A still from tonight's Proms premiere, Beethoveniana, composed by Iain Farrington and directed by Toby Amies

The 2020 BBC Proms begins this evening on BBC Radio 3 – albeit in an unusual form due to the restrictions on public performance in response to Covid-19. But undaunted, the Proms is set to open its 2020 season with a fascinating project making a virtue of the situation – a new work called Beethoveniana, celebrating the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, recorded in lockdown by a ‘Grand Virtual Orchestra’ comprising more than 300 musicians from the BBC’s orchestras and the BBC Singers. The musicians sent in their individual home recordings, which have been painstakingly stitched together digitally by a five person BBC team.

Below, Beethoveniana composer Iain Farrington talks about writing the work, before BBC Senior Technical Producer Robert Winter takes us behind the scenes of how the project was put together.

Composer, musician and arranger Iain Farrington on composing Beethoveniana

When it looked like the Proms season couldn't happen in the normal way, this piece was commissioned for what would have been the First Night, specifically to be recorded by all five BBC orchestras and the BBC Singers in lockdown. As it's the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, I was asked to write a piece based on his nine symphonies. It had to be very practical so that everyone could record separately and keep together, whilst taking advantage of the scale of the ensemble – using 10 solo bassoons or 20 horns for example.

It had a very quick turn-around because of the timescale of over 300 performers recording, editing and mixing it all together. Essentially I took Beethoven's music and put it in a musical washing machine to see which colours would run. What's come out is a collage of fragments tied together that sum up his music: heroic, witty, defiant, turbulent, tragic and reflective. It also shows the influence his music has had on different genres, as well as the stylistic diversity of the Proms itself. It has been an incredible project to be a part of.

BBC Senior Technical Producer Robert Winter on putting more than 300 performances together

In June a Zoom meeting request with the subject ‘First Night of The Proms Grand Virtual Orchestra’ landed in my inbox from Mike George, the Producer at the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. I along with Operations Team Leader Chris Rouse, in London, Tom Parnell, Operations Team Leader in Salford, Andrew Smillie, Senior Audio Supervisor in Cardiff and Graeme Taylor, Senior Technical Producer in Glasgow were all invited to be told more about this ambitious project. Mike briefed us that Iain Farrington had been commissioned to write a piece for all of the BBC Orchestras and the BBC Singers to be ‘performed’ at the First Night of The Proms 5 weeks later. This meant that more than 300 musicians had to record their parts at home and for us to work out how to mix all of them together in just under three weeks.

Putting it all together

We decided that each of us should look after one orchestra each. I looked after contributions from the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra, Chris Rouse looked after the BBC Concert Orchestra, Tom Parnell looked after the BBC Philharmonic in Salford, Andrew Smillie took the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and Graeme Taylor in Glasgow looked after the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I was in charge of the final mix and my colleagues provided me with sub-mix stems of groups of instruments.

We briefed the musicians on how to best record themselves at home using anything they had to hand. This was usually a mobile phone or a handheld recorder, but some had more sophisticated setups. All the parts were recorded in one take against a click track and submitted to us via DropBox. We received every kind of file format and quality that you could imagine!

Editing the performances together

The first thing to do was to sync all the audio in our digital audio workstations. We’d asked the musicians to clap on the count into the start of the click so we could use that as an easy way to sync everything together.

Clapping for sync

 BBC Philharmonic Wind & Brass edit

One of the main challenges we found was trying to make the musicians sound as if they were all performing in the same beautiful space. Every home recording had a different acoustic, so a lot of restoration work had to be done to remove room tone, unwanted noises and artefacts. By using some fairly aggressive tone equalisation and several different sized artificial reverbs, each section of the orchestra started to sound like a section and like they were all playing in the same space.

EQ for a violin

We had to do a few fine adjustments to some parts to help with the general ensemble and timing as the musicians all recorded in isolation and couldn’t hear each other to perfect this as would normally happen. In particular this was an issue with fast violin runs, brass fanfares and rhythmic heavy passages that needed everyone to lock to a groove.

BBCSO Edit window

BBC Philharmonic Mixer
 

BBC NOW edit session

The final step was to mix all of the Orchestras and Singers together to send to Chris to master.

A very small part of the final mix session

Mastering the audio

We hope we have achieved our aim of producing something that sounds like a lot of musicians, playing the same piece, at the right time in the same space!

The First Night of the Proms starts at 7.00pm this Friday July 17, on BBC Radio 3. The night begins with Beethoveniana, a new commission by Iain Farrington to mark 250 years since Beethoven’s birth.

You can also watch Farrington’s Beethoveniana on television this Sunday July 19, on BBC Four, accompanied by a new film by director Toby Amies. Beethoveniana will be followed by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, recorded in 2017. Find full details of the BBC Proms. 

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