The British broadcaster Channel 4 will feature conductor Charles Hazlewood as he assembles an orchestra made up of disabled musicians.
The show was announced today as one of four new music programs commissioned by Tabitha Jackson, Channel 4 Arts Commissioning Editor. The documentary will follow how the British conductor recruited the members to form "The British Paraorchestra" and prepare for their first concert.
Channel 4 said the documentary by "What Larks Productions" would explore the "achievements and challenges facing disabled musicians in Britain today".
"The Channel 4 arts mission is to find the creative expression of what it is to be alive now. While on the face of it these films are about music, in fact what they really illuminate, in a beautifully crafted way, is contemporary human experience and the power of music within that," said Jackson.
The British Paraorchestra, the UK’s first orchestra of world-class musicians with disabilities, includes a blind lutenist, a pianist with one arm, and a harpist with a hand deformity.
Hazlewood was inspired to put the orchestra together after his daughter was born with cerebral palsy.
Channel 4 has also ordered "Attenborough and Bjork: The Nature of Music", in which Bjork and David Attenborough take a journey through our relationship with music.
"James Rhodes: Notes from the Inside" follows musician James Rhodes as he takes a piano into a psychiatric hospital to explore how music can "change lives for the better".
The last program is "Chopin Saved My Life", which explores Chopin's first Ballade.
