BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Live streaming is at the forefront of the performing arts sector. During COVID-19, musicians have been forced to cancel physical concerts and instead perform from smaller venues, delivering the music and vision to your chamber lounge room.
Musica Viva’s new Discover series is a prime example. A combination of high-quality recording gear, low ticket prices, and geographical freedom for viewers has allowed for a previously impossible combination: musical intimacy, and the potential for a mass arts-loving audience.
Futuristic as they may appear, pianist Bernadette Harvey believes these technology-fuelled performances can in fact bring us closer to chamber music’s origins. It’s an unusual way to look at such a traditional artform, but it makes perfect sense.
“The people at Musica Viva have had their work cut out in the last few months, reorganising the fundamental performance model from the large and expensive concert hall format to the intimate domestic set-up,” Bernadette explains.
“They’ve actually returned chamber music to its birthplace, and I have to say that this kind of setting is one I enjoy the most.”
Bernadette is slated for her live streamed chamber performance this October 1. To her, “it is a privilege to perform in any setting, in the flesh or through technology”. Musica Viva has embraced this technology, launching the Discover live stream series on the year of the organisation’s 75th anniversary. Since July, performers Karin Schaupp, James Crabb and Julian Smiles have adopted the new medium and performance outlet.
“[Musica Viva has] created a lifeline for Australian musicians who’ve been cast aside by indifferent politicians,” Bernadette believes. But she is also candid when she describes the medium of streaming as a “double-edged sword”. Though she acknowledges the benefits in lower-cost tickets and up-close experiences, she does miss the way the sound swirls around a larger concert hall, reverberating across the space and arriving at the listener.
“The pianist feels the audience listening. Whether this same feeling of connection is there via livestream, I don’t know.”
What makes Bernadette’s live stream special is that she’ll be making a discovery of her own (if you’ll pardon the pun). Like many listeners who are just beginning to navigate through online events, Bernadette is also making her entry into the medium: Discover will be her first performance of this kind.
When we spoke to Karin Schaupp about how to prepare for such a new style of performance, the classical guitarist said she was practising the way she would for any live event. For Bernadette, her own preparation has come from her experience in the recording studio, which she feels has laid the groundwork for her to engage with the technological elements of a live stream.
Indeed, Bernadette has just recently come from the recording studio, having last year released her album Alchemy with Jupiter String Quartet via Marquis Classics. Her recorded performance was so effective that the album has been considered for a Grammy Awards nomination.
From her latest album to her extensive performance career (which has awarded her a Centenary Medal and ABC Young Performer of the Year win, among other achievements), Bernadette tends to embrace a variety of music. The program for her Discover concert is no different, spanning Chopin to Donald Hollier.
She describes this program as “a reflection on what happened to me during the first wave of the pandemic when I went into isolation in the Mid-West region of New South Wales”.
“I cannot explain why but, when I went into isolation in March, I had a deep yearning to reach back through my past and address the problem of Chopin that has niggled at me since I was a teenager.”
The problem in question was music that felt, quite understandably, “difficult and time-consuming”.
“But here I was in isolation, in the Mid-West of NSW, and I would become aware of myself sitting on the couch early mornings with a book about Chopin in my hands, totally engrossed,” she says.
“The more I read about his life – with all its self-imposed isolations, its burden of tuberculosis, its survival of the flu epidemic, its sorrowful detachment from his homeland – the more connection I felt to him during this frighteningly unique moment in our world history.
“I was led respectfully and carefully to rediscover his music, so original and deeply rich in beauty.”
On the Australian side of her program is Donald Hollier’s Second Sonatina. Bernadette’s mother Anne T. Harvey released a book about Hollier called Musick’s Empire. Bernadette performed the sonatinaat the book launch, having met the composer a few weeks earlier.
“He guided me through my practice of [his Second Sonatina], and helped me understand its movement, its flamboyance, its texture and its meaning. For a short series of four movements, it packs a punch, running the gamut of emotions and motions that music can achieve.
“Whenever I play this sonatina, and anything of Hollier’s, I will always be thinking of my beautiful mum – who will be listening, by the way – and my dad. Legends.”
Bernadette will also perform Kevin Puts’ Alternating Currents, of which she gave the Australian premiere as part of a 2005 Musica Viva event.
“Alternating Current is like an old friend, and I never tire of playing it.”
It’s all the more special that she’ll perform within a fresh context – still under the watch of her loved ones.
“I do love performing in intimate, domestic settings such as the one I’ll be playing in on October 1,” Bernadette says.
“The fact that it’s live streamed is a lovely extension as it allows me to connect with distant friends and family.”
You might like to make it an intimate event for your own distant friends and family, too?
Bernadette Harvey will perform as part of the Musica Viva Discover series at 7pm October 1.
Tickets to the live stream start at $5, thanks to support from the Musica Viva Artists Fund.
Images supplied.
