Highly Strung

Synopsis; A portrait of the troubled times of the Adelaide String Quartet.

Ever since Nigel Kennedy appeared in the late 1980s, classical music has been on a general push to re-invent itself as a sexy competitor for the music lover’s discretionary dollar. Performers are glamourised  in glossy brochures to appeal to a demographic long accustomed to consuming their music imagistically.

Writer-director Scott Hicks’s account of the Adelaide-based Australian String Quartet (ASQ) appears for its first thirty minutes or so to be some kind of related promotional campaign with its four photogenic members posed invitingly in an elegantly minimalist studio setting and tossing off suitably enthusiastic sound-bites.  The thin narrative holding this together involves the twin themes of the recruiting of its two new members, violinists Kristian Winther and Ioana Tache, who have joined viola player Stephen King and cellist Sharon Draper and the assembling of a matched set of Guadagnini instruments, worth many millions of dollars, for the four of them to play on.

Given that the foursome are a pleasantly polite, or in other words, constitutively bland, lot It is this latter aspect which gives Hicks some way forward with his meagre material as we travel to New York and meet the contrastingly grotesque Carpenter siblings, three young celebrity violinists, self-styled “Kardashians of the classical music world”, who have lent their prodigious talents to a hedge fund manager who has invested in the Stradivari brand (exactly how is far from clear). “Only in America” one thinks as the threesome attend marketing strategy meetings, select luxury clothes to wear onstage (although they don’t get to wear diamond-encrusted shoes valued at $128,000 a pair) and crow about playing in the most expensive concert in history ($140 million of Stradivaris on stage).  None of this is directly related to the now refreshingly modest ASQ other than being a harbinger of the practical and ethical problems involved when instruments become so expensive that they are unable to be played but must live in bank vaults and museums.  One option is to make copies and so we travel to Padua to observe a long-haired luthier, Roberto Cavagnoli, making a copy of the ASQ Guadagnini cello and a brief discussion of whether the originals are really better than the copies.

Hicks gets lucky when an irreconcilable rift opens up between the now-married Kristian and Ioana and Stephen and  Sharon.  Entirely symptomatic of the post-Kennedy state of classical music, after a relatively short time “creative differences” have arisen with Kristian wanting to play more contemporary scores and their older, less adventurous colleagues content to roll out the traditional repertoire approved of by the ASQ board.  Unfortunately

Hicks doesn’t manage to get very far with breaking an apparent code of silence and so sails off an yet another angle with the story of arts patron Ulrike Klein whose dedication to music has made the Guadagnini purchase possible (she apparently made her money out of a skincare brand, now presumably owned by some corporate behemoth, that she co-founded in South Australia with her husband)  

Throughout all of this Hicks, much like his 2007 documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts drifts on the surface of things seemingly content to re-iterate the familiar signifiers of classical music culture without getting beneath their surface in any way.

There is a huge gap between classical and non-classical music lovers and Hicks’ digressive documentary, which unsurprisingly premiered at the Adelaide Arts Festival, won’t go any way to changing that. Members of the former camp however should find enough here of interest. The rest of us might be advised to wait until it comes out on the small screen.

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