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Music from the Inside Out

(2004. USA. Produced and Directed by Daniel Anker)

Review by Shawn Pavey

Special to Bestfilmfests.com

Most documentaries about orchestra music focus on the conductor, the composer, or the soloist.

Daniel Anker, in the documentary film "Music from the Inside Out," follows a group of musicians from the renowned Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra and asks them the tough questions. The big, ponderous, philosophical questions that help us understand what it means to devote one's life and profession to playing music.

Through extensive interviews of a select group of musicians, this film offers insight into the reasons these musicians play. Enter the violinist who went through junior and senior high school explaining that the mark on her neck was not a hickey, but a mark left from thousands of hours spent playing a violin tucked under her chin.

Enter Trombones

Enter: the German trombonist with a love for Latin dance music.

Enter: the quiet young woman who becomes a wild-woman percussionist.

Enter: the violist who became a violist because his school was out of violins.

Enter: the entire cast, each with different stories and different approaches to the same love.

What Is Music?

When talking about this film, Anker describes the difficulty of getting musicians to answer questions such as, "What is music?" But he focuses the conversations to explain each person's personal attachment to music, while illustrating the different paths each took to become a member of one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world.

Music defines the film. During a conversation with a violist in a fine Italian restaurant, a waiter breaks out in a stunning tenor aria from Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro."

In my favorite scene, the entire orchestra enjoys a fine meal in a restaurant during a European tour. Someone comes to the table, saying they must hear the accordion player busking for tips on the sidewalk outside. We follow the musicians out of the restaurant to find a young man playing Vivaldi's "Spring" from The Four Seasons on accordian.

Stunning Sight and Sound

While the music is stunning and the conversations insightful, the visual qualities of this film are also striking, especially during performance footage. Many times when I see an orchestra on film, the musicians look spectral, on the verge of becoming ghostly, due to the overhead lighting they need to see the score. Acker, in the performance footage, spent substantial time and resources to light the orchestra in such a way that the musicians look warm and alive.

Festival Perils

It is unfortunate that during the screening of the film at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the projection experienced such critical technical problems that the film had to be rescheduled, thereby removing it from competition.

Fortunately, they rescheduled the screening. Unfortunately, it was after the judging for the festival's prizes. Had this not happened, the outcome of the event's final awards might have been different. "Music from the Inside Out" is aptly titled. It pulls us in to a world we rarely see through the eyes of the musicians who live there, propelling us into the the experience of playing in a world class orchestra.

BRAVO!

Shawn Pavey is a published poet, musician, teacher at North Carolina's summer Governor's School and correspondent for Bestfilmfests.com.

For more information on Music from the Inside Out visit the website of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.