It’s Prime Time for ‘Shine’ Pianist Helfgott

Before she arranged for her husband to fulfill his lifelong dream of performing in North America, Gillian Helfgott consulted the stars and found the aspects “absolutely wonderful.” A dusting of snow--an exotic event for Australians like the Helfgotts--which opened the long-awaited “Shine” tour here on Tuesday, convinced her the stars had been right.

“David is just purring,” said the 65-year-old astrologer who is credited with--and, in an equal number of circles, damned for--transforming David Helfgott from chain-smoking, monologue-muttering wine-bar piano man to chain-smoking, monologue-muttering superstar concert pianist.

The 49-year-old Helfgott is the real-life hero of the movie “Shine,” nominated for seven Academy Awards, which tells the story of his promising musical career, cut short by mental illness and then resurrected with the help of Gillian.

While his wife, his German music coach and a phalanx of officials from the movie “Shine” conducted the only scheduled press conference of the 30-day, 18-concert North American tour, the object of all the hoopla was said to be upstairs in his hotel room, doing push-ups and “singing away to himself.”

“David doesn’t get nervous,” Gillian Helfgott explained. “But he does get excited.”

So, apparently, do music and movie fans who have besieged box offices in 10 U.S. and Canadian cities. Tickets for Helfgott’s four concerts in Southern California (Los Angeles, March 25 and 27 and Pasadena, April 28 and 30) sold out within hours. At Boston’s venerable Symphony Hall, not even a folding chair was said to be vacant for the debut “Celebration of Life” concert, featuring works by Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven.

Compact disc versions of the “Shine” soundtrack and of Helfgott’s suddenly famous interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto are flying off the shelves at a rate of 10,000 per week, said David Lawrence-Kuehn of BMG Classics U.S. (The Rachmaninoff Third, which requires a full orchestra, isn’t on either of his two recital agendas--the second “The Miracle of Love,” features Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven.)

While she is in North America, Gillian Helfgott plans to visit bookstores to promote her memoir, “Love You to Bits and Pieces,” a bestseller in Australia that is also selling briskly in this country.

But from the start of a world tour that began last month in New Zealand, music critics have not universally shared this enthusiasm. The rambling conversations he conducts with himself while performing are less adorable than distracting, they have maintained. He is heavy-handed, they’ve written, thumping away like the Perth piano-bar entertainer he was for many years, and he often pounds at the pedals. His overnight ascension to international-phenomenon status, musical purists have contended, says more about marketing and about curiosity surrounding Helfgott’s unusual state of mental health than it does about his artistic abilities.

As David Dubal of the piano faculty of the Juilliard School of Music told Newsweek magazine recently, “Mr. Helfgott is a dreadful pianist.” His own childhood mentor, Australian music professor Sir Frank Callaway, described Helfgott as “sort of a circus act.”

Gillian Helfgott conceded at Tuesday’s press conference that rather than flocking to hear a brilliant musician, “probably there are people who are coming to see David tonight because of ‘Shine.’ ”

Scott Hicks’ movie sternly depicts Helfgott as having a troubled childhood in a household run by an authoritarian, even abusive, father and shows his descent into the mental disarray that his psychiatrist has termed “schizoaffective disorder.”

By contrast, Gillian Helfgott prefers to think of her husband of 13 years as “eccentric.” She leaves discussion of his behavior and his medication to her book, where she reports that he takes a drug called Serenace. She would say she is thrilled that “Shine” is “enabling mental health to get wider coverage.”

Director Hicks was equally quick to put the same sunny spin on questions about the film’s accuracy. “Isaac Stern himself did not offer a scholarship” to Helfgott, as suggested in the film, Hicks explained, for example. But, he underlined, “Stern was a catalyst.” Hicks also minimized charges by some family members that the film distorts what actually took place in the Helfgott household. One sister, Margaret, says David was not abused and the beating portrayed in “Shine” never took place.

“It would be a unique family that would all share precisely the same point of view,” said Hicks. “Yes, David has a sister who has a 100% different point of view, to which she is entitled--just as David is entitled to his point of view.”

“I don’t feel she has the right to invalidate David’s experience,” she said of Margaret Helfgott’s remarks. Besides, she added, “Margaret lives in Israel. She probably hasn’t spent more than a week with David in the last 22 years.”

The pianist’s personal manager, Austin Prichard-Levy, said tour personnel were exercising “deep restraints” to reduce potential stress on the performer. He acknowledged that Helfgott’s performances do sometimes deteriorate “because of the mental traffic in his head.”

But half-fiercely, half-quizzically, Gillian Helfgott refuted the suggestion that her husband might be too emotionally fragile to withstand the pressures of worldwide scrutiny.

“Can you tell me where it comes from, that David is going to fall apart?” she demanded. “He has never missed a concert performance. In the wine bar, where he worked from 8 to 12, four nights a week, David never missed a performance.”

Hicks, meanwhile, attributed “some of the more virulent response” to Helfgott’s appearances to criticism by “self-appointed guardians of an elite culture” who object to the fact that Helfgott has attained fame “without their permission.”

Audiences at Helfgott’s concerts never ask for their money back, Hicks pointed out, “and that, I think, is as valid as anything in a world of entertainment as well as art.”