Streaming the Arts

Last week I attended Midem, the annual beanfeast for anyone involved in the music business. Every January the Palais des Festival in Cannes plays host to a host of record company execs, publishers, promoters, distributors and probably far too many wannabies, who bravely sally forth to the south of France with the illusion that this year it will all happen for them.

I go to Midem under the auspices of the IMZ - The International Music Centre, based in Vienna. This slightly odd institution looks after the interests of producers and broadcasters of music and dance for television - so its fair to say that the membership might all count as wannabies! Certainly the earnest discussions and meetings on the IMZ stand seem to result in very little actual progress in co-productions and sales, although the daily Avant Premiere screenings are a welcome chance to see what people across the world have been up to in this worryingly niche market.

For the last few years, the question of finding the television arts audience and getting productions to them, at a time when conventional terrestrial broadcasters are reducing their arts coverage, has increasingly obsessed us all. (And don't believe the BBC's protestations about the quality and scope of their arts offerings, its more or less chimera). Its quite clear that there is an audience out there and a good way to reach them is via the internet. But there are quite a lot of problems.

There are still plenty of opera and concert relays to be had, if you like that sort of thing. The problem is that, whilst most countries in Europe still have State broadcasters who are required to broadcast a certain number of relays per year, the material is very often either mundane or ludicrous - this year's prize for crassness has to be awarded to Swiss Television, for their "groundbreaking" "La Boheme", filmed live in and around a Zurich tower block, which made my blood curdle.

So lots of investment is being poured into streaming and downloading arts events on the net and there were several very informative seminars about this at Midem. One particularly good session involved the new bosses of Medici - an American owned, pan European group of content producers and the British DVD company, Opus Arte, which is owned by the Royal Opera House.
The Medici man announced that they were streaming and downloading to hundreds of thousands of customers, but admitted that they were some years away from monetising the project and Opus Arte confessed that they weren't quite at the point of finalising a business plan for their yet to be launched download platform.

It was left to the floor to put some perspective on the proceedings. LSO live have been successful in getting their strong brand to its supporters, largely by CD, distributed conventionally as well as on the net. They, like the very impressive San Francisco Symphony Orchestra media operation largely eschew streaming and downloading, preferring to disseminate information and sales oulets via the net. Only the mighty Berlin Phil actually have a live streaming operation, their Virtual Concert Hall and their representative admitted that although in their first year they had over a million clicks on the site, this only translated to twenty thousand actual subscribers - a two percent success rate that seems to be mirrored wherever one looks in the magic world of classical streaming and downloads. Without the sponsorship of Deutche bank they would not be able to service even those twenty thousand people.

In addition, there are crucial elements which are the proverbial elephant in the room: Performers and Union agreements, copyright and publishing problems and - not mentioned very often, the fact that the copper wires that carry so much of the Internet, certainly in Europe are rather more suited to homemade clips on You Tube than high definition state of the art films. The average MP3 download carries a mere thirty percent or so of the actual musical information on a track - what on earth is the point of making beautiful high definition music films when they will end up looking as though they were shot with a handycam? (Always assuming you can download them cleanly in the first place)

Of course I'm being simplistic, the net will work for high quality television eventually, someone will work out how to pay for the content to be produced and get that content to the market in sufficient numbers - and that someone will make a lot of money and a lot of arts and music lovers very happy. Just don't junk your DVD player or your Sky Arts subscription quite yet!

Elizabeth Soderstrom

Forty years ago, a boy soprano who had achieved some success was summoned by Pierre Boulez to play the not inconsiderable part of Yniold in Debussy's magical opera "Pelleas et Melisande". This was to be a seminal production at the Royal Opera House - Boulez had not long previously pronounced that all opera houses should be blown up, so goodness only knows how Sir David Webster, the outgoing boss at Floral Street managed to persuade him to enter the enemy encampment.

To be sure, Monsieur Boulez attached tough conditions to the engagement - he demanded a full week of orchestral rehearsals during the ROH orchestra's summer break - ( The orchestra were a pretty uncompromising lot at the time and guarded their time away from the house.) M Boulez also insisted that the part of Yniold - son of Golaud, Melisande's dysfunctional husband, must be played by a boy, which was never done, because the part was considered too difficult, musically and emotionally.

