Music heard in long extracts (over 1 minute)
Mozart : Violin Concerto No 3 in G major K216, first movement
Sibelius : Violin Concerto - beginning (arr piano and violin)
Brahms : Violin Concerto - first movement; last movement
Franck : Violin Sonata - end
Kreisler : Schon Rosmarin
Schubert : Trout Quintet
Mozart : Variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, madame
Beethoven : Violin Sonata No 5 in F Op 24, Spring - first mvt

With briefer extracts from...
Yankee Doodle; Tartini: Violin Sonata in G min; Paganini: Witches' Dance; Ysaye: Caprice after Saint Saens; Saint-Saens: Introduction and Allegro; Wieniawski: Violin Concerto No 2; Eccles: Sonata for Cello; Bach: Partita No 3 in E major; Saint-Saens: Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso; Bach: Violin Sonata in D maj; Leclair: Sonata in D major; Falla: Jota from Canciones populares espanolas

This is a remarkable programme: both a cultural and historical document, and fascinating entertainment as well. In 1979, American violinist Isaac Stern - then 59 - accepted an invitation to go to China along with his accompanist Richard Golub. The idea was to give a few masterclasses, perhaps a concert or two, but mainly to act as a sort of musical ambassador to encourage the artists re-emerging after the terrible damage done by Mao's Cultural Revolution.

A personal witness to that damage was Tan Shuzhen, a teacher in the Shanghai Conservatory. At the height of the Cultural Revolution he had to hide in a windowless closet over a cess pit for 14 months - his crime being to advocate the music of Beethoven. In a highly poignant part of the film, he tells his story with no self pity: after all, he was relatively lucky. Ten of his colleagues committed suicide.

But the rest of the programme is a celebration. We see Stern at work in masterclasses, where his lively intelligence brings joy to audiences and students alike as he transforms their playing from note-perfect representations into performances with feeling. It's quite enlightening to hear an orchestra start off playing Mozart with a Chinese accent before Stern teaches them Viennese!

We also get a thousand wonderful glimpses of China as it was (and how much of it outside Shanghai or the Shenzhen Economic Zone still is today): the bicycles, the villages, the astounding scenery, the table-tennis academies, the breathtaking acrobatics of the opera and circus performers, the elderly cohorts performing morning tai-chi, and perhaps most endearing, the keen, smiling English students who disarmingly say, "I love Country and Western! John Denver! Bee Gees! Dolly Parton!"

Too many modern documentaries cut off every scene or musical extract after four or five seconds, fearful that any more demands on our limited attention spans would make us flip to the next channel. Not this: it is a documentary made in the old style, with substantial musical extracts and long scenes, and is resoundingly more satisfying because of it - listen, for example, to Stern playing the last two minutes of the Franck Violin Sonata in recital.

There are many extracts of Chinese music both traditional and modern. At one point (just before the train sequence) you hear a minute or so of a wonderfully evocative piece for the Chinese lute, the pipa. In case you'd like to track it down - and it is a substantial and gorgeous work - it's called Dance of the Yi People (Yi Zu Wu Qu) by Wang Huiran.