Isolde Films

The story of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his life and career during the rule of Stalin.

Award-winning filmmaker Tony Palmer directs this riveting documentary on the life and times of influential English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. With archived performances by conductor Sir Adrian Boult and stirring musical passages from "The Tallis Fantasia" and "The Lark Ascending," among others, Palmer's film also features interviews with Vaughan and his beloved wife, Ursula.

Rose Sellars is a middle-aged woman who falls in love with a widower. However, his children believe that their father is too old to start a new relationship.

This emotional film by the award-winning director Tony Palmer includes a performance of the “Third Symphony” by The London Sinfonietta alongside powerful footage of Górecki at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

This autobiographical film about the most important and influential composer of the 20th century includes documents, photographs and film never seen publicly before. Stravinsky's three surviving children talk about their father and there are contributions from the late Madame Vera Stravinsky, his music associate Robert Craft, Marie Rambert, Balanchine, Nadia Boulanger and many friends. Included in the film are important performances: Les Noces has never before been heard in this, its original form, and the choreography of Petrushka was specially recreated for the film by the Bolshoi and was not seen in this form since 1911. Finally, there is priceless film of Stravinsky himself in this unique film.

The great composer of The Planets, Gustav Holst also taught himself Sanskrit, lived in a street of brothels in Algiers, cycled into the Sahara Desert, and allied himself during the First World War with a ‘red priest' who pinned on the door of his church "prayers at noon for the victims of Imperial Aggression". He hated the words used to his most famous tune "I Vow to Thee My Country" because it was the opposite of what he believed, and died before the age of 60 - broken and disillusioned.

A documentary portrait of composer Malcolm Arnold. Broadcast in two parts on The South Bank Show but premiered in its entirety at the Royal Festival Hall

Documentary covering the famous Wigan Casino northern soul venue and the working class kids who spend all their money not on alcohol but on records and dancing all night.

A biographical look at the career of the acclaimed Margot Fonteyn. As a little girl called Peggy Hookham growing up in Shanghai, she told her mother she would one day become the greatest dancer in the world. Still performing at the age of 67 despite being almost unable to walk, hers is a story of courage and tenacity, of unbelievable devotion to her art and to those whom she loved. Those who ultimately left her penniless and alone, to be buried in a pauper’s grave.

This is Palmer's highly controversial portrait of Brahms - a film that exploded the familiar image of 'stodgy old bearded Brahms' - a man whose first musical experience had been playing an upright piano in the brothels of Hamburg where he had grown up, and who at the end of his life lived a bachelor in Vienna having his every need satisfied by the prostitutes of the city whom he always affectionately described as his ‘little singing girls'. It is a celebration - of Brahms' unabashed, life-enhancing, sexually explosive music. Warren Mitchell portrays the composer

A portrait of one of England's greatest composers. Winner of the Prix Italia.

Tony Palmer examines the life and legacy of the German composer, Carl Orff.

There's no doubt that Richard Wagner who built it was the most influential composer in the whole of the 19th Century. But his family has survived a mixture of lies, deception, fraud and dangerous political alliances.

Explores the life and career of American soprano Renée Fleming. Share an intimate visit with Renée behind the scenes, at home and on stage as she rehearses and performs in Verdi’s Otello and Requiem, and sings Strauss, Mozart, Dvorák, Korngold, Ellington, Gershwin, Puccini, Massenet, and Rachmaninoff. Other world-class artists featured in this fascinating personal portrait include: Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, Sir Peter Hall, Valery Gergiev, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Katarina Witt, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ben Heppner, Daniel Barenboim, André Previn, and Gianfranco Ferré.

Tony Palmer’s study of the German composer Paul Hindemith.