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Tony Palmer Reviews
- a small selection -
5) In From the Cold? (Richard Burton)
6) Menuhin - A Family Portrait
7) The Harvest of Sorrow (Rachmaninoff)
8) Benjamin Britten and His Festival
10) Once At A Border... (Stravinsky)
12) Hindemith - a Pilgrim's Progress
13) Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Górecki)
14) England, My England (Purcell)
15) At the Haunted End of the Day (Walton)
17) Hero - The Story of Bobby Moore
18) Toward the Unknown Region - Malcolm Arnold, A Story of Survival
All You Need Is Love
Sunday Times, 7th February 1977
All You Need Is Love
… brilliant exposition … magisterial style … magnificent Sunday Times
… a brilliant authoritative, historical study New York Library Journal
… this beautifully–presented book and films are something of a triumph … the first well–planned … history of the people’s music in the people’s century, infuriating, stimulating, long overdue: and hugely welcome. The Listener
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Wagner
Opera News, November 1981
by Richard Hornak
Wagner can be mentioned alongside such exceptional film biographies as Gandhi, Reds and Abel Gance's Napoléon..... Wagner is one of the most beautifully photographed motion pictures in history.
The Guardian
The great thing about Tony Palmer’s film is that, on its epic scale, it takes over from real life and makes you submit totally… Richard Burton was the very embodiment of Wagner… this film is one of the truly great experiences of the cinema. Edward Greenfield
Die Welt
An absolute bulls-eye... wonderful... technically brilliant.. musically and filmically on the highest level... it will surely set out on a triumphant procession around the world.
Der Spiegel
A monumental film... a complete work of art... truly visionary...
The Sunday Times
A remarkable event... hardly a minute too long... a British Film of glory... takes the screen by storm... a big spirited work.
Tribune de Génève
The music is sumptuously played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Sir Georg Solti... Vittorio Storaro's photography is of the highest quality.
Corriere della Sera
Professionalism of the highest English standard... a virtuoso piece, inspired, and quite simply colossal.
L'Unità
An incredible achievement... on the screen, just as in the music of Wagner, the colour becomes action... an enormous and brilliant production.
Music and Musicians Magazine
Musically magnificent, dramatically stunning and visually awe-inspiring. Denbigh Richards
De Telegraaf
A winner all the way.
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New York Daily News, 3rd June 1985
Wagner – You’ve Heard The Music. Now You Can See The Man For Nine Brilliant Hours
Tony Palmer’s Wagnerian–length cinematic tribute to history’s most important composer bursts with just the sort of larger–than–life scope befitting its subject.
Women’s Wear Daily, 3rd June 1985
'Wagner'
It is a work of such integrity, a landmark in the cinematic treatment of the way a man’s ideas govern his life, that one hesitates to suggest alterations as if it were something conventional.
New York Times, 16th June 1985
Wagner’s Life is in His Art
Positively indelible are a few scenes involving old stagers named Gielgud, Richardson and Olivier as the trio of court advisers.
'Wagner' is notable for the care it lavishes on the details of this strangely magnetic man’s extramusical as well as musical life.
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Maria Callas
Daily Express, 3rd October1987
Breathing new life into Callas the magnificent
by David Fingelton
Tony Palmer’s truly superb film brings Callas back to life in an uncannily vivid way. [...] He uses the arias and their words to illustrate the state of Callas' life and her feelings, at each given time the effect is electrifying. [...] Do watch this marvellous film. It’s a deeply moving experience.
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Financial Times, 5th August1987
Tony Palmer’s 'Callas'
by William Weaver
The Divina resists portrayal, but last week a capacity audience witnessed the world premiere of Tony Palmer’s persuasive Maria Callas. [...] Palmer’s film made an immediate, profound impression. Much of the material was familiar, but Palmer used it with insight. He also found some unexploited footage.
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Testimony (Shostakovich)
Wales on Sunday, 19th March 1989
Men and women behind the myth
by Simon Mundy
Testimony has won him the Fellini Prize at the Europa Festival, the critics’ prize at Sao Paulo and Gold Medal at the 1987 New York Film and Television Festival, where that year he became the first director to walk away with the gold medals in all three of the categories in which he was entered. [...] Palmer has hit an emotional nerve, being praised by critics and audience all over the world but arousing considerable antipathy from those who try to keep the orthodox publicity myths alive. [...] In June both the National Film Theatre in London and the New York Institute of Broadcasting will be showing retrospective seasons of Palmer’s work, an unprecedented accolade for a maker of arts documentaries.
