COMPOSERS: Mahler,Puccini,Tchaikovsky
LABELS: Warner/NVC Arts
CATALOGUE NO: 0927-43538-2
Aside from their distinct contributions to Romantic music, one common feature that emerges in these three hour-long biopics is the composers' problems with their women: Tchaikovsky's early divorce, Puccini's affairs and Mahler's neglect of childcare duties during extended periods of composition.
The first film uses a Tchaikovsky-loving tram-driver as a neat structural device, as her route introduces the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, where Tchaikovsky studied, and the Mariinsky Theatre.
Another link with contemporary life brings images of Moscow's gay nightclubs, counterpointed — oddly convincingly — with mention of his homosexual love for a student, and with the love theme from Romeo and Juliet. By contrast come expert contributions from Vengerov, Kissin, Mikhail Rudy and Yuri Temirkanov.
Viewers may find the Puccini film especially enlightening, given that most opera programme-books eschew straight biographical survey. As well as his mischievousness — he stole organ pipes as a boy to sell for cigarettes — the attention to detail of his exotic operatic settings and his love of modern machines is well described.
Perhaps inevitably the film begins with a 1990 World Cup sequence to the backdrop of 'Nessun dorma'. Mahler's obsession with death pervades the final film, which includes illuminating comment from Michael Tilson Thomas, Thomas Hampson and Georg Solti.
Inevitably the better-known works are featured in these programmes, though there is at least one exception in each film: Tchaikovsky's early Characteristic Dances, Puccini's first opera if villi and Mahler's Piano Quartet among them.
The impressive individual contributors remain frustratingly uncredited on-screen — with the single exception of Colin Matthews, who talks on the powerful impact of Mahler's Sixth Symphony — though there is the option of ploughing through the list of names given in the booklet. Edward Ehesania