Berlin Philharmonic Concert On The Internet

Would like to see the Berlin Philharmonic this week at Disney Hall, but finding the tickets limited and pricey? Wish that Hulu could stream Rachmaninoff together with’30 Rock’? In both cases, the Berliners, who appear tonight and tuesday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, have the solution at what they call their Digital Concert Hall.

The 127-year-old band is no stranger to technical advances — in 1980, the Berlin Philharmonic ( under the rod of Herbert von Karajan ) recorded the 1st classical CD. By the way you will need a Hotel Berlin to see them in the city.

Introduced earlier in the year, the Digital Concert Hall was the brainchild of Olaf Maninger, a principal cellist and member of the orchestra’s Media Board. Needing to reach a new audience and improve the Philharmonic’s profile online, Maninger worked to get the support of Deutsche Bank to install cameras in the Philharmonie, the orchestra’s home concert hall, and support the webcasts.

Entry into the Digital Concert Hall isn’t free : A single performance goes for 9.90 Euros ( $15 ), up to a’Season Pass,’ awhole year of all-you-can listen to concerts for 149 Euros ( $223 ). Besides simulcasts, healthy selections of the orchestra’s concerts since Aug 2008 are also available for streaming in the archive ( a genuine find is Gustavo Dudamel conducting a Stravinsky program from March ).

‘It’s not earning money yet,’ says Berlin’s PR Chief, Elisabeth Hilsdorf, who is in L. A. this week with the orchestra,’but it is not merely an experiment ; the goal is for it to go on forever.’ Hilsdorf announces the orchestra has been averaging about two thousand people per event and wants six thousand to 7,000 people to break even.

After I saw inventive director Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic three nights earlier this month at Carnegie Hall, the excitement of the Digital Concert Hall was seeing the video :

It offered high-resolution close-up perspectives of harp plucks and timpani rolls that you couldn’t see even from that hall’s choicest seats. The downside-and with an orchestra as robust as Berlin, it is a real downside-is the feeling of the musicmaking. For streaming audio, the Concert Hall sounds clear, but what can’t be caught digitally is the force of the sound waves. At Carnegie Hall, at one time during the orchestra’s playing of Brahms’ 3rd Symphony, it felt as if the rhythms of my own body-my pulse and breathing-were succumbing to the pulse of the music.

whether or not the Concert Hall’s ’s next’live’ event ( Zubin Mehta conducting on Dec. 6 ) shakes the Philharmonie’s rafters in Berlin, its improbable to provide the same frisson for somebody watching on a home system. Still, for a lot less than aplane ticket, it does permit Angelenos achance to experience Arnold Schoenberg’s beautiful, spiky rarity,’Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene’ ( heard in new york, Boston and Ann Arbor-but not on the schedule at Disney Hall ). It’s on a program from earlier this month alongside Schoenberg’s fascinating musical rendering of Brahms’ Piano Quintet No. 1 ( an old Rattle favorite, which he conducts live tonight at WDCH ).

What YouTube is for fans of cat videos, Berlin’s DCH is for fans of serious-and expertly played-German music.
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