The music of Beethoven, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, and Copland is brought to life by MTT in Season One of Keeping Score.
Keeping Score: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
In 1913, with Europe on the brink of war, a fashionable Parisian
audience reacted with hostile frenzy to the premiere of Igor
Stravinsky's new work, The Rite of Spring. In this DVD, Michael Tilson
Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony take you from
the salons of St. Petersburg to the villages where Stravinsky found
inspiration in the earthly power of Russian folk music and dance.
Nearly a century after this wild rainforest of sound was performed, The
Rite of Spring remains as exhilarating and liberating as music can be.
MTT and the San Francisco Symphony show you why.
Keeping Score: Beethoven's Eroica
Not all revolutions are political. Some overturn artistic conventions.
Beethoven's Eroica challenged accepted artistic notions of music as a
kind of decorative background and brought the listener along on a
gripping voyage into the unconscious. Retracing Beethoven's steps
through Vienna's aristocratic ballrooms and Austria's rustic villages,
MTT explores how Beethoven channeled hs fears of deafness, his
admiration for Napoleon, and his obsession to prove himself the
greatest composer of his time and to write a piece that forever changed
what a symphony would be.
Keeping Score: Copland and the American Sound
Copland wrote classical music in his own special way. He transformed it
to capture the energy of American's bustling cities and the vast quiet
of its empty plains. He created a musical style that evoked the
diversity of the American people. The sounds of Jewish music,
African-American jazz, folk songs, cowboy ballads, and Latin American
dances all played their parts in his compositions. Michael Tilson
Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony explore the music of Copland and
the cityscapes, landscapes, and social and political developments that
shaped it.
Keeping Score: Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony
In this DVD, MTT delves into the notes and symbols that make up
Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, and unlocks the drama, pathos, elation and
despair within. Tchaikovsky's Fourth represents a watershed in the
composer's symphonic evolution, as he brought the innermost secrets of
his psyche to a genre traditionally associated with the logical
development of musical ideas within established structural principles.
Full-length concert performances, on all discs, by the San
Francisco Symphony in high-definition 16:9 widescreen and 5.1 surround
sound.
