Between 2016 and 2018, the pianist Boris Giltburg made a series of films for Fly On The Wall in the late-night practice rooms of a London piano shop, playing between concerts and recording sessions as repertoire demanded. This collection brings them together. At its centre is Rachmaninov's Études-tableaux, Op. 39 — the full forty-minute cycle, which Giltburg had recorded in the studio for Naxos and chose to film here across a single night, in continuous takes, as performance rather than construction. Around it stand the sessions that preceded it: Prokofiev's Suggestion Diabolique, an étude from Rachmaninov's earlier Op. 33, Giltburg's own piano arrangements of two Shostakovich string quartets, and two of Liszt's Transcendental Studies. Filmed across three years and gathered here complete, the collection is a portrait of an artist at work — the record of a partnership between pianist and filmmaker over the period that led to their eleven-hour Beethoven32.
This collection brings together the complete filmed sessions of Boris Giltburg made by Fly On The Wall between 2016 and 2018. They were filmed in the basement practice rooms of Jaques Samuel Pianos on the Edgware Road, an institution among London's professional pianists, where Giltburg worked late at night between concerts and recordings. Each film was made in a single continuous take, the piece played complete; over three years they grew from short studies into some of the most ambitious single-take performances Fly On The Wall had attempted.
At the centre of the collection is Rachmaninov's complete Études-tableaux, Op. 39, filmed across a single night in June 2018. Giltburg had already recorded the cycle in the studio for Naxos, where a performance is built up across many takes; what he wanted here was to play the whole forty minutes through in one sitting, in continuous takes, with the stakes of an unrepeatable performance and the knowledge that what he played would stand. He has described the long continuous span as among the most demanding forms he had attempted: it asks the player to hold the architecture of an entire cycle in a single arc, with no seam to retreat behind. The nine etudes — written in 1916 and 1917, in the final months before Rachmaninov left Russia for ever — are the composer's late style at its most concentrated, darker and leaner than the Op. 33 set before them. Rachmaninov withheld the pictures behind the “tableaux”; what Giltburg found was a music “deeply connected to the 20th century”, opening “the same fantastical path for the imagination as do Kafka, Bulgakov, or indeed Neil Gaiman”.
The films surrounding it trace the three years that led there. Prokofiev's Suggestion Diabolique was the first, played late one evening after a concert. An étude from Rachmaninov's earlier Op. 33 and two of Liszt's Transcendental Studies — the nocturnal Harmonies du soir and the snow-driven Chasse-neige — followed at intervals, alongside Giltburg's own piano arrangements of Shostakovich's String Quartets Nos. 4 and 8, the latter an eighteen-minute single take. Each session reached for a longer and more complete span than the last, until the forty-minute Rachmaninov cycle.
These were the first long-form films Fly On The Wall made, and the sessions that opened the path to its most ambitious project — the eleven-hour Beethoven32 cycle with Giltburg for Naxos three years later. The complete collection is available exclusively on YouTube.
