Product Details

• Actors: George Solti, Yehudi Menuhin
• Directors: George Solti
• Format: Anamorphic, Classical, Color, Dolby, DVD, HiFi Sound, NTSC, Surround Sound, THX, Widescreen
• Language: English, Hungarian
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: KULTUR VIDEO
• DVD Release Date: September 30, 2008
• Run Time: 75 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001CK7OME
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,789 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

It's as though we've been caught in a storm at sea and blown to shore with no more than the clothes on our backs." So wrote the great Hungarian composer B‚la Bart¢k (1881-1945) on his arrival in New York in 1940 after his flight from war-torn Europe. His last five years in the US produced some of his greatest and most moving music. In this film many of the composer's friends and colleagues including Yehudi Menuhin and Georg Solti join his sons Peter and B‚la Jr to tell the story of these last years of exile.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Revelatory film for Bartok lovers, October 15, 2008

By 

Jeff Dunn (Alameda, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After the Storm - The American Exile of Béla Bartók / Menuhin, Solti (DVD)

Unfortunately, you have to know a bit about Bartok, his significance to 20th-century classical music, and his last years in America before he died of leukemia to appreciate this film. Otherwise, it will be confusing, even boring.

But if you do know the above, the film offers lots of details about Bartok's last years, with a number of interviews with key individuals who knew the family at the time. Excerpts of the music written in America also are heard, with clever cuts to shots of symbolic importance.

My favorite revelation is that the Bartok family was cheated by the mortuary who sold them the coffin in New York. It was supposed to be stainless steel, so it could be moved at a later date back to Hungary. But when it was dug up in 1988, it had disintegrated. As an ongoing theme, the film covers the transfer of Bartok's remains back to his homeland.

The film shows all the places where Bartok lived in the U.S., even his notes where birdcalls were captured in North Carolina and later incorporated in his Concerto for Orchestra. But the film is not a triumph of organization or clarity. It's best to read a summary of Bartok's life beforehand to get your bearings before seeing the film.

The film should be a must-see for conservatory students and anyone fairly familiar with Bartok and his music, but I'd be leery of recommending it to the general public--it's too specialized.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars After the storm, June 30, 2010

By 

Naturelady "Debi" (East Coast USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: After the Storm - The American Exile of Béla Bartók / Menuhin, Solti (DVD)

This was a present for my hubby who asked for a Bela Bartok CD for a gift. He was fascinated by this lesser known (to me, anyway) composer and piano teacher. He was very suprised and loved it. This DVD put a whole new level on his gift of the CD because he loves learning about the history of composers. The dvd was fascinating, and really explained a lot of the changes in Bartok's music after he came to America. If you ever used the classic piano lesson books, this is the guy to thank for creating them and changing how piano was being taught. Buy the video and discover his life and his compositions - it really brings this piano teacher/composer to life.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The last five years!, March 12, 2009

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After the Storm - The American Exile of Béla Bartók / Menuhin, Solti (DVD)

The name and transcendence of Bela Bartok has not achieved for most audiences around the world the special and well deserved consideration. Not only because his notable contributions in order to preserve for the future's memory the basic Hungarian musical roots. He really was a kaleidsocopic composer whose harmonic language captured with fevered realism the mood of a world in crisis.

If we take a look around all his music, we find the trace of a man hovered by a deep and serious worriment for trying to express and translate all the bitter dissonances, cloudy passages, lyric expressiveness tinged by a nocturnal inspiration and honest approach that hardly may be found in other similar colleagues.

His Piano Concertos, string quartets and even the unerring message hidden bellow his posthumous composition, the Concerto for Orchestra seems to have plainly understood just for a few directors (Fritz Reiner, Ferenc Fricsay, Antal Dorati), while the rest of most directors seem to focus around the pyrothecnic and virtuosistic effects (somtehing similar happens with Pictures at exhibition). I mean, it tends to forget this Concerto is deeply tragic; it's a real farewell in all the sense of the world.

This memorable and sad tribute for the memory of this overlooked musical genius is a little but remarkable grain of sand in Bartok's memory.

The man and his circumstance. In memoriam!