So, we’re stuck in the 19th century. You know it and I know it. Classical musicians are one of only two subspecies of Homo Sapien Sapien who still wear tailcoats. Innovations such as video screens, subtitles, mood lighting, etc., find it hard to be accepted in the concert hall. So we need new ways of taking advantage of the technology now available to us.
We are trying something new here at the Edmonton Symphony. This was the bright idea of our PR director, Melayne. She found someone who if both a writer for the Edmonton Journal AND a subscriber to the ESO. Shocking, but true. So this person, Elizbeth Withey, decided to try to see if she could watch an Oilers game AND attend the orchestra at the same time. For her experiment she picked our performance of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. What makes this extra special is that she blogged LIVE FROM THE HALL!!!! You can read her blog about the performance here. It starts about a quarter of the way down the page with the entry heading: Reminder, Live Symphony Blog Tonight. You read up from there.
As you can see from her blog I think she totally lost track of the Oilers game. Watching Mr. Chaplin and hearing the ESO proved to be too engaging of an experience. Not surprised, the Oilers suck this year, and Chaplin was a real genius! We plan on continuing this experiment in January with live blogging of some of our Masters Concerts. Wouldn’t it be great if we could live stream the performances as well? Maybe in a perfect world…….