Pianomania
Filmmaker: Lilian Franck (Co-Director)
Austria/Germany / 2010 / 93 minutes / German and English with English subtitles
Opening Weekend Date: 20 August 2010
Cinemas screening the film: Clapham Picture House, Stratford Picture House, Greenwich Picture House & Key Cities
Check out our exclusive interview with Director Lilian Franck, on the Birds Eye View Blog .
Pianomania The story of the unsung hero of musical perfection.
"The tone isn't breathing" complains pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, distraught. This is a typical sentence in Steinway & Sons' chief technician and Master Tuner Stefan Knüpfer's usual working day. A piano has its own personality, each piece demands its own timbre and every interpretation has a particular temperament.
The award-winning film Pianomania follows Stefan Knüpfer, Steinway & Sons' Master Tuner in Vienna, as he works with some of the world's best-known concert pianists, including Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang and Alfred Brendel. To find the right instrument with the necessary qualities and compatible with the vision of the virtuoso, to tune it to perfection, and finally to get it on the stage, needs nerves of steel, boundless passion, and an extraordinary competence in translating words into sounds.
With fascinating rehearsal and music recording footage cameras are rarely allowed to capture, Pianomania reveals the art, the science and the passion behind the search for perfection.
Lilian Franck - Director
Lilian Franck has been creating documentary films together with Robert Cibis in the international market for ten years. Her film education took place at the Film Academy in Baden Württemberg, Germany,and the Grande Ecole Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Paris.