THE time scale of this feature documentary begins in Italy, 305 years ago, with the birth of GB Guadagnini.

It ends a mere few months ago in South Australia where German-born Ulrike Klein has spent a goodly slab of wealth from making and selling skin-care products to build a 150-seat hall for chamber music performances on her property Ngeringa, near Mount Barker.

Geographically, “Highly Strung” takes writer/director/cinematographer Scott Hicks (whose 1996 bio-pic of pianist David Helfgott “Shine” garnered a big scrunch of awards) from Melbourne to New York to Cremona in Italy.

The names of two great 18th-century Italian luthiers have become bywords for bowed instruments that now, if they come on the market, command astronomical prices.

In 1996, Hicks devoted time, money, creative energy and passion to making a magnificent film about a then-little-known concert pianist. In 2015, his theme is the third luthier who made bowed instruments contemporaneously with Stradivari and Guarneri but, for some reason (perhaps the media frenzy whenever a newsworthy event involves that famous pair), has remained relatively little-known except among virtuoso performers.

Ulrike Klein owns four Guadagnini instruments, which she loaned to the members of the Australian String Quartet. The film spends a goodly portion of its time with Hicks filming and talking with the quartet members, lovely, smart, enthusiastic, brilliant young musicians, about themselves, how the quartet functions, and their tools of trade, collectively valued at around $6 million.

Why such a price? Hicks goes to Cremona where a young Italian luthier is building a cello. The film’s intimate observation of the process begins in the forest from which the tree was harvested. It’s a labour of love, working timber to meticulously-measured shapes and sizes. There is no room for error. Haste is not part of the exercise. You come to realise, watching the craftsman using tools sharper than verbal description allows, to liberate the instrument from the wood, that luthiers are sculptors.

In the US, Hicks searches out other Guadagnini instruments. This phase of the film is somewhat discomforting. The Americans love their music and their instruments. But they also spend a lot of time thinking about money, which seems to be a misplacement of attitude toward their tools of trade. Sure, the money is important. But without the music, the money would not

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