The Orchestra Mozart, Claudio Abbado’s last great musical project, ran into financial trouble even before the maestro’s death. Hence this modest film, documenting the public and private lives of group members during their 2012 13 tour, emerges as a double memorial. Abbado fans will be particularly interested in the extended informal interview in the accompanying booklet. There’s much less of Abbado talking in the film itself. Music-making is also unexpectedly sparse, mere shards identified only in the closing titles and in any case likely to be subsumed beneath Uri Caine’s fashionable pianistic doodles.

What the makers Helmut Failoni and Francesco Merini find most fascinating about Orchestra Mozart is its unlikely mélange of players of diverse age, nationality, temperament and playing style. We have brief footage of Venezuelan slums as well as glossier images of the tour’s affluent stopovers, places like Bologna, Lucerne, Vienna, Madrid and Palermo.

Gone are the days when a feature of this kind might have been expected to embrace a few dissenting voices, let alone talk politics directly, but was there really no room for an investigation of the band’s graceful blend of historically informed practice and more traditional ‘modern’ approaches (and instruments)? True aficionados will presumably already have the audio-visual Bach Brandenburg Concertos set down by these forces in 2007 (Medici Arts, 4/09 – also issued in EuroArts’ 80th-birthday DVD package, ‘Claudio Abbado: A Life Dedicated to Music’). It must be counted a weakness of the present release that we never get to see a full performance.

In short, there’s nothing here to sway those immune to the Abbado cult. We all know about Abbado’s refusal to cajole his players or impose his own conceptual ideas, preferring to work as an enabler with friends rather than as a director of professional clock-watchers. The conductor claims that his habit of memorising scores is a psychological necessity, liberating him to communicate directly with collaborators through glance or gesture. Audiences and critics alike tend to be wowed by that sort of thing, old LSO hands less so. Yes, it’s interesting to see his Bologna base and his personal stash of orchestral material, but I was expecting more than the vague implication that it would make for a better world if we would only listen to each other more. Sound and vision are admirably crisp.