Bruno Monsaingeon: Pioneer of Music and Film Portraiture 

Film portraits of musicians have been around for the best part of nearly a century – but from the time more than 50 years ago when acclaimed film director, violinist and writer Bruno Monsaingeon began his quest to capture some of the world’s most exceptional performers on camera, he was taking a new multidimensional line in this field. In an interview here made exclusively for Liner Notes, he relates to Jon Tolansky the ways in which he was motivated to build up a filmography portraying the human and artistic personas of legendary artists such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Glenn Gould, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter, and the Alban Berg Quartet – in quantitative size terms a small token of his more than 90 films, many of them awarded the most prestigious international awards. It was the profoundly empathetic manner in which he gained the artists’ confidence and trust, enabling them to welcome him into their lives on a personal and intimate level, that created the vital ambience and freely developing on-going time scales that he needed in order to fulfil his aspirations. They shared their souls as well as their music with him freely without incumbrance in a way that yet was meticulously precisely put together in direction for the finished films. Passion and precision in music – those fundaments had already been compulsively infusing Bruno Monsaingeon’s life for a very long time: since early childhood.