Toscanini in His Own Words

Review Most classical documentaries about dead icons follow a maddeningly simple formula: A narrator speaks stoically over sweeping shots of the musician's homeland. Stock footage and slow pans of photos are interspersed for historical authenticity. Interviews with a few friends and colleagues provide conversational intimacy. And a soundtrack of the musician's work rolls constantly. Market it to as few people as humanly possible--call it a day. Which is why Weinstein's new film on conductor Arturo Toscanini stands out. Drawing on recorded interviews the Italian maestro made with his son Walter, quirky Canadian music documentarian Weinstein hired actors to sit around the fireplace and reenact the Toscanini dialogues with dramatic flair. They're pretty believable, too. In the lead role, Barry Jackson inhabits the onetime NBC Symphony Orchestra leader with crotchety gusto, showing how a Parma émigré single-handedly made it acceptable for white-haired European statesmen to become American idols. The then-87-year-old conductor is entertainingly crusty with his iconoclastic dismissals of Leopold Stokowski, Puccini and that darling of operatic divadom, Maria Callas. "You can't understand a word she sings," he spits. When he heaps praise, the crankiness dissolves into misty-eyed idolatry. "Beethoven is in a different sphere, and everything is below it," he rhapsodizes. Toscanini never gave press interviews nor kept a journal. So for Peeping Tomism into one of America's most enigmatic and transformational classical icons, this is a must-see. -- Chicago.timeout.com, Bryant Manning, Apr 23-29, 2009 One of the tell-tale symptoms of our age is that everything has to come out. Everything has to be known. The information machinery must constantly be greased and oiled. An individual's wishes mean nothing. Here we have an hour-plus entertainment drawn from 150 hours of living-room conversations between Arturo Toscanini and his family and friends taped surrepticiously by his son, Walter, and made available to the producers of this album in 2007, 50 years after the maestro's death at 89. The result is neither drawing room comedy nor Shavian crossfire, but rather a great deal of adulation directed at the old man, most of it justified, and a century's worth of reminiscences by one of the half dozen or so greatest conductors of all time. The screen is peppered with music and visual clips of the conductor at work, many drawn from the NBC telecasts of 1948-52. A cast of able actors has been assembled to bring the script to life. Harvey Sachs, author of an important biography of Toscanini and, later, editor of his letters, is listed as co-writer along with director Larry Weinstein. Since there is no narrative to speak of, nor any onscreen identification of characters, in keeping with the current vogue for performing-arts documentaries, one has to assume their work mostly had to do with boiling the conversations down to size. Sachs also wrote a brief bio of the conductor for the booklet. His presence certainly lends an air of authenticity to the project. I suspect that Toscanini would have hated this thing, and, in all probability, Walter, too. Toscanini did not believe in interviews or personal publicity. Only the critic BH Haggin, a great admirer, was granted access and wrote a book about it, Conversations with Toscanini. The conductor wanted to speak to the world through his music. How quaint today's producers and directors might consider that notion. It is one thing to publish a person's letters posthumously. That is a long-establishd literary practice, though it is sometimes argued that a letter to a friend or loved one is inherently private. But taping a person in his own living room without telling him is something else again. Yes, Toscanini was an old, somewhat difficult man, and getting his memories down in his own words was perhaps worth the risk of betrayal. So Walter undoubtedly thought. Fortunately, the script is done with good taste, and the burning fireplace is a nice touch. At the end of the evening it is suddenly New Year's Eve, and everyone, Toscanini included, toasts the future, and the background music ends with Wagner, as it began. The other celebrants are conductor Wilfrid Pelletier (actor Michael Brandon), Iris Cantelli (Valentina Chico), and Anita Colombo (Jennie Goosens). There are no major revelations here, but there are some moments of genuine interest. That includes the conductor's definite belief in inspiration from on high, to be found in the first two entries: BEETHOVEN: "In the adagio of the Ninth Symphony, I feel what is inexpressible. I see bright lights from far, far away, and patterns of amazing shapes and colors, and the music I am conducting seems to descend from up there, removed from the earth, from the field of gravity. One wants to conduct it on one's knees." WAGNER: "When the Lohengrin prelude begins, where Wagner got that music from I do not know. But I always say, one fine day he disa
ASIN: B001QJXBRI
VSKU: DBV.B001QJXBRI.A
Condition: Acceptable
Author/Artist:Jackson|Brandon|Long|Larry Weinstein|Chico|Giammetta|Goossens|Valzacchi
Binding: Dvd
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