Georg Wübbolt’s film celebrates the 100th anniversary of Solti’s birth on October 21, 1912. After the selection of pithy encomiums from talking heads that customarily inaugurates such ventures, the film settles into a deft, whistle-stop chronological survey of the great conductor’s life and career. It was a tough journey to the top, as Sir Peter Jonas eloquently adumbrates at one point, with the young Solti losing his parents, his name (György Stern) and his country. ‘I fought it out and never stopped thinking about conducting,’ says the octogenarian Solti. ‘I had to fight for my life.’

Solti is a documentary director’s dream. Unlike, say, Sir Adrian Boult or Bernard Haitink, there is always so much to look at even when he’s sitting still. His extraordinary range of physical and facial gestures puts him almost, but not quite, in the terpsichorean class of Leonard Bernstein. György, Georg or Sir George was not a ‘less is more’ man when it came to podium technique. But the results speak for themselves. The mesmeric maestro won 32 Grammy Awards, more than any other artist, pop or classical. His recording of The Ring, so Norman Lebrecht tells us, is the best-selling classical record of all time.

Narration and commentary is voiced principally by the contributors (they include Valerie Solti, Valery Gergiev, Christoph von Dohnányi and, of course, Sir Georg himself), but occasionally and intrusively by an American-accented voice-over, delivered in the same apocalyptic tones that you hear in cinema trailers. There is much skilfully sequenced archive footage (though none of Solti’s tenure at Covent Garden), even if the director finds it hard ever to linger on his subject doing what he did best. For this, turn to ‘Solti in Rehearsal’ filmed in the late Sixties (Arthaus, 3/04) or the 54-minute bonus on the present disc of him conducting a concert of Russian music with his beloved Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1977.

Worth a view, but the best documentary on Solti remains Peter Maniura’s longer portrait, The Making of a Maestro (Arthaus, 2/02), first shown just a few weeks before Solti’s death – and that has some scenes with Solti that will move you to tears.