Vision on

DVDs make ideal Christmas gifts, especially for music lovers, who now have a huge choice, from documentaries to operas. Mark Pappenheim sifts through the best releases of the year

Cormac Rigby once presented a series of ballet programmes on Radio 3. How we all laughed. The pictures may well be better on radio, as fans of the "wireless" often boast, but this was going too far. Ballet music without the dancing is just music, and, musically speaking, most of it is dross. Not Stravinsky's, of course. You may think you know his dance music well enough from CDs or the concert hall, but, as last year's Royal Ballet Stravinsky triple-bill revealed, seeing the steps the notes were meant to match can make you hear it in an entirely new way. This was particularly so of Agon, the composer's last collaboration with Balanchine: what, in concert, had always seemed a drily angular exercise in serial abstraction here took on an unexpected sheen of sly comedy and Broadway camp. A shame then that Balanchine's executors refused BBC2 permission to broadcast it as part of the triple-bill earlier this year, which means it's missing from Opus Arte's DVD (OA 0832 D). That still leaves The Firebird and Les Noces in revelatory and near-definitive versions, as recreated for the Royal Ballet in the Fifties and Sixties respectively by Fokine's former assistant and the great Bronislava Nijinska herself. The "extras" too are really worth having, including an interview with David Drew (Kostchei the Immortal in The Firebird) about the difficulties of rehearsing with the aged and near-deaf Nijinska and archive film of the eightysomething Stravinsky conducting the Firebird suite in his last ever London concert in 1965, and coming back on stage afterwards in his overcoat to signal that there would be no encore.

Sue Knussen's multi-award-winning documentary, The Art of Conducting: Great Conductors of the Past, also began life as a BBC broadcast, although curiously the Beeb no longer even gets a logo on the cover of the DVD re-release (Warner Vision/ Teldec 0927 42667-2). The original film is intercut with variously illuminating comments from performers, past and present, on the mysteries of conductors and their craft. But, while the new format offers 47 minutes of hitherto-unseen "bonus" interviews (with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Isaac Stern and others), what makes it essential viewing is the precious archive footage of 16 of the 20th century's greatest podium wizards, from Weingartner to Von Karajan, Koussevitzky to Klemperer, captured on film both in performance and in rehearsal. The equally valuable follow-up volume, The Art of Conducting: Legendary Conductors of a Golden Age (Warner Vision/Teldec 0927 42668-2), offers less talk and more music, focusing on six main maestros – Mengelberg, Furtwängler, Kleiber, Munch, Celibidache and Mravinsky – with "bonus" footage of Karajan, Scherchen, Cluytens and Talich, much of it drawn from once-rare ex-Eastern Bloc sources.

EMI's new Classic Archive series also relies on BBC material. The first batch of eight releases features discs devoted to the soprano Régine Crespin, the violinists David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan and Yehudi Menuhin, the pianist Claudio Arrau, Rostropovich and Richter playing the five Beethoven cello sonatas, and one rather naughtily entitled "Heifetz, Rubinstein, Piatigorsky", as if it contained performances by the legendary "Million Dollar Trio" instead of separate solo offerings.

Last but not least is the Stokowski disc (EMI Classics DVA 4 92842 9) containing dramatic readings of Beethoven's fifth and Schubert's Unfinished symphonies with a specially re-seated LPO (strings to the left, woodwind to the right) at Croydon's Fairfield Hall in 1969 and, from three years later, an RFH concert celebrating the conductor's 90th birthday, and 60th anniversary with the LSO, in radiant performances of Wagner's "Mastersingers" overture and Debussy's Mallarmé Prelude; a "bonus" track shows Pierre Monteux conducting The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Stokowski's Mickey Mouse moment from Fantasia) with the LSO in 1961, the year the walrus-mustachioed maestro signed up to become the orchestra's conductor "for life" at the age of 86!

