For the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020 he repackaged other films he had made in 1970, including footage not broadcast at the time. Nupen had a gift for putting artists completely at ease and securing portraits of them that caught the essence of their musical personality. The following year he recorded a similarly spellbinding performance in The Ghost (1970), of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op 70, No 1, given that name, featuring Barenboim, Zukerman and Du Pré. The Trout (1969) again defied convention, first by being shot live, without a single retake, and second by its inclusion of footage showing the artists going about their professional lives, engaging in high-spirited offstage antics. Immediately grasping the potential of filming a scheduled performance of Schubert’s Trout Quintet by Barenboim and a group of friends (Itzhak Perlman on the violin, Pinchas Zukerman on viola, Du Pré and Zubin Mehta, returning to the double bass for the first time for many years), he asked for, and received, permission to place cameras, discreetly concealed in tongue-and-groove hides, on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall alongside the artists. It produced Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices Are Russian, and all his more than 70 subsequent films, many transmitted on various broadcasting platforms including the BBC and Channel 4. The logistics of the project imposed a greater strain on BBC bureaucracy than it could bear, so Nupen, along with Findlay and Heelas, resigned in 1968 to set up their own company, Allegro Films. The Magic of Music, one of Christopher Nupen’s films featuring the pianist Daniil Trifonov Perhaps the most notable of them was the first, which attempted to emulate the success of Double Concerto by filming Ashkenazy as he moved home from London to Reykjavik. It began with a radio study of Scriabin under the title Prometheus: Bringer of Fire, and continued with some two dozen films for television of the pianist in a range of repertory including Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Rachmaninov. His working relationship with Ashkenazy was henceforth to prove one of the longest and most productive of his career. Despite the consternation engendered on the sixth floor of Television Centre when it was broadcast in 1966, the film was a prize-winning success. With the film editor Peter Heelas and cameraman David Findlay he established a team that would work fruitfully together for more than 40 years.ĭouble Concerto, as their first enterprise was called, was unconventionally edited as a documentary incorporating a complete performance, combining both 35mm film and the 16mm used by the new generation of silent, hand-held cameras, flagrantly outstripping the commission of a nine-minute introduction to a concert.

He was given a budget to shoot and edit a nine-minute introduction to the concert, itself to be directed by Brian Large. Acting on the suggestion of the young Barenboim, whom he had befriended, he proposed a film about a performance by Barenboim and Ashkenazy of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos, K365, at a concert with the English Chamber Orchestra.

Remembering Jacqueline du Pré, 1994, written and directed by Christopher NupenĪfter spending five years in BBC Radio, in 1966 he was offered a job in the music department of BBC Television by Huw Wheldon.

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