As one of the film’s co-producers, with my colleague Seb Grant, I’m as engaged as everyone else here. My independent production company Illuminations is partnering with WNET.org and with BBC in Britain to translate the vivid, contemporary staging to television. Earlier this year, for Great Performances again, we produced in a similar manner a film of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, which also stars Patrick Stewart (as Claudius) along with David Tennant as the Prince. For us, there’s little to beat the thrill of working like this with a great text, a great production and a great cast.

This Macbeth originated at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the summer of 2007. Originally staged in Chichester’s small Minerva studio space, the production is a thrilling, visceral, genuinely scary experience in the theatre — and that’s what we are hoping we can achieve on film too. The main stage set was a kitchen in an underground bunker, but this also doubled as a military hospital, a train and other settings. For the film, we can keep the kitchen at the film’s heart (Macbeth making himself a sandwich as he briefs Banquo’s murderers is a highpoint) but we can also open out the rest of the action.

We have found a truly spectacular location, with a warren of below-ground spaces. A touch frustratingly we need to respect the owner’s wish for us not to disclose where we are, but as we start to film our hopes for its particular beauties and strangeness are more than realised on the screen. We will be here for three six-day weeks, aiming to capture some eight minutes of finished screen time each day.

Rupert Goold has not made a film before but he has recently had an astonishingly  successful run on the British stage. The theatre company he runs, Headlong Theatre, has been touring his bold version of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. He oversaw a revival of Sam Mendes’ recent production of Oliver!, directed J B Priestley’s Time and the Conways at the National Theatre this summer, and also this autumn’s smash-hit Enron, which transfers to Broadway in 2010. He has also just staged Puccini’s Turandot for English National Opera, setting the action in a Chinese restaurant, a decision that was hailed by some critics and derided by others.

For us part of the key to working successfully with a debut director is to surround her or him with a great creative team. For the Macbeth shoot Rupert’s key collaborator is director of photography Sam McCurdy BSC. Sam is an immensely experienced cinematographer who has several low-budget horror films on his CV, and it was partly this experience that made him seem perfect for what’s unquestionably a grim and gory tale.

Day one is taken up with filming what’s known as the ‘England’ scene, an interlude in the play’s concluding action. Patrick Stewart begins filming with us on Tuesday but he has already come on a location visit, just to begin to feel this remarkable place and to have it help shape his performance. He has been working for nearly two years towards having this production, and his central performance, filmed for television. He’s excited as the rest of us about starting — and I’ll contribute regular updates here about his and our progress through the rest of the shoot.

John Wyver is also posting daily production reports at the Illuminations blog, www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk.

Related Links:

• Illuminations
  Site for the production company
• Royal Shakespeare Company
  Company’s main site
• Chichester Festival Theatre
  The theatre’s online home
• Archive site for stage production of Macbeth at Chichester Festival Theatre
• English National Opera
  Site for the opera company
• Sam McCurdy BSC
  Personal site by our director of photography

Originating at England’s innovative Chichester Festival Theatre, director Goold’s exciting interpretation relocates the bloody action to a nameless 20th century nether world. Tony-nominated Kate Fleetwood also returns to reprise her stage role performance as Lady Macbeth.

Shot in High Definition on UK locations, Goold will maintain the atmosphere and tone of the critically acclaimed stage production, heightening the Shakespearean classic with an edgy style reminiscent of Illuminations’ recent film adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, which will be broadcast on PBS in April 2010 by THIRTEEN’s Great Performances.

For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is series producer; David Horn is executive producer. For Illuminations, John Wyver and Sebastian Grant are producers.

