England, My England: The Story of Henry Purcell. DVD. Directed by Tony Palmer. West Long Branch, NJ: Distributed by Kultur International Films, 2007. D4221. ISBN: 0769785387. ISBN: 9780769785387. $24.99. Rachmaninoff, The Harvest of Sorrow. DVD. Directed by Tony Palmer. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2007, 1998. D4223. ISBN: 0769785395. ISBN: 9780769785394. $24.99. No one, not even Ken Russell, has made as many films about classical music as Tony Palmer, writer-director of documentaries or dramatizations about Benjamin Britten, Maria Callas, Yehudi Menuhin, Giacomo Puccini, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and others, employing a variety of stylistic approaches. While Rachmaninoff, The Harvest of Sorrow, his portrait of Sergei Rachmaninoff, is a conventional documentary, England, My England: The Story of Henry Purcell is anything but conventional. The Harvest of Sorrow offers footage from Rachmaninoff's silent home movies, stock footage of Russia and New York City, a visit to the Russian home from which he reluctantly fled in 1917, passages from the composer's letters and other writings read by John Gielgud, fragments of performances of his works by the orchestra and chorus of the Mariinsky Theater, conducted by Valery Gergiev, and several Russian pianists, and interviews with Gergiev and Rachmaninoff 's grandson and niece. As the title, drawn from an early song, indicates, the portrait is rather melancholy. Palmer looks at how religion, his family, and his first love affairs affected the themes of Rachmaninoff's music. The biggest influence, however, was Russia itself. Palmer excels at illustrating Rachmaninoff's melancholy soul by juxtaposing his words and music to underscore his sense of a lost homeland and the unfulfilled promise of his country. He is bitter at having to abandon his composing for years during his exile in New York, Los Angeles, and Switzerland so that he could support his family through concerts, a task that left him especially bitter because he never felt he played well enough and cut short performances when he sensed the restlessness of his audiences. While much is known about Rachmaninoff, there is little documentary material about Henry Purcell. Palmer and his screenwriters, John Osborne and Charles Wood, address this dilemma by making it film, originally produced as a motion picture in 1995, jumps between dramatizations of Purcell's time, concentrating on the court of Charles II (Simon Callow) and the historical events of the day, and the 1960s when an actor (also played by Callow) portraying Charles II in a clunky stage production decides to write a play about Purcell. This approach works because it obviates the need for a detailed biography and because it demonstrates how Purcell's music was a product of his time and place, reflecting the personalities and events of life at court. …