DAY 31 THURSDAY 22ND OCTOBER, ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA

Just one radio interview today – nice community radio station, run by volunteers. Then bit of time to myself – so no blogging! Here’s three reviews from today instead:

Reviewed by Paul Byrnes The Sydney Morning Herald - Paul Byrnes

Grabsky's elegant film reveals that Beethoven shares many characteristics with some of our own doomed musical geniuses.
Rating stars-4
HE MAY search, but does he find? The British arts documentary veteran Phil Grabsky made the much-admired In Search of Mozart in 2006. Here he goes in search of another genius – arguably one more difficult to pin down.
Ludwig van Beethoven was so many things at once: deaf, drunk, dishevelled, a braggart, moralist, meddler and, at times, dishonest. He was also generous, romantic, lovelorn and some say companionable. He seems to have inspired great friendship and devotion among a select few closest to him. We get a sense of all these things from Grabsky's intriguing film, but there is still a gap. Where did a man so flawed and troubled by life, love and illness find the spiritual depth to write music that was so moving and even joyous? Where does the hope come from?
That is the problem with the biopic, whether fictionalised and Hollywooded or factualised and scholarly, like this one. The genius cannot be cracked open. It remains at the core, sealed and mysterious, so the biographer must circle and ponder, accumulating mere detail, but never really knowing.
Grabsky uses the only solution there is: talk to the people who have tried to know Beethoven by playing his notes, and see what they have found. The language is music, so he speaks to those who speak it. Thus, he visited some of the modern world's greatest musicians, filming them at home and at work, or in breaks from rehearsal. The style is informal, and often intimate. The Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam (with wild Ludwigian hair) demonstrates the kind of music the boy would have grown up hearing from his court musician father in Bonn in the 1770s. The American pianist Emanuel Ax says he must have had large hands, because his fingering is so difficult to play. Ax believes some of it was his little joke, to annoy imitators.
Grabsky also films some great orchestras and ensembles across Europe and North America: the Salzburg Camerata with Sir Roger Norrington, the Vienna Symphony with Fabio Luisi, the Endellion String Quartet, Claudio Abbado conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in a production of Fidelio. These interviews and performances are often intriguing in themselves. I could watch the French pianist Helene Grimaud talk for hours about Beethoven – or the weather. Some of them are quite poetic: talking about a passage in the 4th Symphony, the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda says the allegro is like "the opening of a bottle of champagne".
Beethoven's problems with women punctuate the story. It's clear that the frustrated romances, the dashed hopes of marrying "up", the stifling Viennese rules about social intercourse, all had a big impact on his well-being and music. They seem to bring out his best and worst – the haunting beauty of the Moonlight Sonata and Fuer Elise, written for his objects of desire, versus the four years in which he fought his brother's widow for custody of her son, Karl. She was a slut, according to Ludwig. And yet, for the arrogant moralist he arguably became, he did not shy away from pursuit of married ladies. The man badly needed a wife.
The illnesses remain intriguing. Was it tinnitus, lead-poisoning, syphilis or typhus that damaged his hearing? Or all of the above? Did alcohol drag him down, as it did his father? "On the all-time list of composer drinkers, [Ludwig] would be near the top," says the musicologist Giovanni Bietti. In later life he so rarely changed his clothes that his friends used to replace them while he slept – that certainly sounds like the habits of a major drunk.
What becomes clear in Grabsky's elegant film is that Beethoven shares many characteristics with some of our own doomed and recently departed musical geniuses. We know he contemplated suicide, but decided he had too much music to get written. That shows a great degree of courage, as well as hubris. As good as the film is, Beethoven remains mysterious. He refuses to roll over, so to speak.

From THE AGE:
IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN (G) ★★★ (139 minutes)
Nova
Reviewer Philippa Hawker

FILMMAKER Phil Grabsky (The Boy who Played on the Buddhas of Bamiyan) has already made an intensive study of Mozart, and he structures his portrait of Beethoven in a similar fashion.
It's a combination of austerity and riches. Grabsky traces a chronology, shuns dramatised reconstructions and keeps his supporting images - of locations where the composer lived and worked - relatively simple. The vividness comes from a host of interviews with leading scholars, conductors and performers, supplemented by performances, brief, but exhilarating, of more than 50 pieces of music.
We hear vivid turns of phrase. Conductor Roger Norrington compares Mozart and Beethoven, saying they had one thing in common: they both wrote very fast. "But Mozart was writing for Saturday. Beethoven was writing for eternity."
And there are concrete demonstrations, as when pianist Emanuel Ax takes to the keyboard to make a point about the composer's virtuosity as a performer.
When it comes to the personal life, there are no startling revelations or glib speculations, but there are telling details - some light-hearted, some distressing. Beethoven's creative life, with all its achievements, cannot easily be reconciled with the image of a difficult, solitary figure, shadowed by depression. Grabsky, to his credit, doesn't try to make one life fit the other, but he manages to illuminate both.