This week the classical music world will take a first step in widening its reach globally, made possible by a troika – the integration of technology, music and sponsorship.

To date, the reach of classical music has been limited by concerts halls with a seating capacity averaging 2000-3000 people, by disappearing classical music radio stations in most cities, by a dearth of live concert broadcasts on both radio and TV and by the Internet, which has an abundance of classical music video clips available, but certainly does not foster an audience of classical music enthusiasts. Moreover, the available technology for live broadcasting on the Internet, has worked far better for the Pop world, than for a Beethoven Symphony. And because of it, the full scope and breadth of what a symphonic concert can offer, has remained a rarity on the Internet.

But with the launch this week of The Digital Concert Hall, a virtual concert venue of the Berlin Philharmonic, trail-blazed by sponsor Deutsche Bank, the new virtual concert hall will have an Internet venue with a new state-of-the-art audio technology comprised of a high-definition image, exceptional sound quality that is close to CD quality, and even good camera work that will now transmit concerts with thrilling immediacy. Just imagine the staggering audience numbers that can now have the opportunity to “go” to any number of live classical music concerts and experience the thrill that much smaller audiences around the world have known for hundreds of years…

In my blog of April 18, I wrote that the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which took place in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, gave the classical music world a “facelift,” generating interest in classical music around the world from a generation steeped in social media.

The Digital Concert Hall is moving far beyond that…

Music critic, Timothy Mangan wrote in his post Classical Life by Tim Mangan last week that, “the Berliner’s Digital Concert Hall appears to be a horse of a different color, i.e. something worth a ride.” Indeed.

Think about it. You get to sit at home wherever you are in the world, tune in and virtually “be” at a live concert in Berlin and be part of the “happening” in real time. Mind you, not just any concert, but a concert of one of the world’s greatest orchestras. The Berlin Philharmonic will launch its first full season of live webcasts on August 28 with Simon Rattle conducting. Watch the test link yourself (at http://dch.berliner-philharmoniker.de/#/en/tour/).

The Digital Concert Hall will behave as every other concert hall does – charge for tickets or season subscriptions. The difference is that the ticket price for a single concert is $14. Try that at Carnegie Hall…

But I bet one thing will really change forever. Extra mirrors will need to be placed backstage for musicians who will now have to also look the part — and maybe check out that “long hair”…

(update from the January 7th blog)

Classical music got a “facelift” yesterday, thanks to the forward-thinking creative people who were behind the performance at Carnegie Hall on April 15, of the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra. “Facelift” in the sense that classical music garnered attention and respect from a generation steeped in social media, one that generally relegates classical music to “that history stuff” or the “long haired” variety of music.

I get why that generation thinks that.  If you have ever been to a Symphony Orchestra performance and looked around at the attending public, you might have noticed that there were very few ‘40 somethings’ in the audience.  Other than music students, the general audience was more composed of the over 50s kind, and that’s being generous with age.  It has something to do with the fact that music education in our public schools stopped decades ago, when the support for the arts diminished dramatically.  So it is not surprising that young adults today offer a befuddled look, when asked if they prefer Mozart or Tchaikovsky.

But for now, classical music has been jolted to new popularity by two events – one, an ingenious mash up of musicians that formed an Internet Orchestra, each of whom recorded their own video of their musical part of famed Dan Tan’s new composition in their own home or studio in some 70 countries, and the other, a very real live performance by 95 musicians who were selected out of 3,000 musicians, ages 17-55, to perform in Carnegie Hall, New York City, under the baton of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

How wonderful is that… Just think, as Anthony Tommasini, music critic for the New York Times, put it in his review of the concert on April 16, “YouTube deserves a lot of credit.  After all, they could have sponsored a YouTube International Basketball Team.”

Indeed.

Tommasini also opinionated that this event has altered the audition process — forever.  He must have been speaking about orchestral musicians who traditionally send discs to audition for philharmonics, or even travel to audition live.

But I say that much more has been triggered. The Internet Orchestra as well as the YouTube Symphony has presented the classical music genre with a new frontier, by boldly venturing out of comfortable 2-3000 seat concert halls and onto the wide arenas of the Internet.  Not that there haven’t been concerts and Master Classes on the web to date, but never on this scale.

Maybe the web can do what the schools and concert organizations have failed to do – expose the public-at-large to the wonders of classical music.