Tragedy And Philosophy. A Parallel History

Directed by enigmatic and brilliant documentary essayist Chris Marker, THE OWL’S LEGACY is an intellectually agile, engaging, and sometimes biting look at ancient Greece, its influences on Western culture and how many eras have reinterpreted the Greek legacy to reflect their own needs. Each of the 13 episodes is centered on a potent Greek word: from “democracy” and “philosophy” to “mythology” and “misogyny”. Marker convenes and films symposia meals featuring wine and thoughtful conversation in locales including Paris, Tokyo, Tbilisi, Berkeley and an olive grove on the outskirts of Athens.

With this recording project, Gustavo Dudamel & Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela pay homage to two of our greatest inspirations: Beethoven and Bolivar. Two bold, passionate visionaries whose parallel lives straddled the transition from the Enlightenment to the revolutionary Romantic eras, who came of age in the shadow of Napoleon, and went on to dominate the cultural consciousness of their time. Bolivar led millions of South Americans to freedom and became the spiritual father of nations; Beethoven championed the emancipation of art from the sphere of the aristocracy and, in his symphonies, established the compositional and philosophical vocabulary for all music thereafter.