SILVER SCREEN PIANISTS
Pianists appear in the movies again and again. Sometimes the plots in which they pop up are predictable to a yawning degree, and could probably be boiled down to ‘tortured young artist pours out his heart into a concerto (usually Rachmaninov No 2) and then wins the girl, the competition, and everlasting happiness’. But sometimes films also pack surprises and ring changes upon common tropes with a bit of freshness. How about ‘if you play one wrong note in the concerto, I’ll kill you’ as a hook for the plot of Grand Piano? Sounds fun, no? And who could resist ‘disembodied hand plays some Bach, then hops upstairs to murder everyone in their beds’? (The Beast with Five Fingers). Yum. Count me in.
The piano has had a long association with films, both as a subject of the lens and as an accompanying musical event. If you want to explore the wider history of celluloid and the keyboard, there’s an excellent article by Michael Quinn in issue 33 of with oodles of fascinating details. But I’m proposing to narrow the field, and look only at in film. And, to narrow this further, only at pianists in film. Thus I won’t be covering documentaries about Horowitz or Rubinstein, or biopics of real-life men and women. Which is a relief, because there are with Katharine Hepburn and with Nastassja Kinski), and a whole heap about Liszt ( with Claudio Arrau, with Roger Daltrey, et al). Flicks about Chopin aren’t lacking either – remember the frothy one with Hugh Grant? – and there’s even a surprisingly stodgy romp about Percy Grainger’s mother-fixated bondage and flagellation fetish (). And let’s not forget the dazzling about Liberace.
