If your image of an orchestral concert is distant and impersonal — musicians seated in semicircular rows around a conductor who faces away from the audience — then the Vermont Symphony Orchestra‘s concert on Saturday, October 26, at the Flynn in Burlington will upend expectations.
Titled “Romeo, Juliet, and the Firebird,” the concert features Lili Boulanger’s brief “D’un matin de printemps,” followed by two arrangements of ballet scores: Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite No. 2 and the Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky. As the VSO performs each piece, a live video feed from four strategically placed cameras will play on a screen behind the orchestra, allowing the audience a close-up look at the 65-odd musicians and conductor doing their thing.
“It’s no longer whoever you get to see from your seat,” VSO executive director Elise Brunelle said.
Music director Andrew Crust, now conducting his second season with the VSO, perfected this approach during his three seasons as associate conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. There, he led a series of concerts augmented by live video. Toronto-based musician and composer Alex Clark wrote the video scripts for those concerts, notating the music scores with directions for eight cameras. A script reader directed the operators to, for example, cue Camera A to the oboist at measure 12.
Clark has also written the video scripts for the VSO’s concert, and VSO Chorus member Jennifer Carpenter will read them during the performance to videographers Justin Bunnell and Michael B. Fisher of RetroMotion Creative. The Burlington video production company creates music videos, documentaries and commercials for companies such as Casella Waste Systems and City Market, Onion River Co-op; during the pandemic, it produced several prerecorded videos of chamber groups for the VSO, as well as live ones of the orchestra’s Jukebox Quartet.
“It’s no longer whoever you get to see from your seat.” Elise Brunelle
At the Flynn, one fixed camera will face Crust while another captures a bird’s-eye view of the orchestra. The two videographers will control an onstage camera mounted on a tripod and another on a platform to the side of the concert hall.
“There’s a lot of potential for errors,” RetroMotion owner Bunnell said. A camera could shake, or the musicians could dip or sway unpredictably as they play. “It’s high stakes.”
Some audience members may wonder whether adding a visual element to a primarily auditory event necessarily enhances the experience. But, as Crust pointed out, “We listen with our eyes in a lot of ways. If the camera is on the clarinets, then your ears hear clarinets. The visual guides you.”
Without close-ups, he added, audiences miss “a lot of what goes on during a performance,” including “the physicality, the fine details of the technique, [and] the communication” between musicians and conductor.
The latter is likely to be an eye-opener. “Conducting is a mystery to a lot of people,” Crust said. “People think we’re telling the musicians when to play, but what we’re really doing is telling them how to play.” A conductor’s gestures can influence everything from tempo and dynamics to the style of playing. “Really, any musical element can be shown with the hands,” he said.
The musicians, Crust joked, “are maybe not so thrilled about their pores being one meter tall on a screen. But we play onstage under lights; we’re used to that level of scrutiny.”
On Saturday, Crust, a music education advocate, will preface each of the three works with a talk and slideshow — a few steps beyond a conductor’s usual brief introductory remarks. The orchestra will play excerpts to illustrate his points before performing the full piece.
“Classical music is a vast, deep ocean, and people get intimidated by their lack of knowledge,” the director said. “We all understand the music intuitively at some level, but I think our audience really likes to know more about the pieces they’re going to hear.”
Bunnell, a former saxophonist whose grandparents brought him to the symphony regularly as he grew up in Savannah, Ga., said he’s thrilled to be working with an orchestra the size of the VSO.
“I’m happy that Andrew is thinking in terms of bringing this level of technology to the Flynn,” he said. “If there’s a young kid in the audience, they could be inspired to be part of the arts. They’re so used to screens, they might get the message of, ‘Hey, we’re cool, too!'”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Zooming In | At the Flynn, live video projection brings audiences closer to VSO musicians”
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This article appears in The Tech Issue 2024.
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