Schubert: The Trout / The Greatest Love And The Greatest Sorrow DVD – Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra 

The Trout is an exuberant explosion of youthful enjoyment in music: first from Schubert himself who wrote his famous Trout quintet when he was 22 years old and then from five young artists of the highest rank. They pick up the spirit of Schubert’s music magnificently both in preparation and rehearsal and in their 1969 performance of the work which has become one of the most remembered ever given.The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow is a film which sets out to bring the viewer closer not to the details of Schubert’s life but to the spirit of what he was trying to express with what he called his creative gift and with which he tried to brighten the world. The film begins with the funeral of Beethoven at which Schubert was a torch-bearer and the story is told almost entirely in music that Schubert wrote in the twenty months that remained to him after that date together with quotations from his letters and diaries and the words that he chose to set in some of his songs.