Standards for Grading Symphony Orchestra Concerts of Symphonies, Concertos, and other Large-scale Compositions

Sound

HDVD recordings, including those of symphony orchestras, should provide at least 5.0 surround sound. This rule tends to exclude legacy recordings in stereo that often have weak PQ also. There may be exceptions for extraordinary content or titles such as a documentary where stereo (or even monaural) sound does the job and more elaborate sound would not be possible or particularly enjoyable. At the moment, the only exception to this rule for a recording of a symphony orchestra is the Karajan 1965/66 Movie Documentary about the movies Karajan made with Clouzot.

Sound should be recorded with 96kHz/24 bit technology. At the moment, only a few discs of symphony orchestra performances issued by NHK were recorded this carefully. (AIX has also issued some chamber music recorded with 96kHz/24 bit technology.) We can tell the difference between those sound recording that started with 96kHz/24 bit sampling and all the rest. Many of our recent titles were probably recorded at 48kHz/16 bit or 48kHz/24 bit sampling rates. The rest of our titles probably started with or 44.1kHz/16 bit sampling (the CD standard) or worse. Because the quality of the recorded sound is so important in the recording of classical music, we will give an A+ grade only to a symphony orchestra recording that was made beginning with 96kHz/24 bit sampling.

When the spec is less than 96kHz/24 bit or no spec is given (the norm at present) the reviewer must trust his ear whether the sound is good enough to be covered on this site as a HDVD disc. The objective is to exclude stereo sound or sound poorly recorded that has been spiffed up electronically to be represented as high-fi surround sound. So what should the reviewer hear (not "look") for?

Sound output normally should be via LPCM, dts-HD Master Audio, or Dolby True-HD, i.e., one of the lossless output flavors. Its seems that dts-HD Master Audio is being used most or all of the time now. But there are HDVD titles on the market with lesser output specs.

The next consideration is the placement of microphones, the quality of the initial capture, and the mixing of the inputs, etc. that leads to the final product. Here the reviewer can only look for clues and whatever information is provided and then hear how it sounds.

First consider the accuracy and clarity of the sound of the individual instruments. Do they sound real? Next consider how good the small sections sound (two oboes, three trombones, four French horns). Then how about those larger sections of strings and how does it sound when many sections are playing together in various combinations? When the HDVD video is done right, you will usually see as well as hear the sections playing together. This is a tremendous help in judging how accurate the "sound-stage" is. The goal is to hear the timbre of all the individual instruments at the same time you hear the colors created by the composer with his combinations of forces.

Each composition will give you clues by which to judge the performance and the recording. If the sound if muffled, stifled, or cramped, something is wrong. Good recording sounds clean, free,F and brilliant. If there is a picture of the harp playing, but you don't hear it well, this is a red flag because the distinctive sound of the harp cuts through almost anything. If you see all the strings playing pizzicato, do they sound percussive or do you hear a string of beautiful notes? If the latter, you are listening to a good orchestra and probably a good recording. Can you clearly hear the concertmaster playing solos? Can you hear the notes of the second violins supporting the notes of the first violins? (Well, don't expect that often.)

Your final call as to whether the sound is "high-fidelity" is pretty subjective. Many Blu-ray users  think the sound they are getting is much better than what they remember from DVDs. Does this mean that Blu-ray sound on our fine-arts titles is good? Or is it just an indication how rotten the sound was on most DVDs?

Picture Quality

The starting point for picture quality is "let there be light." To show a symphony orchestra well, you have to have plenty of light. Good lighting is usually present in standard symphony venues. But in outdoor or other unusual situations, the lighting may be bad. If the stage itself is heavily colored, say, with gold and rosewood (like Severance Hall in Cleveland or Davies Hall in San Francisco) the camera crews may already be handicapped. On the other hand, there can be too much light that overwhelms the cameras and makes everything look bleached.

Resolution should be sharp and clear. There should be a  minimum of  edge artifacts (jaggies), pixel blocking, Moiré patterns, or similar issues. Resolution is closely related to proper color balance. Flesh tones should look real. The picture should not be "rosy" with pink or yellow flesh tones or faces that look pasty or plastic. Nor should the picture seem drained of color with musicians or audience members that look like zombies.

Focus should always be perfect. Further, with good light, proper cameras, and wise planning, there should usually be enough depth of focus available to frame every shot with sharp focus throughout the whole picture. We expect field-of-focus tricks at a horror movie, but not in a symphony HDVD where the whole point is to "be there."

There should be a minimum of motion artifacts. It's great if the conductor doesn't use a baton. If he does, there may be some motion smear. Timpani mallets also smear. The cameraman can try to reduce this by avoiding a dark background with the mallets. When the conductor comes on stage, the TV director should try for head-on shot that reduces or eliminates panning motion. Cameramen should also avoid panning across the orchestra in any way that will introduce jerkiness or smear.

Picture Content

Good picture content in an HDVD will be radically different from good picture content for a DVD! Generally, the management and technicians in our industry do not now recognize this fact, and this is the biggest problem we have now in getting good HDVDs of symphony recordings.