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Films & Filming, June 1988
Testimony
by Derek Elley
It is one of those comparatively rare events nowadays – a real piece of cinema. [...] Palmer’s prowess as an editor, his knack of juxtaposing image and music – something which has remained his forte since he first caused a stir back in the Sixties with Buddhist monks burning to The Beatles – has a field day in Testimony. [...] Most importantly for a movie about a composer (and something one often doubts with Russell), there is always the feeling that Palmer understands the music. For a start he puts to rest the hoary old cliché that the private Shostakovich is only to be found in his chamber music – try listening to the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Fourteenth symphonies – but he also brings vividly alive musical details (like the composer’s use of unison scoring) in colour sequences showing the orchestra, as in the climax of the Fifth..... The best British film of the year - truly remarkable.
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Time, 12th December 1988
"I Am the Enemy You Loved" – Stalin and Shostakovich fight a duel in a powerful new film
by Michael Walsh
British director Tony Palmer’s new film, Testimony, dramatizes the view that Shostakovich was a closet dissident who was bitterly resentful of the system that shackled him. [...] Palmer makes little pretence to literalism, preferring to relate the composer’s odyssey through stark images, shot mostly in black and white. [...] Testimony is a powerful drama, the tragedy of a man who had to betray himself in order to survive.
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BBC Music Magazine, 1st April 2006
Shorn of the composer’s youthful iconoclasm or any scenes of happier private life, this is the familiar tale of Shostakovich v Stalin, but told with the individual flair of a born image-maker in black and white scenes tellingly lit and interspersed with flashes of colour (mostly red). Kingsley captures well the composers ironical tone as well as his nervousness under fire… As a concentrated dose of pure anguish, it’s compellingly done.
In From the Cold? (Richard Burton)
The Times, 21st September 1988
One man’s myth
by Celia Brayfield
Early in his career, Tony Palmer was one of a group of directors who created a new form of dramatic biography. With this film he has recreated the genre, exploring the extraordinary potential for complexity of a medium which is commonly dismissed as essentially simplistic. [...] The original material of this programme was photographed magnificently and used with restraint. The editing was masterly, a textbook demonstration of how to create a compelling narrative from source material which varied from dull to sublime.
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Daily Telegraph, 1987
The case for Burton
by Gillian Reynolds
Palmer’s extraordinary film not only kept faith with his subject, it did something altogether more unusual these days. It took an argument about what makes great art to a mass audience and did so with a passion and conviction which might have belonged to Burton himself. It made marvellous television.
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Menuhin - A Family Portrait
Chicago Tribune, 12th August 1991
'Menuhin' a fine portrait of an artist
by Rick Kogan
This is a wonderful and emotionally charged biography of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. [...] Filmmaker Tony Palmer has created something of a video biographical miracle. [...] 'Menuhin: A Family Portrait' is a fascinatingly detailed portrait of the growth of an artist.
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The Star–Ledger, 12th August 1991
Tales of musical mastery, family friction commingle in profile of Yehudi Menuhin
by Jerry Krupnick
You will come away from these utterly fascinating two hours shaking from the emotional impact of its revelations; wondering how a filmmaker could capture and integrate this complex material. [...] This is an extraordinary family portrait. […] It brings tears to our eyes. Just the glorious music alone is worth watching of this eye-and-ear-boggling film.
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The Harvest of Sorrow (Rachmaninoff)
The Times, May 1999
Great music and no monks
by Geoff Brown
Exile, a sense of longing and loss: over the decades these have dominated the most reflective of Palmer’s portraits of 20th–century composers. Think of Walton in At the Haunted End of the Day (1981), marooned in old age and sunshine in Ischia, light years away from the grit and grey of his childhood in Oldham. Think of A Time There Was (1980), Palmer’s second portrait of Britten, resonant with the bleak melancholy of the Suffolk coast, and the pain of losing life and loved ones. [...] On reflection, lots of people could make a John le Carré film, but there is only one Tony Palmer to explore musicians' lives with passion, sensitivity and love.
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Benjamin Britten and His Festival
The Daily Telegraph, 23rd November 1967
Brilliant film on Britten at Aldeburgh
by Sean Day-Lewis
This superb film by Tony Palmer, shot at (this) year's Aldeburgh Festival when the Queen opened... the Maltings at Snape, may well achieve the status of a classic, repeated again and again over the years… the brilliant editing (was) of the highest quality, making a natural partnership of music and picture.
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A Time There Was (Britten)
The Daily Mail, 7th April 1980
Public Fame, Private Torment
- by Martin Jackson
Tony Palmer proves once again he is a deeply intuitive, caring and thoughtful programme maker. This was a loving portrait of a most remarkable and gifted man.
