Klarinet Archive - Posting 000208.txt from 2010/11

From: Oliver Seely <oseely@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Opera
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:33:33 -0500


There are a couple of musical documentaries, certainly amusing and somewhat instructive, which have been floating around the past couple of years. The first, "The Piano: A Love Affair" with host Alexander Waugh offers his take on a life-long obsession and although the day job (he's a writer like his father and grandfather) must be pursued to put "bacon on the table," his piano in the other room continues to beckon. From his first guest, a KLM pilot who knows where every piano bar is located at all the airports where she lands so that she can play Rachmaninoff between flights through the street piano in Sheffield (the kid says, "Please edit out my mistakes.") to Waugh's rubber keyboard which he takes everywhere, the piece is a wonderful romp through the agony and ecstasy many of us feel in trying to pursue our first love.

The second, "Stephen Fry on Wagner," is reasonably successful at sucking in the viewer as Waugh does. Waugh's obsession is his piano and Fry's is Wagner. He makes a convincing case until the very end when he interviews Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who also was a prisoner at Auschwitz and a member of the musical ensemble which played to welcome the newcomers as they entered the camp enroute to their ghastly fates. As he is waxing eloquently about his upcoming trip to Bayreuth, she says that she just can't see herself sitting through five hours of all that noise, and people screaming at each other.

To his credit Fry left in that part of the interview which is a bit of a surprise ending. Anyway, if you're able to find the two documentaries they make excellent viewing. I don't believe either is commercially available (not on amazon.com in any case). One has to use other means to obtain them.

Oliver

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