Beethoven, Schumann & Brahms; The Love Of Destiny

Music videos featuring classical selections have been around awhile now, and these two earlier productions take two different approaches to combining visuals with the music. Beethoven, Schumann & Brahms is the more straightforward of the two, featuring famed pianist Alexis Weissenberg and renowned violinist Pierre Amoyal. Although some seasonal shots are used, much of the camerawork focuses on the players as they collaborate on Beethoven's "Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 7," or during Weissenberg's solos of Schumann's well known "Kinderszenen Scenen" ("Scenes of Childhood") and his "Arabesque in A Major." Weissenberg teams up with mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza for a selection of lieder by Brahms (including "My Love is Green"). It's a pleasant way to spend a relaxing hour. The second title is a different story. Using Mascani's "Cavalleria Rusticana" as bridging music, this unusual tape attempts to tell an operatic story through the medium of cinema. The premise seems to be that singer Peter Dvorsky is an opera singer (which, of course, he is) who travels to a mansion, apparently, which contains a dressing room housing costumes which prick his memory about a woman he loved. This causes him to have flashbacks of roles he's played with this woman (again, apparently) and he sings arias from major operas: Puccini's Madame Butterfly and Tosca, Massenet's Manon, and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, among others. For many, opera on the stage is already a fairly silly spectacle, and I freely acknowledge my prejudices here in favor of that view. But to have some guy singing anguished high notes while waltzing around a dressing room or better yet, bursting into operatic aria while behind the wheel of his Toyota is perhaps more silliness than even opera lovers are prepared to bear. The first title would be suitable for a general music collection, the second is for hard-core fans only--the kind that maybe have two or three sets of those baby binoculars on sticks. (Available from most distributors.)