OTHER TECH

02/15/2006 Last night I attended a stupendous concert at Carnegie Hall: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam conducted by Mariss Jansons played Shostakovich's monumental Seventh Symphony. Taking advantage of the tremendous arts resources of New York City, I go to a live music or theatrical event once a week on average. Right after I got back from the Consumer Electronics Show, in fact, I was at a live concert every evening for six days in a row. Not only are most of these concerts musically enjoyable events, they are also the best way I know of recalibrating my ears to what music should sound like.

They also point out how far even the best stereo systems are from being able to capture the full sonic impact of concerts like the one last night, in which Shostakovich's long and powerful symphony was performed. Its nickname is the "Leningrad" Symphony, because it was composed in that city while it was under siege and bombardment by Germany in what the Russian's call the "Great Patriotic War." The first movement, in fact, contains a musical depiction of the oncoming Nazi hordes, rendered in a Bolero-like passage that builds from a solo snare drum up to some particularly brutal full-orchestra blasts.

And blasts they were. The orchestra is large, even for Shostakovich's usual ample scoring, and includes some extra brass players (at the upper right of the ensemble in the picture) to punch the main melody through the din of the loudest passages. They did their work well, as did the rest of the ensemble, which is among the top dozen orchestras in the world.

From where I was sitting the hall did its work well, too (not every seat in Carnegie is worth the asking price sonically). The architecture maintained the clarity of the orchestral lines at all times - at least when we weren't being deafened - as well as a warmly enveloping ambience that still allowed the first movement's whomping battle music to achieve its full musical power. To reproduce all these effects at home would require a multichannel system of more than even 7.1 channels (you'd need some "up" channels to reproduce sounds reflected from the Carnegie ceiling), a multichannel recording of around 20 bits dynamic range (even SACD and DVD-Audio releases are limited by the self-noise of the microphones they were made with and the noise added by modern production techniques), and, finally, a listening room that is at least as quiet as Carnegie Hall is in the crucial 3- to 5-kHz range.

There is one thing that audio systems do have over live events: no cell phones jangling at precisely the wrong times. Last night, in the middle of an emotional soft passage in the third movement, a cell phone in the balcony or family-circle section went off. While it was probably an oversight of the call's recipient that the phone wasn't turned off, it could also have been a deliberate political statement - not impossible in New York City these days - as the ring tone, clearly audible from my seat, was the opening bars of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

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