Classical DVDS

This great music is also worth seeing, says Richard Osborne

DVD is more often a hindrance than a help where classical music is concerned. Few opera productions, even the less bizarre ones, transfer well to the small screen and, whatever their longer-term archival interest, filmed concerts have a limited appeal. Nonetheless anyone drawn to

Vilde Frang’s Korngold and Britten CD may be interested to see her playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with Sir

Simon Rattle and a slimmeddown Berlin Philharmonic as part of a memorable Europakonzert which the orchestra gave in the beautiful late-18th-century box-pewed church of Roros in central Norway in May 2016 (Euroarts 2061488, £14).

There is also an operatic DVD that is impossible to overlook. When Salzburg’s new Grosses Festspielhaus opened in 1960 amazement was expressed at the stage’s Cinerama-like dimensions. Fifty-five years on, those filmic dimensions have been used by director Philipp Stölzl to create an absorbing new staging using split-level video screens of that most popular of operatic double-bills, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. The direction, too, is filmic with the blackand-white Cavalleria rusticana played like a 1930s gangster movie and Pagliacci played Hollywoodstyle in full colour, albeit with a degree of menace Hollywood would blench at. The headline act, German megastar Jonas Kaufmann, plays both tenor leads: the hot-headed young adulterer Turiddu and the cuckolded clown Canio. Kaufmann doesn’t match the psychopathic fury of Jon Vickers’s Canio in the famous 1968 Karajan film but he’s remarkable in both roles. The supporting casts are superb and Christian Thielemann’s conducting electrifies much as Karajan’s did in the 1960s (Sony/unitel 88875 193409, £11.75). Where DVD really comes into its own is in retrospectives and documentaries. The Menuhin Century, a box of 80 CDS and eleven DVDS entitled ‘Menuhin on Film

1947-97’, is one of the great retrospectives. Copies of the deluxe box complete with Bruno Monsaingeon’s book (Warner Classics 2564 678274) can still be found at the original discounted price of about £149, though it’s very much a case of ‘hurry while stocks last’.

Finally, what DVD does best: two memorable documentaries. It’s doubtful nowadays whether any British broadcaster could or would tackle Widor: Master of the Organ

Symphony, a beautifully crafted two-dvd/two-cd set from Fugue State Films (FSFDVD010, £45) that includes, among its many musical riches, a 150-minute filmed documentary on Charles-marie Widor, a hugely influential musician whose life began before the revolutions of 1848 and ended two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Organ aficionados who already own FSF’S set devoted to the great organbuilder Cavaillé-coll will need no encouraging. But this set deserves to reach a wider constituency.

As for Anne-kathrin Peitz’s Satiesfictions: Promenades with Erik Satie, a 65-minute film with bonuses attached, it’s an artwork in its own right, the kind of documentary René Clair and Jacques Tati might have dreamt up had they ever worked together. Satie has no English equivalent (Lord Berners was a poor imitation) but fans of the French Surrealists, the Pythons and Spike Milligan will love this appropriately off-the-wall film (Accentus ACC20312, £20).