A digital wake-up call
BY ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, THE GAZETTE January 17, 2009
...Continued
Does the camera discriminate? Perhaps. Ask me what I thought in general about the webcast and I would say that Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 was compelling and Strauss's Symphonia Domestica was a bore. Mehta's approach to the latter score, a portrait of a normal day in the life of the composer, has always been a tad, well, suburban.
But I wonder whether the back-and-forth camera rhetoric between soloist and conductor inevitably makes a concerto seem more interesting in a format that is fundamentally visual. The dynamic in Place des Arts is the opposite. In an MSO program the concerto
(more often than not, a warhorse) is a warmup act for the big symphony or tone poem after intermission. It is
surely no coincidence that PBS symphony broadcasts over the years have treated soloists as stars and conductors as butlers.
All the same, the BPO Digital Concert Hall has its visual delights. It was possible to confirm that this orchestra, like many formerly venerable institutions, is actually quite young. (The New York Philharmonic, to judge by the New Year's Eve concert with Susan Graham, is much longer in the tooth.) At one point, the camera rendered the sheet music on one stand in Berlin clear enough to read. You don't get that from the back of the corbeille.
One reservation worth voicing came from Zubin Mehta (who, both as a conductor and raconteur, has a remarkable knack for getting to the point). The Digital Concert Hall, he said during a live intermission interview, is great for the Berlin Philharmonic, which never leaves a seat unsold. But what about the orchestras that are struggling?
At the end of that Sunday, I had seen and heard two live performances. I believe I can say honestly that I found the second concert, the non-virtual one, more fulfilling and involving. But the Digital Concert Hall, with its advantages of convenience and price, is not to be dismissed. For now I shall simply adopt a suitable accent and say: I'll be back.
The next Digital Concert Hall live webcast is today at 2. Bernard Haitink conducts Mahler's Symphony No. 7. Go to http://dch.berliner-philharmoniker.de.
The 2009 edition of the Montreal International Musical Competition, which runs from May 18 to June 2 and is dedicated to voice, has received 200 applications from 35 countries. We should not be surprised to see 19 from Quebec, 40 from the rest of Canada and 21 from the United States.
Take note however, of the contingent from halfway across the world: There are 39 from South Korea. This compares with 11 from France, two each from Italy and Spain and one from Germany.
Another interesting blip: seven from Armenia. Heading further east we find only seven from China and two from Japan. The Korean surge is astonishing.
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