THE ORCHESTRA CELEBRATING THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY

Musical fantasy without dialogue, conceived and directed by Zbig Rybczynski, SFX HDTV film, 57:11. Produced by Zbig Vision and Ex Nihilo, co-produced by NHK, Canal+ and PBS Great Performances.  

AWARDS

• EMMY PRIME TIME® - Outstanding Achievement in Special Effects, 1990

• PRIX ITALIA - 1990

• GRAND PRIX  - International Electronic Cinema Festival, TokyoMontreux

• 1990 GRAND PRIX  - A.V.A. Festival in Tokyo 1991

• HI VISION AWARD - Tokyo 1990

LOGLINE

Emmy Prime Time award-winning The Orchestra is visual poetry without words. Strange, virtuosic surrealism, impudent imaginary to Mozart, Chopin, Albinoni, Schubert, Rossini, and Ravel. In 1990 this production was pioneering in a field of High Definition television technology.  Rybczynski creates the first feature-length, HDTV real-time, no post-production, multi-layer motion picture.

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SYNOPSIS 

The story, music, and dancers “fly” throughout the backdrops of the Louvre, Chartres Cathedral, The Paris Opera House, other mysterious places, and magical gardens. The  Funeral March  is seen as a circle of life at an unending keyboard. Schubert's  Ave Maria  is an areal ballet performed by man and woman in the background of Chartres Cathedral. Sexuality, playful and overt is never far away, and right at the center of Rossini's Overture to  The Thieving Magpie  with its soldiers and whirling dancers. Ravel's Bolero becomes a parable about the rise and fall of Communism, marched, danced, and enacted on an endless brick stair. When The Orchestra was still in the production, the Communism in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe was alive and kicking, it seems like Rybczynski foreseen the end of the regime. “The director as a virtuoso artist in the sphere of electronic effects, employing seamlessly integrated digital effects and wonderfully atmospheric locations, creates a multi-layer visual symphony. Brilliantly executed and hugely entertaining, provocative, and completely unlike anything you have ever seen before. You truly won’t believe your eyes. And you will never hear this music in the same way again. “ Steven Bonde, London Film Festival.