This dreary if perversely instructive DVD charts the ups and downs (mainly downs) of four young Russian pianists as they journey from their early prodigy years to a bleak and uncertain future; an all-too-rapid move from innocence to experience. Film of early acclaim and an assumption that fame and fortune are a natural heritage leads to a quagmire of contradictory advice from “professors” and competition jurors. To be told that your performance was too slow only to be told that the same performance was too fast is hardly enlightening, while attempts to explore an infinitely rich repertoire are all too often treated with scorn and indifference. Whether in Russia, Germany or France much of the teaching on display looks shoddy and irresponsible.

Yet at the heart of this DVD is “god’s curse on pianists” and a competition scene that has proliferated throughout the globe. Here agents in particular unite to declare that without a first prize in a major competition you have no chance of a career; a characteristically lazy and absurd assumption. Many of today’s most celebrated and potentially celebrated pianists have achieved their status without such artifice. Today the majority of competition winners are quickly forgotten, their brief celebrity eclipsed by their successors. More encouragingly, some of today’s most gifted young pianists have achieved recognition and recording contracts without such adventitious aid. Meanwhile, the luckless four on this DVD are left in a sad limbo, their years of study leading only to a stark and uncertain future and leaving one participant to bewail “nobody wants me!” For her, as for her companions, music has become the reverse of life-enhancing, a neurotic rather than an enriching obsession.