Love Wool

Although he would become one of 20th-century music’s most capricious rebels — as in love with the free spirits of jazz as with the living monuments of classical — pianist Friedrich Gulda (1930–2000) was born and bred in that most traditional of musical cities, Vienna. He studied theory with the late-Romanticist Joseph Marx at the Vienna Academy of Music, and he won the Geneva International Pianists' Competition at age sixteen, eventually earning a reputation for the rare blend of cogency and freedom within his interpretations of music from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Ravel and Debussy.

Lifelong friends Lenny (Dominic Chianese) and Ruben (Dick Latessa) are both in their 70s and dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers. The New York they inhabit is fading away: the places they've frequented for years give them a refuge from the changes they see around them. At last they are confronted with the reality that the last holdouts are a threatened species, and they are too. This film is about love and friendship, and the way these things keep us young, and make us feel alive. It's about one man at a point in his life when he is finally forced to concede that his whole life is no longer ahead of him, and he makes a last reach for one thing he's never had - true love.

As the author has said, every good apocalypse must come to an end. I admit to being a little worried about where he would take us in this concluding chapter of his silo series. I needn't have wasted my energy. This story is as thrilling and satisfying a conclusion as I could hope for. The author's devastating imagination and deft writing are both evident from first page to last.

When Paul McCartney - who arguably kick-started the whole baroque pop genre when he recorded the likes of 'Yesterday' and 'Eleanor Rigby' with pivotal strings arrangements - made his oft-quoted remark that pop was the classical music of the 20th Century, perhaps he meant it in a more literal sense than anyone realised at the time. In the immediate wake of ground-breaking albums like Rubber Soul, Revolver and Pet Sounds, the British and American music scenes became increasingly ambitious and cerebral. As the major recording studios becoming ever more sophisticated, a new generation of musicians and producers sought to emulate the backroom auteur status of Brian Wilson or the symbiotic relationship between George Martin and The Beatles.