"Actor: Sharon Kam"

• A Mozart Gala From Prague | DVD | (29/05/2006) from £26.98   |  Saving you £-6.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Mozart: A Mozart Gala From Prague (Honeck Czech Philharmonic Orchestra)

• Joint Concert - Tel Aviv | DVD | (17/07/2001) from £21.58   |  Saving you £-1.59 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Some concerts are important simply as occasions: The Joint Concert--Tel Aviv was a celebration of reconciliation, a performance shared by the Berlin Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Zubin Mehta takes a massive band consisting of both orchestras through performances of Ben Haim's fascinating Psalm, Ravel's La Valse and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The Ravel is particularly impressive--a work that can often slip into feyness or the too overtly sinister--here has a depth of complexity to its sound that saves it from either, and the sheer volume of the harps in a couple of passages gives the performance an interesting and individual strangeness. The Beethoven is monumental in its scale--rarely has the transition between the "Scherzo" and the "Finale" sounded so like Forster's goblins walking across the universe. Young and promising soloists--Viviane Hagner (violin) and Sharon Kam (clarinet)--play the Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso with the Israel Philharmonic and the Weber Concertino with the Berlin Philharmonic; we grow so rapidly used to the sound of the orchestras playing together that their individual sounds strike us as almost delicate.On the DVD: The DVD has menus in English, French, German and Spanish and is presented in 4:3 screen ratio with PCM stereo sound, relegating a description of the importance of the event to the booklet. --Roz Kaveney