Sure, some people–and bless them, really–are happy to spend their money on the unknown, but you don’t see me, for one, forgoing glorious mint chocolate chip for some chocolate cherry almond paste surprise without at least being offered a small plastic spoonful first! What can presenters do, then, to provide enough of a plastic spoonful to both intrigue and reassure audiences?
Audio and video content are obvious answers, as are free track downloads, if a recording of a piece exists. The Metropolitan Opera has recently been doing a fantastic job promoting videos. They posted this video of Sondra singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca on their Facebook page almost immediately after the dress rehearsal:
Maybe not the best example, since people generally know what that aria sounds like, but it proves that the organization understands the value of a preview. Would you go see a movie without seeing a trailer on TV, in the theater, or online?
The New York Times, too, understands the value of a video preview. In place of a traditional print preview in the paper, they produced this “Taking on Tosca” video for their website:
The Met also has four short videos of Nixon in China (prominently featured on their homepage), which audiences are probably less familiar with:
Composer Judd Greenstein and his cohorts at the newly minted Ecstatic Music Festival recently took the idea of a preview to a different level, producing a marathon day of artists that would be featured at the festival for the rest of the season. The website copy reads:
The Ecstatic Music Festival kicks off on Monday, January 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) with a FREE 7-hour marathon from 2-9 pm featuring sets by some of the artists appearing later in the festival along with additional performers and headliners Buke and Gass with Victoire. Program highlights include a rare performance of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It with Ne(x)tworks; the U.S. premiere of John Matthias, Adrian Corker and Andrew Prior’s new work for violin, voice, electric guitar, piano and NeuroSampler, what happens; the second-ever New York performance of Corey Dargel’s complete Other People’s Love Songs with NOW Ensemble; and the Chiara String Quartet performing Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3.
Doors open at 1 pm. The marathon is free, and no tickets or reservations are required. A variety of snacks and drinks, including beer and wine, will be available at the concessions stand throughout the day.
I showed up around 6 p.m. (pre-Tosca and consequently seriously overdressed) only to be told that I had to wait to go in because it was too crowded. Apparently, 1100 people had come throughout the day, which is really fantastic for Monday in January, albeit a holiday. The box office was open all day, so if you liked what you heard, you could walk right over there an buy tickets for future concerts.
The other benefit to having a free preview day like this is the press it generated. I’ve written before questioning the value of critical reviews when a classical concert is only going to be performed once (“Oh well, I missed that.”/”Oh good, I missed that!”). The free Ecstatic Music Festival marathon was reviewed by the New York Times and Tweeted and blogged about by various others, essentially creating a more useful preview than say, a straight-up profile of Judd would have.
Last week, the New York Philharmonic announced their season from WNYC’s Greene Space downtown. I had a meeting immediately after uptown, so was unable to attend. Fortunately, they live video-streamed the event. The press conference was essentially an appealingly casual living room chat between Alan Gilbert and Zarin Mehta, with special guests Alec Baldwin and Magnus Lindberg in the house, and David Zinman and Frank Peter Zimmermann via video Skype. Here is the video, which the Philharmonic has now posted on YouTube:
What I wonder, though, is if we’re going to do this in a cool space, complete with a specialty cocktail called “The Gilbert” (awesome) and a live webcast, why was there no performance element? I realize this is an orchestra, but surely one of the soloists from the season could have played something, or a movie-style trailer could have been produced with clips of the soloists playing elsewhere? Alan Gilbert was clearly very excited about upcoming collaborations with the Park Avenue Armory: why not create a video of him getting a tour of the place that they could have cut to? Or combine the two ideas: show an exclusive clip of Philharmonic musicians playing in the Armory, just for the sake of this season release.
It is exciting to hear a music director announce a season, but that could be accomplished by an e mail blast. We need to be shown, not told, what we’re going to be expected to go see days, weeks, and months down the road.
I’ll ask the presenters out there: have you tried to a preview day for your season, with video footage or live performances? Do you find it challenging to collect video footage from soloists, or to secure the rights to cut that footage into a trailer?