SKY Arts

Master artist Graeme Stevenson travels around Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States on his Harley Davidson filming artists in their studios and showing their techniques. The series is educational, entertaining, humorous and enables viewers to learn from some of the best artists in the world.

Today’s brightest personalities discover the surprising stories buried within their own families in the fifth season of the critically acclaimed PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This season features an array of celebrated guests who are cultural trailblazers with fascinating family stories, including Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei; Emmy and Golden Globe Award winners Felicity Huffman, Laura Linney and S. Epatha Merkerson; and actors Michael K. Williams, Andy Samberg, Chloe Sevigny and Kal Penn.

Season Five also includes superstar author George R.R. Martin; acclaimed journalists Christiane Amanpour, Ann Curry, Joe Madison and Lisa Ling; bestselling author and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg; TV hosts Seth Meyers and Michael Strahan; artists Marina Abramovic and Kehinde Wiley; politicians Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Ryan; Academy Award-winning filmmakers Alejandro Innaritu and Michael Moore; and comedians Tig Notaro and Sarah Silverman.

A fascinating look at the life and work of some of Hollywood's most iconic filmmakers. Each episode brought to life by Derek Malcolm, Neil Norman, Stephen Armstrong, Bonnie Greer OBE and Ian Nathan along with classic moments from each film career.

This series travels to the great opera houses of the world, from Milan and Venice, to London and New York, to pay tribute to the greatest opera singers of our time. Hosted and narrated by operatic soprano, Danielle de Niese.

Featuring classic moments in the careers of twelve legends of opera, from Luciano Pavarotti to Enrico Caruso, Joan Sutherland to Kiri Te Kanawa and Jessye Norman to Mario Lanza. Filmed in the United Kingdom and Italy, each episode features historical archival footage, performance highlights and contributions from artists, critics and directors.

Stephen Mangan and Joan Bakewell host the fifth series of this unbreakable painting show that aims to uncover the UK’s next great portrait artist.

Mixing exquisite design and stunning art with a dash of radical idealism, The Victorian House of Arts & Crafts celebrates one of the UK’s greatest art and design movements. In this social experiment, six modern day craftspeople are sent back in time to live in a remote country house where they immerse themselves in the idealistic dreams of Arts and Crafts visionaries William Morris, John Ruskin and Gertrude Jekyll.

Cut off from modern life, they must forego technology to lovingly breathe new life into the property by decorating and furnishing four key rooms, with everything made by hand from scratch. But will 21st century sensibilities crumble under the reality and pressures of 19th century life?

Kenny Rogers is an American singer, songwriter, actor and record producer. He is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Though he has been most successful with country audiences, he has charted more than 120 hit singles across various music genres, topped the country and pop album charts for more than 200 individual weeks in the United States alone and has sold over 120 million records worldwide, certifying his position as one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

Super group Bokante performs at the 2018 Malta Jazz Festival, a musical event held every year on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Bokante is an experiment designed by the founder of Snarky Puppy and creator of GroundUP Music, Michael League (who traded his bass in favour of a baritone guitar in this group) whose creative process was everything except conventional.

Is it because Murger had himself lived this way in his youth? No one better described the half-starved, struggling artists than the writer in his Scenes de la Vie de Boheme: artists ready to burn a manuscript to try to keep warm yet, in an era of triumphant bourgeois materialism, dreaming of another existence. Taking up these scenes of Bohemian life, Puccini offers us a heart-breaking love story and some of the most beautiful music in the history of opera in the story of the poet Rodolfo and fragile Mimi. The staging of this new production has been entrusted to Claus Guth who sets the drama in a future devoid of hope in which love and art become the sole means of transcendence.

During the 1990s, the English pop experienced a renaissance reminiscent of the 1960s, with the emergence of a current that exudes optimism and national pride: the Britpop. Like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in their time, two groups take centre stage and do battle to establish itself as the spokesperson of a generation: Blur, formed in London and Oasis, from the suburbs in Manchester, in the northwest of the country.

Ben Harper is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Harper plays an eclectic mix of blues, folk, soul, reggae and rock music and is known for his guitar-playing skills, vocals, live performances, and activism. Harper is a three-time Grammy Award winner, with awards for Best Pop Instrumental Performance and Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album and Best Blues Album.

Gustave Courbet is one of the most important French painters of the XIXth century. This enfant terrible is full of contradictions and can be as endearing as annoying. Filmed in Paris, his Ornans native city and Switzerland – where he spent his last days in exile, this piece aims to better understand the paintings of this precursor of modern art by getting to know the human being itself. Archives and interviews with psychoanalysts and doctors will shed a new light on the painter’s work. Gustave Courbet never ceases to amaze!

