fri 04/10/2024

Set The Piano Stool on Fire: on filming Alfred Brendel | reviews, news & interviews

Set The Piano Stool on Fire: on filming Alfred Brendel

Set The Piano Stool on Fire: on filming Alfred Brendel

Director Mark Kidel on his intimate film about genius and protégé

The genius and the prodigy: Kit Armstrong and Alfred BrendelImages © John Batten

When Alfred Brendel first mentioned Kit Armstrong to me, in early 2008, I knew there was a film there. He was brimming with excitement: Kit had come to him with an interpretation of a Chopin Nocturne that displayed a command and maturity that was baffling considering Kit was 13 at the time of the recording.

Alfred led me into his inner sanctum, a practice room filled to bursting with two Steinways, a large carved idol from New Guinea, Liszt’s death mask and a rich and varied collection of paintings and images, some of them revealing the pianist’s wicked Dadaist sense of humour. He slipped the CD into the player, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.

For Alfred Brendel to approve of a pianist’s Chopin was remarkable: he had once told me that he’d left the composer alone as Alfred Cortot’s Chopin could not be bettered. It was the Nocturne he now played me that decided Alfred to teach Kit Armstrong - the first child pianist he had ever taken on.

When I suggested to Alfred’s manager Tom Hull that I wanted to make a film about the master and his young apprentice, he warned that they were shielding Kit from media attention, as they – wisely - didn’t want him spun into another celeb prodigy. He was in fact already very present on YouTube, playing Bach ridiculously well at six, his feet barely reaching the pedals. There had even been, so the rumour went, a number of fake Kit Armstrongs floating around the web. I argued that we shouldn’t delay recording the evolution of this unique teacher-pupil relationship, adding that I wouldn’t release any of the footage until the time was right. But the answer remained a firm "No".

KIT_ARMSTRONG_amp_ALFRED_BRENDEL_-_JBP_9183Nine months later, I was summoned to tea with Alfred and Kit and told that they had decided to go ahead with the film. I had made a documentary about Alfred eight years before, Alfred Brendel, Man and Mask, the only major portrait film he had ever permitted. The collaboration had gone well. I was back at Alfred’s house a week or so later, filming the first of many lessons, in a process which lasted two years. The crowded practice room was not ideal fly-on-the-wall filming territory. My sound engineer Mary Milton had to squeeze between the two grand pianos and the wall. I was hampered by a very limited amount of camera angles. Shooting was made easier by the small size of my digital camera, but being a fly on the wall was still a challenge: I felt more like the elephant in the practice room, knocking precious objects off shelves as I tried to move around without disturbing the magic of the delicate teaching dialogue that unfolded before us.

Both Alfred and Kit are ambivalent about the camera. They are born performers but shy as well. Making documentaries allows the film-maker to penetrate other people’s worlds in a unique and privileged way, even when it is clear that the people you film are conscious of the camera or not sure they really want you there at all. There are, however, those magical times when spontaneous emotion overrides the care which the subjects devote to nurturing an image. I was around Kit and Alfred long enough to capture some of these moments. The evidence of what goes on between them is often barely perceptible, in a glance or a revealing bit of body language. As Kit’s German manager Julia Nees suggests in the film, “They are kindred spirits”: there is something deep that passes between them and which goes beyond the mere imparting of wisdom, technique and musical interpretation. Both men are fiercely brilliant in their own individual ways but they also share an off-centre quirkiness and sense of the absurd which counter-balances their cerebral intensity.

Over the next 24 months, the relationship changed: Kit became more confident and open with his teacher, and his playing progressed by leaps and bounds. Alfred worked hard at freeing Kit’s spirit from the mixed blessing of technical virtuosity, trying, as he put it to me, “to set the piano stool on fire”. Kit, like Yehudi Menuhin and other child prodigies, Alfred explained, came into playing the piano with an uncanny grasp of the emotional content of the music. You can only guess how prodigies achieve this. As they develop, such extraordinary talents have to find emotional territory of their own to draw on, and the film is partly a chronicle of Kit’s initiation into the world of musical passion.

We see Kit visibly moved as he watches his teacher in a moment of exquisite communion with one of his own "masters"

There was an elegiac quality to the filming too, as during the course of the two years, Alfred retired from public performance. Although he refuses – with some justification, as he has had other immensely talented pupils - to acknowledge Kit as his spiritual heir, it is impossible not to see as one of the film’s narrative strands the old master passing the baton to the young prodigy, in an age-old celebration of the ritual of master-apprentice initiation. Alfred, ever the perfectionist, has never been easy about his performances being filmed; it's got harder rather than easier as the decades have gone by. The only recent material came from a session I filmed at Snape Maltings in 2000. I asked if I could film his last UK recital at the Music at Plush festival in the summer of 2008, as I knew that Kit would be in the audience. Alfred refused. In the end, he allowed me to shoot the encores – Bach, Schubert and Liszt. The Liszt provides one of the most moving moments in the film, as we see Kit visibly moved as he watches his teacher in a moment of exquisite communion with one of his own "masters".

