“ ‘I’m all alone in the Fox Theater, a building with a capacity of 1,700, and live musicians are playing Mahler as if it’s for me,’ says Don Hamilton,” writes E.J. Iannelli in Thursday’s (5/13) Inlander (Spokane, WA). “Hamilton’s private concert experience stems from the fact that he’s been overseeing the recording process for the Spokane Symphony’s first-ever streaming concert series, itself a product of the COVID-19 restrictions…. Those same restrictions obviously affect film crews…. The purpose of this streaming series is to entertain a far larger audience than the symphony—or indeed any other local performing arts organization—has been able to host for the past year. In making the concerts accessible to anyone with an internet connection and enough to cover the $25 price of admission, there’s even some shared hope that the series will bring the Spokane Symphony a larger audience than ever before…. These concerts are so much more ambitious than just a pandemic-necessitated stopgap. ‘I’ve been really trying to figure out what turns this digital format to our advantage,’ says Music Director James Lowe. ‘I realized is that there’s an opportunity to do something digitally that we just can’t do in real life.’ ”
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