San Francisco is Facebook’s first streamed orchestra
mainpress release:
SAN FRANCISCO, 18 April 2016 – The San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by guest conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, will be the first major symphony orchestra to use Facebook’s live video streaming feature “Facebook Live” to webcast a world premiere to audiences around the globe, for free. Commissioned by the SFS, composer Mason Bates’s latest work Auditorium, with Bates performing on electronica, will be streamed from Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on Wednesday 27 April at approximately 8:15 pm local time/PST (Thursday, 28 April at approx. 4:15 am in the UK) on the Symphony’s Facebook page www.facebook.com/sfsymphony. The world premiere webcast will also be archived and available for on-demand streaming following the performance. To experience Auditorium, viewers should be followers of the SFS Facebook page, and will receive an automatic notification when the stream begins.
This is truly wonderful to see. Personally, I find this sort of event thrilling, for back in 1997, with the help of Steinway’s administration in New York, we turned Steinway Hall into a wired haven of internet connections for the live streamed classical piano recital I performed with Skitch Henderson providing opening remarks. Most people still had dial up connections, but there were T1 lines here and there, and schools started using them as well. I had envisioned a world of classical music being brought to viewers’ computer screens in their living rooms, and not quite yet on traveling devices as we now enjoy. Good luck to the San Francisco Symphony, Pablo and Mason. How exciting to witness this on the Facebook platform.
Couch culture for social media zombies.
All San Francisco symphony concert are broadcast in 2 weeks after performance on Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. on local classical music station. Save me trip and money to go to SF.