According to my records, the idea of streaming “live” regular performances (as opposed to video recordings of past performances) first began to take root at the beginning of this past June, when Old First Concerts (O1C) planned a series of Friday evening solo recitals, which would be streamed from a venue conducive to the soloist. There were a generous share of “speed bumps” that O1C encountered. Nevertheless, about a month later the concert series was permitted to return to Old First Presbyterian Church; and live streaming had become a technically reliable practice for its production team. Not long thereafter, the Center for New Music also began to present performances live-streamed from their venue, along with an impressive variety of other venues offering an equally impressive variety of performance genres.
As a result, in the midst of a quarter-year of cultivating technical expertise in presenting “live” performances through cyberspace, it was more than a little disappointing that the technical standards of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) were back in the Dark Ages. It was as if all of the expertise that had accumulated, particularly at O1C, had been deliberately ignored or, worse, that SFCM was oblivious to how much technical production knowledge had accumulated since June. Consequently, last night’s solo recital by cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau was haunted by no end of frustrated ghosts, particularly where audio content was concerned.
Most likely, this was the result of a production crew making the mistaken assumption that one could simply point a camera and rely on the microphone attached to that camera to take care of the audio. It took O1C about a month to get over this difficulty and prepare the placement of multiple microphones consistent with not only the instruments being performed but also capturing any spoken remarks to the audience provided by the performers. Last night Fonteneau had many informative observations he wished to account to this audience, and almost all of them were inaudible.
Things fared somewhat better where the cello was concerned; but, even in this case, audio capture was, at best, weak. Most problematic was probably the performance of the third of Mario Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms” pieces, which involved interplay between the cellist and a pair of loudspeakers playing synthesized electronic sounds. Having heard other Davidovsky compositions in this series, I know that he could be both subtle and humorous in such interplay; but, since audio capture was so inadequate, it was hard to tell how much of the electronic contribution was audible.
Fonteneau seemed more comfortable with short (and, for the most part, playful) compositions by Tania León and Gregor Piatigorsky. Both of these composers had rich personal backgrounds, and their music reflected those backgrounds through any number of engaging techniques. Most disappointing, however, was the opening performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1008 (second) suite for solo cello in D minor. The dance qualities of all but the opening movement seemed to elude Fonteneau, and even the Prélude felt out of sorts. Most likely Fonteneau was no more comfortable trying to work in his physical setting than his audience was in trying to listen.
Will SFCM get its technical act together in time for its next offering this coming Thursday? Enquiring minds want to know! The expertise is definitely out there; so I would propose that a bit of productive knowledge-sharing is in order.
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