I’ve been obsessively listening to “The Hounds of Winter,” one of the tracks on “If on a Winter’s Night,” Sting’s latest CD, a winter-themed album. The song isn’t new—it first came out more than a decade ago on Sting’s Mercury Falling—but it’s a superb new arrangement that pulls several excellent instrumentalists into the mix, including people like classical cellist Vincent Ségal and jazz/world percussionist Cyro Baptista. On that track there’s also Kathryn Tickell, a traditional violinist from Sting’s hometown of Newcastle, England, whose wonderfully haunting repeating line of fourths and octaves against Julian Sutton’s moaning Melodeon sounds like the “lonesome, lonesome sound” of the hounds of the song’s lyrics. The album has a whole range of pieces that relate somehow to winter, including an arrangement of Schubert’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (from Winterreise), English carols like “Balulalow,” and an arrangement of a Bach melody from one of the cello suites, set to new words by Sting.

Serial obsessions are a hallmark of Sting’s career. Classical musicians and audiences took notice when Songs from the Labyrinth came out in 2006—here, Sting sang Dowland songs with lutenist Edim Karamazov. (Sting also took up the lute-playing for the project.) He’s nothing if not prolific, and lately he’s dipped into several projects, the first being a film whose subject is Robert and Clara Schumann, and the second being the “Winter’s Night” album. Just before his December appearances in New York in connection with both those projects, and the premiere of Great Performances’ Sting: A Winter’s Night broadcast premiere on Thanksgiving evening, he spoke to SundayArts blogger Jennifer Melick.

I’m curious to know about some of the musical choices you have made—there was Dowland several years back, who’s sometimes referred to as the melancholy madrigalist, and then Robert Schumann, who struggled with his own difficulties, his mental illness. And now, with “If on a Winter’s Night” you’ve got this new album with a winter theme—the coldest, darkest season. Does melancholy in general interest you? How did you put together this latest album?

Sting: Well, I did a lot of research with my producer, Bob Sadin, into the music of winter. And I looked at songs from many centuries, of many genres—classical songs and folksongs and sacred music, and some modern song. I suppose I was looking for my resonance, my ambivalence of feelings about the season: its cold, its discomfort, its bleak, profound beauty. But also its magic. So I was looking for magical stories. So I think it is the season of the imagination. And it’s a very very rich season.

“If on a Winter’s Night” is definitely not a religious or “Christmas” album, but there are several songs on it— “Balulalow” and “Lo, How a Rose” for instance—that are traditionally sung at Christmastime. How important is keeping those sorts of traditions alive? (Below you can listen to a 30 second sample of “The Hounds of Winter.”

Sting: I avoided “Frosty the Snowman” and “Jingle Bells” and … things that have become just bromides, or just overused symbols. I was looking for a more spiritual approach to the season, and that perhaps more familiar songs would give us. If “Lo, How a Rose,” maybe a lot of people know “Lo, How a Rose,” but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people hearing this album, have never heard these songs. So from a pop audience’s point of view, these songs are very obscure. The cognoscenti have heard of Peter Warlock but most people have no idea.

Listen to part of “Hounds of Winter”:

While you’re here in New York you’ll be performing in one large venue—the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on December 8 and 9—and one very small one—a private event at the Greene Space on December 3 that will be streamed live (at wnyc.org/thegreenespace and wqxr.org). Is there an intimacy that you try for, regardless of the style of music or how big or small the space is?

Sting: I think variety is important. Not only in terms of music and style of music and interpretation, but also the type of venues you play. For me, success is having the freedom to explore new territory and making that territory, as far as possible, my own.

The “winter” album and the DVD film Twin Spirits both came out this fall. How did you end up doing a project about the music and lives of Robert and Clara Schumann?

Sting: I knew a little about Schumann before I did Twin Spirits, which we started about five years ago. But I knew nothing of Clara Schumann. I knew nothing of her music, which I suppose indicates a sort of misogyny of music—you know, because she’s a woman, you don’t need to listen to her. But what’s interesting about this production is that the music is placed alongside her husband’s and treated equally, and she more than stands up to the comparison. I think her work is fantastic. Given that she was also raising a family and having a concert career at the same time, while Robert was languishing. It’s really her story.

What’s neat about the Twin Spirits film is that you and your wife, Trudie Styler, are both connected with it—she reads Clara letters and you read Robert’s. I guess this is somewhat of a rare opportunity for the two of you to work together.

