At Elstree Studios we met quite a different pianistic quirk. It was there that we worked with Gene Kelly on his balletic film Invitation to the Dance. Seen later, it had a marvellous continuity and tremendous vitality. In the making, it was split up into 'takes' usually little more than eight bars in length for technical reasons, and even Kelly found it difficult to swing into each section with complete assurance. So he engaged a pianist who was at that time my sonata partner, Henry Bronkhurst, for the whole three months of the series, at considerable expense. Henry didn't appear in the film at all, and he wasn't heard. It was simply his job to play a tiny four-bar 'jingle' - a favourite sort of 'how's your father' tune of Gene Kelly's - to start the dancer going. It was always the same corny little fragment, and always in medium tempoe whatever the speed of the complete dance. These 'jingles' were then cut out of the recordings, the rest joined up, and voilâ - the complete ballet emerged. Such great artists often do have their own peculiarities... << less