The Alchemy of the Piano
A film by Jan Schmidt-Garre
Francesco Piemontesi (piano)
Naxos 2.110778 DVD [150]

The Alchemy of the Piano is a ninety-minute documentary by the German film director and producer Jan Schmidt-Garre, who was born in 1962 and studied conducting and musical theory with Sergiu Celibidache. This version is from Naxos in May of 2025 having been first released in 2024 by Arthaus; it is a PARS Media co-production with the Bayerischer Rundfunk and Sergei Rachmaninoff Foundation, in collaboration with ORF, Arte, NRK, RSI, SRF, SVT and Naxos Audiovisual. Additional support was received from FFF Bayern and the Funk Stiftung.

Filmed over a year, it is loving exploration of the curiosity and admiration which the BBC Music Magazine award-winning Swiss pianist, Francesco Piemontesi (b.1983), has for his fellow performers and the composers whose music they interpret – indeed which can be said they bring to life. At least one pianist here says that composers’ music belongs primarily to the performer and not its composer once it is in the hands of the former. This is a point of view persuasively illustrated throughout the documentary; we are compelled to listen to the intricacies, delicacies and specific development of the music in ways quite different from the potentially more complex requirements of orchestral, choral – or even chamber – writing.

How and why this happens – and with what motivations and experience – a dozen or so of some of the greatest living and (recently) deceased artists illustrate clearly in conversation in the most articulate fashion. These include Piemontesi’s mentor, the late Alfred Brendel, Maria João Pires, Stephen Kovacevich, Jean-Rodolphe Kars and Antonio Pappano. On top of that there is a sixty-minute ‘bonus’ recital by Piemontesi with Yulianna Avdeeva and Zlata Chochieva on Rachmaninoff’s own Steinway in the Villa Senar, his home on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland during the 1930s.

The ‘alchemy’ which Piemontesi has in mind is not an attempt to transform anything but alludes – successfully, if perhaps a little too cautiously for some, to his fascination with the forces and adherence to pianistic styles which motivate him and his fellow players. He communicates this through a series of interviews, impressively conducted in English, French, German and Italian (there are subtitles) – but Piemontesi is Swiss, after all – with the eight pianists so important to him.

This is well done; and of real interest. Brendel, typically, talks about sonata form, Maria João Pires about the kinetics of playing – the piano as extension of the body, Kovacevich about ways in which the piano produces such a range of sound. This is a welcome compendium of such wisdom, aptly illustrated, and well compiled.

The DVD is ‘through-produced’: that is, it is not a linear history or survey of the piano, its history, acoustics or repertoire with segmented ‘chapters’, introduction, arguments and conclusions. Rather – as Piemontesi explains to camera at the start – it is a ‘journey’ which he took with “older and more experienced” musicians to explore the piano and its world. This was inspired by Piemontesi’s experience of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances; it draws not on a central or dominant ‘thesis’ which is advanced by either Piemontesi or Schmidt-Garre but is rather a composite – a result of the conviction and experience amply demonstrated by the handful of eminent practitioners whose contributions make up the substance of The Alchemy of the Piano.

Perhaps the intention of Schmidt-Garre’s style is to suggest that there are so many overlaps and crossovers, so much common ground that the essence of pianism is akin to the fluidity implied by ‘alchemy’. If so, the film succeeds. More than simply impressionistic or serendipitously collage-like, there is rigour in looking carefully at the spectrum of attributes and strengths which someone of Piemontesi’s stature should bring to such an enterprise.

In fact, as the film goes on, we realise that Piemontesi has specific (albeit perhaps somewhat wide-ranging) questions to which he wants answers: how does Stephen Kovacevich achieve the sound he does? – in this case flatter fingers so more flesh on the keyboard; for Jean-Rodolphe Kars, the importance of a literary or visual ‘image’; after more than a dozen years, apparently, not playing, Kars illustrates the way in which the register of Faure’s First Nocturne imperceptibly moves lower to illustrate the sublime as an inspiration – obviously as much to him, the performer, as to the composer. Kars also emphasises the Christian impetus in music; he avers that without his faith music would mean nothing… and refers to Messiaen’s assertion that he would not have composed had he not had his faith. Analogously, that which no voice can intone corresponds to the Divine – and so on. In fact, the first segment – the film often cuts back to previous encounters when the logic of Piemontesi’s journey demands it – of each interview is followed by a brief cartoon with a flask into which are added: the Body; Sound; Images; Voice (literally, in the segments with Ermonela Jaho singing excerpts by Francesco Cilea, suggesting that the piano breathes and can use lengthier phrasing than the verticality alluded to by Piemontesi at the start of their first segment… and the importance of the legato also as an emotional aspiration); Colour – to which Pappano emphatically adds Shape; Form, by which Brendel (who practically gives Piemontesi a lesson) means with ‘less personality’ here – at least in Schubert D. 960. The Alchemy of the Piano offers this admixture to us in such a way that cannot but help enrich our listening experience.

