3/19/2020 Coronavirus Concerts: The Music World Contends with the Pandemic | The New Yorker

Cultural Comment

Coronavirus Concerts: The Music

World Contends with the Pandemic

By Alex Ross
March 14, 2020

Audience-free concerts streamed on the Internet, like the one performed by the Berlin Philharmonic,
cannot provide the bond that forms under the spell of live music. Photograph from Alamy

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O
n March 12th, the Berlin Philharmonic gave one of the eeriest concerts in its history—a
history that has not lacked for eerie moments. In response to the coronavirus pandemic,
Berlin, along with other major cities, had called a halt to all large gatherings. The Philharmonic went
ahead with its scheduled program all the same, performing in a vacant hall and streaming the event
over the Internet. The facilities were already in place: Berlin’s Digital Concert Hall, with its crisp
sound and elegant camera work, has long held pride of place in the world of classical music online.
Ordinarily, you have to pay a hefty fee for the service, but the Philharmonic offered this concert
without charge, and for the next month its entire archive will be free to all.

The program consisted of two turbulent masterpieces from the fraught heart of the twentieth century.
First was Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia,” composed in 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr.; one of its movements, “O King,” pays tribute to the fallen leader. Then came Béla
Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which had its première in Boston, in December, 1944, amid the
nal inferno of the Second World War. The works are profoundly different in style—Berio belonged
to the postwar avant-garde generation, whereas Bartók was a classic modernist with a air for folkish
melody—yet they share an aesthetic of multiplicity, of distinct masses colliding.

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Tense music is not always a good match for a tense time, as some listeners in New York discovered
after the 9/11 attacks. The polystylistic kaleidoscope of the third movement of “Sinfonia,” in which
the scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony is overlaid with fragments of other familiar scores and
scraps of verbal chatter, was anything but calming, particularly when its spoken-word component dips
into the icy existentialism of Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: “It’s getting late. Where now?
When now? . . . Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.” Yet the cool poise of the Berlin
performance, with the virtuosic singers of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart expertly delivering the
text, gave a sense of anarchy controlled, or at least comprehended. The Bartók bene tted from the
customary re nement of the orchestra’s soloists and from unerring structural cohesion. If a feeling of
collective elation was missing in the nale, the omission was understandable under the circumstances.

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The conductor was Simon Rattle, who completed his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director last
season. He is an eager, eloquent communicator, and it was fortunate that he happened to be on hand
for this singular occasion. In pre-taped introductions for each piece, Rattle refused to peddle bromides
about music’s power to comfort and uplift, instead reminding viewers of the historical darkness from
which these works arose. The Bartók, he said, is the statement of a “dying refugee,” of a “person who
was displaced.” It asks, “How do you remain yourself in another place? How do you take what is
deeply important to yourself in a place where you have basically no contact with the outside world?”
Rattle seemed to be alluding not only to the self-quarantine culture of the coronavirus crisis but also
to the desperate precariousness of refugee lives around the world. And he seemed to be gesturing,
even more broadly, toward the isolation into which rampant digital technologies have beguiled us.

The orchestra was, of course, in isolation itself, and the absence of an audience made the experience
exceedingly strange. Rattle walked onstage not to a round of applause but to a shuffling of feet and a
tapping of bows—the usual signals of appreciation from an orchestra. As I sat and watched at my
home laptop, I became sufficiently immersed in the music that I forgot about the peculiar context,
and it was a shock when stony silence intruded at the end. After the Berio, the players awkwardly
applauded for a moment and rose in acknowledgment of the ghost public in the ether. After the
Bartók, conductor and orchestra simply stood and looked out at the empty hall. Rattle then turned to
the musicians and said, “Eine Riesenfreude [a great joy]. Bless you, thank you so much.”

Other ensembles have been giving audience-free concerts in recent days—I’ve assembled a list of
events on my blog—and a sense of weirdness is pervasive. Later on Thursday, the Philadelphia
Orchestra, under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, presented the Fifth and Sixth symphonies of Beethoven
alongside “Jeder Baum spricht,” a new piece by Iman Habibi. The nale of the Fifth delays its closing
cadence to a famously absurd degree, revving up the audience’s desire to answer with loud applause.
Again, the leaden silence that followed the performance was unnerving. Nézet-Séguin and his players
looked a little ashen as they stared out to the cameras. Music is at heart a social medium, and it
desperately needs contact.

The ad-hoc concerts are a welcome stopgap, helping musicians to keep working and listeners to stay
engaged. Yet they shouldn’t be seen as any sort of wave of the future. We are already too sedentary and
technology-addicted in our relationship with the arts. The monopolies that rule the digital realm

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possess unheard-of power, and non-celebrity artists increasingly struggle in a marketplace where
audiences no longer expect to pay for recorded music. Furthermore, streaming ravages the
environment, requiring vast quantities of electricity as music les are stored and transmitted. A 2019
study by researchers in Glasgow and Oslo found that the shift to digital music has led to a signi cant
increase in carbon emissions.

Perilous times for working musicians lie ahead. “Force majeure” clauses in artist contracts—releasing
companies from liability in the event of disruptions—mean that many opera singers and freelance
instrumentalists, not to mention actors, dancers, and backstage technicians, will go unpaid for the
duration of the pandemic. The tenor Zach Finkelstein has written about the force-majeure issue on
his blog, predicting that “many household classical music names will likely be insolvent or in dire
nancial straits by this coming summer.” It’s heartening to see an announcement such as the one I
received from Opera Omaha, saying that, in spite of the cancellation of a forthcoming festival, “it will
ful ll its contractual commitments to its artists and crew.” Finkelstein has made a list of several dozen
organizations that are acting similarly. So far, the bigger companies are missing from it.

Smaller-budget ensembles are also endangered by the coronavirus stoppage, and some may not
survive. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a top-rank freelance group in Europe, has issued a
statement communicating its members’ fear for the future. Pointedly, it congratulates fellow-groups
on using technology to carry on with their work but observes that “we have no empty house to stream
from.” Many organizations—those that have no multimillion-dollar endowments or lists of élite
donors to fall back on—have begun pleading for donations. The new-music group Equal Sound has
started a Corona Relief Fund.

After 9/11, the performing arts in New York never quite returned to normal. Many people who had
routinely travelled to the Met or to the Philharmonic from the suburbs failed to resume their old
habits; the seduction of staying home proved stronger, especially as digital offerings proliferated. In
coming months, the same challenge will arise. Perhaps the exercise of watching events remotely will
heighten our commitment to the artists who matter most to us. The most instructive thing about the
Berlin concert was how it dramatized what technology cannot supply: the temporary bond of
purposeful community that forms under the spell of live music. The nal silence was a vacuum crying
to be lled.

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A Guide to the Coronavirus

How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.

What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.

How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?

Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.

The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.

We are all irrational panic shoppers.

The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.

How pandemics change history.

Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise”
and “Listen to This.” He will publish his third book, “Wagnerism,” in September.

More: Coronavirus Classical Music Streaming Live Music

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