The great bass-baritone, Owen Brannigan suggested that the boy who had played Sam the sweep with him in "Let make an Opera" and Sem - or was it Ham - or Japhet in "Noyes Fludde" might fit the bill. The boy became part of what is still considered one of the ultimate casts and productions of "Pelleas". This lucky child was coached by Norman Feasey - the legendery ROH repetiteuir and also by a young, shy pianist - Roger Vignoles. (The boy's parents thought that Roger was the nicest person they had met in the classical music world because he took personal charge of them on the opening night).

The boy worked diligently, enough to secure the approval of his stage father Golaud - Donald Macintyre would unfailingly apologise to him every night after he threw him down onto an unforgiving, steeply raked stage. But the boy's favourite times were spent in Melisande's dressing room, where the impossibly beautiful Elizabeth Sodestrom would encourage, amuse and mother him.

Bronchitis meant that the boy had to miss two performances and the recording of the opera, produced by the legendary Paul Myers for CBS. But he was encouraged to visit Abbey Road studios, with his parents, on the final Sunday of the recording sessions. Reeling from bumping into Paul McCartney outside studio 2, he was spotted by M Boulez, who promptly stuck him in front of a microphone. The orchestra were asked to do an extra session, (CBS must have been furious) and the recording was made. Yniold has no scenes with Melisande and Ms Soderstrom was on her way back to her hotel. But she stayed for the evening, sending little parcels of peeled oranges into studio 1 for the boy, because he was still suffering, not only from bronchitis, but a suddenly accelerated puberty. The boy only saw her once more, at the press launch of the record, but he never forgot her, and never will.

Elizabeth Soderstrom was one of the truly great singers of the last century. She had a perfect voice, was beautiful and could really act - at a time when operatic sopranos generally contented themselves with standing and delivering, always centre stage. She was witty, charming, sexy and, above all, radiant with happiness. Maybe she was too nice - I only heard about her death on the 20th November from a friend, the obituaries have been too slow to appear. As they do, it will be a timely reminder that true artistry does not revolve around marketing teams, outlandish press stories and spurious record contracts.

The boy, by the way, was me. I am sad that Elizabeth has gone, but very happy with the brief memories. Sometimes one gets very lucky.

Gilbert and Sullivan series

No excuses for the huge gap in my blogs, but a possible reason: I have been very busy with running the first Holt Summer Festival and producing and directing a five part series about Gilbert and Sullivan for Sky Arts. Of course this is a poor apology, but it will have to do.

The first Holt Festival was a resounding success, wonderful artists, beautiful weather - and we broke even! I am now planning next years festival, anyone within striking distance of North Norfolk, or interested in taking a holiday here in the first week of August 2120 should keep their eyes on the festival website: www.holtfestival.org More information will follow in due course.

As for Gilbert and Sullivan - well, I know a lot more about them than I did a year ago and its all pretty fascinating stuff. The enlightened folk at Sky Arts were keen to find an answer to the question why - why are G&S as popular now as they ever were? Simon Butteriss, G&S patterman extraordinaire and my co-conspirator in many theatre and television projects over the years, has written and presented a fascinating account. We are currently editing some six months of interviews and performance excerpts, which will be broadcast around the middle of next year. In the meantime, we are going to be exploring new initiatives to ensure that Capriol Films continues to make worthwhile music and arts films and - very importantly - gets them out to an increasingly important market.

We need people to buy our films on order that we make more of them. I intend to be a lot more organised about communicating our ambitions to all you arts starved bloggers - I promise! But you can help this process by buying our wares, details are on the homepage. As retail stores become less and less geared to selling anything other than major films and television series, we must embrace the power of the internet. The much vaunted down loadable future is still some way off - copper wires do not make for easy access, but DVD's of our material are still a very viable delivery source. We need to make our very high quality DVDs more universally available, even allowing for the present postal problems - and we will. More news soon.

Alfred Brendel

As I type this, the great Alfred Brendel is playing Mozart on BBC2 - unusual eh? Not unusual that Brendel should play Mozart, of course - although sadly not in public anymore, since his farewell concert at the Musikverein in Vienna on the 18th December last. No, unusual, because BBC2 doesn't seem to pay much heed to cultural matters in general, yet alone broadcasting fairly esoteric stuff that dates back eight years or so. Is there a logic to this scheduling? In the rapidly fragmenting broadcast landscape, does it matter?

Yet another spin off from the DCD Media "empire" has just gone - well, sort of live, www.classicaltv.com promises much, but will presumably deliver little of contemporary relevance. This will be because, of course, there are so few music films being made, other than the statutory Proms broadcasts from the Beeb and a couple of "landmark" events a year from C4. Sky Arts does, of course perform miracles, but still with an almost exclusive reliance on back catalogue.

