Woodlands and Beyond… multimedia concert. Performed 2017 at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Hélène Grimaud is piano soloist accompanied by images from Mat Hennek’s photo series “Woodlands and Beyond... “ shown on a large LED screen. All the music is about water. Inclusdes 8 short piano solos by Luciano Berio, Tōru Takemitsu, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Isaac Albéniz, Franz Liszt, Leoš Janáček, and Claude Debussy stitched together by 7 “Water Transition” chamber music pieces composed by Nitin Sawhney for this concert. The photographs from Hennek depict forests, water, and other nature images. Directed for TV by François-René Martin. Released 2020, disc has 5.0 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: D+
The Artists
Hélène Grimaud is a French A-list concert pianist who has performed classical music with top orchestras all over the world. Her partner in life is Mat Hennek, a German fine-art photographer. The couple live in upstate New York. Nitin Sawhney is a prodigious musician and composer of new-world-style classical and popular concert music who also crosses over to work in movies, TV, commercials, choreographed dance, and theater.
A nature lover, Grimaud set out to create a short classical music concert based on brief solo piano works (none longer than 10 minutes) that have to do with water. She hired her friend Sawhney to write 7 short water transition pieces to link the classical piano works into a whole. Sawhney’s pieces are played by a modern-instrument chamber group. When Grimaud plays the solo pieces on stage, the transition music is heard from a recording. The title of this show was Water, and Grimaud released a sound-only recording of Water with DG in 2016. Here’s a slick video trailer—itself a work of art— about this DG recording:
The Inspiration
I think the Water album sold well. Perhaps the beautiful trailer inspired Grimaud: why not make a multi-media video by adding photographs from Mat Hennek’s Woodlands and Beyond… exhibition to the Water music? Thus sprang Woodlands and Beyond... to life. The new show had the same music as Water. Mennek came up with a giant LED screen (9x9 meters square) that could show his photography on a large stage. Grimaud and Hennek booked the exotic new Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
The Show at the Elbphilharmonie
The show was a success. The audience saw the piano performance supported by beautiful images of water, forest landscapes, aerial views, and abstract photographic art:
And the audience was probably taken back by the sudden visit by a wolf! (Grimaud has a charity that protects wolves in the wild.)
How Not to Make a Multi-media Video
So far so good. But it seems the producers wanted to juice up the video. This task they assigned to videographer François-René Martin. He tried. Didn’t work. Let’s see why.
Whole-stage shots that make the LED screen look good make Grimaud look tiny. When Martin went in close with the cameras, he found that the big LED screen created pattern artifacts. These are horrible in a home theater or PC display—they may not look so bad on a tiny smart phone :
So Martin had to go close using angles that avoided the LEDs. And he tried to hype the show with relatively short file clips. But this led to disaster with only a few cameras on the huge stage. Close in, precise composition is needed, which requires that the cameramen have plenty of time to compose images before they shoot. But since the cameramen lacked time, the video file is swamped with composition errors like the two below:
Another frequent error—backs of heads:
What is going on in the image below? This is an out-of-focus view of Grimaud’s arm blocking the intended view of her hands on the keyboard!
There are so many focus errors that one wonders if the producers told Martin to do this deliberately. First below is “no focus” shot followed by a “wrong focus” view of the wall of the auditorium clearly displayed while Grimaud is fuzzy:
And next is a whole-stage shot with nothing in focus:
Martin has trouble with depth-of-field-of-focus. 88 keys defeat him:
The producers try to distract from the bad images with trick photography. Next below—a forest engulfed by a tsunami? Well, maybe this is a good image:
But the double-images below are the kind of things that students might do at your favorite arts-magnet high school. When I first saw the image below on the far left, I didn’t recognize either Grimaud or the piano as my brain was trying to understand the in-focus water image. And what’s that in the background? Oh! It’s a mermaid at an underwater piano, which then turns out to be Grimaud on the stage. OK, I get it now. But I don’t remember anything about the music. And what’s that smear falling across the image on the far right below? Is it sunlight coming through a hole in the ceiling? Didn’t they spend a lot of money on that crazy roof at the Elbphilharmonie?
Many clips present a sort of three-part image with a background, foreground (Grimaud), and then a distorted image from the background in the lower right corner. I never figured this out:
And I also never figured out our last image below:
I was so exasperated by this video that I was sure it had a DVD-style too-fast pace. So I ran the numbers. Wrong again. The average clip here last 10.4 seconds, a pace that we have long established as the threshold for a decent HDVD concert video. But the Wonk Worksheet does reveal exactly what is wrong with the video file: only 25% of the video clips showing the pianist are realistic, meaning something that a member of the audience could see. 75% of the shots of the soloist are unrealistic, meaning shots that only a cameraman could see. And something like 60% of all the video clips show nothing but Grimaud’s face or fingers. This is not a multi-media video—it’s an insanely repetitious recording of fingers and a face (often just parts of a face) with a handful of nice images by Hennek thrown it for fun.
Sum up: Grimaud is a beautiful person and pianist who wears tasteful, elegant attire when she performs. Her artistry is impeccable and delightful to see and hear. Get the DG CD of the Water music. Buy Hennek’s coffee table book. The grade on this title has to be a D+ at best, since you would only want to buy this unacceptable video for some special reason.
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