Sound Quality Is Secondary in the Era of Livestreamed Concerts
Forget performance hall acoustics when everything is mediated by a camera lens.
Soprano Aleksandra Kurzak and tenor Roberto Alagna perform live with the Vienna Morphing Quintet from Èze, France, on Aug. 16.
Photographer: James Pouliot/The Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera usually stages more than 200 performances and hosts almost 800,000 visitors every season at its cavernous building in New York. But when the curtain fell on its March 11 production of Così Fan Tutti ahead of the city’s coronavirus lockdown, history recorded it as the company’s last of 2020.
Like most everyone else, the Met began hosting virtual events: On April 25, the At-Home Gala featured 40 opera stars around the world singing into their laptops over Skype; despite poor audio quality, the performance raised $3 million. Fresh from that success, the company began boosting production values and hired audio-visual professionals to record a series called Met Stars Live in Concert.