Films / Master Class (short)
Canada | Experimental Short | 2011 | 23
Director: Serge Levchin
Master Class is a condensed record of a single lesson, given by the
Georgian-born, Soviet-trained pianist Eteri Andjaparidze. Ms.
Andjaparidze works through a fragment of Rachmaninoff’s “Variations on a
Theme of Corelli” with a student, who poses peculiar cultural,
linguistic, emotional and technical challenges. Both, master and
student, must struggle through the inevitable lapses of communication to
reach occasional triumphs.
This film is an attempt to elicit something of the extraordinary, even
fantastic that abides in the perfectly mundane world of the practice
room. And while the camera never escapes the confines of the lesson, the
film nevertheless manages to reveal some of the themes that intersect
within that narrow space: the lure of mastery, the difficulties of
cultural transmission, the bitterness of exile, all mired in the routine
of practice and repetition.
