DAY 37 WEDNESDAY 28th OCTOBER, HONG KONG



Woke up feeling a bit rough. Really need to go outside for some fresh as opposed to recycled air. Had a little walk about but spent most of the day on the computer and starting to read up about Haydn. Caught the ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island just as the sun was going down as I had appointment with the host of tomorrow’s screening. Walking through the overpasses, tunnels and shopping malls is a bewildering experience – you really do feel like a white blood cell coursing through the veins of some mighty beast. At random, I dropped into a clothes shop – picked up a suit and asked the price. £5000! Yes, that’s right…£5000. Apparently their target market is rich Chinese businessmen who come to HK with suitcases full of money…only they can afford this stuff. I laughed and left. Everyone has earphones for music or their telephones – so strange: I mean virtually everyone has these little black wires coming out of their ears…Like one big security company… Had stunning dinner and thoroughly nice time with Professor Daniel Chua who is something of a Beethoven expert himself but is also hosting the screening at the Hong Kong University. I really am finding people here are tremendously nice. Glad to return to the relative quiet and solitude of my hotel room though – you could get lost in the bowels of these huge department stores and never emerge..

DAY 36 TUESDAY 27th OCTOBER, HONG KONG

Ventured out…went for a run down by the ferries… What a truly wild, weird and wonderful place.. Where to start? Even though it was only about 7am, there was a sea of people out rushing to get to work. Red cabs everywhere..building work…hawkers…dim sum bars…joggers…great views across to Hong Kong island.. After a radio interview to promote Thursday’s preview screening, I’d set up three appointments which simultaneously would give me a good look around. I really don’t know if I can describe the city – it is so easy to get lost in the bowels of buildings – pavements, streets, walkways all pass through the ground floors of buildings and you are endlessly walking past fancy, well-lit shops (expensive too – where do people get their money?!). But the people are extremely polite and friendly, everything is spotless, the public transport puts the London tube to absolute shame and, I discover at the one meeting a bit out of the centre, this crammed, crushed state of affairs is the middle but, thanks to legislation preventing endless building, the countryside is close by and from the little I saw it looks stunning.

DAY 35 MONDAY 26th OCTOBER, FLYING TO HONG KONG

Well, it’s farewell Australia… I am glad to be one stage nearer home but I will certainly be eager to get back to Australia – it’s a wonderful place with wonderful people. And another excellent flight on Qantas (no they are not sponsors, sadly..)took me to the next and final stop…Hong Kong. I arrived in the dark but nevertheless it’s an impressive sight. It’s always one thing to see a place with your own eyes. Certainly I had not realised how many skyscrapers there were..talk about cramming millions of people into a small space! First of all, though, I have to say that it should be compulsory for all employees of British and American airports to visit Hong Kong and see how it should be done. Now that is what I call efficient! Arrival, passport, bags, free buses to hotels – all as smooth and quick as you could hope for. Mind you, the area I am staying in – Kowloon – is an absolute jungle – a chaotic symphony if you will – of neon, wires, underpasses, overpasses, tunnels, junctions, and lord knows what. I have arrived in the world of the film Blade Runner… I actually felt too overwhelmed to wander the streets which is what I usually do in new places. I used the excuse of dozens of emails to stay safely indoors – in another (comfortable) prison cell where you cant open a window and cant see the sky… And the normal hour or two wasted getting the right room, the internet to work, correcting the mistakes in the billing, etc, etc…

DAY 34 SUNDAY 25th OCTOBER, PERTH, AUSTRALIA

Nice review to read in the coffee bar at 7am at a local golf course


Sunday Times (Western Australia)
by Gavin Bond
October 25, 2009
Dedicated director and historian Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart) has now turned his attention to chronicling the life and times of arguably history’s most revered composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, with this meticulously crafted documentary.

Grabsky combines a series of interviews with numerous accomplished classical musicians (who gush eloquently about Beethoven’s intricate compositions) with informative narration by British thesp Juliet Stevenson.

This combination of fact and opinion is most successful in delivering a comprehensive historical portrait of the man and his considerable musical achievements.

Like his previous film, Grabsky chronologically documents his subject’s legacy by first recounting the musical prodigy’s first performance at the age of seven.

The precocious pianist then penned his first concerto while still in his teens before establishing himself as a pre-eminent and amazingly dexterous musician who performed for the Venetian aristocracy of the day.

The film then dissects his remarkable output as a composer of a series of progressively inventive, emotive and stirring concertos and symphonies, an opera and, his self-proclaimed proudest achievement, a religious mass.

Music lovers will also be pleased to note that a renowned bevy of cellists, violinists and string quartets perform more than 50 live performances of Beethoven’s best known works, culminating in a rousing rendition of Ode to Joy.

Through the use of excerpts from his personal diary, this doco also explores Beethoven’s rather tragic and troubled personal life, including his dysfunctional childhood and ongoing ill health.

