Pianomania
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Pianomania
''Pianomania'' is a 2009 German-Austrian documentary film by directors Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis. The film presents Stefan Knüpfer, a virtuoso piano tuner from the piano company Steinway & Sons, in his work with pianists such as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Synopsis The collaborative work between Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Stefan Knüpfer is at the centre of the film. Bach's ''The Art of Fugue'' is to be recorded. Pierre-Laurent Aimard has decided in favour of concert grand piano Nr. 109 for the Bach recording. The film begins one year before the recording. Knüpfer wants to study instruments from the time of Bach for Aimard. He experiments with sound absorbers made from felt and with glass sound mirrors. But as fate will have it, the number 109 grand piano is sold to Australia a few months later; and that is not the last obstacle that gets in their way. Knüpfer and Aimard meet regularly, and when the tension is so thick it can be cut with a knif ...
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Lilian Franck
Lilian Franck (born March 11, 1971) is a German film director and producer, best known for her 2010 documentary ''Pianomania'', a collaborative work with filmmaker Robert Cibis and winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the German Film Award for Best Sound Design in 2011 and the Semaine De La Critique prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. Education Franck was born on March 11, 1971 in Würzberg, Germany. She studied at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and at Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. Career In 2002, she received the German–French Journalist Award ( de) for her documentary ''Half A Chance?'' (2002), her first with co-director and collaborator Robert Cibis. Franck and Cibis co-founded OVALmedia. Their first project producing and directing together was ''Human Capital - The Employment Trade'' (2007). Later in 2007, their project ''Disgustingly Healthy'', a ...
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Lang Lang
Lang Lang (; born 14 June 1982) is a Chinese pianist who has performed with leading orchestras in China, North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Active since the 1990s, he was the first Chinese pianist to be engaged by the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and some top American orchestras. A ''Chicago Tribune'' music critic called him "the biggest, most exciting young keyboard talent I have encountered in many a year of attending piano recitals". Lang is considered by many as one of the most accomplished classical musicians of modern time. Early life Lang Lang was born in Shenyang, Liaoning, in 1982 to a family of the Manchu Niohuru clan. His father Lang Guoren is a musician, playing the erhu. The ''Tom and Jerry'' episode ''The Cat Concerto'', which features Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2., motivated two-year-old Lang to learn the piano. He started lessons with Zhu Ya-Fen at age three, and won first place at the Shenyang Piano Competition and performed his ...
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Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957) is a French pianist. Biography Aimard was born in Lyon, where he entered the conservatory. Later he studied with Yvonne Loriod and with Maria Curcio. In 1973, he was awarded the chamber music prize of the Paris Conservatoire. In the same year, he won the first prize at the international Olivier Messiaen Competition. In 1977, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, he became a founding member of the Ensemble InterContemporain. He made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of twenty, performing the piano solo part in Olivier Messiaen's ''Turangalîla-Symphonie''. Aimard is particularly committed to contemporary music. He was the soloist in several premieres of works such as ''Répons'' by Pierre Boulez, '' Klavierstück XIV'' by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the eleventh and thirteenth piano études of György Ligeti. One of his most notable recordings is that of the first two books of Ligeti's piano études. ...
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Till Fellner
Till Fellner (born 9 March 1972) is an Austrian pianist. Biography Till Fellner was born in Vienna and studied at the Konservatorium der Stadt Wien with Helene Sedo-Stadler, and subsequently with Alfred Brendel, Meira Farkas, Oleg Maisenberg and Claus-Christian Schuster. He won first prize in the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Vevey, Switzerland in 1993, and was awarded the Mozartinterpretationspreis of the Mozart Society of Vienna in 1998. Fellner has played with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and NHK Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Herbert Blomstedt, Semyon Bychkov, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Bernard Haitink, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Manfred Honeck, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Neville Marriner, Kurt Masur, Kent Nagano, Jonathan Nott, Kirill Petrenko, and Han ...
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Alfred Brendel
Alfred Brendel KBE (born 5 January 1931) is an Austrian classical pianist, poet, author, composer, and lecturer who is known particularly for his performances of Mozart, Schubert, Schoenberg, and Beethoven.Stephen Plaistow"Brendel, Alfred" ''Grove Music Online'', 2007. Retrieved 3 June 2007. Biography Brendel was born in Wizemberk, Czechoslovakia (now Loučná nad Desnou, Czech Republic) to a non-musical family. They moved to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), when Brendel was three years old and he began piano lessons there at the age of six with Sofija Deželić. He later moved to Graz, Austria, where he studied piano with Ludovica von Kaan at the Graz Conservatory and composition with Artur Michel. Towards the end of World War II, the 14-year-old Brendel was sent back to Yugoslavia to dig trenches. After the war, Brendel composed music as well as continued to play the piano, to write and to paint. However, he never had more formal piano lessons and, although he attended ma ...
