Keeping Score: Revolutions in Music
San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas
Production: San Francisco Symphony
Video: Enhanced for 16:9 widescreen color
Audio: DD 5.1 (performance); DD 2.0 (documentary)
Subtitles: English SDH, German, French, Spanish
Rating: ****
This entry in the SFS’s own Keeping Score series – which has already brought us MTT on Music, Copland and the American Sound, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – manages to make analysis of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 just as interesting and compelling as were the other three DVD subjects, which I had expected had been easier to present. These productions were originally designed for telecast by PBS on their Great Performances series and are now being released as individual DVDs as another media product of the enterprising San Francisco Symphony, which is also producing all the Mahler Symphonies on SACD releases.
The DVDs combine a live performance segment in Dolby surround with an hour documentary exploring the particular work or composer or concert music in general (as did the first in the series). The documentaries star the Symphony’s Music Director, Michael Tilson Thomas, and he continues the appealing, popular pedagogic approach of his former mentor, Leonard Bernstein – probably the best spokesman for classical music to the masses the world has ever seen. In the documentary, MTT goes back to Vienna and some rustic Austrian villages to retrace Beethoven’s life and his struggle to create a new sort of symphony. There are of course generous passages from the work as performed by the San Francisco Symphony – serving as a preview of the complete performance in Davis Symphony Hall, also on the DVD.
The camerawork and editing is first rate on both the documentary and the performance segment. The performance portions demonstrate how far the presentation of a symphony performing on video has advanced and become more sophisticated in the last decade or so. Of course not having to be a live telecast most certainly must make the director’s job a bit easier. There is little danger any more that viewers will be treated to a closeup of a musician doing nothing at all, or worse yet, emptying the condensation of his horn onto the floor. The higher resolution available today makes it possible to have more long shots of the complete orchestra when the music seems to call for it. Earlier symphony orchestra videos had mostly close ups and eventually became claustrophobic because when there was a major orchestral climax you wanted to see the entire orchestra. The documentary is kept visually interesting at all times, while MTT’s delivery is light and informal – probably able to keep the interest of someone with almost no previous knowledge of Beethoven or classical music.
– John Sunier
