VividNon: watching new BBC show "Maestro"

Stolen from movies_michelle: VividNon! For all those not at Vividcon! Yeah. Not that I miss it or anything. Or that I can hear those sparkly gold shoes at the back of the cupboard calling me. Snf.

There's a new reality show on the BBC, called Maestro. If you're in the UK you can watch it online or on Tuesdays; if not, torrents are the way to go. There's only one episode so far, and I highly recommend it.

Brief description: a bunch of British celebrities compete to conduct a full orchestra, performing some piece of classical music. They get training from professional conductors, and are judged by them and by the orchestra; the celeb who wins gets to conduct at the Proms.

There's a great line-up of celebrities, and all of them are celebrities because they do something and do it very well. They can take criticism, they work damn hard, and when they mess up they can laugh at themselves, so when it's funny, it's funny because you're laughing with them, not at them. No Paris Hiltons here: it's drum 'n' bass DJ Goldie, Blur bassist Alex James, actress Jane Asher, newsreader Katie Derham, broadcaster Peter Snow, actor David Soul (yes, Hutch!), comedian Sue Perkins and comedian Bradley Walsh.

My Dutch newspaper had a review of this show, saying "this isn't about watching other people's humiliation. It's about grinding prejudices into the dust."

That made me want to watch. And having watched, I agree. Classical music has a certain snobby, not-for-hoi-polloi image, and so far "Maestro" is doing a beautiful job of smashing that stereotype to bits.

What absolutely made this first episode for me was the performance by Goldie, the drum 'n' bass artist. Here's a guy with a full set of gold teeth and a neck tattoo, who can't read music (when he lays down a d&b track, he sketches it out on paper in a way that I suspect vidders who make storyboards would recognize), and not only does he have the kind of charisma and effortless charm politicians would kill for, but he is mesmerizing to watch in front of an orchestra. If you watch the episode, his performance directing "Hall of the Mountain King" is at the very end, and it is just stunning. It almost looks as though he's squeezing the music out of the orchestra by supernatural means.

Here's a Youtube clip of that performance, though it doesn't do the music or the performance any justice. (And here's a better clip, though with wrong aspect ratio.

Why do I think this relates to vidding? Well, for one thing, the conductor has to somehow express the music visually. Just by movement and facial expressions, they have to somehow mark the beat, the variations, the solos, the loudness or softness, the emotional color of the music (yes, I am making up terms as I go along) - and more than that, they can't react to the music as it happens, they have to be ahead of the music, in the same way as when you lay down a track of moving images; the images always have to be some frames ahead of the audio to look right.