Dramatic Portrait Knight

The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don't look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.

'The Flying Dutchman', a romantic opera in three acts, was first performed in 1843. The story of the Dutch captain Bernard Fokke provided the material for the plot. Unlike many other sailors, he did not succeed in circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope. He tried to defy God and the forces of nature but did not wrestle them down because he cursed them and has since been doomed to cruise the world's oceans forever with his ghost ship. Anyone who encountered this ship with a black mast and blood-red sails was destined for misfortune.

FSM presents the Miklós Rózsa Treasury (1949-1968), a 15CD set celebrating one of the giants of film music. In this single package FSM makes available virtually every surviving, as-yet-unreleased note from the composer’s fertile and productive association with M-G-M.