Ensemble: Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Brass Ensemble

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Date of Concert: 1976

Playing Time: 00:33:27

Television Director: Niebeling, Hugo

Catalogue Number: A05500607

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Brass concerts at Christmas are famous in Germany. In Soest, a historic city which once belonged to the Hanseatic League, Christmas music has been ringing from the city's tower on Christmas Day since the Middle Ages.

This is a film of pageantry which shows the full diversity of the world of mountains, with their proud peaks, deep valleys and gorges, forbidding fir forests, and the park of Linderhof, one of the castles built by Ludwig II, the fairytale king of Bavaria. The distant beauty of the mountains is just one of the moods which the film evokes, moods which recall to mind those conveyed by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, moods which quietly help us in our preparation for the joys of the festive days to come.

The path taken by the film leads us out of the barren isolation of remote upland valleys and the handful of remaining farms, down into the lush, colourful Baroque ornamentation of Bavarian churches, and then finally to the Bavarian National Museum, where some of the most beautiful mangers in the world have been collected.

The Berlin Philhamonic Brass Ensemble journeys through the countryside, from mountain peaks to fortress courtyards whose only illumination is provided by torches. The modern troubadours play rousing, ceremonial music as the spirit moves them. The high points are the ringing trumpet sonatas in a mausoleum populated by life-size statues of the departed counts, and a splendid canzone in the Cistercian abbey of Stams in the valley of the Inn near Innsbruck.