Behind the scenes documentaries are generally irresistible.

The best of them offer human drama, clashing egos, chaos, despair and very often triumph.

Sadly there was very few of those ingredients in "Five Days in September: The Rebirth of an Orchestra".

Charting the reception of new conductor Peter Oundjian by the stagnant Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 2004 it is a delight for the ears but not necessarily the intellect because it is such a simple story.

He comes, they love him, everybody lives happily ever after. Clearly after a few duff choices the whole crew is willing him to succeed.

The five days of the film's title refers to the length of his opening season but the viewer gets the feeling that the story has begun in the final chapter.

There is not enough of a sense of what was wrong in the first place to really get a full appreciation of the mammoth success which greets the culmination of what must have been a lot of hard work.

But we don't quite get a sense of the teething troubles along the way. The film crews don't manage to find anyone whispering in the backrooms about the new guy.

Oundjian, an Englishman who was forced to give up the violin because of RSI, is not really probed about what it feels like to pack it in. We don't know if conducting, which to the layman might seem like a nebulous activity, makes up for the loss of being able to play.

And there's a snatched conversation with a 21-year-old principal violinist who is playing in an orchestra for the first time but we don't really get a sense of the strain she's under.

Some of the scenes seem slightly staged. There's plenty of breathless women chasing Oundjian down corridors holding hurried conversations — they all seemed to have fallen in love with him, seemingly blind to his rather smug manner.

But while the film might not deliver great insight, what it does manage to convey — and perhaps this is far more important — is the limitless enthusiasm common at all levels for making what is truly sublime music.

If you were lukewarm about classical music before watching, you will find yourself fired up after. It's moving, it works on deep levels and seems so much more powerful by watching them create it.

At one stage they hammer out a dramatic version of 'Three Blind Mice' to make the point that in the right hands nothing need sound pedestrian.

In short? Lame story, fantastic soundtrack.

Five Days in September will be screened tomorrow at 9.15 p.m. at BUEI auditorium.