Sting: Yes, it is. It was originally the Royal Opera House’s idea that we read these letters, and I was a little reticent at first, but they said, oh, just read the letters, and the story will tell itself. And of course it does, so my job in playing Robert was not necessarily to emote or “act” the part, because I think a lot of his struggle was internal. So I really allowed the letters to tell the story and internalized the emotions as much as possible. When we did it live, Alfred Brendel came backstage, and he said, you know, you were the first person who hasn’t overacted this role, and thank you for that. I was very flattered.

The Twin Spirits Schumann film project is really a step in a different direction for you. Do you think about the broader sort of pop audience reacts to some of these sort of extracurricular” or different projects, for lack of a better word?

Sting: It’s important for me not to underestimate the people who listen to my records. I imagine they are as curious, and indeed about the world, as I am. And basically I am there to express my enthusiasm for where my curiosity leads me. I am led by curiosity more than anything else, more than even commercial concerns, I am led by curiosity. My curiosity has coincided largely with popular taste for many years, so I have to trust my instincts.

You perform in Twin Spirits with actor Derek Jacobi, baritone Simon Keenlyside, violinist Sergej Krylov, pianist Iain Burnside, soprano Rebecca Evans, cellist Natalie Clein, and pianist Natasha Paremski Watching your conversations on the Twin Spirits supplementary DVD with them and with the director, John Caird, I was struck by how much you seem ask questions, and appear to be in a listening and learning type of mode.

Sting: I am the eternal student—from Chekhov.

When you’re in New York, what do you like to do for culture?

Sting: I go to the theater, to see a show, to a concert, to restaurants and to the cinema. The last show I saw was South Pacific. Which I adored. I was very shocked by the production, how the racism had been excised from the movie. And I was very shocked to see that it was back. It’s quite a piece of theater, to realize that this girl who you’ve been sort of rooting for suddenly reveals herself, it’s quite shocking. A much heavier piece than the movie.

Photo by Clive Barda/ DG courtesy of Deutsche Grammophone.

Watch a preview of the concert:

“Sting: A Winter’s Night…” captures the artist in the evocative setting of one of England’s most famous cathedrals. Standing on a peninsula overlooking the River Wear in County Durham, the 1,000 year-old UNESCO world heritage building is an iconic landmark of Northern England. Inside, the architecture and atmosphere are equally as inspiring, and it is in this setting that Sting is joined by guest musicians, including local Newcastle artists Kathryn Tickell (Northumbrian pipes and fiddle), Peter Tickell (fiddle) and Julian Sutton (Melodeon). Esteemed performers from around the world also include Dominic Miller (guitar), Vincent Ségal (cello), Scottish harpist Mary MacMaster, Ira Coleman (bass), Chris Gecker (trumpet), David Mansfield (violin and mandolin), Cyro Baptista, Bashiri Johnson and Rhani Krija (percussion), and vocalists Laila Biali, Lisa Fischer, Jo Lawry and Steven Santoro. Producer Robert Sadin conducts an ensemble of 35 musicians, which includes additional string and brass sections.

Featuring traditional music of the British Isles as its starting point, Sting and guest musicians interpret stirring, folk-based melodies including “The Snow it Melts the Soonest” (traditional Newcastle ballad), “Soul Cake” (traditional English “begging” song), “Christmas at Sea” (traditional Scottish song), “Gabriel’s Message” (14th century carol), “Balulalow” (lullaby by Peter Warlock) and “Now Winter Comes Slowly” (Henry Purcell). Two of Sting’s own compositions are also featured: “Lullaby for an Anxious Child” and “The Hounds of Winter,” which originally appeared on his previous release Mercury Falling. “Winter is a season I’ve always had an affinity for,” says Sting. “It’s certainly rich in terms of inspiration and materials.”

