A digital wake-up call
BY ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, THE GAZETTE January 17, 2009
Every so often I swear off two-
concert days. But last Sunday I was at it again, taking in the MSO in the afternoon after hearing the Berlin Philharmonic in the morning.
Both events were live. Perpetually sold out at home and abroad, the famous German orchestra has decided to reach out to a still broader audience through an initiative it calls the Digital Concert Hall. Sign up on your computer, buy a ticket with your credit card for 9.90 euros - call it 16 bucks - and you are in.
You can even turn up late, as I did. I make no apologies to Zubin Mehta and Murray Perahia, or to you. Music critics are usually just entering their REM stage at 10 a.m. Happily, the crawl from the bed to the computer did not involve shaving, getting dressed or a polar dash along the de Maisonneuve bicycle path. The question is whether it offered a real alternative to the live experience.
There is no question that the electronic transmission of live events is a burgeoning and recession-proof industry. The Opéra de Montréal fed Madama Butterfly to a big screen on the Esplanade of Place des Arts last June and Montrealers came by the thousands.
The Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD cinema simulcasts are hugely successful and have spawned imitators in the world of ballet and theatre. Two weeks hence the Stratford Shakespeare Festival will present its eye-popping production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in Cineplex movie houses across Canada. There is nothing live about this, but the connection with the Met project is obvious.
Ballet, theatre and opera, however, are substantially visual experiences. The symphony is, or should be, an audio affair. Webcast concerts are typically seen on a small monitor and heard on dirt-cheap computer speakers. These are two reasons for not getting too excited about the phenomenon. Another, surely, is the noisy fan at work in most CPUs.
As an audio experience, watching a concert on your computer is no better, and maybe worse, than watching a concert on TV. Even in the pop world, where the 2006 Live 8 transmission over AOL was supposed to herald great things, the webcast buzz has been relatively subdued.
But as screens widen and consumers take the trouble to integrate their computers with their playback systems, the phenomenon will obviously become more attractive. I could at least appreciate its promise last week while rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
It helped that the concert was live. There was no pause button to let you
investigate the refrigerator. One of the seldom-recognized advantages of live listening over sitting down with a CD or DVD is the obligation to concentrate and subordinate your worldly desires to a more powerful and enduring force.
Berlin Philharmonic music director Simon Rattle, who launched the Digital series on Jan. 6, asserted in a taped interview that people now feel that digital entertainment should be as available as water. Something about that image does not seem right.
But back to the experience. Even bad loudspeakers give you something to hear in a close-field setting (which, incidentally, is why listening to music in a reasonably quiet car is so satisfying). And visuals undoubtedly add something. Good camerawork puts you in the Philharmonie, the famous Berlin concert hall, and makes you part of the audience. Listening to a live radio broadcast leaves you in the living room. ...Continue