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Rudolf Buchbinder
Rudolf Buchbinder (born 1 December 1946, Litoměřice, Czechoslovakia) is an Austrian classical pianist. Biography Buchbinder studied with Bruno Seidlhofer at the Vienna Academy of Music. In 1965, he made a tour of North and South Americas. In 1966 he won a special prize awarded at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Subsequently he has toured with the Vienna Philharmonic and appeared as soloist around the world. He has also taught piano at the Basel Academy of Music. For the Teldec label he has recorded the complete keyboard music of Joseph Haydn, all Mozart's major works for piano, all the Beethoven piano sonatas and variations, and both Brahms piano concertos with Harnoncourt and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. With János Starker, he recorded memorable performances of works for cello and piano by Beethoven and Brahms. He has twice recorded the Beethoven Piano Concertos conducting from the keyboard, first with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra for th ...
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Steinway & Sons
Steinway & Sons, also known as Steinway (), is a German-American piano company, founded in 1853 in Manhattan by German piano builder Henry E. Steinway, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (later known as Henry E. Steinway). The company's growth led to the opening of a factory in New York City, United States, and later a factory in Hamburg, Germany. The factory in the Queens borough of New York City supplies the Americas, and the factory in Hamburg supplies the rest of the world. Steinway is a prominent piano company, known for making pianos of high quality and for inventions within the area of piano development. Steinway has been granted 139 patents in piano making, with the first in 1857. The company's share of the high-end grand piano market consistently exceeds 80 percent. The dominant position has been criticized, with some musicians and writers arguing that it has blocked innovation and led to a homogenization of the sound favored by pianists. Steinway pianos have received n ...
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Film Academy Baden-Württemberg
The Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg (German: ''Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg'') was founded in 1991 as a publicly funded film school in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The Filmakademie is one of the most internationally renowned film schools. One of its major distinguishing characteristics is the close collaboration with three other educational institutions on one campus: the Filmakademie's acclaimed Animationsinstitut (Institute of Animation and Visual Effects);3D World 98's CGI Ivy League table
Issue 98 of 3D World, 1 November 2007
the Atelier Ludwigsburg-Paris, an inter-university master-class on European film production and distribution hosted at the Filmakademie and in cooperation with notable French film school

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European Film Academy
The European Film Academy is an initiative of a group of European filmmakers who came together in Berlin on the occasion of the first presentation of the European Film Awards in November 1988. The Academy—under the name of European Cinema Society—was officially founded by its first President, the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, as well as 40 filmmakers from all over Europe, among them Bernardo Bertolucci, Claude Chabrol, Dušan Makavejev, István Szabó, and Wim Wenders. Every year, the European Film Academy honours films and filmmakers with the European Film Awards. The ceremony is taking place every even year in a different European city, and every odd year in Berlin. European Film Academy In 1988, the Academy—under the name of European Cinema Society—was officially founded by its first President, the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, as well as 40 filmmakers from all over Europe in order to promote European film culture worldwide and to protect and to support the inte ...
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Hof International Film Festival
The Hof International Filmfestival is a German film festival that takes place in Hof, Bavaria, every year in October. Apart from numerous foreign productions, the main focus traditionally is on German films. During six festival days, about 130 films (80 feature and documentary films as well as 50 short films) are shown in 8 theaters of 2 cinema centers, adding up to a total of 200 individual film presentations. With the exception of the retrospective, all films are German or world premieres. History Initiators of the festival were Heinz Badewitz and Uwe Brandner, who were also members of the Hof "New Jazz Group", together with the artist Werner Weinelt, who later on relocated his art gallery to the pub "Galeriehaus" in Hof. Badewitz, festival director until his death in 2016, and Brandner, had moved to Munich in 1963 where they made short films together. However, they had problems to find a cinema for their film presentations in Munich. Without further ado, Badewitz, who was ...
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Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology. Biography Childhood and early years (1881–98) Bartók was born in the Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on 25 March 1881. On his father's side, the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsodszirák, Borsod. His paternal grandmother was a Catholic of Bunjevci origin, but considered herself Hungarian. Bartók's father (1855–1888) was also named Béla. Bartók's mother, Paula (née Voit) (1857–1939), also spoke Hungarian fluently. A native of Turócszentmárton ...
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