New York Phil goes Facebook live
mainThe new regime at the NY Philharmonic is putting the incoming music director Jaap van Zweden into the social media spotlight.
Van Zweden will conduct two concerts on February 14 and 15 – a New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s Dark Waves together with a semi-staged with Act I of Wagner’s Die Walküre, with Heidi Melton and Simon O’Neill.
The second concert will be broadcast lives and free on Facebook. Bookmark here.
Smart move.
If Wagner were to quote Norma Desmond: “I *am* big, it’s the *pictures* that got small!”
How did we get from Bayreuth to Facebook?
In other words, how did we get from a specially designed opera house to a mobile phone screen?
What is even the point of listening to Die Walkure on a mobile phone?
Next: The Ring in 140 characters.
If I’m not mistaken, you can also watch on your computer (or your wireless-enabled smart tv), get a nice big picture and, if you also have decent speakers connected, good sound, too.
There are lots of things wrong with the classical music field but the greater access to live video concerts is not one of them. It’s the future.
Nothing can rival live symphony concerts… accessibility through artificial media are a good alternative like a photograph of the Real Thing and it may raise interest in visiting the concert halls if this accessibility is used intelligently in marketing. The availability of pictures of paintings in museums has, as far as I know, greatly contributed to visiting the museums for real. And Venice, Paris and Rome would not have been overrun by visiting tourists if they had not known about the cities through pictures.
All that great technology doesn’t make the conducting any better…
Doesn’t make it any worse, either.
Very exciting, but not new for NYP, which broadcast Japans first concert this season (opening night) on FB Live: https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Alec-Baldwin-to-Host-Facebook-Live-Broadcast-of-New-York-Philharmonics-Opening-Gala-20170918.
This is hardly the first time the New York Philharmonic has done a facebook live show.
Mahler 5, Brahms 3 and Dvorak New World shows come immediately to mind!
(You definitely need a new headline writer! Too many misleading headlines on this blog.)
The NY Phil has previously live-streamed concerts on Facebook. One such performance took place on 14 January 2017. Alan Gilbert conducted. Terrance McKnight was the host.
The program consisted of the Emperor Concerto (Beethoven) and Symphony No. 3 (Brahms).
This performance can be viewed at https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Terrance%20McKnight%20philharmonic.
Jasper
Great news!
Are you really going to get more people to attend your concerts if you post them live on facebook? Why spend $50 and fight terrible traffic when you can see it in HD for free (if you have a good sound system, all the better). Dumb move. This orchestra needs to pay its principal players over $300,000/year (preposterous), you need people to show up!
Now that they fired Phil Myers, I don’t have a ton of interest in hearing them these days anyway.