Toledo Symphony musicians perform in a TAPA Streaming concert.
“Alain Trudel, music director at the Toledo Symphony, couldn’t have guessed that the March 13 [2020] concert would be his last onstage performance for the next 14 months,” writes Ahmed Elbenni in Sunday’s (5/16) Toledo Blade (OH). “Trudel [returned] home to Canada on the weekend. The country’s borders closed shortly thereafter…. ‘We realized we couldn’t go dark,’ said Zak Vassar, president and CEO of Toledo Symphony…. For the past four years, the Toledo Symphony had kept a WGTE-TV camera crew onstage to shoot high-definition video so as to help the seated audience follow different facets of live performances…. They were quickly repurposed for live-streaming…. The launch of TAPA Streaming [in September], Vassar said, marked a ‘philosophical shift’ for Toledo Symphony: ‘Usually the audience comes to us, now we came to them.’ … At 8 p.m. Friday … Trudel will finally … once again set foot in the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle, this time to conduct a concert featuring pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin and Jessie Montgomery…. Far from losing its audience during the coronavirus crisis, the Toledo Symphony has dramatically expanded it… Its concerts now reach 46 states and 27 countries.”
