Exhibition 4: Etudes-Tableaux

Since his launch to fame in 2013, Boris Giltburg has become one of the most established and successful solo concert pianists in the world. Over the course of five years, we filmed Boris during late-night private sessions in a central London piano shop.

This fourth exhibition presents the extraordinary finale to this partnership, filmed on 7th June 2018. It is a set of live performances of Rachmaninov's complete Etudes Tableau Op. 39, shot over the course of one single night. And a document of an elite musician immersed in his own private musical world.

On October 9th, 2015, we were introduced to pianist Boris Giltburg. For the previous six months we had been releasing clips from our Fly On The Wall documentary project online. Boris was something different; a younger artist, he was perhaps best described as 'newly' established. He had experienced a meteoric rise after his Queen Elizabeth competition success two years earlier. Now signed to a major agency and with two Naxos albums under his belt, we sensed a fresh, relentless enthusiasm we wanted to capture.

Boris' London ‘home’ was a piano shop in London called Jaques Samuel Pianos. Based on North London's gritty Edgware Road, the store is an institution amongst London's professional pianists, renting out practice rooms in the basement. Boris would regularly come, late at night, to practise there as he balanced the voluminous demands of repertoire-learning with his incessant concert schedule.

We first filmed Boris on one such evening. We were no stranger to the shop, having recently started a series there. So we set up the scene, and we waited. Arriving at 10pm after an evening concert, Boris performed a fiendish rendition of Prokofiev's Suggestion Diabolique.

The video was a resounding success on our online series. Boris immediately offered another. And so our ongoing relationship began. Every few months, we would visit the shop and film Boris at work. What began with a short 4-minute clip grew into longer and longer sessions. A trio of Rachmaninov Etudes. A small set of Liszt studies. Some works by Shostakovich. Soon we were filming longer pieces: Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 arranged for piano, an 18-minute masterpiece, filmed in one single take.

Ultimately, the relationship would morph into the epic 11-hour film project that would be Beethoven32 (2021). But the key moment was to happen on June 7th, 2018, when we decided to film the 40-minute Etudes Tableaux by Sergei Rachmaninov. I had edited Boris' studio album of the work for Naxos a few months earlier and knew Boris' polished version of it intimately. But we wanted to capture something different. Something real. So we decided to film the entire work over the course of one single night, each movement in one single take. The camera would disappear. And we would try to capture a portrait of an artist truly in his own musical world.