The Score | Videos for All

Perhaps the signature coronavirus-era music event features musicians in Hollywood Squares-style boxes on video screens, creating a composite musical performance. There has been a dizzying number of these creations, including, early on, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s 65 musicians performing Elgar’s Nimrod from their homes, edited by Jeremy Tusz, the MSO’s audio and video producer; and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring. The many music videos thanking and honoring doctors, nurses, and other essential workers during the pandemic include the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s brass quintet, which recorded “Georgia on My Mind” for a video (in photo) honoring frontline workers, in an arrangement by Principal Tuba Michael Moore. For their tribute performance, Boston Pops musicians performed John Williams’s Summon the Heroes, composed for the 1996 Olympic Games; joining them were Conductor Keith Lockhart and Williams, the Pops’ conductor laureate. The Hartford Symphony Orchestra created an online performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird (in photo) thanking essential workers and community groups in a video created with The Bushnell, the HSO’s performance venue, that featured Hartford-area workers, thank-you signs, and musicians performing from their homes. Kentucky’s Louisville Orchestra created “Lift Up Louisville,” a music video (in photo) recorded at home by orchestra musicians and other local classical and popular musicians, to benefit city’s pandemic-response fund. Houston-based River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO) released a new virtual performance of Anthony DiLorenzo’s Anthem of Hope, commissioned in 2017 in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, honoring essential workers and featuring ROCO’s 39 musicians, who recorded their solo parts at home. The Southern ­Arizona Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Linus Lerner honored Tucson nurses with a virtual performance of Ennio Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe from the 1986 film The Mission.