Monday 10th Settembre 2012 , 19.30
Film Screening

Sopracenerina Hall, Locarno
map

Free Entrance


Bruno Monsaingeon spent many years putting together this major biographical profile of the Russian pianist.

(Fipa d’Or, 1998 - Prix Procirep Classique en images – Ve Biennale de musique filmée,1998 – Prix du documentaire – Festival de Baff, Canada 1998 – Grand prix Académie Charles Cros, 1998 – Prix de la meilleure diffusione musicale audiovisuelle – Syndicat professionnel de la critique dramatique et musicale ,1998 Grand Prix Pratt & Whitney Canada – Festival du film sur l’Art de Montreal, 1999 – Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award, 1999)

“The performing musicians with whom I have a real affinity, those who seem to me the truly important ones, are those who reach beyond the instrument they happen to play, who travel within themselves and do not just rely on the parameters of the instrument in order to express music. The instrument is nothing more than an instrument, it does not dictate one's musical thinking, nor does one exploit it in order to bring one's relationship to it to the center of attention, but rather to give the listener a sense of intimacy with the music one plays. Amongst all the great instrumentalists with whom I have had the privilege to work, few as forcefully as Richter create that extraordinary impression of "dematerializing" music. Like a cannon which would fire a shell without recoiling, like a plane which would take off vertically without momentum, he is capable of varying colours ad infinitum, with or without gradation, of alternating the most tenuous pianissimo and the most volcanic fortissimo without caesura or force of inertia. If he does occasionally give the impression of a struggle with matter, it is in order to pulverize it, to give life to a pure singing tone, whether in the exhilaration of hysterically virtuoso pieces in which his fingers seem to push back the limits of the physically possible, or in the extreme slowness of adagios to which he can, like almost no one else, impart a sense of complete immobility”
Bruno Monsaingeon.

For more information on the Film Cycle click here