The low resolution of DVD forces the TV director for DVD to shoot mostly (or entirely) close-up shots of the conductor and individual musicians or pairs of musicians. This gets boring fast. So the director tries to spice in up with rapid cuts, all manner of unusual angles, and extreme close-ups of musicians and instruments.

But with the higher resolution of HDVD, the TV director has the ability to follow "Huang's Law" for the good HDVD shoot: "Use the flexible power of the the high-def camera to get a pleasant (not hyperactive) mixture of shots of the whole orchestra, groups of sections, large sections, small sections, groups of sections and individuals, and solo players---depending on what forces the composer commits at various places in the score." (Huang's Law is a precept of our confrere William Alexander Huang.)

It follows then that picture content must be planned for HDVD only. (If a DVD is to be published for the same music, the DVD should be shot separately at another performance. Or perhaps a clever director with enough gear could use one set of cameras to shoot simultaneously for HDVD and DVD.) The HDVD video content should have the characteristics discussed in the rest of this section on Picture Content.

The TV director should follow the composer's score as his script. Of course, the TV director has to know where the instruments will be located in the orchestra for the event to be recorded. Then the TV director can plan, bar by bar, how to put the most  information into each frame so as to give the viewer the best impression of seeing the actual event. When more than a few instruments are playing, the emphasis should be on large scale shots of sections and groups of sections or the whole orchestra. With DVD, you can't do this. With HDVD, you can; and the difference makes for a huge increase in the value of the video to the viewer.  

Once a shot is framed, emphasis should be on holding the camera still long enough to give the viewer time to savor the shot. The TV director should not interfere with the viewer enjoyment with excessive zooming in and out,  panning within a section, change of focus tricks, and the like. This is the opposite of the frantic succession of hyper-active closeups that is typically used for DVDs.

Of course, the conductor is an important part of any symphony concert and the viewer wants to see how the conductor operates. In many symphony DVDs, the conductor is shown innumerable time as the "hub" of the performance while the players (mostly soloists) show up as "spokes."

HDVD makes "hub and spoke" obsolete. The good TV director for HDVD will use a more balanced approach that shows the conductor a reasonable number of times, especially in situations where the conductor manages dramatic changes in the music. Some conductors are inherently interesting to watch. Others get great results even though they are boring to see.   Ultimately, the average viewer doesn't really glean too much from seeing a conductor, so shots of the conductor should not be overdone. (I recently spent 3 hours watching two world-class tennis players in a thrilling match. Alas, the next day, my serve was a bad as ever.)

If we don't want to see the conductor all that much, we for sure don't want to see the backs of the musicians! Shots of back are anathema! Many of the "back shots" we are seeing in HDVDs are really just conductor shots  from a distance. Getting rid of these low-value shots of conductors will also get rid of a lot of shots of backs of musicians.

Of course, some HDVD viewers might be young aspiring conductors. They want to see the conductor more than I care to. The TV director can serve these viewers by providing an alternate angle that shows the conductor only. Just set one camera to capture the conductor through out the whole program. Then the viewer can watch the conductor as much as the viewer pleases.

Most of us want primarily to see the musicians playing their instruments. We don't want to see just their faces. We don't want to see just a violin or a tuba. We want to see men and women doing what they have spent their whole lives mastering---playing their instruments. Musicians tend to look ordinary. They are not movie stars. But when they play their instruments we can see them for what they are: angels from God singing to us. So these angels are the stars of every scene, as soloist, in duets and trios, in sections, groups of sections, and in tutti. (A corollary of this is that the more great shots you have of the orchestra, the more shots you will have of the back of the conductor.)

Rejoice if the concert hall provides risers to elevate each rank of musicians over the rank in front. This makes it easier for cameras behind the conductor to get great combo shots of the musicians.

The TV director should try to show each string section separately so the viewer knows where they are. Usually the viewer can then easily locate the wood winds, the tuba, the trombones, trumpets, harps, and percussion.

But where are those horns? Always show the whole horn section at the earliest opportunity so the viewer can see how they or organized. Horn players divide up the score in special ways. The camera should allow the viewer to see how the horn section is organized and which players team up. Then when only two adjacent horns play, bore in on the duet. When the whole section plays, pull back and show that fact.

One camera should always be able to show the concertmaster from his front. Avoid shooting the right rear of his head even if you can see the violin.

All these rules are made to be broken. If the base fiddles are playing a creepy sound, then maybe it's neat to show a huge close-up of a bow slowly dragging across a string. If the composer has the melody flying like crazy around the orchestra, maybe you will need hyperactive short shots of solo players.

Because the quality of the video content is so important in the recording of classical music, we will give an A+ grade only to a symphony orchestra recording only if we feel the video was shot with HDVD presentation in mind. Stated differently, we will not give an A+ grade to a title that was shot for DVD and then also published in Blu-ray form as a second profit center.

Summary

Today is March 4, 2012. Right now we know of several symphony HDVDs, all from NHK, that meet the standards detailed above for SQ, PQ, and video content. All of these titles get the grade of A+. NHK is the only publisher of symphonic music that is seriously trying to take full advantage of he technology that we as consumers have in our high-definition home theaters. NHK is setting the standard, and everybody else in Blu-ray symphonic music is bringing out obsolete material. It will therefore be hard for us to give a grade better than A- to such titles. We challenge them to catch up!