This mustn't turn in to yet another sad middle aged arts film maker's rant. (Nor indeed, be as badly constructed as the last sentence). The nub of it is simply this: in times gone by, artists of Brendel's stature would be sure of having their work recorded in sound and pictures, not least so that future generations could learn and be inspired. This still happens to a degree, but given that high class hi def video is so much easier and cheaper to produce now than when Brendel was at the height of his fame, should there not be more stuff being recorded and filmed?

I'm not nuts about simple performance relays -as anyone who has investigated my paltry oeuvre can attest - but I sure as hell am keen that the new Brendels don't get ignored in the scramble to maintain viewer ratings and set up Internet channels with the same old artists and repertoire. To be continued - I have to stop now 'cos this is the first blog I have attempted as a non smoker, (4 days only) and I'm starting to twitch!

New Year resolutions

Of course, my resolution is to blog more frequently, if such a verb exists. 2008 has flown by in a flurry of effort to sell the films we have made and finance the ones we want to make. The result of these endeavours is that DVD's "Falstaff" and "Peter Warlock - Some Little Joy" are now available internationally, as well as from www.signumrecords.com - but if you are interested enough to read these musings you will, hopefully have already purchased these rather classy discs! The next Signum release will the film of "Boheme" that I made, based on my Music Theatre London production. This should be available in March - updates will appear on this site soon. Future production news is under wraps at the moment, but all will be revealed shortly.

"She Stoops to Conquer" will soon be available as part of a complete educational package - if you are an English literature or drama teacher, you will be getting a flyer in the post any day now. If you want to buy the DVD I'm afraid you will have to wait for a while, although if anyone from the USA or Canada is reading this, you can buy the film and documentary ("A Gooseberry Fool") in a boxed set from www.acornmedia.com from the 10th February. This is always asuming anyone is still checking into the blog, given my laziness over the last few months.

But be warbed, all will change in 2009, cyberspace will resonate with my bon mots and hopelessly subjective opinions!

She Stoops to Conquer

At last we got it on air! Actually "at last" is a misnomer, Sky Arts transmitted the film and documentary ("A Gooseberry Fool - Oliver Goldsmith Stoops to Conquer) a matter of weeks after we delivered the master tapes. As promised, there is something on the website about the project, but there will be more as we explore ways of getting the films out to as many people as possible.

Both films received a great deal of press coverage, almost all of it very favourable, although one broadsheet was sniffy about the direction and acting in the main film, which rather begs the question - why bother making it pick of the day?

Congratulations to cast and crew for making this film so watchable and thanks to Sky Arts for helping to make it happen. There are more epics in the pipeline, but for now I must try and sell this one and - yes - do things like update the website!

She Stoops to Conquer

My initial burst of enthusiastic blogging dissipated when Capriol Films went into production on our latest epic - "She Stoops to Conquer". Somehow, the time just passed and now I must return to cyberspace in the hope that someone out there is still checking the Capriol website - my apologies to any keen souls who have been.

Making a high definition film of a one hundred and forty minute play in sixteen shooting days was a tall order, but we managed it and I am very pleased with the result. Cast and crew were magnificent, the location, the lovely Wiveton Hall in North Norfolk, was perfect and the final post production at BSkyB went more or less according to plan - annoying equipment failures were mitigated by the keenness of the Sky editors and engineers.

Very soon we will be putting a "She Stoops" page on the main Capriol website, with stills, chat etc and Sky Arts, our co-producers will be doing something similar on their website - details to follow. Simon Butteriss's accompanying documentary "A Gooseberry Fool - Oliver Goldsmith Stoops to Conquer" will be broadcast on Sky Arts and Sky Arts HD on Saturday 26th January at 8.00pm, followed on Sunday 27th January, also at 8.00pm on the same channels, by the main film of "She Stoops". Those who cannot access Sky will have to wait until the DVD release, which will happen in the middle of the year, just as soon as we have raised some more money.

Money has been, predictably I suppose, an issue in this production, since the local screen agency, Screen East, found themselves ultimately unable to invest in the film. This has left a huge gap in Capriol's finances, so foreign TV sales, educational projects and DVD sales will be extremely important. If anyone reading this thinks they will be interested in purchasing the DVD containing the complete film and documentary, please add a comment - we'd really like to know! Do keep checking the website for the "She Stoops" page - I hope to have it up and running within a week or so.