Film maker Reiner Moritz presents and intimate portrait of the pianist Hélène Grimaud that not only looks back to her childhood and explores her career as one of the world’s leading pianists, touring around the globe – but also shows her in her role as conservationist and founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in New York. The result is a film examining Grimaud’s special artistry within the context of her broader personality and life; featuring extensive performance footage, it offers a fascinating glimpse into what makes one of the most sought after pianists of her generation who she is.
Helene Grimaud & Members of Orchestre de Paris play Schumann
Pianist Hélène Grimaud has been called “a renaissance woman”, and her painterly, passionate sensibility makes everything she plays glow with colour. She’s never more fully herself than when playing chamber music, and this beautifully filmed concert from 2001 captures that collaborative spirit in the round. Grimaud joins colleagues from the Orchestre de Paris at Paris’s Cité de la Musique to perform Schumann’s Piano Quintet and two gloriously poetic sets of miniatures. Together, they’re near-ideal interpreters of Schumann: a pianist-composer whose own imagination was never more potent than when (as here) the piano is merely first among equals in a world of high-Romantic emotion.