Ten years of StreamBoyz: an evening on Rádio Devín

In the summer of 2018 we turned ten. To mark the occasion, Rádio Devín broadcast an hour-and-a-half conversation in its Večer na tému (An Evening on a Theme) series about how the concerts of the Slovak Philharmonic get onto the internet. It was hosted by Marek Piaček, and the studio guests were the members of the StreamBoyz team at the time – Stano Beňačka, sound engineer Vašek Frkal, Vašo Frkal, director Renáta Beličová and chorus master Jozef Chabroň. The then General Director Marian Lapšanský also had his say.

You can listen to the whole programme (in Slovak) here:

The original recording is also in the Rádio Devín archive.

What you will hear

Click a time to move the player to that point.

• 03:04 – Marian Lapšanský on his trip to Finland, the orchestra in Lahti and the ClassicLive project. And on why he had to go to the Minister of Culture: every recording involves performers' rights.
• 07:39 – How the direction is prepared. A score with coloured slips at every change of shot, attending rehearsals, and the fact that every conductor brings out different instruments.
• 13:42 – Five cameras, whose positions in the historic building were decided by the heritage authorities.
• 14:35 – Lighting. The musicians have to see their parts, the cameras need their own light – and the white hall of the Reduta makes it easy for no one.
• 19:10 – The choir and the Psalm of the Carpathian Land, which the Slovak Philharmonic Choir can start without being given a note.
• 25:26 – Robotic cameras and presets. “Three-five” means camera 3, position 5.
• 30:21 – Jozef Chabroň's first broadcast and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.
• 37:18 – The camera operator as a pilot. Joystick controllers like in a computer game and concentration like when landing a plane.
• 38:45 – Renáta Beličová and Strauss's Elektra.
• 49:32 – An extra rehearsal and the safety shots: a close-up of the conductor and the whole orchestra.
• 52:14 – Vašo Frkal, the youngest of the team, two years of “exile” in the historic building of the Slovak National Theatre, and the question of why the flute counts as a woodwind.
• 59:25 – Thursday or Friday? How we choose which of the two concerts goes into the archive.
• 1:00:48 – Marian Lapšanský on why we do all this.
• 1:05:23 – Before the streaming era – archive recordings, television, and its camera crane that kept passing in front of our lens.
• 1:08:13 – One microphone that is really four: the Soundfield and one-point recording.
• 1:12:55 – A technical corner: a hundred gigabytes per hour of recording and video on the web at 960 × 540.
• 1:14:44 – Peter Gonda, Multiplace and the first live broadcasts via ClassicLive – including on New Year's Eve on Hviezdoslav Square.
• 1:17:48 – Closing words with Marian Lapšanský.

Concerts that vanished with their last note

For Marian Lapšanský the archive was not a technical novelty but a matter of the heart. “I always felt very sorry for excellent concerts that vanished for ever with their last note,” he says in the programme. A recording preserves them and makes them available to those who cannot get to the concert hall – from the regions of Slovakia and from around the world. Ten years on, he felt, the archive had not only statistical but also scholarly value.

He also recalls how the whole adventure began. The first live broadcasts went out through the ClassicLive network, conceived in Lahti, Finland. The Ministry of Culture helped settle the performers' rights: the Slovak Philharmonic received more than 20 million Slovak crowns for studio equipment and for fees to the performers. We wrote more about who was behind ClassicLive in The archive began with a dance.

Music you only come to love once you know it

Renáta Beličová writes every shot into the score, and preparing at home for a single concert can take her two weeks. The hardest thing, she says, is to stop listening to the music as a listener and to follow the score two pages ahead. With Strauss's Elektra, however, she discovered something more: “there is a lot of music that you only come to love once you know it thoroughly.”

Jozef Chabroň, a conductor himself, thought before his first broadcast that it could not be difficult. After the concert, in his own words, he was “soaked to the skin” – it was harder than conducting a concert or leading a four-hour rehearsal.

Eight years later

A lot has changed since the programme. The StreamBoyz are now the StreamTeam of the Slovak Philharmonic, the recordings are in Full HD and the team is led by Andrej Osvald. Vašek and Vašo Frkal and Jozef Chabroň are among the former members, and Stano Beňačka has retired but still works with us externally. Renáta Beličová continues to direct. One thing, however, still holds: during a concert we have only one take in the control room.

You can read how we started in How we started and the whole story in the History of the StreamTeam.

The programme was prepared and hosted by Marek Piaček and broadcast by Rádio Devín on 4 July 2018. The quotations come from a transcript of the programme.