Benjamin Schmid: 9 Days
Director: Carl Plötzeneder
Distributor: BMFI
Length: 52 min.
16:9 shot in digital video | stereo
© 2008, a production of BFMI in co-production with ORF
The filmteam ac­com­pan­ies Ben­jamin Schmid on a mu­sic­al tour de force, re­hears­ing and per­form­ing a mul­ti­pli­city of con­certs at dif­fer­ent sites across Ger­many, Switzer­land and Aus­tria. It re­veals parts of the strain a mu­si­cian on tour is ex­posed, but also the vast mu­sic­al band­with, that the vi­ol­in­ist ex­presses with­in this 9-day trip.
Mr. Schmid’s it­in­er­ary lists stops like Zurich, Koblenz, Co­logne, Frank­furt, Graz ,Vi­enna and fi­nally his home town Salzburg. He per­forms six clas­sic­al con­certs with pieces of Max Bruch, Béla Bartók, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schubert and Ca­m­ille Saint-Saëns plus two Jazz con­certs with mu­sic by Django Re­in­hardt and Stéphane Grap­pelli, Fritz Kre­isler, Kurt weill and Georg Breinsch­mid. Fur­ther­more, he also gives a mas­ter­class to a ja­pan­ese stu­dent in between. Out of nine work­ing days, he spends more than three of them on an aero­plane, a train or a car, cov­er­ing a dis­tance of more than 5000 kilo­metres.
In­ter­views with the con­duct­ors Daniel Rais­in, Ber­trand De Billy and Adrés Orozco-Es­trada, as well as the vi­en­nese vir­tu­osi Ernst Ot­tensamer and Tibor Ko­vacs, and the jazz mu­si­cians Georg Breinsch­mid, Sti­an Carstensen and Diknu Schnee­ber­ger do not only provide back­ground in­form­a­tion on the mu­sic pieces, but also ac­com­plish an in­tim­ate view on Ben­jamin Schmid’s per­son­al­ity and his thoughts on mu­sic.