All music naturally fades to silence, but Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performances live on, thanks to in-house recordings of all its classical subscription concerts.
Those recordings serve as an archive of the orchestra's artistic achievements and are the basis of radio broadcasts heard across the United States — and as an Internet presence internationally.
“We believe that what we do should be shared with the wider world beyond Heinz Hall, first and foremost with our own community,” says Declan McGovern, the symphony's vice president of operations and general manager.
“It's about generating life for concerts beyond the concert hall and beyond the concert time so the artistry and heritage of our concerts can live on in people's minds at a time and place of their own choosing,” he says.
The Pittsburgh Symphony began making commercial recordings in 1941. But the scope of commercial recordings — in artists and repertoire — is miniscule compared with concert archives since the 1970s.
The broadcasts are produced at WQED-FM in Oakland using recordings supplied by the symphony. Jim Cunningham, the station's artistic director, is the producer of the broadcasts. He adds interviews, archival performances and chamber-music performances by symphony members to fill out the one-hour, 59-minute duration of the shows.
Symphony concerts are broadcast at 8 p.m. Sundays on WQED, 52 weeks a year. Next season, the concerts will be presented Wednesday evenings, as well. They are distributed by Public Radio International.
WQED disseminates symphony concert performances in other ways. It broadcasts four concerts live each season. It also offers online streaming concerts from its archives on the Concert Channel on its website.
The symphony and WQED have a close relationship and help each other. The symphony owns an open-reel tape machine, needed for pre-digital concert recordings, but WQED makes copies after transferring the older technology to digital format.
Cunningham has gone along on symphony tours since the 1980s, not only filing reports for the station to broadcast but also bringing back concert recordings made overseas. Often tour performances will surpass ones at Heinz Hall or feature repertoire played only on tour.
“It's spectacular to be involved with one of the greatest orchestras in the world and share it,” Cunningham says. “We have listeners in Hawaii, Maine, Baltimore, the Midwest and prairies, and we hear from them.”
Listeners send handwritten notes as well as emails.
“I don't love all the music played on my local classical-radio station,” emailed Nancy May from Bradenton, Fla., “but I always love the music played from Pittsburgh Symphony Radio.”
Harold Chambers, the symphony's in-house recording engineer, grew up in Bethel Park. The Pittsburgh Symphony was his first experience of live music and a significant influence on his decision to study music. He earned degrees in saxophone performance and recording arts and sciences at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He worked in radio for more than 20 years, including 10 as director of operations and production at WQXR-FM in New York City.
Chambers joined the symphony in September 2013 and works in a new recording office on the fifth floor of Heinz Hall, across the hallway from the music director's suite. Typically, a staff conductor will work with Chambers during the concert. They consult on what sounds best night-to-night for editing the recordings for broadcast, then Chambers makes the edits.
The recording suite used to be located at the top of the hall, behind the highest seats in the gallery. But Chambers says he found that too distant, particularly if he had to make a last-minute adjustment to the microphone array. The performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in May posed such a challenge in the passage in the last movement where music director Manfred Honeck placed a wind band offstage. Chambers had to run an extra mic, because the wind band sounded too distant through the stage mics.
“It all starts with the microphones,” Chambers says. “I don't care what you're doing downstream (for mixing and the actual recording), if the mics aren't right, the recording won't be. The rule is ‘take good mics, put them in the right spots and get out of the way.'
“I use a center pair of cardioid microphones, with flanking omnidirectionals to give a warmer sound to the orchestra. Then I put some spot mics on woodwinds and the rear of the orchestra depending on the piece. When there are soloists, I add spot mics, but the majority of the sound comes from the front four mics. The orchestra is remarkably well balanced,” he says. “I try to stay out of the way.”
The symphony's earliest radio broadcasts, which date to the 1920s on KDKA, were live, unedited performances. Nationwide broadcasts began in 1936 on NBC's Blue Network. Tapes do survive of some broadcast concerts led by William Steinberg in the 1960s, when WWSW carried the symphony, but most of the tapes from that era went missing.
WQED-FM has been broadcasting the symphony since 1974, and the station has a large archive of broadcast tapes. The symphony holds the archives of the master tapes of each concert. Neither archive is fully inventoried.
“Our ambition is to give new life to these archival treasures. But we've only started the process. It's quite a long-term project,” McGovern says.
The symphony received a $20,000 grant in May from the National Endowment for the Arts to develop a digital-archive portal. It is expected to come online in the summer of 2016.
Musicians support the radio broadcasts by foregoing fees they otherwise would be paid.
“I think it's great for our legacy as the orchestra moves through time. It's great to have these recordings. I don't see any negative,” says Micah Howard, chairman of the orchestra committee. “It's very important, because it lets the rest of the world know what's happening here in Pittsburgh. We have great orchestra and a great conductor.”
Musicians sometimes listen to archival recordings while preparing for upcoming concerts. Howard says they are very useful for critiquing one's own playing.
It's not a new notion. Legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein once said listening to recordings he had made was his “best teacher.”
Mark Kanny is classical music critic for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7877 or mkanny@tribweb.com.
