Imagine... Alma Deutscher: Finding Cinderella, BBC One review - beguiling profile of a musical prodigy

Alma is the real deal; frighteningly talented but disarmingly likeable. We see her at the family home in Surrey, the footage intercut with the final rehearsals and performance of the opera. Her linguist father has been filming Alma’s musical development since she was six, and shows host Alan Yentob clips of her at work, the pencil seemingly unable to keep up with the flurry of ideas which fill her head. At times, the fast-talking Alma seems baffled by her facility: “It’s a mystery… melodies just pop into my head.” Yentob is visibly flummoxed when Alma cheerfully improvises on four notes he plucks at random from a hat.

You wonder whether the parents will turn out to be the villains of the piece, but they’re remarkably level-headed. Alma and her younger sister Helen (pictured below, with Alma) are home-educated, but that’s only after Alma returned home upset on the first day of primary school, complaining that she’d not learned enough. On the basis of what we see, Alma does enjoy a happy enough existence. She plays in a treehouse and flits around the garden, twirling a glittery skipping rope which functions as a talisman.We watch Alma during rehearsals for Cinderella. She’s thrilled to hear her material in context, giggling that “it sounds even better than when I think about it,” after one aria. She’s her own repetiteur, with Helen as page-turner. When conductor and orchestra arrive, Alma immediately queries bassoon parts and alters tempi, instructing her players with crystalline precision. Bryn Terfel and Sir Simon Rattle chip in, both awed by Alma’s gifts but stressing that she needs to develop at her pace, in her own time. Rattle shrewdly points out that, “It won’t always flow so easily… but we’ll all be there for her when it gets hard.”

So, is Alma’s music any good? Cynics might point out that it sounds like technically brilliant pastiche, the work of a supernaturally gifted student who has listened to lots of Mozart and Schubert. But the ease with which Alma inhabits the idiom is phenomenal, and it’s clear that she understands instinctively the nuts and bolts of how music works. The most touching sequence comes near the close, with Alma and her sister duetting on a pair of violins once owned by Mozart. Such a shame that this enjoyable film was broadcast so late on a Monday night: luckily it can be seen on iPlayer.

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