The Golden Ring

Watching the Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, and a stellar cast record Wagner's immense Götterdämmerung for Decca in the fall of 1964 provides a thousand lessons in the art of working under pressure. For this classic documentary, The Golden Ring, a BBC camera crew eavesdropped as producer John Culshaw guided his engineering team through tricky technical maneuvers far removed from the relative ease of modern digital editing. What utter concentration and focus Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Gottlob Frick, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau b...

Maestro or Mephisto: The Real Georg Solti

This film tells the story of one of the greatest and most controversial conductors of the 20th Century. The Hungarian-born Georg Solti had huge drive, energy and ambition. A combination of willpower and extraordinary talent took him to the peak of musical power and prestige. This film includes remarkably candid interviews which Solti talked with great honesty about his life, challenges and achievements. It also includes new interviews with some of the artists and musicians who worked closely with him.

United Nations 50th Anniversary Concert

The World Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Sir Georg Solti, performs pieces by Rossini, Bartók, and Beethoven in Victoria Hall, Geneva in July 1995 in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of United Nations.

Man of Three Worlds: Luchino Visconti

BBC television program exploring Visconti’s mastery of cinema, theater, and opera direction.

Verdi: Un ballo in maschera

Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) is an 1859 opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The text, by Antonio Somma, was based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's 1833 five act opera, Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué. The plot concerns the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden who was shot, as the result of a political conspiracy, while attending a masked ball, dying of his wounds thirteen days later.