Given the riches of its archives, the BBC's own DVD-releasing policy is perverse. Gilbert Deflo's striking Spanish staging of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo – filmed at Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu earlier this year, with richly-hued Renaissance costumes and landscape sets inspired by the interior decor of Mantua's Ducal Palace (scene of the opera's 1607 premiere), and accompanied by a period-instrument orchestra conducted, in Monteverdian mufti, by the excellent Jordi Savall – should certainly be seen by anyone who is interested in authenticity, but apparently earns its release on BBC Opus Arte (OA 0842 D) merely because it was shown on the digital (and thus largely unwatched) BBC4 in June. Yet it's been left to the British Film Institute to reissue Ken Russell's quirkily didactic, 1962 portrait of the then largely neglected and misunderstood Elgar (BFI BFIVD524): a milestone in the history of musical popularisation (and the BBC's once proud part in it). The film is rich in musical insights and memorable imagery (the three crosses that mystically appear against the Worcestershire skyline to the strains of Gerontius; the lunatic band in the Powick asylum; the recurring visual refrain of Elgar racing through the Malvern Hills; alternately on pony, bike and motor car, to the surging strings of the Introduction & Allegro). It now comes kitted out on DVD both with a commentary by Russell himself (dottily forgetful) in conversation with Elgar biographer Michael Kennedy and with "home movie" footage of the still sprightly composer out and about, with friends, family and dogs, at the Three Choirs Festivals of 1929, 1930 and 1932, plus newsreel film of him conducting "Land of Hope and Glory" at the opening of EMI's Abbey Road studios in 1931.

Another landmark BBC TV documentary of 1965, The Golden Ring – a behind-the-mics look at the making of the first ever complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring – has reappeared on Decca (Decca 071 153-9), but again without even a BBC logo on the box, presumably in revenge for the fact that, in those far-off days when "plugging" was still unknown at the corporation, Humphrey Burton's chummy commentary never once mentioned the record company's name. But, with such unforgettable scenes as Gottlob Frick repeatedly intoning Hagen's dark-black summons to his vassals while off-stage engineers struggle to balance the echoing steerhorns, or Birgit Nilsson's amazment on finding a live cart-horse breathing down her neck as she tries to complete her final take of Brünnhilde's immolation scene, this probably remains the best "plug" yet for Wagner's Ring, as well as for Georg Solti's recording of it.

A more recent complete Ring, the New York Metropolitan Opera's 1989-90 staging by Otto Schenk, has just made it onto DVD on Decca's stablemate DG (DG 073 043-9, 7-DVD set) but – with a would-be authentic re-creation of Wagner's original stage directions that will presumably appeal to fans of Star Wars – James Levine's mostly strong conducting and cast (including Jessye Norman as Sieglinde) are perhaps best appreciated in the sound-only version on CD. Also from 1990, and arguably more authentic, in spirit anyway, is the complete recording of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (Philips 075 089-9), as performed in its fuller 1872 version by Valery Gergiev and his Kirov company in the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, home of the opera's premiere. Faithfully recreated, four years after the exiled Russian director's death, Andrei Tarkovsky's visionary and cinematically fluid 1983 Covent Garden staging provides a striking setting not just for the peerless home cast (including such familiar names as Olga Borodina and Sergei Leiferkus) but above all for a harrowingly intense portrayal of the tortured title role by British bass Robert Lloyd.

Passing swiftly from tragedy to comedy, Riccardo Muti's Verdi centenary year La Scala production of Falstaff (TDK 10 5127 9), recorded last year in the tiny 328-seat theatre in the composer's birthplace Busseto, is almost the last word in authenticity of another kind, offering a recreation of a 1913 staging given under Toscanini to mark the centenary of the composer's birth. With beautiful period sets like hand-tinted engravings and richly coloured costumes, it's a joy to look at; and, though a basic textbook staging – all text and no subtext – it comes to joyous life thanks to the idiomatic singing and word-pointing of an almost exclusively Italian cast (the exception being Juan Diego Florez's mellifluous, and still very Latin, Fenton) and a remarkably touching Fat Knight from the 31-year-old Ambrogio Maestri.

Finally, a quick recommendation for The Mysteries (Heritage Theatre), the exuberant South African reinvention of the Chester Mystery Plays that took London, and then the world, by storm last year, and exudes almost as much joy, beauty and sly humour on DVD as in the theatre.