Conducting Mahler

A video work accompanying Bang on a Can All-Stars' 1998 live performance of Brian Eno's Music for Airports.

A fascinating study of merging form with content, broken into four shorts, each complete with opening title and closing credits: "19 Questions," "Fourteen," "Paying Attention," and "Overpopulation and Art."

A compilation of six standalone short films, each inspired by a contemporary Dutch music composition and created as part of a collaboration between Nederlandse film directors and composers for a Holland Festival presentation.

In this unique documentary, Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer trains his lens on the groundbreaking music group Bang on a Can, capturing the band's performance of Brian Eno's ethereal composition "Music for Airports" at the 1999 Holland Festival. The film not only highlights the work of Eno, a distinguished ambient music composer, but also charts the cross-pollination of musical ideas between Europe and America in the 21st century.

Carefully composed portrait of prominent modern composer Elliott Carter (1908-1912). Scheffer depicts both the person and the development in his music and the musical tradition it grew out of, as well as the time in which the American Carter grew up. The result: historical images of the city of New York, old film footage, cinematographic finds to illustrate the music and statements by conspicuous fellow-composers and musicians, including Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim.

Attrazione d'Amore is a touching illustration of the unique relation that has developed between the Conductor Riccardo Chailly and his famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Voyage to Cythera navigates through wonderful musical quotes made of performances conducted by Berio, rehearsals, archival documents and interviews featuring Riccardo Chailly and Louis Andriessen.

An elegiac documentary following virtuosic clarinettist and composer Kinan Azmeh, a Damascus-born musician living in exile, as he attempts to find meaning and purpose after the outbreak of war in Syria. A profound exploration of the role art can play in forging identity and community.

One morning, the late Karlheinz Stockhausen awoke from a dream that told him to take to the sky. Stockhausen envisioned four helicopters swirling in the clouds, with each of a quartet’s members tucked inside his own chopper, communicating through headsets, stringing away in sync to the rotor-blade motors. He immediately set forth to make that dream a reality. In 1995, Dutch film director Scheffer followed Stockhausen in the days leading up to the premiere performance of his Helicopter String Quartet in Amsterdam. The resulting film offers a rare glimpse of Stockhausen as he patiently dictates every agonizingly detailed measure to the Arditti Quartet.

Eclat is a fascinating documentary about the work. We witness rehearsals by the Netherlands' Nieuw Ensemble, hear comments about the piece from the composer, conductor Ed Spanjaard and some of the musicians, and we see a full performance of the work. Eclat ("To burst out") is a beautiful example of the strangely lyrical pointillist style that Boulez had inherited from Anton von Webern. Aural pinwheels and shifting musical kaleidoscopes with stunning instrumental color is the only way to verbally describe what must be heard to be understood. This is definitely not for those who hate "modern" music. For those who respond to contemporary music, this piece is masterful and this film is a must-see!

It is the dream of the Persian avant-garde composer Nader Mashayekhi to bring modern classical music to his country Iran. His dream becomes reality when he is asked to conduct the Teheran Symphony Orchestra.

Frank Scheffer's (collage like) documentary on the American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa, as broadcast by VPRO in the Netherlands April 22,2007. Most of what’s on here is seen before, particularly in Roelof Kier’s 1971 documentary and/or Scheffer’s own documentary “A present day composer refuses to die”. But there is some new stuff too, particularly interviews with Denny Walley, Haskell Wekler, Elliot Ingber and Bruce Fowler.

The young conductor John Warner (27) and the musicians of Orchestra for the Earth are going to Austria, searching for the deeper meaning of the magical Gustav Mahler composition "Das Lied von der Erde". They refuse to take an aeroplane, since its CO2 emissions are too high, which contributes to Climate Change. Therefore, they travel by train. The Orchestra for the Earth wants to draw attention to the theme of Climate Change with their music.

Director Scheffer registered a performance of the Tea Opera by Chinese composer Tan Dun (who won an Oscar in 2001 with his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Scheffer interlaces the images with interviews with Dun, stage director Pierre Audi and librettist Xu Ying, about the opera and the role tea and oriental philosophy play in this work. Using monochrome, sometimes abstract images (in yellow, blue, red and green), close-ups of plants and flowers and images of the Chinese nature and people (sometimes accelerated or decelerated, sometimes in black-and-white), he mirrors the stylised opera performance and Dun's reflective music.

Documentary about the creation of the chamber opera Si Fan, composed by Chinese composer Guo Wenjing in 2015 for the Nieuw Ensemble. In Si Fan (‘yearnings of love’), Guo combines traditional opera from his native Sichuan with his own music. "I don’t think when composing, I follow my heart", Guo says to Ed Spanjaard, head conductor of the Nieuw Ensemble, who comes to visit him in China to learn about the secrets of Sichuan opera. In this painstaking film, Shen Tiemei, the star singer of the Sichuan opera, speaks about the differences between East and West, and between tradition and the modern age.

A documentary based on Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony. Riccardo Chailly is conducting and analyzing the four movements of the symphony.

A brief overview and focus on composers Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, John Cage, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter and their contemporaries.