and I have nice comfortable seats, and I certainly could rent a movie a lot cheaper than I could going to the movies, but there’s something about being at a movie that’s a new release. It’s the same as going to a live concert, or a screening of a concert or an opera. It still has that communal experience.” Supporters of live classical music on the big screen point to that communal experience. There are those, however, who question whether these events could eventually affect the art form itself by changing the audience’s expectation of what live events look and sound like. Video cameras reward opera companies who hire thin, attractive singers, who may have voices that are too small in the opera house but are perfectly adequate with microphones. For orchestra theatercasts, opinions on close-ups range widely. At his Sonic Labyrinth blog in January 2011, music professor Jeffrey Johnson complained, “We don’t need so many close-ups of the musicians. We don’t always need to pan during wide shots…. There is nothing boring about watching an orchestra. Choose an angle and let us watch them for a while.” But the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin, commenting in September
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2009 on a Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall transmission, wrote, “This ‘listener’ likes to see the hands of the piano soloist, the face of the conductor, the fingers of the clarinetist.” No one interviewed for this article claimed that a classical performance sounded better in a movie theater than it did live. The more likely risk is that fans used to seeing up-close images of musicians could be frustrated at the greater physical distance between themselves and the orchestra musicians or singers. Some in the classical industry worry that this could hasten the amplification of opera, ruining the art form in the way that many feel microphones destroyed the essence of attending a Broadway musical. Only time will tell what the long-range effects of live theatercasts might be.
Courtesy NCM Fathom
Actress Kate Burton speaks to the camera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Shakespeare-themed LA Phil LIVE concert in 2011, also featuring Orlando Bloom, Anika Noni Rose, Matthew Rhys, and Malcolm McDowell.
don’t have to drive an hour to Walt Disney Concert Hall, with the famous Los Angeles traffic?’ ” Borda says with only six concert transmissions in its first two seasons, it’s too early to say yet, but at “every single performance we turn to the audience and say, ‘Support your local orchestra.’ There’s still nothing like a live performance in the hall. Our sense is that all boats rise with the tide, and if this can actually turn people on to going to a symphony concert, that’s a very good thing.” Metropolitan Opera General Director Peter Gelb has said much the same of the HD broadcasts. “Our success in HD has had a positive effect not only on the Met but on opera generally around the world,” he said in Opera News in July 2010. NCM Fathom vehemently denies that movie-theater broadcasts hurt attendance at live events. “I’ll give you an example that’s completely out of the realm of classical music or opera,” says NCM Fathom’s Dan Diamond. “In 2004, Prince was coming out of a nine-year sabbatical from touring. We were talking with the tour promoters, saying, ‘What can we do in movie theaters that would be unique and different to launch Prince’s tour?’ And the first thing that came up was, ‘The local promoters are all going to be up in arms if we do anything with Prince in the theaters before he gets to those markets.’ ”
All Boats Rise
Another inevitable question about orchestra simulcasts in movie theaters is whether they hurt attendance at live events by local orchestras. As the LA Phil’s Deborah Borda puts it, “Is it cannibalizing our audience? Are people out there saying, ‘I can get a great experience with this, and this means I symphony
SUMMER 2012