Grabsky also delves into the cantankerous composer’s turbulent romantic life and his eventual mental breakdown and premature demise in 1827 at the age of 56.

But what this film does best is illuminate the many inexplicable paradoxes of the man himself.

The fact that Beethoven was a misanthrope who created such optimistic music, that he was an incurable romantic who remained unmarried and that his instinct for melody failed to be thwarted by his inability to hear prove to be most enlightening, even to authorities on the subject.

Despite its excessive length, this reverential doco will enthuse fans, historians and even those, like yours truly, whose familiarity with Beethoven is limited to the opening strains of his 5th Symphony.

The day was spent golfing, working, reading & listening to Haydn…

DAY 33 SATURDAY 24th OCTOBER, PERTH, AUSTRALIA



Three reviews I picked up today and read over my cup of tea:

THE AUSTRALIAN – EVAN WILLIAMS
24 OCTOBER 2009
Beethoven’s Unfinished Symphony
In Search of Beethoven (G)
3 stars
Limited national release
IT can only be coincidence, but two of the films I reviewed recently in these pages both contained excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And very different films they were: Departures, that deeply moving idyll of love and death from Japan, and the Hollywood sci-fi thriller Surrogates, whose credits refer to a Beethoven "song" (though I must have missed it at the time).

But is it such a coincidence? I've seen a list of more than 200 films with Beethoven on the soundtrack. There are the famous ones: Disney's Fantasia, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (the Ninth again), and Copying Beethoven, Agnieszka Holland's partly fictionalised account of the composer's last years. According to my reliable internet source, Beethoven also popped up briefly on the soundtracks of Sex in the City, Hellboy II: The Golden Army and The Assassination of Richard Nixon, and can be heard, would you believe, in Drag Me to Hell, a horror film on current release. What the great man would have made of all this is anyone's guess, but he would have relished the royalties.

Biopics of the great composers used to be standard Hollywood fare: Cornel Wilde doing his consumptive Chopin bit in A Song to Remember (that splash of blood on the keyboard after some crashing chords), Brahms (in the person of Robert Walker) eyeing Clara Schumann in Song of Love, Dirk Bogarde doing his best Lizst impersonation in Song Without End, playing the piano in a way that reminded one wag at the time of someone washing his socks. The last big-name actor to play Chopin was Hugh Grant in the 1991 Impromptu. And the last to play Beethoven in a major biopic was the inscrutable Gary Oldman, in Immortal Beloved (1994).

To this growing filmography we can now add Phil Grabsky's documentary In Search of Beethoven, a brave attempt to come to grips with the composer's anguished life. It is a meticulous work: ambitious, lucid, sensitive, visually handsome and supported by a host of interviews with musical authorities. And, it shouldn't surprise us, it never quite gets the measure of its subject. What film could? But nor, I fear, does it live up to the large claims made for it. According to the producers, In Search of Beethoven "delves beyond the familiar image of the tortured, cantankerous, unhinged personality to reveal a surprising and completely creative genius".

Really? We all know Beethoven was a surprising and creative genius, so I'm not exactly sure what is being revealed. The popular notion of Beethoven as a "heroic, tormented figure battling to overcome his tragic fate" is described in the film's production notes as a "romantic myth". If so, it is exactly the romantic myth that the film perpetuates. It is true that we are given glimpses of another side of Beethoven, but they hardly amount to an alternative theory of personality. Experts line up to tell us that he was jealous of Haydn and Mozart, determined, in a seemingly egotistical way, to overshadow them. He was also a man of some personal vanity - fond of good food and wine, fastidious in his dress - not qualities we associate with distracted genius. According to Grabsky, he liked to cut a fashionable figure in Viennese social circles. An amusing story is told that soon after moving into rented quarters in Vienna, he took a stonemason to his room upstairs and, without consulting his outraged landlord, smashed a hole through the outer wall to improve the view. He would have been at home in Sydney's real estate market.

Grabsky made that splendid documentary In Search of Mozart in 2006, and it was a model of its kind, with well-chosen musical excerpts and readings from Mozart's letters. We are asked to believe that his Beethoven film is challenging accepted wisdom, but nothing in it disturbs our impression of a tragic figure cruelly used by fate.

The suicidal outpourings in the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, written in 1802, when Beethoven's deafness was well advanced, are movingly recounted. "In my profession it is a terrible hardship," Beethoven wrote of his deafness a year earlier, in what seems now like a masterpiece of understatement. Today his deafness would almost certainly be curable, and I have always thought of it as the worst and most bitterly ironic affliction ever visited on a human being. But perhaps it was a necessary spur to that sublime creativity.