The French title to the film is La transmission and "transmission" is what the film is largely about. This has been a theme in several of my music films – a portrait of the great pianist Leon Fleisher, who can claim to be the last in a line of pianistic apostolic succession that goes back to Beethoven via Artur Schnabel and Czerny; Ravi Shankar, whose pupils shared his home, in the ancient Indian tradition of the guru-shishya relationship; and finally, in Soweto Strings, the film about the work of viola player Rosemary Nalden in the South African townships, an inspired process of initiation that liberates disadvantaged young people through the healing power of music.

I am grateful that Alfred and Kit granted us access. They weren’t always happy having a film crew around but there is now a unique document which records exceptional moments in piano teaching as well as some of Alfred Brendel’s considerable wisdom and experience. I also hope that the film communicates something of the subtle power of transmission, in a way that makes sense not just in terms of music. But the film is, in the end, a celebration of music-making of the highest order, made up of moments stolen from a master and apprentice as they work their way towards something close to perfection.

There is something deep that passes between them and which goes beyond the mere imparting of wisdom, technique and musical interpretation

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Having attended the June 4 screening, I was left with very mixed feelings. The sound -as Mr Brendel himself noted- is outstanding and the photography is superb. The narrative structure works very well too. The problem for me is that the film tries to tread ever-so-lightly around the tender wunderkind that I felt as if in a septic tank. No friction, no doubt (or self-doubt), no challenge to Armstrong's views about his life or about the world and his place in it, no time spent on why he was raised the way he was (e.g. we never hear anything about his father, or about how he did in school, or what people other than the Brendels, his mother and his agent think about him).

That tallies, Emmanuel, with my limited impressions (from Verbier) of Kit Armstrong. The younger you're hailed as a fabulous performer - which he undoubtedly was, in the handful of things I heard - the more all around you are bound to fawn. It doesn't lead to a natural development as a Mensch, does it? The most human artists I've met all learnt their craft away from the spotlight of adulation.

Well, perhaps, but I tried to restrict my point to the merits of the film rather than the constitution of its wunderkind subject. It seems to me that it's alright to stand in awe of one's chosen focus, as long as one still enjoys enough freedom and curiosity to interrogate it. It was quite obvious that Mr Kidel did not enjoy this degree of freedom in making his film... I can't judge how Mr Armstrong could or should develop as a human being. The artist doesn't owe the audience anything, nor can we assume that moving music-making must always be associated with skills and qualities that we appreciate at the interpersonal level. Having said that, it is very interesting that, by his own account, Brendel developed in a diametrically opposite way to Armstrong...

A very late reply: Kit Armstrong is a very private person. Prodigies rarely have normal lives and it is never easy for them. He is also one of those outstandingly intelligent people (very good at maths too) who find the ordinary business of communicating difficult. But he is changing. When I first met him, quite a while before we started filming, he was even more reticent. He is now much more forthcoming. As for his father, he is never mentioned and I don't see the point of embarrassing him or his mother with questions about someone who doesn't figure in their lives. The film was first and foremost about the relationship between Kit and Alfred.

When might we expect to see this film released in the USA? I know of many, myself included, who would welcome it eagerly.

There are, sadly, no plans to release this in the USA. I fear it wouldn't find the audience a distributor would require. Or organize a screening yourself if you are connected to a local art house cinema or music festival. You can buy it on DVD in the UK - try Amazon

Thank you for your reply. It is indeed unfortunate that the economics of film distribution prevent the release of productions such as yours here in the USA. Our loss, I'm afraid. However, I have ordered the DVD from Amazon UK and eagerly await its arrival.

As a follow up to my comments above, I have not only watched this wonderful film many times since acquiring it in 2012, I have also since seen Kit Armstrong in performance numerous times--including his multiple appearances at the splendid Homage to Alfred Brendel in Berlin in 2017. During that ten-day period in Berlin Mr. Kidel also screened his splendid film about Brendel himself, "Man and Mask". (Along with Mr Brendel, I arrived only in time for the post-film Q & A, as we were otherwise detained by Mauro Peter's performance of Die Schoene Mullerin upstairs!) Suffice it to say that Kit Armstrong, to my ears, continues to grow and mature as both an artist and as a human being.

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