4 Emperors and 1 Nightingale
Director Wilber Bank
Countries Netherlands
Duration 52 min
Synopsis
This documentary gives an eye-opening view to the past and to early contributions of significant artists from the last century. The four Emperors: the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), the choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983), the painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and the entrepreneur Serge de Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his Ballets Russes. The lost ballet: Le Chant du Rossignol, based on a fairytale of H.C.Andersen, created in 1925, and reconstructed in 1999 by two English dancers Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, and performed by the Ballets de Monte-Carlo. The Nightingale: the English ballerina Dame Alicia Markova, now 92 years old, who danced the role of the nightingale in 1925 in Monte-Carlo and Paris, when she was 14 years old, and still remembers every step of her solo from that time. Finally the expert witnesses who have died but still survive in interviews, filmed in the sixties and seventies: Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine, his first wife Tamara Geva, the secretary of Diaghilev, Boris Kochno and the composer and entrepreneur Nicolas Nabokov.
This documentary gives an eye-opening view to the past and to early contributions of significant artists from the last century. The four Emperors: the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), the choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983), the painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and the entrepreneur Serge de Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his Ballets Russes. The lost ballet: Le Chant du Rossignol, based on a fairytale of H.C.Andersen, created in 1925, and reconstructed in 1999 by two English dancers Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, and performed by the Ballets de Monte-Carlo. The Nightingale: the English ballerina Dame Alicia Markova, now 92 years old, who danced the role of the nightingale in 1925 in Monte-Carlo and Paris, when she was 14 years old, and still remembers every step of her solo from that time. Finally the expert witnesses who have died but still survive in interviews, filmed in the sixties and seventies: Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine, his first wife Tamara Geva, the secretary of Diaghilev, Boris Kochno and the composer and entrepreneur Nicolas Nabokov.