Beethoven and the banjo

Whatever next on my beloved Radio Three?  Beethoven's Moonlight  Sonata played on the banjo?  Er, why not?  I imagine that Beethoven wouldn't have minded if he had been paid his royalty fee.  It was strangely appealing and quite enjoyable.  The arrangement was by the ace banjo player Bela Fleck and it would be fair to say that the banjo played a secondary role to the cello, which carried the main theme.  Curiously I picked up a second-hand dvd called Copying Beethoven yesterday.  I had never heard of the film before but I look forward to watching it. Although classical music dvds have been reviewed for some time in my Gramophone magazine, classical music dvds are not something I have really gotten into.  Saying that, I do remember being thrilled by watching Beethoven's Third Symphony being played in some grand Viennese palace by, I think, the Academy of Ancient Music dressed in period costumes.  Sadly, I have never really enjoyed watching opera on dvd either, even with our vastly improved tv surround sound system.  It just doesn't work for me.  But then opera in general doesn't work for me if I know too much about the storyline and the lyrics that I'm listening to.  I'm sure I must be missing out on several important dimension of this great art form but my preferred method of listening to opera is just that, listening to opera without regard to what's happening in the drama.  The briefest of plot synopses is enough for me. Perhaps I need to see more of it preformed live.