Customer Reviews

Khachaturian

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I purchase this DVD because I am a fan of Khachaturian. Yes, like the other reviews, this a great documentary and its very well done! Sometime, its like a movie. The DVD have many, many archival footage (some of them are like to be registred yesterday,in the daily life of Khachaturian.For exemple,you can see the composer get a nap on is piano! LOL I wonder where they get that!?)In this documentary, you can see the wonderful ballet Gayane and Spartacus, the Russian révolution, the Armenia and his people, concerto,and listen great music! If you like good documentary, this one worth the money! For your get an idea, go to YouTube and enter key word "Khachaturian documentary". There, you can see a 44 secondes of this DVD!

This is a terrific documentary. I will always have two lasting impressions: the wonderfully filmed and edited cello piece conducted by Khachaturian and the vibrant, colorful, and dizzyingly edited piano playing and fashion show of the blonde. Curious? buy the DVD; it is hugely intertaining and informative.

Absolutely great in all aspects. The life and times of Aram Khachaturian from youth to old age, famous music friends of the Soviet era, a view of early USSR (mainly Russia, Georgia and Armenia) with great music throughout. So many archival films from the Russian sources showing how life was especially under the Stalin years.

Like his compatriots Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shoastakovich, the Armenian-born Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) was part of the famous 1948 repudiation after charges of formalism were leveled against the three -- and many other musicians -- by the Soviet musical politburo. What is most interesting about this biography of Khachaturian's life (and there are many very interesting elements) is Khachaturian understood the charge of formalism to be anti-people music.

Even though formalism is later defined in this fine film as music written to a formal style and not demonstrating the patriotic needs of Soviet realism, how anyone could interpret the heart on sleeve romance of Khachaturian as anti-people music is difficult to understand. If anything, the relatively simple way the composer ties melody to tempo engages people's emotions. Chalk that up as another of the great mysteries of Stalin's Soviet Union.

That and most other mysteries about composer Khachaturian are resolved in this empathetic 83-minute documentary released in 2003. It won some awards and rightfully so, for this is a consistently interesting film about the Soviet epoch and one of its inherited sons, Aram Khachaturian.

Featuring much of the composer's most famous music including excerpts from the ballets Gayne and Spartacus, the the Symphony No. 2 and the violin, cello and piano concertos -- the former with clips of David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich playing in concert under the composer's baton -- this film that helps define Khachaturian as a man of his hometown, Tbilisi, who went on to Moscow and gained international acclaim but never lost his feel or heart for his homeland and always traslated it through his music.

The film introduces his understanding about being Armenian: we are Armeanian, we are happy, and we make happy music. If you know this composer's music (and why would you be shopping for his biography otherwise?) you know that says everything about him and his scores. The piece of music with the most face time in the documentary is Spartacus, the composer's romantic tale of the Roman slave revolt.

Shot in modern digital technique, the film is clean and clear all the time, even going back to clips from the 1919 Soviet revolution and earlier. The orchestral excerpts are played by the Armenian Philharomic Orchestra under Loris Tjeknavorian. Pianist Dora Serviarian-Kuhn, the executive producer, plays portions of the piano concerto. Peter Rosen produced and directed the film and Solomon Volkov of Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich fame, was one of the writers and appears in film often, as does Khachaturian's son Karen.

Extras include the Concerto-Rhapsody for Cello with Rostropovich, the making of the film, and Serviarian-Kuhn playing the third movement of the piano concerto. Anyone with interest in Soviet music or the composer would enjoy this documentary. Dramatically and in content, it's not on a scale with Shostakovich Against Stalin, but it's very good and has few slow moments.

The best, most touching documentary I have ever seen. I would even give ten stars if I could. The music is just beyond-words amazing. A must see film for anyone wether you're a musician or not. You'd wanna watch it over and over again!!!