Published: 19 August, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

• Pianomania
Directed by Robert Cibis
Certificate: PG

There are 230 strings to a Steinway grand piano and you have to tweak them gently to get them sounding just so.

This is the daunting job of Stefan Knupfer, a piano tuner who jet-sets it about the world’s biggest concert venues making sure their Steinways’ sound is nicely reverberating across the audience.

He approaches the job with a bag of tools and the concentration of a neurosurgeon, uses such tricks as bouncing a tennis ball on strings to test their tensile strength, and even replaces a piano leg with a violin as an experiment.

This Austrian-made documentary follows him for a year as he works to get one piano sounding exactly right, ready to be used to play an unfinished piece by Bach.

This film is a homage to his work, to the company that has been making these exquisite instruments for decades, and to the awesome skills of the top concert pianists who pull up their stools to the Steinway keys and let rip.

We are taken backstage at the Steinway workshops in Hamburg, and are allowed to eavesdrop on the conversa­tions of the people who work there – many of whom are the fourth generation of their families to be making the pianos.

The dedication of the people who produce these instruments is akin to the scientists who worked on the Moon landings – there is an intensity about their profes­sion which is astonishing, and the reason these pianos are the best in the world.

Director Robert Cibis treats the viewer to behind-the-scenes access to the world of today’s virtuosos – Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner, Rudolf Buchbinder – but it is the dedication and skill of the piano tuner, who Cibis met when he tuned his brother’s piano, that gives this documentary its impetus.

As you would expect, this film has a soundtrack that seeps through you and will have you playing pretend piano on your cinema chair’s armrest.
Even if classical music isn’t your bag, you can’t help but admire the talent on display.

• Salt
Directed by Phillip Noyce
Certificate: 15

Angelina Jolie  once asked Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal if she could have a crack at being James Bond. The studio exec was making the first one with Daniel Craig and Jolie said to her: “I can do that.”

Pascal remembered this conversation a few years down the line as she was putting together a spy thriller, and decided that instead of the lead being a Jack Ryan/Jason Bourne-style secret agent, they’d change the lead character’s name from Edwin to Evelyn, and get Jolie to pout her way through it.

Salt is a CIA spy.

Things take a turn for the worst when a defector says she is actually a “sleeper agent” for the Russians.

Salt goes on the run to prove her innocence.

Glossy, with Jolie holding it together, Salt is a capable offering, though credits no one involved, from the actors to the viewer, with a surplus of grey cells.