Classical - Dermot Clinch watches the great pianists on film

The hands of Vladimir Horowitz steeplechase elegantly up and down the keyboard on a silent film of the 1920s, knocking off another Chopin etude. Horowitz was a genius, sighs Tamas Vasary: his hands were perfect, they were "beautiful racehorses". The Hungarian pianist is delighted by the great Russian wizard. But he is careful to add, in case there's doubt, that of course Horowitz "was a musician as well".

Not all pianists featured in The Art of Piano (IMG), a new, entertaining film by Christian Labrande and Donald Sturrock, were musicians as well. Gyorgy Cziffra probably was, but he played far too fast. Ignacy Jan Paderewski probably was, but he was far too dashing. Swooning women surround Paderewski - b1860 - in a clip from a Hollywood film, as the Pole hammers out a Liszt rhapsody with a clenched fist and battering-ram thumb. It is left to another Pole, Artur Rubinstein, to comment that Paderewski may have been an "unforgettably marvellous personality" but he was also "the father of a very, very poor tradition".

Paderewski made it to become prime minister of Poland even so, and newsreel footage of a man in a stovepipe hat is here to prove it. The Art of Piano follows the formula of The Art of Singing and The Art of Conducting of truffling up gems from the archives and stringing them together with linking paragraphs. John Tusa speaks of X's "huge range of sonorities" and Y's "exquisite delicacy of touch", but his text gets no more profoundly revealing. Celluloid hands and fingers - flat, crabbed, crouched, bent - are the film's illumination.

And heads. Could Rubinstein's hair really have been that white, and his tie-pin that dazzling? The refined Pole sits in a stiff Louis XVIII chair, and his social ease in front of the camera is matched only by the relaxed design and large, muscular purpose of his perfomance, at the age of 82, of the cadenza of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto. Glenn Gould's posture, cross-legged if he wanted, demonstrated another very poor tradition, but as Stephen Kovacevich, one of the contemporary pianists employed on the film as a pundit, suggests, Gould was one of the most influential artists of the century. There is no mention of Gould's concert chair: the one with burst upholstery and bare crossbar, on which, in later years, the pianist's entire weight was born by his genitals.

Rachmaninov in exile on board ship in his black homburg; Gilels performing to chilled Russian airmen on the Great Steppe with Tupolevs flying overhead; Myra Hess playing Mozart with the RAF orchestra in 1942 and having pages turned by a man with wings on his shoulder: what is it about pianists these days that they restrict themselves to playing the piano? And have they forgotten the use of crazed, Baudelairean eyes and the vocabulary of esprit, eternite, poesie? Alfred Cortot "looked always for the opium in music", says Daniel Barenboim, "avoiding anything that could be construed as even remotely smelling of normality". The comment seems savagely acute.

And the "art" of piano? A film with Jan Paderewski as its presiding genius was perhaps never likely to answer the question. A partial, athletic, physical answer is provided by striking footage of the "unimaginably great" Josef Hofmann playing Rachmaninov's C Sharp Minor Prelude. Like a sportsman on a good day, changing mind in mid-shot, stepping across the line, stroking the ball to the boundary, Hofmann appears to have all the time in the world to be able to do whatever he wants. It was a bad day for him: he hated cameras, and was probably drunk. But the piano was his body and from initial impulse to final touchdown his hands might go anywhere, do anything.

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