Our Story
Allegro™ Films was formed in 1968 and may well have been the first truly independent television production company in the United Kingdom. The founding members were Christopher Nupen (producer/director), David Findlay (lighting cameraman) and Peter Heelas (film editor) who met at the BBC and remained together for over forty years and sixty productions.
We established ourselves as the pioneer of a new genre of music film, blending fly-on-the-wall documentary and performance, which provided new and intimate insights into the workings of the artists and their music-making. It was all made possible by an extraordinary constellation of unprecedented circumstances; the invention of the first lightweight and silent 16mm film cameras; the meteoric rise of public service broadcasting and Nupen’s unique access to – and the emergence of - a golden generation of super-gifted musicians.
It suddenly became possible to record musicians at close quarters and to put sequences on the screen that had never been there before - scenes which, until then, had been the exclusive preserve of the great performers and their intimate friends.
“Under the banner of Allegro™ Films, Christopher Nupen pioneered a style of filming music and music-making for television in which his excellence has rarely been equalled and never excelled. Of that genre he is the undoubted master. His films will endure forever as reference documents to the executant’s art in the 20th century and as constant sources of musical delight.”
And so, in the late 1960s, the world began to discover that while books, audio recordings and concerts may be able to do more for the art itself, when it comes to remembering our artists, performers or composers, film can do something which none of the other media is quite able to match.
The performers who have appeared in Allegro™ films include Andrés Segovia, Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nathan Milstein, Isaac Stern, Murray Perahia, Placido Domingo, Gidon Kremer, Marc Neikrug, Cristobal Halffter, Evgeny Kissin and Daniil Trifonov among others.
The effects were dramatic and the films brought many people to music for the first time in their lives - in many parts of the world. In time, the success of the artist portrait films gave rise to the creation of a series of composer films heavily styled on the subject’s own words to understand the thinking behind the music. These included Georges Bizet, Ottorino Respighi, Modest Mussorgski, Johannes Brahms, Jean Sibelius, Marc Neikrug, Cristobal Halffter, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Franz Peter Schubert and Niccolo Paganini.
“His contribution is unique of course, somebody who really was a musician to his roots. His [Nupen] work is thought of in the highest category, I mean, he was one of the people who set a great benchmark.”
Our founder Christopher Nupen passed away in 2023 but not before the BBC broadcast Listening Through the Lens, a feature-length documentary celebrating his remarkable career and his single-minded dedication to conveying the spiritual power of music. The film also encapsulates the story of Allegro™ Films, together with all the artists who made our story possible.
Today, Allegro™ Films remains as busy as ever under the stewardship of Caroline Nupen (Christopher’s wife) and the film-maker Matthew Percival who has been connected to Allegro Films since 1997. Together with the wider team, they continue to look for inspiring human-led stories about music, culture and the arts.
