PBS to air Cliburn documentary ‘Virtuosity’
Virtuosity, the well-received documentary about the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, will air nationally on PBS (locally on KERA/Channel 13) at 8 p.m. Friday.
The film, directed by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Christopher Wilkinson, features all 30 competitors and gives significant screen time to such audience favorites as gold medalist Vadym Kholodenko, silver medalist Beatrice Rana, crystal award winner Sean Chen, finalist Fei-Fei Dong and semifinalist Alessandro Deljavan. It chronicles the hopes, pressures and disappointments felt by the world’s most talented pianists during the 14th quadrennial competition, held in Fort Worth two summers ago.
The film debuted to an enthusiastic audience of 1,000 viewers at Bass Hall during the Lone Star Film Festival last fall and has been presented at several film festivals in recent months.
Virtuosity largely explores the relationships the pianists have with their music, families, audiences and critics.
“Real life is different than we imagine,” Kholodenko told the Star-Telegram at the film’s premiere.
A crew of about 50 — a ubiquitous presence at Bass Hall during the contest — shot the documentary, and the filmmakers ended up with “an equivalent to 1.2 million feet of film because we had so many cameras on the performances,” the Los Angeles-based Wilkinson said in an interview last fall. He told the Star-Telegram in June 2013 that the total budget for the documentary and the Cliburn competition webcast, also shot and produced by his crew, was $500,000.
The project, which began a year before the competition, included filming the contestants in their homes in places such as Moscow, Kiev, Brussels, New York, Tokyo and Lecce, Italy, before they traveled to Fort Worth. During the Cliburn, the crew followed them onstage and off, capturing the joys and agonies of competing at the top level, with potential careers at stake.
“I said, ‘You do whatever you want to do, but I don’t want it to be a [pat] on the shoulder of how good the Cliburn is,’” Jacques Marquis, president and CEO of the Cliburn Foundation, who is listed as the film’s executive producer, said last fall.
During the competition, the film crew’s control room was housed inside a trailer that filled the garage bay of Bass Hall. They also interviewed people behind the scenes and others involved with the competition, such as a group of music critics that included Olin Chism, who reviewed all of the performances for the Star-Telegram.
But Virtuosity is ultimately about the pianists, Wilkinson said.
“Fei-Fei Dong said, ‘Music is like a mirror,’” Wilkinson said, “and I think that will be a tagline for what Virtuosity is. At a certain level, you have to be able to articulate your personality through your performance.
“It’s my most personal film,” Wilkinson said at the premiere, “because of my relationship to music and my relationship to those kids.”
The DVD also goes on sale for $19.99 Friday via the Cliburn’s website, www.cliburn.org.
This story contains material from the Star-Telegram archives.
Virtuosity
▪ 8 p.m. Friday
▪ KERA/Channel 13
This story was originally published July 30, 2015 at 7:00 PM with the headline "PBS to air Cliburn documentary ‘Virtuosity’."