BBC Four will this weekend present a tribute to the acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nupen with a new documentary titled Listening Through The Lens: The Films of Christopher Nupen. The 90-minute programme, narrated by Stephen Fry, contains excerpts from some of the director’s most celebrated films as well as interviews with the broadcasters and musicians who he encountered throughout his career including David Attenborough, Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré, and Melvyn Bragg.

Born in South-Africa, Nupen moved to Britain after university where he began his documentary career with the BBC. Moving quickly from radio to film, Nupen’s intimate biographical documentaries give his viewers an insight into the world of classical music and the lives of such icons as du Pré, Barenboim, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Evgeny Kissin.

BBC Four celebrates the ground-breaking work of Christopher Nupen on Sunday (photo: Allegro Films)

As Ashkenazy puts it in the film, Nupen’s depth of musical knowledge was a great advantage in the making of these portrait films: ‘He gave all his mental and emotional energy to give music as much as he could, and he understood all of it basically. And this identification, with all the music that he knew and all the musicians that he knew, shows very strongly in his work.’

In 1966, with the BBC, Nupen made Double Concerto, a film about the collaboration between Ashkenazy and Barenboim. In the new documentary Sir David Attenborough recalls the ground-breaking nature of this piece: ‘nobody had ever made a film in that kind of way and it was very clear that it was a new directorial voice… on the same wavelength, indeed the same note, as those who were taking part in it.’

Having left the BBC in 1968 to co-found the Allegro Films production company, Nupen filmed du Pré, Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Zubin Mehta’s performance of Schubert’s Trout quintet in London in 1969. Zukerman recalls that ‘when the Trout came out in Germany […] there was such a hullaballoo about it, literally overnight, we became a household word and that’s, I think, the strength of the film of course’.

Filming of one Nupen's early triumphs, 'The Ghost' (photo: Allegro Films)

Nupen recently published his autobiography (also titled Listening through the Lens), reviewed in Gramophone in April 2020, where Jeremy Nicholas praised it as an ‘account of how he made his films and a fascinating tale it proves to be’.

The documentary Listening Through The Lens: The Films of Christopher Nupen will be broadcast on BBC Four on Sunday 3 October at 9pm.

Either side of that the channel will broadcast two of Nupen’s films: at 8pm, Jacqueline du Pre: A Gift Beyond Words and at 10.30pm We Want Light, a powerful film exploring the relationship between Jewish people and German music.

The secret of Christopher Nupen's success - in the words of some of today's leading artists and broadcasters:

Vladimir Ashkenazy: ‘One of the great qualities of Christopher, was that he never felt like he was intruding on you, putting pressure on you. He was just always trying to be a part of your life and trying to give it to the potential viewers.’

Pinchas Zuckerman: ‘An understanding of the depth, the ability of the music to transport […] a human. The energy that one creates, he [Christopher Nupen] understands that as if he himself was playing, and that’s what I try to do most of the time: to go through the notes that I have written on the page to the person listening, and he captured that and he could do that with the camera.’

Lord Melvyn Bragg: ‘He was an unthreatening obsessive; I mean he bent your ear – why won’t you do this – but it was good, it wasn’t boring and it wasn’t self-serving. It was the music he was interested in and that’s what he devoted himself to.’

Itzhak Perlman: ‘One word that comes to mind is enthusiastic. He was really, really enthusiastic about whatever he does and sometimes “to be a professional” […] can be an insulting word. […] Christopher was never a pro. He was an amateur in the good sense of the word, like he was committed to what he was doing and I trusted his knowledge and of course his taste.’

Daniil Trifonov: ‘Christopher Nupen knows how to go into the psychology of an artist and it really shows the art of music making from inside out and it helps just to understand what it is to be a performer.’