There are no flashy ‘effects’ or intrusive filmic gimmicks. The style is sober and appropriate to the subject matter. Quirky? Maybe – but, more charitably, full of concrete musings that reflect Piemontesi’s insights. The Uzbec-born pianist, Eldar Nebolsin, for example, credibly ‘stages’ (that is, mimes) Rachmaninoff’s famous 1940 recording of the Symphonic Dances, an excerpt from which concludes the main film. In the end, we do indeed emerge with a happy sense of the magic, persuasion and potential of the piano, pianism and its (mostly solo) repertoire.

The same satisfaction is to be had with the hour-long ‘bonus recital’ on Rachmaninoff’s Steinway filmed at the villa in which Piemontesi plays in the company of Yulianna Avdeeva and Zlata Chochieva (details beneath review).

True, there are short sequences when the format becomes a little self-conscious, as when Piemontesi describes, while walking through the streets and yard where she is playing, how he first met Maria João Pires, and how pleased he was to be meeting her again now to ask her ‘various things’. Indeed, each interview is preceded by footage of Piemontesi walking or driving to each appointment. However, the film’s pace is relaxed enough for the musical substance – in that case, for example, how much Pires uses her body consciously to add to the expressiveness of what she is playing – to be uppermost. We surely get the impression that, for Pires at least, each note of a piece like the Schubert D.664, a few bars of which illustrate the conversation, it is the very sound of the music that drives the pianist, and not the other way around.

The illustrated 24-page booklet in English and German that comes with the DVD contains very full production credits and black and white photographs but no track listing as such; you buy the DVD for the perspectives on piano music and a pithy interview with Piemontesi, whose answer to the question whether he is worried that such an attempts as this to ‘uncover the secrets of piano playing’ alludes to Simone Weil’s aphorism that ‘The unconcealed hides the inconceivable. That is why it must be conceived’; this might be paraphrased as advocating close examination – because it can do no harm. In other words, the piano, pianism, pianists ‘can take it’. It’s likely you’ll come away with that conviction – and much more.

Mark Sealey

Technical Details
Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Audio language: English, French, German, Italian, Russian
Subtitles: English, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean

Excerpts of music by these composers:
Ludwig van Beethoven
Frédéric Chopin
Francesco Cilea
Claude Debussy
Gabriel Fauré
Felix Mendelssohn
Olivier Messiaen
Giacomo Puccini
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Franz Schubert
Giuseppe Verdi

Artists
Francesco Piemontesi
Yulianna Avdeeva
Alfred Brendel
Zlata Chochieva
Ermonela Jaho
Jean-Rodolphe Kars
Stephen Kovacevich
Antonio Pappano
Maria João Pires

Bonus
At Sergei Vassilyevich’s Piano – A tribute to the pianist Sergei V. Rachmaninoff
Recital at Villa Senar, with Eldar Nebolsin as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Heisenberg, Marieke Schroeder and Erwin Stürzer.

Contents:
Schubert: Impromptu Opus 90, Number. 4, Drei Klavierstücke Number 3
Liszt: Transcendental Study Number 12
(Francesco Piemontesi, piano)
Beethoven: 32 Variations WoO 80, Chopin’s Scherzo Number 3
Rachmaninoff: Prélude Opus 23 Number 10
(Yulianna Avdeeva, piano)
Bach-Rachmaninoff: Violin Partita Number 3
Mendelssohn-Rachmaninoff: Scherzo from Midsummer Night’s Dream
Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninoff: Lullaby Opus 16 Number 1
Scriabin: Poème Opus 32 Number 1
(Zlata Chochieva, piano)

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