By Boran Zaza, Director of Communications & Development at Orchestras Canada and content creator for classical musicians.
The Setting
In April 2022, thanks to generous funding from the Canada Council for the Arts through the Supporting Artistic Practice program, I had the unique opportunity of attending a workshop that was the first of its kind in the world: Live Multi-Camera Directing in Classical Music, focused on Orchestras. The workshop was organized by the IMZ Academy and hosted by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in their beautiful Konserthuset (concert hall) in Sweden.
“I was in a convention last year with other classical music directors. I looked at my peers, and realized we all had white hair!”, reflected Peter Maniura, Director of the IMZ Academy, and an award-winning TV producer and director. “We had to do something about it, we had to train a new generation of multi-camera directors who know classical music.” This is how the idea of this workshop came to be!
The Participants
16 participants from around the globe came together in the beautiful city of Gothenburg, Sweden from April 26-28 to attend this workshop. Canada was well-represented: I was there, along with 2 colleagues from the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra! More on that later. Other participants came from the BBC Philharmonic, Latvian Television, the Lithuanian National Television, the Swedish Television as well as music learning institutions that record and/or stream their concerts such as the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague and Bruckner University among others.
Gothenburg and Digital Concerts
Why Gothenburg? The city is significant as it is home to Sweden’s national symphony orchestra, which has been creating digital concerts for over a decade and owns state-of-the-art equipment for audio and video! It all started back when the renowned Gustavo Dudamel was the GSO’s Principal Conductor: when he led his farewell concert in 2012, many of the patrons couldn’t get a ticket as the concert was sold-out. This is how the idea to digitize the orchestra’s concerts came. “Taxpayers support our orchestra. Not all of them live in Gothenburg, and many live in remote places and can’t access our concerts. We had to find a way to make our music accessible to them.” said Sten Cranner, General Manager & Artistic Director of GSO.
The Gear
To provide the best possible coverage and digital concert experience for their patrons attending from outside the concert hall, the GSO uses ten Panasonic AW-UE150 4K PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras, another AK-UB300 4K box camera, two sliders and two Polecam Autopods, which give vertical and lateral movements within shots. Two camera operators control all these cameras remotely, so there are no camera operators physically on stage. This is fantastic for classical music as having a camera operator moving on stage can be disturbing for both the musicians and the audience. The director, score reader, sound engineer and camera operators all work together in the control room, from which the concert is both streamed live and recorded simultaneously, allowing for editing for the final version that lives on the website and mobile app, GSOplay. Those digital concerts are regularly followed by over 150,000 monthly listeners (and those numbers skyrocketed during the pandemic). Check this video to learn more:
Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts, where I share the process of preparing for the workshop, as well as my top learnings and tips for a successful live multi-camera broadcast of a classical concert!
I documented the whole trip on Instagram stories as well! You can check them out here.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
