The Alchemy of the Piano

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a ‘wonderful Mozartian’, has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists – their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world’s leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria João Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, its colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff’s Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.