Michael Tilson Thomas

San Francisco Symphony

Beethoven spent three years composing the Eroica, an intimate journal of his emotional crises and his dramatic emergence as an original master. Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony help you make sense of this voyage into life as it really is.

Millions around the world were touched by his music... Cincinnati was inspired by the maestro. A production of Public Media Connect.

Jenny is young. Her life is over. She killed someone. And she would do it again. When an 80-year-old piano teacher discovers the girl’s secret, her brutality and her dreams, she decides to transform her pupil into the musical wunderkind she once was.

Robots live alongside mankind in a not too distant future, but are they really living?

Letters, Riddles and Writs is a one act opera for television by Michael Nyman broadcast in 1991.

The Choir and Orchestra of the La Fenice Theatre, conducted by Fabio Luisi, take over Piazza San Marco in Venice for a grandiose concert. Facing the basilica, the musicians perform the famous cantata "Carmina burana", twenty-four medieval poems set to music by Carl Orff between 1935 and 1936.

Here is the most convincing presentation of Brahms' symphonies that I personally have ever experienced. There is no explaining a gift like Leonard Bernstein, a true legend and one of the truly great ones of the 20th century (and a great Brahms conductor!). I have followed his career and recordings both at the NY Philharmonic and at Vienna (other places too). His brilliance and incandescence are revelatory in these Brahms performances. His view of a thorough-going romantic Brahms expressing his passionate control of an inner rage in classical form is convincing. He and this great Vienna orchestra give a consistent statement of it. And, of course, Bernstein's introductory comments are without peer.

Around 1536, at Windsor Castle, King Henry VIII of England fell in love with the young queen's lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour. In order to free himself from his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the monarch decided to recall Anne's former lover, Lord Percy, from exile, as he still loved the queen. Both were unjustly sentenced to be beheaded for alleged adultery. The outcast Anne Boleyn spends her last moments in the Tower of London, from where she is led directly to the execution site...

A look back at the violent conflict between the two leading figures of musical modernity, Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, in the first decades of the 20th century. Although Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky both had a decisive influence on the fourth art, their creations remained diametrically opposed. While the Austrian developed the dodecaphonic method, placing the twelve notes of the chromatic scale at the heart of the composition technique to the detriment of tonality, his Russian rival based his practice on stylistic eclecticism. Their supporters formed two opposing camps, and the two composers - one the father of the Second Viennese School, the other of Neoclassicism - became, in the wake of their successes, the figureheads of a conflict that marked the history of music by its duration and intensity.