The most touching sequence comes near the close, with Alma and her sister duetting on a pair of violins once owned by Mozart. 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. 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. Rattle shrewdly points out that, “It won’t always flow so easily… but we’ll all be there for her when it gets hard.” 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. When conductor and orchestra arrive, Alma immediately queries bassoon parts and alters tempi, instructing her players with crystalline precision. She’s her own repetiteur, with Helen as page-turner. She’s thrilled to hear her material in context, giggling that “it sounds even better than when I think about it,” after one aria. We watch Alma during rehearsals for Cinderella. She plays in a treehouse and flits around the garden, twirling a glittery skipping rope which functions as a talisman. On the basis of what we see, Alma does enjoy a happy enough existence. 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.

You wonder whether the parents will turn out to be the villains of the piece, but they’re remarkably level-headed.

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. 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. We see her at the family home in Surrey, the footage intercut with the final rehearsals and performance of the opera. I can’t recall much about my own talents at that age, apart from being able to tie my own shoelaces and build passable models out of Lego.Īlma is the real deal frighteningly talented but disarmingly likeable. What’s unusual about that, you might ask? Apart from being female, Alma was 11 years old when she finished writing it.

Finding cinderella review