Gershwin’s World

22 Jan 2006

As part of the Sydney Festival programme (endorsed by those magnanimous intellectual powers of Smart car fame), Gershwin’s World was presented last night at Symphony in the Domain.

The music might have been great, but I’d forgotten how terrible outdoor sound can be. I’m sure it was worse than previous years… high notes would carry effortlessly across the Domain, low-pitched feedback (yes, it happened several times) similarly rumbled without difficulty, but the midrange would generously be described as muddy. Sigh. Of course, we were sitting off to the edge, so it was probably too far from the sound tower for anyone to care, but still. And the vision mixing team must’ve similarly been falling asleep at the wheel, methinks. The camerawork was generally adept, with one or two exceptions easily attributed to control. In one instance, a shot from side of stage followed Caroline O’Connor off, then remained live, giving an exceptional view of the back of the head of the person speaking. Quality with a capital K. I can just imagine the poor camera guy: “Uhh, is my tally light stuck on?” Nope, the vision mixer op just dropped dead at the desk mid-show. Repeatedly. (They must’ve performed CPR and he came back to life a few times throughout the show). The thing is, it’s not like there was mixed live switching and playback, or even titles to worry about. It was only live vision throughout the show, with the sole exception of intermission/pre-show/post-show playback. Sigh.

Technical grumblings aside, the music was… nice. Oh dear. The sound was honestly poor enough I can’t make further judgement! I enjoyed it because I enjoy Gershwin’s music, not particularly on account of that performance or space. In all, a particularly missable experience: staying home and listening to a CD may have been the better option.

What, still reading? Well, okay. One last word about pyro. The finale was great. The vision guy had died again, so that was plenty boring (he resuscitated about halfway through the pyro display, probably because of the noise, but it didn’t matter by that stage seeing as everyone was looking up), but the fireworks… well. I think the pyro team must’ve fallen asleep, too, because it started at a not-altogether-fluent spot, and continued long after the end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (an excuse for pyro no doubt, seemingly bearing no relation to the rest of the programme. Shrug!). I laughed aloud when the performance finished, because for thirty seconds constantly there was row after row of fireworks launching from the top of a building (no photos, sorry) as though the pyro team had just realised “Oh, crap, the show just finished and we’ve got half an hour of pyro still to fire! Quick, press everything at once!”. The result was an incredibly bright fireworks display that held little artistic value and felt hurried… probably because it was (well, I think it was, anyway. Insert standard opinion-based-blog disclaimer here.)