Great English Composers: Walton and Holst (2014)
2h 50min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
Walton - This award-winning 1981 film is a revealing and moving portrait of the great composer. Supported by achive material, extracts from many of his works, and interviews with Lady Susana Walton, Laurence Olivier and Sacheverell Sitwell, Walton reflects on his own journey from Oldham in Lancashire to his island home on Ischia in Italy, where he died in 1983. Holst - New DVD from director Tony Palmer telling the story of Holst – first ever film about this extraordinary man. The first ever film about this extraordinary man – who taught himself Sanskrit, lived in a street of brothels in Algiers, cycled into the Sahara Desert, allied himself during the First World War with a 'red priest' who pinned on the door of his church "prayers at noon for the victims of Imperial Aggression", who hated the words used to his most famous tune "I Vow to Thee My Country" because it was the opposite of what he believed, who distributed a newspaper called The Socialist Worker, whose music - especially The Planets - owed little or nothing to anyone, least of all the 'English folk song tradition', but was a very great composer who died of cancer, broken and disillusioned, before he was 60. - Studio:
- Tony Palmer
- Genres:
- Documentary, Music & Musicals, Special Interest