Maestro or Mephisto: the Real Georg Solti, BBC Four, review

In many respects, Sir Georg Solti neatly fulfilled the caricature of the orchestral maestro – lean, intense and excitable, with an indeterminate foreign accent and something daemonic about his fiery-eyed charisma and panther-like body language on the podium. Here was a man possessed, who admits that when he was clambering his way up the career ladder he would have murdered his grandfather to get what he wanted.

But film-maker Andy King-Dabbs moved behind this two-dimensional image to paint a more sympathetic and nuanced picture of both man and musician. Maestro or Mephisto: the Real Georg Solti (BBC Four, Friday) was one of the best BBC arts documentaries for years.

Born 100 years ago in Budapest to Jewish parents, Solti struggled to establish himself in the face of European anti-Semitism and never lost his drive to succeed against the odds. Prejudice continued to dog him in England, although the hostility goaded and inspired him: “They called me Prussian bastard and Mephisto and all sorts of nice names,” he remembered with grim glee as he reflected on his bumpy first years as music director at Covent Garden, “a very English institution”, in the early Sixties.

But his steely perseverance won out. Soon he had disciplined what had been a third-rate pit band, mouldering with lazy jobsworth players into a first-rate symphony orchestra. Bouquets and rave reviews followed. Covent Garden’s manager John Tooley talked about the “rhythmic conciseness, precision and excitement” which Solti brought to the music he conducted – qualities which also suited him to the technology of studio stereo recording and made him a big star on the Decca label.

Not everyone was blown away, however: old-school connoisseurs often found his style excessively hard-edged, and his attempt to forge a bond with the London Philharmonic Orchestra was never resolved. Some of its players thought he had “no stick technique whatsoever” and that he cultivated a sound that was loud, fast, brash and cold. “All he did was get in the way,” complained one disgruntled percussionist.

Furiously impatient though he could be with laziness and incompetence, he was neither vindictive nor merciless: the memory of what he had endured in the Thirties on the wrong side of the tracks remained vivid to him and in the years before his death in 1997, he developed a passionate desire to help and mentor young musicians.

He could be great fun, too: glimpses of his radiant charm and uproarious sense of humour came from his second wife Valerie and colleagues such as Kiri Te Kanawa. There may have been no false modesty about him, but he wasn’t an egomaniac: he could be teased and tickled, and pretty sopranos found him an incorrigible flirt.

This was just the sort of straightforward arts coverage television needs more of: well crafted and balanced, lucid and unpatronising, with evocative archive footage and illuminating interviews, it was an absolute treat.