Despite COVID pandemic, Merced Symphony still lifting up the community through music

With the COVID pandemic putting kibosh on live music as we know it, the Merced Symphony Association had to get creative to host its first virtual concert season.

The fruits of that creativity will be harvested this week. The association, in partnership with Merced County Office of Education and Magik Orchestra, is scheduled to host a virtual live concert scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday.

The concert will feature Max Richter’s Recomposed version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and a violin solo from Liana Berube, interpreting Largo from Sonata No. 3 by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The free concert can be viewed on the Merced County Office of Education’s Facebook page, and on the Merced Symphony’s Youtube channel.

It’s the second live broadcast the symphony is putting on. The first was their Back on Stage concert in September.

Ryan Heller, president of the symphony board, said after the symphony board hosted their first virtual concert of the season in September, they knew they wanted to have more concerts, after receiving a positive response from patrons.

“It was just critically important for us, you know when we realized that this wasn’t just going to be a postponement, but really a new kind of season, not to leave the community hanging and waiting for when we could gather in person again,” Heller said.

“But (it was) also equally important not to leave our musicians and our music director. They have careers and livelihoods that are largely supported by our programs, our ability to raise funds and spend funds, so we wanted to be supportive to them in the arts community, broadly as possible so we made the decision to pull the trigger and we have seen this incredible learning experience that has resulted in our first digital season.”

More concerts

In putting on the virtual concerts, the symphony is adhering to social distancing guidelines. They have also partnered with the Merced Office of Education to make sure students from local school districts and their families have access to stream the concerts.

The symphony also decided to primarily use string instruments due to the concern that wind instruments could potentially carry a greater risk for the virus transmission.

An incredible challenge for the symphony was not simply adhering to the social distancing guidelines and opting for string instruments, but putting on the live broadcasts.

Cameramen have to make sure they capture the musicians at different angles, and prepare for potential technical difficulties with the livestreams.

“One of the interesting things is when you are doing a broadcast concert as opposed to a regular performance — the layouts are different, because when you are doing a regular in person performance, in order to maximize the acoustics, you lay out the musicians in a certain way. And you do it differently for the broadcast concert, which actually created a ton of room on stage for the camera professionals to move around,” Heller explained.

“The technical team at MCOE definitely know their stuff, and like us they have never done this before, so we were very very pleased to see that it went off without a hitch, there were no technical glitches.”

Friday’s concert will have 20 musicians performing. Musicians interested in performing can contact the symphony board directly, and Heller connects them with Ming Luke, the symphony’s conductor.

Heller hopes to have another concert, but only time will tell.

“We’ve been fortunate that we’re in a good place financially going into the season, but we now have to ascertain with the rest of the season is going to look like or if this will be our season finale, Heller said.

“We’ve been playing this whole thing by ear, looking at a lot of moving parts with regard to the level of interest from patrons in our community, our ability to raise funds … it’s been a really, really unexpected learning experience.”