In 1969 five young musicians, all of them still relatively unknown to the general public - but destined to become international artists of the highest rank - came together to play Schubert’s Trout Quintet in the new Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, in London. Their names: Daniel Barenboim, ltzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré and Zubin Mehta.
The concert took place on August 30th and I guessed that it would pass into legend in time. And so the obvious thing to do was to make a film about it because film remembers our artists and their artistic personalities in a way that not one of the other media is quite able to match. (…)
The resulting film, The Trout, was to become almost certainly the most frequently broadcast classical music film ever made. When it was broadcast for the eighth time in Germany, on 25 May 1994 on the ARTE network, it drew the biggest audience of all classical music transmissions on that network during the whole of the year - 25 years after it first appeared! It has become the best remembered emblem of a time in music which has gone, and seems to be forever gone.
The Trout (55 min)
Jacqueline is my all-time favorite cellist; Perlman, of all violinists currently alive, is the one I admire and look up to the most. An absolute joy of a movie for classical buffs.