Joint Concert - Tel Aviv DVD

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 [show more]

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