) of it being a 1.5 hour movie..
- not entirely sure if it's of good journalistic value.. eg Cortot seems to be praised much more than criticised... not a balanced view..

It's great.. piano music fans need to get this!!

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5.0 out of 5 stars It's Even Better on DVD, Feb 21 2004

By

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Art of Piano (DVD)

Having owned the videotape of this program I was pleased to get the new DVD version. It has additions to the tape. For one thing, although conducted primarily in English, there are English subtitles for those bits that are conducted in languages other than English. And there are also Japanese, Spanish and French subtitles for those who wish them. Some of the film footage is simply magnificent and extremely rare. For instance, one sees the elderly Francis Plante playing brilliantly; born in 1839, he had actually heard Chopin play! There is some tendency to cut away from music footage in order to continue the voice-over narration, and that is understandable, but it is also occasionally frustrating. Some have complained that there are only two female pianists represented - a long and impressive bit with Dame Myra Hess, and an uncredited bit underneath the credits with Annie Fischer - but then there are plenty of other male pianists who could have been included, too. The makers of the film only had two hours with which to work, so one can understand the omissions. There is a minimum of fawning, a fair amount of substantive information - both plusses. For those of us who are fascinated by both piano technique and ever-changing pianistic styles this DVD is indispensable. It was wonderful to see lengthy bits featuring, among others, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Josef Hofmann, Claudio Arrau, Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli, György Cziffra, Alfred Cortot, Arthur Rubinstein and to have interviews with current musicians like Sir Colin Davis, Stephen Kovacevich, Daniel Barenboim, Piotr Anderszewski, Tamás Vasáry, and Gary Graffman.

Recommended.

Scott Morrison

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1.0 out of 5 stars incomplete!, Sep 21 2003

By

jon "jon" (toronto, canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art of Piano (DVD)

i don't think this is something to be considered, its totally not objective and not well-done ... where is wilhelm kempff??? how about walter gieseking??? there are some pianists there that aren't great enough, cziffra for example... a true good list about the greatest of the century would be kempff, e.fischer, gieseking, gould, backhaus, cortot, arrau...

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden
Yes, this video is quite appealing in its incredible clips of many of the great pianists of the past but I would like to ask a question-where are the women?! Read more

Published on Aug 28 2003 by marymagdalengot it

3.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable, BUT....
Indispensable of course because there is so little footage available of the great pianists. But the producer/editor seems to think that we like seeing performances of pieces faded... Read more

Published on May 20 2003 by Derek C. Oppen