Documentary World in Harmony, about the 2019 George Enescu International Festival, produced by Paradigma Film, has its international premiere today, on Medici TV, the most important classical music channel in the world. Starting with October 19, 2020, the film will be broadcasted exclusively on the Medici TV online platform, where it can be watched for free at this link, by creating a guest account with an email address and a password.
World in Harmony is a half-hour documentary about the 24th edition of the George Enescu International Festival, one of the leading classical music festivals in the world. The event designed its entire 2019 program following the idea that in a world where accord seems to have been vanished, George Enescu Festival aims to restore, at least for a while, some of the world’s lost harmony through the healing power of music.
Inspired by its World in harmony motto, the 2019’s edition presented the largest number of concerts in the history of the Festival – 84, many of the world’s leading orchestras, 32 major works by Enescu, 2,500 world-class artists from over 50 countries, and it lasted for 23 days. It was the largest edition of the Festival so far, taking place in Bucharest, as well as in other 10 Romanian cities and six cities in the world, catching the attention of an estimated total of 250,000 music lovers, who enjoyed the atmosphere of the Festival inside the concert halls, and also in live broadcasts, alternative concerts, and various music-inspired events throughout the country.
The documentary captures not only the grand-scale approach and atmosphere of the Festival, but also the insights of some of the world’s greatest artists invited at the Festival, on the importance of Enescu’s cultural heritage, the relevance of the Festival among the major events of its kind in the world, or the role of the artist and music in society. Joyce DiDonato, Mitsuko Uchida, Evgeny Kissin, Vladimir Jurowski, Vasily Petrenko, Fabio Luisi, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Yuja Wang, and many others share their views on the quality of the Festival audience; the music’s power to make us better; or on our current reality and the narratives we create for the future. In their vision, the Enescu Festival is a celebration of how Enescu’s cultural heritage deeply connects us to our humanity, making us better as people and as a society.
The Enescu Festival’s commitment to a utopian vision of music and education as forces for unity and peace is beautifully evoked by Joyce DiDonato: “[The Festival] gives a chance to gather and have a communal experience around the great themes of life and the great themes of humanity… It’s a beautiful statement by a culture to say, ‘this is something we value, this is something that makes us better as a society and as a culture because it connects us to our humanity in a deep way.”
To the documentary value of the film, which presents the experience of a great classical music Festival in the last year wherein an edition of such scale and communion was possible, given the difficult times we live in, is added the emotional charge lent to the images by the realization, in retrospect, of their uniqueness and unrepeatability.
The documentary will be available on the Festival’s website starting mid-November, 2020.
Named by The New York Times as the closest thing to a Netflix of classical music, Medici TV is the largest online classical music platform, offering its viewers access to a library of over 2,000 programs (concerts, opera and ballet performances, documentaries and masterclasses).
