GOOGLE GETS THEM TO CARNEGIE HALL

On April 15th Google put on quite a show. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra, a project which has grown from virtual seed to musical movement over the last six months, performed for almost three hours in Carnegie Hall under bright digital projections and the elegant baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, a top musical director. I was lucky to have grabbed one of the last seats in the house, third balcony, behind a pole.

YTSO is the brainchild of the London Philharmonic, MTT (Mr Thomas’s preferred nickname), Tan Dun, a composer, and Lang Lang, a pianist, among others (Yo-Yo Ma also appeared in an onstage video). The 96 extremely talented young musicians were plucked from around 3,000 audition videos uploaded on YouTube by applicants around the world. Google, which owns YouTube, paid for and documented the entire event, and the concert, audition videos and interviews are all worth watching. One of the bassists put it well: “they could have made a basketball team, but they chose to make an orchestra”. Thanks, Google.

As the lights dimmed, we watched a vortex of YouTube audition videos stream across the walls and ceilings of the great classical hall. The evening began in the shape of Disney’s "Fantasia", with each orchestral section performing its own short piece under focussed lights.

The concert was a classical cabaret with ceaseless visual stimulation and 500 years of compositions. Each piece stuck to the unspoken rules of YouTube success: good content, delivered with brevity. The YTSO performed over 16 works, most of them under ten minutes long. Lou Harrison’s “music from canticle No. 3” showcased guitar, ocarina and percussion, the woodwinds performed a serenade by Dvorak, and a late 16th-century fugue by Gabrieli floated in rich, gorgeous tones from the wings of the first balcony, where the full brass section had been hiding. Videos appeared between each selection and sometimes during; we're addicted to screens, even when we pay to see live music.

Soloist bravado was a theme. Three children under the age of ten put their 30 tiny fingers to work performing a Rachmaninov waltz for six hands on the piano. They were followed by Yuja Wang, a slightly more mature pianist, who delivered a jaw-dropping Prokofiev's "Scherzo" and "Flight of the Bumblebee". Mason Bates dazzled us into the notion that an orchestra can be cool, as deep electronica beats and a pulsing light show accompanied his piece “Warehouse Medicine”. As for the orchestra, though Wagner’s "Ride of the Valkeries" came off a bit casually, "Nuages" by Debussy was lovely and delicate, and the "Finale" from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony sparkled.

The headline was Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony #1, “Eroica”, a brief, big-budget cinema piece featuring metal wheels smashed by hammers. Dun’s music did what John Williams's did 30 years ago: although a bit cheesy, it woos people to the concert hall. No Beethoven (though it quoted), but good fun.

I was certain we were witnessing what might save classical music from the cash-starved coma it’s been sliding into. “How do you get people to come to Carnegie Hall?” Fill the stage and the audience with those who care deeply about music, who want to hear it and to play it, and who now have the internet as impresario. In MTT’s words, “upload, upload, upload!”