The Art of Piano - Great Pianists of 20th Century (1999) [DVDRip]

Movies : Concerts : DVD Rip : English

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Piano-Great-Pianists-Century/dp/B00004UF01

XVID, 512x368, Qf=0.20, AC3 (192 kbs stereo), 146 minutes

Note: There are no subs on the non english portions but they only constitute about 1% of the film.

The Art of the Piano is a feature-length 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.