Kristof Barati and Lucas Debargue pair for the first time in a duo concert. Although this was their inaugural collaboration, the two young artists found a perfect understanding around this romantic programme. The two works were written a very few years apart from one another (Brahms’ first sonata for violin and piano in 1879 and Franck’s sonata in A in 1886). The Brahms sonata was recorded by Kristof Barati a few years ago, while Franck’s is a favourite with Lucas Debargue.

The virtuoso piano part suits his gigantic hands and the fantasy of the third movement his love for improvisation. The cyclic form and the many echoes between the piano and violin parts unite the two artists like accomplices in possession of the best assets to bring in all the emotion these romantic works have to offer. The listener is suddenly in a position to re-discover the scores and cannot but join the admiration marks that escape from the audience in between the movements. A very moving performance that deserves its benchmark status.

Seong-Jin Cho pays tribute to Debussy on the occasion the 100th anniversary of the French composer’s death. Cho’s refined palette of colour and superb technical mastery is perfectly suited for revealing the subtle harmonic invention of Images.

Schumann’s Fantasiestucke Op. 12 are rarely featured in concert programs. This half-hour-long cycle is a challenge for the performer who has to demonstrate an extreme versatility of moods ranging from the dark. Des Abends, the angst-filled In der Nacht to the virtuosic Traumeswirren.

With Chopin’s Op. 58, Cho shows his ability in the grand sonata form and his affinity for the composer that earned him the distinction by winning the First Prize of the 2015 Chopin competition.

Gregory Porter: Don’t Forget Your Music is an inspirational story of a unique musical talent. Told through candid interviews, and exclusive access-all-areas coverage, the story traces the Grammy-award winner’s journey to international fame.

There is no doubt Porter is special, his story is particularly poignant in the current American zeitgeist, yet Porter transcends to represent the next generation in the American Jazz story. The camera loves Porter; he is a mountain of a man, softly spoken who strikes a sartorial presence in an eclectic mix of tailored suits, waistcoats and his now famous Jazz hat.

This documentary contains interviews and contributions from Porter’s family, music industry figures and some of the world’s most influential musicians. In a time when the world and media is obsessed with making instant stars through reality TV and social media, this film shows that at the heart of success must be raw talent and self-belief.

In 1932, Charlie Chaplin, in the middle of a professional crisis, decides to go on a trip to Bali with his brother Sydney, where he will find peace and inspiration. Further to this journey, Chaplin was able to overcome his fear of talking movies and to direct some of his greatest successes such as Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). Thanks to a little camera, he and his brother recorded this journey offering us for the first time a glimpse of this turning point in Chaplin’s life.

Recently appointed as the new music director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra, Valery Gergiev has selected two Russian compositions to demonstrate the versatility of his youth orchestra.

The program opens with the Symphonic Diptych by Schedrin, a composer championed by Gergiev for many years. This compact orchestral piece was composed especially for the conductor and features musical material from Schedrin’s concert opera The Enchanted Wanderer. Its colorful and contrasted orchestration is a perfect introduction to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

This landmark score in the Russian repertoire, in which the concertmaster plays a prominent role, takes us on a journey that unfolds through four distinct movements: The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship, The Story of Prince Kalender, The Young Prince and the Young Princess and Festival at Baghdad, The Sea, The Ship Breaks against a Cliff.

Andras Schiff’s versatile artistry excels as both pianist and conductor as this program illustrates.

He is joined by Vilde Frang, a superlative Mozart interpreter, and master violist Tabea Zimmermann for Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante. The work exemplifies the vast range of emotion Mozart is capable of instilling in one single work: from serene and joyful in the outer movements, to thoughtful and sad in the central movement.

Schumann and Brahms, Schiff accompanies Tabea Zimmermann in the core 19th century viola repertoire. Unlike Schumann whose Marchenbilder were written with the viola in mind, Brahms’ wrote his Op.120 for clarinet and piano. He soon provided a viola transcription that has become as popular as the original.

Brian Wilson presents Pet Sounds – the 50th anniversary celebration & final performance in its entirety, along with rare cuts and greatest hits. Pet Sounds is the 11th studio album by the Beach Boys, released on May 16, 1966. In 2004, Pet Sounds was preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. One year earlier, Rolling Stone ranked it second on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Special guests include Al Jardine & Blondie Chaplin.