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David Oistrakh: Artist of the People? [Region 2]

David Oistrakh: Artist of the People? [Region 2]

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Director: Bruno Monsaingeon
Actors: Gidon Kremer, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Igor Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich
Category: DVD

Buy New: $47.35
as of 3/15/2010 19:01 CDT details


New (5) Used (1) from $47.35

Seller: door2doordvds
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars 5 reviews
Sales Rank: 127782

Format: Full Screen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Italian (Subtitled)
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6

UPC: 639842303026
EAN: 0639842303026
ASIN: B000069D4N

Theatrical Release Date: 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com
Bruno Monsaingeon's David Oistrakh: Artist of the People? is a probing portrait of perhaps the most thought-provoking of modern violin virtuosos, and a good companion to his similarly revealing documentary on pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Although conversation with the man himself is minimal (Oistrakh died in 1974), Monsaingeon is able to draw upon the priceless reminiscences of those who worked with him, including his son Igor, conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, protégé Gidon Kremer, and the late Yehudi Menuhin: their frank and sincere comments on Soviet society make for sobering listening. Equally importantly, the range of Oistrakh's repertoire is covered, from Bach to Shostakovich, in footage covering half a century of performance. The musicianship and humanity of a life dedicated to music in the face of an often ruthless establishment is powerfully and movingly evoked. This is a documentary that no one interested in great music-making or 20th-century culture should miss. --Richard Whitehouse

Customer Reviews:
3 out of 5 stars * * * 1/2 Monsaingeon rambles, but Oistrakh is fascinating nonetheless   November 1, 2006
John Grabowski (USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This documentary highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of Bruno Monsaingeon. The filmmmaker has the ability to find some amazingly rare archival footage of his subjects--I think for his Richter documentary he tracked down every frame available of the pianist. But his storytelling is often undisciplined and wanders. While this work isn't nearly as sprawling as his epic Richter bio, it still tends to be a bit out of focus, in my opinion. Rather than really talk much about Oistrakh as an artist--his technique, interpretations, ideas, etc.,--it instead spends most of its time dealing with how difficult it was for a Soviet artist to thrive in an oppressive regime. It's interesting material, but I couldn't help feeling that the same exact story could have been told about Rostropovich, Richter, Mravinsky, Kagan, Temirkanov, Gutman, etc. A better title for this DVD might have been "It's Tough To Be An Artist in the USSR."

That isn't to say it's a bad film or you shouldn't watch it. It just felt undisciplined and a little wide of the mark. There's an early bit where two neighbors where Oistrakh used to live argue over who bought him his country house. It's interesting, but Monsaingeon never contextualizes it--it's just presented as two people arguing. This is just one example of how the film, and most of M's films, can often feel like merely a hodge-podge of clips and interviews strung together, interesting in themselves but ultimately not organized into a larger whole by the filmmaker.

In short, why is Oistrakh special? Why do we care about him so much? The film never addresses that.

The interviews are fascinating, however. Now that the iron curtain has been lifted we have a clearer view than before of what former Soviet artists had to go through--a subject that seems to interest Monsaingeon. Rosdestvensky relates how when Oistrakh died, he was abroad but was prevented from staying and conducting memorial concerts for his comrade because his arbitrary 90-day period he could be out of the country was up. You can see he still feels pain and anger over this act.

If you live in North America, this disc, unfortunately, will only work if you have a region-free DVD player. (If you're not sure if you have a region-free DVD player, you almost certainly don't.) And don't even think about playing it in your computer, unless you have the proper hack. (Again, if you're not sure, you don't have it, and even if it plays it will then "lock" your machine onto the new region and you will be unable to play North America DVDs after that. It will not warn you about this; it will just do it.) For some reason most of Monsaingeon's work is not available on region 1 DVD. That's a shame. Overall I recommend this, if you have the right equipment to view it. If not, you may want to search out a VHS version.


4 out of 5 stars Misses the point somewhat, but important for Oistrakh completists   June 28, 2006
Nabih B. Bulos (Baltimore, MD USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

The question I always want to ask Bruno Monsaingeon is: Where in God's name does he get all this fantastic footage from? Whether it is the clip of Gitlis play Paganini's "La Campanella" in "Art of the Violin", or the clip of Vaclav Hudecek playing Tchaikovsky's VC in this offering, they are just simply fantastic. But I am digressing here...
What we have here is yet another interesting documentary by Mr. Monsaingeon, but as many other reviewers have said it somewhat misses the point. Is it really the job of artists to be politicians, at the risk of silencing their artistic voice? An artist holds allegiance to one thing above all: his/her artistry. It just so happens that Oistrakh WAS a tool of Soviet propaganda, whether in his performances or his teaching, and yes he was constantly being exploited, but he acted as honorably as he could in the face of overwhelmingly bad circumstances. Just listen to what Menuhin says of Oistrakh's reponse to the question of defection. That alone answers questions about the man's integrity.
But a review must tackle the "meat and potatoes" question: Is this a good documentary? In a word, yes. Whether or not the question about Oistrakh's character should have been asked in the first place is another matter for another day, but one cannot deny that this is a well-researched, slickly produced documentary featuring some of the hardest to find footage of Oistrakh. Alongside Paul Cohen's superlative "The Winners", it ranks as one of my favorite musical documentaries.


