John Eliot Gardiner goes in search of Bach the man and the musician. The famous portrait of Bach portrays a grumpy 62-year-old man in a wig and formal coat, yet his greatest works were composed 20 years earlier in an almost unrivalled blaze of creativity. We reveal a complex and passionate artist; a warm and convivial family man at the same time a rebellious spirit struggling with the hierarchies of state and church who wrote timeless music that is today known world-wide. Gardiner undertakes a 'Bach Tour' of Germany, and sifts the relatively few clues we have - some newly-found. Most of all, he uses the music to reveal the real Bach.

An account of the life and work of controversial German orchestra conductor Herbert von Karajan (190...

Jenny is young. Her life is over. She killed someone. And she would do it again. When an 80-year-old...
In the magical world of dancing fireflies, we follow the story of the main character - naughty Sväto...

An unbroken sequence of fragments, last thoughts, elegies and absences by Schubert, Mozart, Wagner, ...

Every year, the Berliner Philharmoniker hold a kind of classical-music fête with a bright, cheerful ...

The Waldbühne in Berlin, one of the most appealing outdoor amphitheatres on the European continent, ...

The young Clara creeps downstairs on Christmas Eve to play with her favourite present – a Nutcracker...

These biographical drama documentaries explore the lives and careers of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Scr...

The Berliner Philharmoniker’s European Concert, held each year on 1 May, is invariably an internatio...

Karajan - Bruckner - Symphonies No. 8 & 9

Beethoven spent three years composing the Eroica, an intimate journal of his emotional crises and hi...

The film is a parody of Disney's Fantasia, though possibly more of a challenge to Fantasia than paro...

This short animation draws on advanced digital technologies to offer a new vision of dance in cinema...

The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of th...

After the great success of his Beethoven cycle, Christian Thielemann now turns with his new orchestr...

The grand scale and magnificent acoustics of the Roman arena in Verona are ideally suited to the pag...

Documentary about Soviet-born pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy.

For their annual season end concert, the Berliner Philharmoniker take the audience on a dreamy, magi...

Imagine a window into the past. Imagine finally connecting singers' bodies to the voices you have al...

70 Years Young is André Rieu’s ultimate concert featuring musical highlights chosen by the maestro h...