Lights go down, but not out

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Monday, performing to an empty hall but a huge audience online.

A live performance isn’t only about the actors or musicians on stage. The liveliness comes from having a living, breathing, responsive audience in attendance. Fourth walls notwithstanding, there’s a subtle but dynamic interaction that happens when performing artists and spectators are in the room together. At its best, it’s electrifying.

Presence is everything, as David Malouf puts it in his essay about orchestral music, Being There. “The truth is,” he writes, “we get a heightened apprehension of this most abstract of the arts when we are most physically present, attending with the whole of ourselves, not just with our ears.”

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Before this week, cellist Timo-Veikko Valve had never done such a thing as perform to an empty concert hall. The principal cellist with the Australian Chamber Orchest­ra had always given concerts in venues with actual people in the seats. He had his first exper­ience of playing to a kind of ­musical no man’s land with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Monday, in what may become the new normal for arts organisations as the nation gets to grips with COVID-19.

Forced to close Hamer Hall to the public, the MSO quickly reconfigured­ Monday evening’s concert as a live-streaming, watch-at-home event. There were some early technical glitches but then the concert was under way, with a program of Bloch, Rimsky-Korsakov and Deborah Cheetham’s musical welcome to country, Long Time Living Here.

About 5500 people watched Valve in the rhapsodic cello piece Schelomo, in which the cello evokes the character and wisdom of the Old Testament king Solomon. By Wednesday, more than 48,000 people had viewed the performanc­e on the MSO’s YouTube channel.

Live-streaming concerts and other events is comparatively routine­ and reasonably cheap. Production costs vary depending on requirements, but a live-stream of good quality can be done for about $20,0000-$30,000.

Keith Urban live-streaming from his Nashville warehouse as Nicolas Kidman watches on.

Could it be the saviour of performing arts companies caught out by COVID-19? Theatres, concert halls and other venues have shut their doors, leaving companies with cancelled seasons and unstaged shows. Actors, musicians, singers and dancers find their talents underappreciated at the same time as there’s a captive audience at home reaching into the deepest recesses of Netflix. Live-streaming could be a way of connecting our nation’s performing artists with a socially distant audience.

Sydney-based company Aust­ralian National Theatre Live has made a speciality of filming theatre productions for screening in cinemas or for online viewing. To date it has worked with companies including Griffin and the Sydney Theatre Company, and filmed plays such as The Dapto Chaser, Diving for Pearls and Jonathan Biggins’s turn as PJ Keating, The Gospel According to Paul.

ANT Live was founded by Grant Dodwell and Peter Hiscock with the idea of giving theatre companies an audience beyond those who attend an actual ­performance. They offer their ­expertise to live-stream plays during this period of enforced closure.

Grant Dodwell and Peter Hiscock, founders of Australian National Theatre Live. Picture: Britta Campion.

“We are suggesting that we could live-stream productions for people to log in and view online,” Hiscock says. “We give people an access code when they pay the money. It’s all possible digitally, and really the question is whether the industry will jump at the idea.”

Says Dodwell: “There will be purists out there who say you lose the live experience from not being in the theatre, but the truth is that you can’t even get into the theatre.”

The concept of filmed theatre, opera and ballet has come a long way since the days of TV simulcasts, and audiences worldwide are familiar with the concept.

The Metropolitan Opera in New York has led the modern methods of filmed performing arts with its Met Live in HD series, in which opera performances are beamed into cinemas as they happen. (The screenings in Australia are recordings rather than live transmissions.)

Another is the Berlin Philharmonic, which makes its concert recordings available online for a fee, via its Digital Concert Hall.

The Metropolitan Opera House and the Philharmonie concert­ hall in Berlin are closed because of public health measures, as are many other performing arts venues­ across the world. Both are making their archi­ve of recordings available for free to viewers online during the period of closure.

The Berlin Phil has 600 performances from the past 10 years online, including recent concerts with new chief conductor Kirill Petrenko. On Thursday, the Met will be screening la Traviata with Diana Damrau and Juan Diego Florez, conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin.

