Christopher Nupen and the golden age of music film-making 

The best channel on the BBC, indeed anywhere on terrestrial TV, is BBC iPlayer. It is full of gems: classical music, TV drama, interviews with great writers. Much of it is new: Alan Yentob’s excellent interview with Tom Stoppard for Imagine, Ridley Road, Steve McQueen’s Small Axe dramas about racism in Britain since the Sixties. But there are also treasures from the archive. 

One of the highlights available at the moment is Listening Through the Lens, a BBC 4 documentary about Christopher Nupen, for half a century the greatest of Britain’s music documentary-makers. His range is astonishing: from Jews and German Music (We Want The Light, 2004) to composers like Schubert, Bizet and Tchaikovsky. But perhaps he is best known for his extraordinary films about performers, from Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Jacqueline du Pré in the 1960s and 1970s to a younger generation of brilliant performers including Evgeny Kissin, Karim Said and Daniil Trifonov.

Listening Through the Lens tells the story of Nupen’s life and career. Born in South Africa in 1934, he came to London in 1958, started learning the Spanish guitar and became a lifelong friend of John Williams, the guitar virtuoso. The two shared a flat through the 1960s. Regular visitors to their flat included Barenboim and du Pré. Through these friendships Nupen got to know the extraordinary new generation of performers who featured in his famous early documentaries. 

He joined the BBC where he made his first documentary, Double Concerto (1966), with the young Barenboim and Ashkenazy. In 1968 he broke away from the BBC and started his own independent production company, Allegro Films, with his long-time collaborators, cameraman David Findlay and film editor, Peter Heelas, who he had met during his brief time in BBC Television. They worked together for the next 40 years.

It is the films from the late Sixties that made his name: a film about du Pré’s legendary performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto, conducted by Barenboim in 1967, one about Ashkenazy in 1968, and the extraordinary performance of the Trout Quintet by Barenboim, du Pré, Pinchas Zukerman, Perlman and Zubin Mehta, then all in their 20s apart from Mehta, the elder statesman, already 32 years old. 

The Trout film is extraordinary for its informality, its sense of youthful energy and exuberance, and. above all, for the sense of their talent, of extraordinary young musicians at play, swapping instruments, making fun of each other and the pleasure they got from each other’s company. Sir John Barbirolli appears briefly in the film, saying: “When you’re young, you should have an excess of everything.” That’s what these wonderful young musicians had and Nupen captured it all: not only in their performance, but also in scenes of them rehearsing and hanging out in Swinging London. 

It was a turning-point in making films about musicians. The old age of deference had gone. Suddenly, classical musicians seemed young and lively, as well as being incredibly talented. They were prepared to be quite natural on the screen, chasing each other in London parks, playing snooker, having fun. As the TV executive David Elstein says, these early Nupen films are “so much more intimate, so much more emotionally engaging” than earlier arts films. There is a feel of A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Richard Lester’s film with and about the Beatles, shot in a cinéma vérité style in black and white, also about a new generation of performers.

There was something else that was new about these early documentaries: new cameras. “What happened,” Nupen explains, “was that the first silent cameras were invented. I could put the cameras closer to the musicians, both physically and in spirit. When the older generation, Rubenstein and Haifetz, made their films, the cameras were miles away. They looked like and felt like and weighed like a rhinoceros.”

“I was conscious,” he goes on, “of making films that hadn’t been made before because of the equipment.” Nupen’s early films were also made at the moment colour television sets first appeared. That added to their newness and the feeling of something special. 

There was also a new sense of the relation between television and the performing arts. First, Monitor, then Nupen’s music films and then in the 1970s Arena on BBC2 and The South Bank Show on ITV made films for the archives. They could preserve the artistic performance and the artistic persona for posterity. When we think of du Pré playing the Elgar Cello Concerto or that famous performance of the Trout, we think of images from Nupen’s films.

There was also the intimacy between Nupen and his team and the musicians. He knew many of them, especially the new stars of the Sixties, not just from the flat he shared with Williams but also from his days at BBC Radio and BBC TV. He was with du Pré when she died in 1987.

Many of Nupen’s later films have a darkness about them: his documentaries about Schubert, Bizet and Sibelius, a prizewinning film about poets during the Spanish Civil War (1978) and We Want the Light: Jews and German Culture (2004) and then the deeply moving portrait of pianist and concentration camp survivor, Alice Sommer Herz, Everything is a Present (2011). The contrast between the exuberance of the Sixties films, and these dark, later meditations on failure and terror, is striking. 

Listening Through the Lens is a marvellous tribute to Christopher Nupen and his collaborators, but also to the executives who commissioned their work (many of whom appear in this film) and, above all, to Nupen’s subjects, the great musicians of the late 20th- and early-21st centuries. No one did more to introduce a new television audience to great musical performances, bringing together absolute integrity and technical mastery. The documentary is both a reminder of a bygone golden age and a challenge to today’s TV executives to have the courage to commission work of such quality. 

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