Butler's Cinema Scene

Stefan Kupfer (right) gets under the hood

“PIANOMANIA” My rating: B (Opens Sept. 30 at the Tivoli)

93 minutes | No MPAA rating

Calling Stefan Kupfer a piano tuner is like calling Dale Ernhardt a motorist.

It’s accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Over the course of a year the documentary “Pianomania” follows Kupfer, a Steinway technician, as he goes about his business of tinkering with pianos at Vienna’s historic Konzerthaus.

It’s not tinkering for tinkering’s sake. His clients are keyboard heavy hitters like Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel and especially the demanding Pierre-Laurent Aimard — musicians who know precisely what they want from their instruments and expect Kupfer to deliver.

Here’s another auto racing metaphor: Kupfer is like a one-man pit crew. He gets under the hood. He tightens a string here and loosens a screw there. He’ll pull an engine and replace it, so to speak.

He works in wood and felt and wire. He can tell with one glance that the replacement hammer heads he has received are 0.7 millimeter too narrow and that the result will be a disaster.

We don’t learn much about Kupfer’s life outside the concert hall (we see him walking his dog through Vienna), and in fact you’ve got to wonder if he has any time for a personal life. He seems to be married to his work.

His clients throw around words like “integration,” “sonorous,” “action,” “warmth,” “dynamic possibilities” and “superficial brilliance.” I haven’t a clue what some of this means, but Kupfer seems to (or at least he fakes it well) and immediately springs into action, coaxing new sounds out of the piano. It seems to be a never-ending process, especially since some players have a way of putting an instrument seriously out of tune after a particularly vigorous passage.

Kupfer obviously has huge respect for the artists he works with, even if to our eyes they may seem royal pains. There are a few moments here when Kupfer seems unsure and desperate, but he quickly shakes it off and gets back to work.

I’ll admit that I found Lilian Franck and Robert Sibis’ documentary to be mostly inside baseball. But I’m also willing to bet that piano junkies are going to regard this film as a motherlode of musical catnip.

The film features great music (although we never hear a piece played all the way through) and the photography by Jerzy Palacz and editing by Michelle Barbin create a genuinely cinematic style.

Ultimately this will best please piano true believers…and there are plenty of them out there.

| Robert W. Butler