Born a milkman’s son in Newcastle, England, Sting met Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers, who formed The Police in 1977. The band quickly became a success in both the U.S. and the UK, scoring several No. 1 hits including Roxanne, Every Breath you Take, King of Pain and Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. The Police earned five Grammy Awards and two Brits, and in 2003, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With the release of Dream of the Blue Turtles in 1985, followed by Bring on the Night, Nothing Like the Sun, The Soul Cages, Ten Summoner’s Tales, Mercury Falling, Brand New Day, All This Time, Sacred Love and Songs from the Labyrinth, Sting has evolved into one of the world’s most distinctive and highly-respected solo performers, collecting an additional 11 Grammy Awards, two Brits, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, three Oscar nominations, Billboard Magazine’s Century Award and MusiCares Person of the Year for 2004.

A production of Graying & Balding, Inc., in association with Universal Music Classical Management & Productions (UMCMP) and THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG, the production is directed by the Emmy Award-winning team Jim Gable and Ann Kim. A DVD of the program will be released November 24 on Deutsche Grammophon, featuring additional performances and behind-the-scenes footage documenting the concert’s genesis.

Great Performances is funded by the Irene Diamond Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Vivian Milstein, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public television viewers and PBS.

Photograph for video thumbnail by Tony Molina.

Watch a preview of the concert:

The My Christmas concert is the ultimate holiday musical experience from Andrea Bocelli, showcasing the tenor in performances of traditional carols and other favorites in English, with a few additional selections in Italian and German. Regarding Christmas music, the star remarks, “I have long dreamed of recording a holiday album that captures the beautiful traditions of the holiday season. Every year, these songs have brought incredible joy to me and my family, and it is my hope to give back that same joy by making this album.” Of her experience singing Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” with Bocelli during the taping, country music star Reba McEntire told the Toronto Sun, “I sat there in awe. I just loved it. (His voice) is rich like frosting on a cake – decadent. It’s so full. I stood there right beside him and just watched him.”

An iconic figure in music who has sold more than 60 million albums to date, Bocelli continues to defy categorization, age barriers and labels of any kind. In concert or on the opera stage, he has sung with everyone from Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo to Bono and Celine Dion. In addition to his solo Great Performances concert programs, Bocelli’s many memorable television appearances include the Oscar and Grammy Awards telecasts, mentoring contestants on American Idol and performances at the Official Ceremonies of the Olympic Games, all of which have propelled Andrea Bocelli into becoming a global household name in contemporary popular music.

Great Performances is funded by the Irene Diamond Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public television viewers and PBS.

The only continuing primetime performance showcase on American television, GREAT PERFORMANCES presents a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries. With its programs garnering 64 Emmy Awards and four George Foster Peabody Awards, the series has received every major television honor.

Regardless of geographic or economic limitations, GREAT PERFORMANCES insures its audiences “the best seats in the house” with a roster of artists and performing arts companies that represent a “Who’s Who” of excellence and virtuosity in the international performing arts.

Adams’ work stands out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Because of his ability to integrate different styles, including American popular forms, his standing today has been of compared in importance to American musical expression to that of Aaron Copland in the forties and Leonard Bernstein in the fifties.

In a segment that aired on October 18, 2009 for WNET.org’s weekly arts program, SundayArts, Paula Zahn interviewed John Adams, composer of the new work City Noir performed for Dudamel’s inaugural concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Learn more about this composer’s work in the following video profile:

When Gustavo Dudamel’s in town, you go. So on Saturday night, I caught the opening concert of the Israel Philharmonic’s U.S. tour with Dudamel at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, just prior to his two Carnegie Hall concerts on November 16 and 17.

I asked my 14-year-old daughter to come along, and I didn’t even have to twist her arm. Here’s the rare A-league conductor who’s not even twice her age, and he jumps around on the podium pretty much like kids her age. On a more serious level, my daughter also gets that Dudamel is considered in the same league artistically as Leonard Bernstein, and that this makes his concerts potentially historic. She has friends who are envious she got to go, friends who know that this “Dude” isn’t the same as the “Later, dude” dude.

