Premiere of the Digital Concert Hall

In the golden days of radio the great sym­phony orches­tras of the world broad­cast over short and long wave bands, cre­at­ing pock­ets of lis­ten­ers all over the globe. In iso­lated Japan in the 1940s the young com­poser Toru Takemitsu learned the ways of West­ern music from the Armed Forces radio net­work. In Maine, Charles Ives lis­tened to the pre­miere of his 2nd Sym­phony, con­ducted by Leonard Bern­stein, over the radio.

When FM came in after the Sec­ond World War, sound qual­ity improved, but the since the range of FM is lim­ited to line-of-sight, those mil­lions of lis­ten­ers lucky enough to get an ionos­phere bounce from New York to Ver­mont or Chicago to Col­orado were left in silence. The advent of the long-playing record took the thrill and neces­sity away from live broad­casts, and radio audi­ences shrank.

Then came the golden age of tele­vi­sion, with new operas com­mis­sioned for the medium, and Leonard Bernstein’s 53 Young People’s Con­certs broad­cast live to the entire nation. But with aston­ish­ing speed, the medium was sub­jected to raw mar­ket forces and the inex­orable drive to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor. Tele­vi­sion went from golden age to New­ton Minnow’s “vast waste­land” in less than two decades.

Now we are in the early days of a new medium — high def­i­n­i­tion broad­casts over the Inter­net. The pio­neer here is Sir Simon Rat­tle and the Berlin Phil­har­monic offer­ing a com­plete sea­son ticket for €149, or sin­gle month passes to their Dig­i­tal Con­cert Hall. The pre­miere con­cert August 28 was priced at a spe­cial €5, and you can still order it and watch it as many times as you want dur­ing any 48 hour period.

The over­all expe­ri­ence was riv­et­ing. Video qual­ity is superb, and the sound is good. First up was Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orches­tra, some­thing Sir Simon must have con­ducted a few thou­sand times in Birm­ing­ham for young audi­ences. This was an adult ver­sion, a chance for Berlin to show off their shim­mer­ing strings and brass, and warm reeds. A delight. Next was the pre­miere of a new work, Lat­erna Mag­ica by Kaija Saari­aho, a mys­te­ri­ous and excit­ing mélange of ear candy that ben­e­fited hugely by video. At one point we heard voices in a whis­per, as if a cho­rus was behind the orches­tra, but sud­denly we could see that the voices were from any­one not busy play­ing at the moment. The play­ers were a cho­rus for a few moments, a stun­ning sur­prise, effec­tive, mov­ing. A real treat was see­ing the com­poser her­self up on stage at the end, bravoed by audi­ence and orches­tra. We knew then that this was a per­for­mance that the com­poser her­self had a hand in and we had heard it the way she wanted us to.

Before the final piece we cre­ated our own inter­mis­sion by hit­ting ‘pause’ and took a lit­tle strudel break here in Tiburon while our server in Berlin cooled its heels. We then launched the final piece, Berlioz’s Sym­phonie Fan­tas­tique. This was a decid­edly un-opiated per­for­mance, with Rat­tle and the Berlin­ers going for warmth, and ensem­ble, leav­ing the mad­ness for oth­ers to explore. Still, every moment kept our rapt atten­tion. This can never be the same as a live expe­ri­ence, but it is deeply sat­is­fy­ing, authen­tic in its own way.

Quib­bles: the sound. I’m guess­ing that the mik­ing is a sin­gle Blum­lein pair some­where fairly far back in the hall, giv­ing pref­er­ence to that nice warm Berlin sound, but a loss of detail that in a record-only world might be barely okay. When the cam­era is hov­er­ing over a piano or celeste key­board and you can’t for the life of you hear the instru­ment, you almost feel as if the whole ensem­ble is lip-synching. Orches­tra bal­ance is pretty good, but the dou­ble basses are con­sid­er­ably under­bal­anced and out of focus. My biggest com­plaint is lack of dynam­ics. Either someone’s got a heavy hand on the com­pres­sor, or the dis­tant mik­ing is the cause. Prob­a­bly a lit­tle of both. Since Berlin offers view­ers a choice of video def­i­n­i­tion, maybe they could do the same for audio. Com­pressed or not? Your choice.

Video direc­tion: direc­tors of all kinds gen­er­ally adopt an imag­i­nary prosce­nium and keep their cam­era angles con­sis­tently on one side of that prosce­nium. It keeps the audi­ence from get­ting dis­ori­ented and woozy. The excep­tion in orches­tra pro­to­col is the con­duc­tor cam­era, which does indeed jump across the prosce­nium line, and we all get used to it. In the Brit­ten, the video direc­tor tried using the con­duc­tor cam­era for the first harp solo. Whoops! Sud­denly the harpist appears to have gone from the left side of the orches­tra to the right, and the shot shows the harpist look­ing from right to left toward the con­duc­tor. My wife almost had to leave the room for a few tense moments.

Over the entire con­cert, cer­tain play­ers and sec­tions were not cov­ered at all. The cel­los were barely seen. There was no sense of the nat­ural ensem­ble of the first desk string play­ers, although there cer­tainly was of the wood­winds. The direc­tor failed to let us know the com­plete forces on stage for any given piece, so in the Berlioz there’s a whole lot of per­cus­sion bat­tery being deployed, but if you didn’t know what a bass drum sounded like, or a gong or cym­bal, there was no visual cue to under­stand how impor­tant they were in dri­ving a par­tic­u­lar moment. And, not to be overly crit­i­cal, but there didn’t seem to be deep knowl­edge of any of the scores dri­ving the director’s choices. Cov­er­age was a lit­tle more like what one might expect at a sport­ing event than a con­cert where every­one should know what’s going to hap­pen next. The direc­tor did seem to have some­thing of a jones for one back-of-the-section fid­dler, though.

Sir Simon Rat­tle, judg­ing by a lengthy inter­view that fol­lowed the con­cert, seems to be the dri­ving force behind this mag­nif­i­cent ven­ture, and he is to be con­grat­u­lated for his lead­er­ship off the podium. And as for his day job, he is a musician’s con­duc­tor, never show­boat­ing for the sake of the audi­ence, giv­ing the orches­tra the absolute min­i­mum of what they need and some­times even a lit­tle bit less, so that the ensem­ble really needs to lis­ten to each other. This is seri­ous, per­fec­tion­ist, music mak­ing of the high­est order.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s per­son­al­ity was con­sis­tent through­out the con­cert, and I’ll be eager to see and hear more of them in the com­ing months. They are a real ensem­ble, mak­ing a beau­ti­ful sound together, never forc­ing, always going to lush­ness. They present a fas­ci­nat­ing con­trast with the great Amer­i­can orches­tra like Cleve­land or the Met, where clar­ity, trans­parency and dynam­ics are prized. And Berlin is dis­tinct from the British orches­tras (we’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot of Proms) which rely on a lot of enthu­si­asm and indi­vid­ual musi­cian­ship. And French orches­tras? Maybe it’s like what Freud said of women: What do French orches­tras really want? But I digress.

Are we at a new Golden Age of the arts with the arrival of a new media? The Web has shuf­fled the deck for every­thing else, from exchange of knowl­edge to shop­ping. I hope that the Dig­i­tal Con­cert Hall will be remem­bered ten years from now as the bril­liant begin­ning of a great cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the dif­fu­sion all the per­form­ing arts, and not as a shin­ing exam­ple of a Golden Age that never reached fulfillment.