Suffering drove Beethoven to despair, and nastiness. And if anything he was a nastier man than the film would have us believe. I have a much-loved copy of Alexander Thayer's monumental biography of the composer, published in 1866 (and in Henry Krehbiel's English edition, in 1921). The three volumes were the gift of a dear friend, and there is nothing of consequence in Grabsky's film that they hadn't already told me. In Thayer's estimation, Beethoven was a self-hater. When his mother died, his father took to drink; and even before his deafness he was plagued by recurring illness. So a good deal of ill-tempered bitterness would have been natural in him. Thayer despised other traits: Beethoven's snobbery, his meanness in money matters. But what can account for the insane fury he showed towards his family?

Yet he gave the world those great, unalterable sounds, those imperishable insights into a world of suffering, beauty and spirituality to be found, I think, in no other music. Genius is all too often flawed (don't mention Wagner), and the greater our admiration for the genius the greater our reluctance to acknowledge the flaws. In Search of Beethoven is at heart a cautious film, despite its pretensions. It prefers the genius to the monster, and so do we all.

But what might have been a great documentary turns out to be merely a good and serviceable one. It lacks fire, daring, and originality. There are too many snippets of music, too many talking heads, too little to define that great arc of the composer's life and spiritual development. But no one who cares about the man and his music will miss it. For that I give credit to its subject. The search goes on.

THE HERALD SUN – 24 OCTOBER 2009
In Search of Beethoven (G) Director: Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart) Starring: Juliet Stephenson (narrator), Roger Norrington, Helene Grimaud, Emmanuel Ax, Jonathan Biss. Rating:
**** Found behind a wall of sound
Anyone who looked at the title above and immediately envisaged the hunt for a slobbering St. Bernard can go and stand in the corner for the rest of the review.

No, the stately chase promised by this polished documentary tracks the life and legacy of the late German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

As he did with Mozart a while back, British filmmaker Phil Grabsky is playing detective with classical music history here.

Dispensing with all the clichéd claptrap and generalisations that inevitably plague movies like this, Grabsky successfully reassesses and revitalises the imposing reputation of his subject.

Simply by staying sensible, and sticking to the facts. The prim narration of actor Juliet Stephenson draws liberally from the composer’s own correspondence.

Elsewhere, the film throws open the doors and invites in a wide diversity of opinions and reflections from a cavalcade of experts, boffins and plonkers.

They all know their stuff, and better still, they all know how to express themselves in a way that allows the music of Beethoven to come alive in a whole new way.

As the film proceeds, novice viewers will also get a fascinating overview of how Beethoven’s unusual blend of gut instinct and unorthodox work techniques set him apart from his strait-laced contemporaries.

The musical performances through the film are exemplary, concluding with a brilliant rendition of the timeless Ninth Symphony by conductor Franz Bruggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century.


THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
25/10/09
BY Peter Crayford
Two good actors have played him before. Gary Oldman in Immortal Beloved and Ed Harris in Copying Beethoven. Neither captured the man or entirely rescued him from numerous black and white melodramas. But Phil Grabsky’s documentary IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN is one of the best films about a musician I have seen.
He interviews a select group of erudite and articulate musicians, critics and musicologists and each has something interesting, unpretentious and memorable to say.
Musical performances illustrate the interviews. Thankfully free of period dramatisations, it lets the music do most of the speaking through formidable recordings.
This documentary gets somewhere close to the mystery that is creativity

So….did I find anything or not? Well, I think you have to be pretty confident in your knowledge of Beethoven to suggest the film offers nothing new..but each to their own. That slightly mixed review in the Australian was still on a whole page and with a photo – all the other films barely got a paragraph. So that is fantastic!

When I turned up at the cinema, they are in a bit of a fuss: so many people have turned up that they have to swap from the 160- to the 260-seater! The place is crammed. Young and old. What a great way to finish the Australian tour. The cinema has a glitch transferring the film from the hard-drive of one cinema to the other – so ironically I do a 20-minute stand-up about the film, explaining why you could not have made this film without modern technology…while, meanwhile, the cinema struggled to get their modern technology to work! They did, however, and we had a really good screening and Q&A to follow. 3 rounds of applause: 2 more and they’d have called the police! (You need to watch the film to understand that joke…).

DAY 32 FRIDAY 23rd OCTOBER, PERTH, AUSTRALIA

A travel day really. A morning of packing and emails and then a midday flight from Adelaide to Perth. I checked in to the hotel then went over the cinema which is going to play Beethoven. It’s called the Paradiso and is pretty much downtown, near to the train station. The Duty Manager Rebecca could not have been nicer or more enthusiastic about the film and she thinks we’ll do ok in tomorrow’s preview screening. It is going into a 160-seater and she hopes it will be pretty full. I did an interview with William from the West Australian who certainly knew the subject well and I enjoyed talking to him for an hour. I’m always aware that I probably talk too much but I enjoy talking about Beethoven and the film. Just as well! Pottered about in the hotel – had a great dinner of snacks in front of the TV..

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.