Help! Did I miss it? Was it on today in the end?
It was indeed. RW simply gainsayed every question put to him, even flatly saying he "didn't acknowledge" points made by listeners. (That may not have been what he meant, but it was unfortunately what he said).
The discussion about "live concerts" flared-up, and RW was insistent that there was "no difference" between "live", and "recorded live". RW was confronted with a soundbite from baroque violinist and ensemble-director Roy Goodman, who insistently but politely said that it wasn't the same thing at all. RW's response (on Goodman's suggestions that things like a string breaking on Vengerov's violin would materially affect how the rest of the performance went) was that "it's not as though we are going to clean these recordings up in the studio afterwards".
I wonder if that's really true? In 2005 I attended a performance of AIDA on the stage of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, in an Awards-Nominations series. The entire cast had arrived that morning from Novosibirsk, Siberia, off an overnight flight. The show was scheduled to go up at 19:00 - but the start was delayed by a hoax bomb alert. In fact it began at 22:30, and finished at 02:00am. The audience had been frisked by the Riot Police ("Stand against that wall with your arms raised") before they could get into the hall. The performers were utterly knackered before the show even began. Is Roger Wright telling us that he'd broadcast 3.5 hours of silence to illustrate what had happened and why the performance was so emotionally charged thereafter? (The production was extremely controversial, set in Chechnya with tanks on stage, and an already-angry audience booed it with full force, somtimes during the music. Half the audience left at the interval.). The incident with the bomb hoax needs to be remembered in connection with the Theatre Siege in Moscow, which had left many dead in its wake - responsibility was claimed by a Chechen Terror Cell. And now we were going to watch... AIDA set in Chechnya...
It always seems to happen to AIDA... by complete chance I was at the Romanian National Opera production of the opera at the RAH that was brought to a halt by a Gay Rights protest (at the time of the show, all homosexual relationships were deemed illegal by the Romanian Govt). The theme of AIDA is about a conflict between what your Government says, and where your heart leads you - and intentionally or otherwise, it was a very poignant moment. Do we have a cast-iron guarantee from RW that every second of the concert is broadcast - include protests which bring it to a halt?
I know a very successful performer who suffers (secretly) from stage fright, to a near-debilitating stage... but has learned strategies for coping with it. A delayed start to a show would leave them crawling up the walls. "Topped-and-tailed" transmissions will not capture the emotions involved in such moments.