The concert itself—Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and two works by Bernstein, his Halil for solo flute, string orchestra, and percussion, and his Jubilee Games, written for the 50th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic, in 1986—was … how do I put this? It felt like a love-fest between the Israel Phil and Dudamel. The program was so intimately connected with the orchestra and its history that it was impossible not to be moved at many points during the evening. Plus, Leonard Bernstein not only was the composer of two pieces of music on the program, he led the IPO as early as 1948, in Beersheba, Israel, and conducted it frequently thereafter, eventually being named laureate conductor in 1988. Jubilee Games itself is a classically Bernsteinian messy hodgepodge; it’s got some parts where musicians can improvise, such as free-form strings sawing away and trombones raucously glissandoing, a little Habanera, a little Shostakovich, ending with a recorded voice singing the Benediction in Hebrew. The orchestra threw itself into the performance and made as good a case as probably can be made for the music.

Dudamel conducted the Tchaikovsky from memory. The brass played with a wild intensity during the first and fourth movements, the strings wonderfully evoked balalaikas in the pizzicato movement, the oboe and bassoon traded the second-movement’s mournful melody back and forth with skill. And of course, it was entertaining to watch Dudamel’s dancelike podium maneuvers, especially when  he gave fist-pump cues on Tchaikovsky’s heavy, Russian offbeats. The orchestra members seemed to bask in the occasion of playing for Dudamel, at first refusing to stand or take bows themselves.

The IPO tour takes place on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary. And as these things happen sometimes, the moment that felt most special wasn’t anything on the written program. It was the opening, with the American flag lit at the left of the proscenium, and the Israeli flag on the right. The orchestra stood up and played first the “Star Spangled Banner” and then “HaTikvah.” Everyone in the auditorium, 2,750 of us, stood up and sang—quite beautifully, actually—and we got all choked up.

Pity the Rodolfo and Mimì pouring out their hearts this July in La Scala’s La Bohème. It’s possible that more people will be craning their necks to see 27-year-old Venezuelan conducting sensation Gustavo Dudamel in the pit, than either the Mimì (Italian soprano Carmela Remigio) or Rodolfo (American tenor James Valenti, who sang a televised Pinkerton this season at New York City Opera). Neither Valenti nor Remigio is a big name like Angela Gheorghiu, the Met’s Mimì this season, or Jonas Kaufmann, who sang Rodolfo in a Bohème conducted by Dudamel in February. But at least Remigio has lived through Dudamania before: she sang Donna Anna in a 2006 Don Giovanni he led in Milan.

Yes, Dudamania is in full swing. In Los Angeles, where Dudamel begins as the L.A. Philharmonic’s new music director in 2009-10, the orchestra welcomed its curly-haired superstar this spring with a lunch catered by none other than Pink’s hot dog stand, creating for the occasion a special “Dude dog”—guacamole, cheese, fajita mix, jalapenos, tortilla chips. (Dudamel is said to be fond of hot dogs.) Normally, classical musicians are barely on the radar screens of the bigger media outlets, but he’s such a hot commodity that he recently had to turn down numerous interview requests, including ones from Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno. His fiery performances of Shostakovich, Mahler, and Beethoven with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela have gotten people excited the way they used to get over Bernstein. The Venezuelan orchestra has become symbol of the against-all-odds success of that country’s government-run music-education program, and Dudamel is its hero.

Of course, opera and symphonic performances are two different beasts, and the lyricism and sweetness of Puccini’s La Bohème are in pretty strong contrast to, say, Beethoven’s obsessional motivic pursuits or Mahler’s extremes of emotion. But it’s hard not to cheer for Dudamel, whose young Venezuelan musicians regularly whoop it up in an encore from Ginastera’s Estancia ballet that involves instrument-twirling, dancing, and a ferocity and joyful abandon you rarely see from a large orchestra. I’ve been enjoying listening to the Fiesta, a new Dudamel/SBYOV CD of an all-Latin American program that includes the Ginastera, as well as Revueltas’s Sensemaya and the rollicking Mambo from Bernstein’s West Side Story that also has had audiences on their feet cheering the way they do after a goal at a soccer game.