British filmmaker Phil Grabsky has dedicated his career to making space in cinema for fine arts and music. You need only skim any multiplex marquee to appreciate that fine arts and music are not where the money is. (It’s worth noting, however, that Grabsky’s production company is behind the Art and Architecture in Cinema series that streams digitally to Regal West Town Mall 9 theaters. The episodes Renoir: Revered and Reviled and Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse can be seen there in coming weeks.)
Grabsky’s excellent In Search of… series of composer biographies—profiling Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Chopin—combine terrific, in-depth interviews with historians, composers, and performers with fairly stunning and intimate digital performance footage. Knox County Public Library owns them all on DVD, and most of them offer the opportunity to hear and see extended or complete performances in isolation from the narrative content.
The lives of these composers were well documented and serious attention was paid to their lives while they were living. Source material is abundant. Still, it’s difficult to imagine a text, however exhaustive, combining fact, domestic arrangements (or domestic conflicts), geographic location, trend and fashion background, the ongoing evolution of instruments, and disruptions like revolutions or dying loved ones in a way that is as transporting as these films. We learn what the days of these men were like and how they turned those days into music that is both familiar and still capable of surprise.
Although In Search of Mozart followed Milos Forman’s Amadeus by some 30 years, producers of the former seem to take some pleasure in busting myths generated or perpetuated by the latter. Mozart was not poisoned. He did not die in debt. He was not an addict.
While much of the information shared by interviewees is stirring, especially moving are conversations with great performers who approach the scores and manuscripts of these composers as personal correspondence from their distant idols. Before demonstrating a passage by Beethoven, Emmanuel Ax explains that Beethoven made manuscript notes dictating that it be played with the left hand in one sweeping motion. The elfin Ax holds up his tiny hands and confesses with a shrug, “Beethoven had very large hands. I must use both hands.” And then he nails it, with the camera perched at his elbow.
Before performing Chopin’s Opus 57 – Berceuse in D-flat major, Ronald Brautigam says that playing Chopin makes him feel like an intruder. “I like a little distance between myself and the composer. I feel like I shouldn’t be there. He should be sitting there playing his own music. It’s not meant to be played by others; it’s too personal for me.”
Producers of the series tell us that there are no additional composers currently slated for the In Search of… treatment. But there is a deviation of the formula screening in select theaters this spring: Grabsky’s Concerto: A Beethoven Journey focuses on Beethoven’s music for piano and orchestra, as explored by Leif Ove Andnes’ extended exploration of that music through performance and recording. Coming soon, let us presume, to a public library near you.
Chris Barrett's Shelf Life alerts readers to new arrivals at the Lawson McGhee Library's stellar Sights and Sounds collection, along with recommendations and reminders of staples worthy of revisiting. He is a former Metro Pulse staff writer who’s now a senior assistant at the Knox County Public Library.
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