3 out of 5 stars What are we talking about: music or politics?   June 4, 2002
Boris Gontarev (LA, CA, USA)
8 out of 13 found this review helpful

Here we have most probably one of the three greatest violinists of the 20th Century - and what are our reviewers write about? Stalin, Zhdanov, Commusnists, KGB... This stuff is dead and gone some 12 years ago, but THE MUSIC and THE ARTISTRY of this great man will live forever! So, let's concentrate and share our views on Oistrakh as a great musician - which he really was! -let's enjoy his great music, and let's forget about those scoundrels which will be remembered in future ONLY because they happened to live at the same time and place with Oistrakh, Kogan, Richter, Gilels, Shafran, Sofronitsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and others GREAT Russian musicians.


4 out of 5 stars Has high moments, wonderful performances   July 3, 2001
scarecrow (Chicago, Illinois United States)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful

In the face of power, the tyranny of a corrupt regime, what is a musician to do when his life is dependent upon it for survival, It is far to facile for Yehudi Menuhin to fault Oistrakh's lack of courage in the face of the Stalinist/Zhadnov Kultura regime, Menuhin sitting comfortably in his posh London flat,what does he know of Oistrakh's struggles,nothing. Yet Menuhin had brokered Oistrakh's appearance in England, a coup that he would have informed the press of the Soviet tyranny had they not allowed him out of Mother Russia. This other installment by Bruce Monsaindeon is not as interesting as the Richter film, there the vintage footage was breathtaking spanning Richter's entire career. Was it the KGB who followed him with a camera?,with such intimate situations,even funerals,tours, and film appearances. Here in the Oistrakh there are also great moments, as now older with jowls and a "grosse bauch" mid section, the ultimate power of his playing, here the excerpt is the Cadenza in the Violin Concerto in A minor, of friend Dmitri Shostakovich. There is also vintage humiliating like performaces from the Thirties Oistrakh playing in one of these Russian Stalinist Odes to the Leader,with many Harps and Flowers, the spectacle of the Dialectic. But Oistrakh's powerful interpretations, the massive sound,conviction he summoned from this tiny box with strings running on its top is/was astonishing. There's also a touching tribute by Rostropovich where Oistrakh was compelled to renounce him(ficticiously Purge Trial mentality-like), for the apparent defection, a luxury not all Soviet artists managed during their careers. Gidon Kremer reflects surprisingly perceptively on Oistrakh's meaning to violinists of his generation as well as Igor, Oistrakh's musician son.


4 out of 5 stars Political midget, musical giant   June 8, 1999
Plaza Marcelino (Caracas Venezuela)
28 out of 32 found this review helpful

Monsaingeon's Oistrakh film is indeed puzzling. Likewise the companion Richter tape, the musical contents of this TV-derived programme presents the viewer with stunning performances (excerpts only, though), both of chamber and of symphonic music, that amply secure Oistrakh's place amongst the really key violinists of the century. Yet more so than in the Richter tape, Monsaingeon also opts for stressing the man's lack of fortitude before the USSR's communist bosses, picturing him as a weak character who hid behind his music-making and looked the other way whilst enjoying the favourable status his condition as "Artist of the People of the USSR" gave him during much of the Stalin reign, one of the darkest periods of European history, and those of his successors, much like what has amply been discussed regarding similar stances in musicians like Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm or Richard Strauss during the nazi regime in Germany, or of other artists who cynically profited from a favoured position in totalitarian states in order to advance in their life (Dalí's flirtations with the Franco regime in Spain comes to mind, as well as Respighi's with the Mussolini Government and Karajan's with Hitler's). Oistrakh's lack of political courage, or perhaps his failure to defect to the West as commented by Menuhin in one of the programme's interviews, may well be deservedly criticisable, as well as his meek acceptance of the exploitation of which he was the subject by his government, be it economical (as the lion's share of his income from tours to the West was snatched from him by the Soviet authorities), political (as a sample of the Soviet regime's purported superiority in catering to the spiritual needs of its citizens) or as a propaganda vehicle (as in one of the film's initial sequences, probably one of the corniest ever filmed anywhere, the crème de la crème of soviet string players gather in an early Technicolour-washed strings-only adaptation of one of Rachmaninov's préludes from his Op.23), but I'd say that Monsaingeon's exaggerate concentration on that sad facet of this giant of a musician's personality ultimaltely proves the weak spot of the film. David Oistrakh may have been something of a midget politically speaking, but when he died in an Amsterdam hotel in 1974 the world lost a giant of a musician, and it is precisely his musical legacy what in the end solidly keeps him in a privileged place our memory and not anything else.



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