Christopher Nupen

Christopher Nupen

In July 2000 film director Christopher Nupen was invited by Daniel Barenboim to the workshop of his West-Eastern Divan orchestra. 'I'm sitting with him at a student concert,' Nupen says, 'and he announces that there will be an encore by someone who did not appear in the concert, which was already something unusual.

'Then out walked an 11-year-old Karim Said, to play Mendelssohn's Rondo capriccioso. It's a big virtuoso piece but it starts with two pages of slow chords. He'd only played a few of those slow chords when I said to myself, "How is it possible for an 11-year-old boy to make so much magic out of a few slow chords?"'

Said, now a 19-year-old first year at the Royal Academy of Music, isn't the first musical magician Nupen has encountered. During a film-making career that spans four decades he has worked with some of the biggest names to have graced the stage - Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Zubin Mehta, Nathan Milstein, Andrés Segovia and, perhaps most famously, Jacqueline du Pré. Each features in at least one, and often several, of Nupen's acclaimed films, with Karim's Journey receiving its premiere at the Barbican in May.

'I made my first radio programme in Siena in Andrés Segovia's class and all the other classes. It was a new style of putting music on radio'

But film-making wasn't always Nupen's ambition. His father, legendary South African cricketer Buster, was a lawyer so it was natural that Nupen would study law (though he admits 'I studied more girls at university than I studied law'). He was also a trained guitarist, however, and aspired to be a professional musician. 'I shared a flat with John Williams [the guitarist and son of Len Williams] for 10 years so I was very close to very good guitar playing. I went to the Accademia Chigiana in Siena in '62 and '63 to study but I realised that I was never going to be a musician on the level of my friends - Williams, Barenboim, Ashkenazy, Du Pré, Perlman and Zukerman.

'So I started using public service broadcasting - radio first and then television - to tell the world how incredibly gifted my friends were. I made my first radio programme in Siena in Andrés Segovia's class and all the other classes. It was a new style of putting music on radio.'

When, in 1966, Barenboim and Ashkenazy wanted to give their first concert together, Nupen persuaded the BBC to allocate £600 and an hour-long television slot. The resulting film, Double Concerto, won the Prague and Monte Carlo prizes and influenced future music programming on television.

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