Just letting you know I am Rodney Greenberg and I made two sets of Tortelier Masterclasses for BBCTV. This Rachmaninov is from the original set of six recorded at BBC Television Centre, London in 1973 (broadcast 1974). The best of them, the Dvorak Concerto, was accidentally wiped by the BBC after its first transmission and I have tried for four decades to find anyone who has it on VHS (1974 was too early for me to have a videorecorder). So it was not repeated with the others a few years later. The Dvorak you are seeing on RU-vid (with subtitles) was taped in 1987 at the Manchester Royal College of Music as a replacement for the wiped programme. RU-vid also has the Elgar Concerto (from 1973) and Debussy's Cello Sonata + Tortelier's own Sonata Breve (1987). If anyone has the 1973 original version of the Dvorak (Tortelier in a red sweater and the same studio set as this Rachmaninov) please POST IT, what a discovery it would be!!
+SpaghettiToaster That one isn't in this studio tho; it looks similar, but the walls are different, and in this one, the audience is up, in that one it is a bit below.
+Rodney Greenberg Goodness! Rodney Greenberg! The name is so familiar from my early days of listening to serious music on R3 and the Proms that I'm delighted to come across you here and to be able to thank you. I watched some of these Tortelier masterclasses when they were first broadcast and I was 12 or 13 and was enchanted by them. I hope that the Dvorak will turn up - I seem to remember that it was wonderful.
I was a huge fan of the original series when learning to play the cello at school in the mid 70s to early 80s when these were broadcast so would like to take this opportunity to personally thank you. I believe that I have most of them still on tape but this may well not have been from the first transmission. However, as they were recorded onto a Betamax tape at the time, I cannot be sure what I have exactly because sadly I don't have access to a machine to play the tape. Thankfully I did copy over my personal favourite, the variations on a rococo theme, onto a VHS tape and this has since been converted into a digital format. I've never tried to do an upload before but do you know if it is OK to put it onto RU-vid?
Rodney Greenberg My great friend, Richard Markson, a pupil of Tortelier also did a tv masterclass but it was wiped. Richard just might have a copy, I don’t know. He has a web site through which you might contact him. If no luck, I might ask if I can give you his email address. Peter McKenzie Oxford.
Thank you so much for uploading this! I'm also studying this sonata and this is really great for me to listen to and learn from a master like Tortelier