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Dallas Morning News, 18th September 1987
Trio of films on composers are works of art
by John Ardoin
Not only does (Palmer) make exemplary documentaries - he is a master of the medium - he takes us into the minds of men of music and explains why they accomplished what they did. This is the most absorbing film ever made about a composer, how he worked, what he thought and what made him what he was. It is as important as any book written on the man and his music.
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Once At A Border... (Stravinsky)
The Times, 8th April 1982
Clinging to miraculous icons
by Paul GriffithsA wholly wonderful programme.... Much of this filmed portrait is like a miraculous image, filled with the sense of Stravinsky as man and musician, above all as Russian and believer.
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Financial Times, 13th April 1982
Tony Palmer's Stravinsky
by David Murray
Palmer's brilliantly organised (film)... All the virtues of the film seemed to stem from Stravinsky himself - and no higher tribute could be paid to the technical virtuosity of Palmer's film, which achieved miracles of compression, lucidity and respect.
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The New York Times, 24th January 1988
An extraordinary portrait
by Allan Kozinn
This superb British documentary was one of the high points of CBS's music programming. It provided an excellent, thorough overview of Stravinsky and his music.
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BBC Music Magazine, 1st July 2007
Tony Palmer has given us many remarkable films about composers, but this is probably the finest of them all...As an introduction to Stravinsky it would be hard to beat. The initiated too will learn plenty. Strongly recommended. *****
Stephen Johnson
All My Loving
Daily Express, 4th November 1968
Sordid, splendid - it's a mad world
by James Thomas
With hideous, clamorous force, Tony Palmer's film about the pop world burst out of the TV screen last night - a disturbing piece of television...which no parent could afford to miss. It was certainly not a film which will die, a psychedelic experience which 10 years from now will be the definitive document of its time. How often does TV really make you sit on the edge of your chair?
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Disc & Music Echo, 9th November 1968
"All my Loving" showed us all the horror of war
- by Vicki Wickham
'All my Loving' was magnificent - honest, accurate, unbiased and totally frank. As a comment on today, it was horrific and powerful, and as a protest it was stunning.
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The Spectator, 8th November 1968
Loud loving
by Stuart Hood, former Controller of Programmes, BBC Television
I have no doubt that wherever it is shown the film will win professional acclaim. Remarkable for its virtuosity, its impact is inescapable. No wonder it has been the subject of passionate argument in the corridors of the BBC for months.
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Hindemith - a Pilgrim's Progress
Daily Telegraph, 14th April 1990
The passion of Tony Palmer
by Gillian Reynolds
Magnificent - like no other documentary I have ever seen. The IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority), to which the film was referred on possible grounds of blasphemy, sent it back with compliments and the sole stipulation that it must be shown with no commercials within its 41 minutes. It is a superlative work, the best and most resonant thing to be seen on Easter Sunday in years.
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The Listener, 25th April 1990
Hindemith - A Pilgrim's Progress
- by Stephen Johnson
The combination of music and visual and verbal images struck me more powerfully than in any other Palmer film. I found the broadcast exhilarating, disturbing and very thought-provoking. It was a powerfully direct, visually superb, morally challenging statement - as one has come to expect from this director.
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Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Górecki)
The Guardian, 2nd April 1993
In the shadow of the Nazi death camps
by Edward Greenfield
A major work of art in itself... Harrowing it may be, but this is required watching for anyone who has ever vegetated to music.
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England, My England (Purcell)
The Australian, 23rd November 1995
Sumptuous with a capital sumpt
by Phillip Adams
Just when the telly seemed to have run out of vision, just when 'the box' seemed the perfect name for that coffin of creativity, along comes something that looks and sounds like a masterpiece. The production is as wonderful to hear as it is to behold. And the images! This is sumptuous with a capital sumpt. Here is a production that puts the spec back into tacular. The cinematography is overwhelming. It will blow you out of your seat.
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Independent on Sunday, 1st January 1996
Blue is the colour, Purcell is the name
by Michael White
Remarkable - not pristine in its period sensibility, but powerful in its gut response. Palmer has a rare gift for humanising distantly historical characters - the film touches some profound truths about the personalities behind the music. As the titles rolled, so did this critic's tears.
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At the Haunted End of the Day (Walton)
'NOW' magazine, 31st October 1980
A harmony of images and music
by Elkan Allan
Not many television programmes are works of art in their own right. This profile of Sir William Walton achieves the stature for which it aims. Visually, it is triumphant. The screen is kept vividly alive in quite a magical way. It is beautiful, dramatic, revelatory and illuminating. In short, a work of art.
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Puccini
The Listener, 29th November 1984
Score for scandal
by Derwent May
Palmer tells the story like a Puccini opera - getting brilliant virtuoso performances out of all the principal characters, yet always holding (the film) at a high pitch of emotion, with wave after wave of crescendo.
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