two music documentary films
Jun. 10th, 2011 06:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacBoth on classical music, of course, and made by an overlapping team of filmmakers.
From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China. This one won an Oscar, so I was hoping it would be interesting. Not really. Famed violinist Isaac Stern was brought to China in 1979 by the Chinese government on a cultural exchange visit. The film basically functions as the vacation pictures of the Stern family in China, and, though China is an interesting place, we all know how other people's vacation pictures can quickly pall.
I'm not quite sure what Stern thought he was going to be doing there, other than vaguely spreading warm goodwill around, but he winds up holding a lot of master classes with some not-ready-for-prime-time Chinese violinists. It turns out that Stern's method of improving students' technique is to play a passage first as he'd play it, and then again with an exaggerated parody of the student's deficiencies. The Chinese must be awfully good-natured to put up with that, because, despite Stern's friendly air, his imitations give the effect of telling the students something like this:
High Fidelity: The Adventures of the Guarneri String Quartet. Life on the road with a top touring string quartet. Although at the time of this film (1987) the Guarneris had been together 23 years, making them - they keep saying - the currently longest-lasting such ensemble without a personnel change (and they'd have more than another dozen years before their oldest member retired), they still bicker and argue a lot, and that's the main impression the film gives. They deliberately lead separate lives outside of work, and their second violinist even prefers to travel separately, so rigidly so that on tour none of the others has any idea where he is until he shows up for the concert.
The strangest bit in the whole movie is a conversation on an airplane between the violist and the first violinist. Apparently they used to exchange parts occasionally, and the violist, rather plaintively, asks why they can't keep doing that. The violinist brushes him off, saying they only did that because he liked to play viola occasionally, and the violist says, "Yeah, you like to play viola and I like to play violin, so why can't we still do that once every couple of years?" He doesn't get much of an answer, partly because the cellist, who's seated a row in front of them, turned around, keeps butting in with, "I don't get it. Why should you want to play violin?" and the violist keeps sputtering in response.
I wonder if this scene was the inspiration for the plot hinge of the play Opus by Michael Hollinger, which concerns a string quartet whose violist is really a violinist who burningly resents having been relegated to the middle part.
From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China. This one won an Oscar, so I was hoping it would be interesting. Not really. Famed violinist Isaac Stern was brought to China in 1979 by the Chinese government on a cultural exchange visit. The film basically functions as the vacation pictures of the Stern family in China, and, though China is an interesting place, we all know how other people's vacation pictures can quickly pall.
I'm not quite sure what Stern thought he was going to be doing there, other than vaguely spreading warm goodwill around, but he winds up holding a lot of master classes with some not-ready-for-prime-time Chinese violinists. It turns out that Stern's method of improving students' technique is to play a passage first as he'd play it, and then again with an exaggerated parody of the student's deficiencies. The Chinese must be awfully good-natured to put up with that, because, despite Stern's friendly air, his imitations give the effect of telling the students something like this:
High Fidelity: The Adventures of the Guarneri String Quartet. Life on the road with a top touring string quartet. Although at the time of this film (1987) the Guarneris had been together 23 years, making them - they keep saying - the currently longest-lasting such ensemble without a personnel change (and they'd have more than another dozen years before their oldest member retired), they still bicker and argue a lot, and that's the main impression the film gives. They deliberately lead separate lives outside of work, and their second violinist even prefers to travel separately, so rigidly so that on tour none of the others has any idea where he is until he shows up for the concert.
The strangest bit in the whole movie is a conversation on an airplane between the violist and the first violinist. Apparently they used to exchange parts occasionally, and the violist, rather plaintively, asks why they can't keep doing that. The violinist brushes him off, saying they only did that because he liked to play viola occasionally, and the violist says, "Yeah, you like to play viola and I like to play violin, so why can't we still do that once every couple of years?" He doesn't get much of an answer, partly because the cellist, who's seated a row in front of them, turned around, keeps butting in with, "I don't get it. Why should you want to play violin?" and the violist keeps sputtering in response.
I wonder if this scene was the inspiration for the plot hinge of the play Opus by Michael Hollinger, which concerns a string quartet whose violist is really a violinist who burningly resents having been relegated to the middle part.
