Mahler Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection." Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in 2011 as well as the MDR Rundfunkchor, the Berliner Rundfunkchor, and the GewandhousChor (Chorus Masters Howard Arman, Simon Halsey, and Gregor Meyer). Soloists are soprano Christiane Oelze and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly. Produced by Paul Smaczny; directed for TV by Henning Kasten. Released 2011, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: C+

It's been several years since I last discussed DVDitis in detail.  DVDitis is a disease that mostly afflicts recordings of symphony concerts that were intended to be published as DVDs and which are also published in Blu-ray. Because of low video resolution, DVD recordings can't provide good shots of an entire symphony orchestra or long shots of multiple sections of the orchestra. To cope with this limitation, the practice developed of shooting many short clips of the conductor alternating with many short clips of single musicians or small groups of musicians. This style of recording reminds me of the Road Runner cartoons.

But when you shoot an symphony orchestra with HD cameras, you can get decent long-range shots. So a symphony HDVD (Blu-ray disc) can be displayed in a more civilized and relaxed way that gets much closer than a DVD to the live experience a concertgoer has in the music hall. Find out more about this in our special article about the good symphony video in HDVD.

When a DVD is made of a symphony concert, you do the best you can with the modest resolution you have. If you take that recording and publish it on a Blu-ray disc, the consumer should get a nicer video picture and often also better sound. But it's still the Road Runner race. A good HDVD of a symphony has to have different and better video content from the DVD to meet our standards. If the HDVD has the same video content as the DVD, I diagnose DVDitis. 

Today our sick patient is an Accentus Music Mahler Symphony No. 2 performed and published in 2011. It's  been patiently waiting in my infirmary for several years to be examined. As any careful doctor would, I order a panel of tests.  But before we read the report, let's discuss some of the things we are testing for.

The single most important hallmark of a good symphony HDVD is the presence of many whole-orchestra ("WO") shots. And the first duty of the videographer is to give us at home an opening WO shot to show us how the orchestra is organized and where all the sections are. After all, a single WO view is the only "shot" a live concertgoer gets to enjoy.

The first screenshot below is one of about 10 views that are the closest thing we get in subject video to a WO shot.  We generously call this a WO view even though quite a few musicians are omitted on the flanks. Still, it shows the most of the orchestra and the chorus. But, alas, the camera is placed so low that you still can't see how the orchestra is organized:

Also, Kasten gives us about 6 shots like the one shown next below, which is also the first thing we see at the beginning.  But this is not a WO shot. True, it shows the whole band, but it's made from too far away to be of much value to us.  You can't tell from this where the different instruments are. We often this an "architectural shot" or an "anthill view" that says more about the venue than the orchestra:

So we are forced to puzzle out piecemeal where things are.  Next below is the single most helpful orientation shot in the whole video, and it appears at 15:17, deep into the 1st movement. From this view we can be sure that there are 10 double-basses and 12 cellos. We also see that the only the first violins are on the conductor's left, etc. But this view only lasts a few fleeting seconds; better push the pause button on your remote:

And we have to wait until the symphony is 40% along to finally see how the 2nd violins and violas are seated (34:03):

One hallmark of a DVD, on the other hand, is a huge number of small-scale shots of 1 to 4 musicians such as the view of 2 clarinets next below. There are no fewer than 343 of such tiny pictures in subject video:

A good symphony video will try to show whole sections at work. The next view below counts as a shot of the bass section because it captures 6 of the 10 (more than half) bass players:

Here's a rare multi-section shot of much of the brass: