'From Auznieks to Smidbergs.Nyx Trio and Latvian music'. Final Recital - DMus

From the very early stages of my research, I hoped my version of the ‘Doctoral Recital’ would be able to merge the live concert experience with the one in the recording studio. Throughout the present document, I talk a lot about how musicians felt like they have been stuck between the live concert and the studio recording while performing without the in-person audience during Covid-19; I was curious to find out what would happen if the concert was actually held in the real recording studio with the audience present. The more I think about the experience of performing without an in-person audience, the more I am sure the distress (and sometimes outright panic) performers have experienced over the years might be in part due to the unbalancing of the factors that make up the act of communication that is the performance of Western art music. Or rather, of the factors we have come to expect in a live performance: an appropriate concert venue—or rather, what we have come to perceive as appropriate, such as a public hall which is designed acoustically and aesthetically for the performance of concerts—the audience, certain pre-concert and post-concert rituals, and so on. I wanted to find out if this concert would feel more like a recording than a live concert because of the venue—in so many ways inappropriate to acoustic performance—and how the resulting ‘imbalance’ would impact my experience.
When planning this final test-performance, I knew it would be a live-streamed event and the choice of the venue—a recording studio—seemed both personally symbolic and methodologically intriguing. Although I had performed there a couple times before (in 2009 and 2016), I was curious to know whether the experience would be different post-Covid. Before Covid-19 those concerts were broadcast on Latvian Radio, the video live-streaming began in 2020, as a result of Covid related restrictions. I still remember both concerts, because the venue made me very aware of the fact that my performance would be recorded, even more so than in many previous broadcast and live-streamed concerts in the ‘actual’ concert halls. The studio where the concerts happen is mostly used for classical music recordings and I have recorded there many times over my career, so when we—my chamber ensemble Nyx Trio—met for the first rehearsal, I immediately felt my mind preparing for a recording—the venue simply suggested it. All the recording equipment, the sound engineers’ booth and ‘recording’ warning lights on the walls: everything pointed towards recording more than a live concert. This was the first time I had ever thought about the balance between the live performances and studio recordings, and the specific attributes of each situation. As I had hypothesised, the venue was indeed an important aspect in determining which performance mode would prevail, at least for me.