Other high-end presenters internation­ally also have opened their archives, including Wigmore Hall, the Vienna State Opera and the Gothenburg Symphony Orch­estra. Hollywood producers are exploring options to release new films via video-on-demand services, because of cinema closures. Web-only festivals have sprung up, such as the Social Distancing Festival, a website listing freely available online content, from premium arts events to ­poetry slams and comedy.

Artists such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Keith Urban have given fans some joy by live-streaming impromptu performances on social media. Soprano Joyce DiDonato and tenor Piotr Beczala were due to appear in the Met’s production of Werther, now suspended, but instead performed 90 minutes of excerpts to a world audience via Facebook from DiDonato’s apartment.

Urban filmed a 30-minute set from his warehouse as wife ­Nicole Kidman danced behind him. “We thought we’ll just set the stream up tonight, mostly because I was sup­posed­ to be playing tonight, and I just thought it would be nice to be able to play anyway, even though we can’t be in front of all you guys,” he told his virtual audience.

Why aren’t more Australian performing arts available in this way? Partly, it’s economics. The high production values of the Met Live in HD series would be prohibitiv­ely expensive for many Australian companies. And grant-giving agencies seem unable to cope with the notion of streaming or filming theatrical performances. ANT Live previously received a Catalyst grant, but Dodwell and Hiscock say the Australia Council will not fund film, and Screen Australia doesn’t regard them as filmmakers. “We pay all the actors, we work in the film industry,” ­Hiscock says. “It’s just that they don’t see us as making films.”

Another issue for some performing arts companies is that artists and crews associated with particular shows may be disbanded because of COVID-19 before they can be filmed — although some are continuing with rehearsals for future productions. Full-time ­ensembles such as orchestras can take advantage of streaming ­opportunities, and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and ACO are exploring that option in the absence of in-house audiences.

“It’s important to maintain the relationship with your audience and people will be wanting to do that in whatever way they can,” says ACO managing director Richard Evans. “At the end of this period, we would like to have a closer relationship with our ­audience than before. That’s the ­challenge we have set ourselves.”

Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the National Theatre stage production of Macbeth, a production that screened in cinemas via NT Live.

The coronavirus pandemic has put substantial, potentially fatal pressure on arts organisations, and industry body Live Performance Australia has called for at least $850m in federal government assistance to shore up the sector. Part of the difficulty is due to uncertainty about the length and severity of bans on public gatherings, now restricted to fewer than 100 people.

The MSO’s managing director Sophi­e Galaise says it is preparing to refund tickets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and, like others, is encouraging ticketholders to consider foregoing refunds. By Monday night, Galaise says, the names of patrons who had donated their tickets back to the orchestra filled 14 pages.

The MSO previously has live-streamed its concerts and was able to act quickly to produce Monday evening’s concert for its YouTube channel. Another live-streamed concert from the Melbourne Town Hall — featuring violin wunderkind Christian Li — will go online on Thursday, and others are in the pipeline.

“I believe we were the only arts organisation to live-stream on Monday night, when everyone went dark around the country,” Galaise says. “We had plans for digital streaming that we were rolling out in coming months, but we decided to go out faster.”

The MSO uses the services of production company Avoca Blue, which has also produced the orch­estra’s filmed concerts for inter­national TV distribution via Unitel. Avoca Media’s Toby ­Parkinson says that for Monday evening’s live-stream, the produc­tion team used eight digital ­cameras in the auditorium (from Australian firm Blackmagic Design), and the sound engineering expertise of radio network ABC Classic, which records dozens of concerts throughout the year.

The producers work with an experienced musician or score-reader, so they can cue the ­cameras for close-ups on Valve, on conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and on musicians in the orchestra during solo passages.

The live-streamed concert had excellent sound, and gave a closer view of the musicians than is possible from a seat in the auditorium. A scrolling thread of amusing comments from viewers at home made up for the absence of foyer chat. It was not quite a substitute for being at Hamer Hall, but between­ us — and no closer than 1.5m please — it was a great ­experience all the same.