PBO’s Disappointing Livestream from Norfolk

Last night the Yale Summer School of Music—Norfolk Chamber Music Festival presented its penultimate program. This involved a visit by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) led by its Assistant Conductor, David Belkovski. The program was live-streamed, and PBO sent out notification by electronic mail about six hours in advance. The offerings did not, strictly speaking, count as chamber music. However, both the Festival and the streaming crew were sufficiently disorganized than genre was the least of the evening’s problems.

David Belkovski conducting countertenor Tim Mead and PBO instrumentalists (screen shot from the video being discussed)

The good news is that Belkovski prepared a well-structured symmetrical program. Appropriately enough, he began with an overture, taken from George Frideric Handel’s HWV 31 Orlando. Countertenor Tim Mead then sang selections from two other Handel operas, Giulio Cesare (HWV 17) and Admeto (HWV 22). The ensemble then performed the HWV 322 concerto grosso in A minor, the fourth (HWV 322) of the Opus 6 collection. The first half of the program then concluded with Mead singing “The Forms,” Errollyn Wallen’s contribution to a two-composition sequence entitled Ancestor.

This overall plan was then traced backward during the second half of the program. Mead began with the second half of Ancestor, Tarik O’Regan’s “The Golden Measure.” This was followed by HWV 325 in B-flat major, the seventh concerto grosso in Opus 6. Mead then returned to sing “Father of Heaven” from the HWV 63 oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, and the program concluded with another aria from HWV 17.

While the music for all of these selections was satisfying, the absence of any useful supplemental information was more than disappointing. Since program book for the Festival was available through the same Web site that provided the livestream, I have to assume that background information was pretty much entirely lacking. This was a substantial setback for Ancestor, which also suffered from a lack of text subtitles during the performance. My guess is that those in the audience had a similar experience to those viewing the livestream, leaving the performance of Ancestor (as Anna Russell put it) “as befogged as before.”

The Handel performances fared somewhat better. Nevertheless, diction was not Mead’s primary virtue; and, again, subtitles (in any language) were out of the question. While I would not write off the entire affair as a waste of time, I certainly came away with a fair amount of annoyance where technical support was concerned. Readers know that, during the early months of the pandemic, I tried to be generous with the “learning curves” required for live-streamed productions. However, as we can now say literally, “That was years ago.” Apparently, the Yale School of Music did not have the budget for technical expertise, which is far more abundant these days than it was before COVID.