Deutsche Welle Brings Beethoven to Digital Concert Hall

Deutsche Welle will be offering a new video live stream this September which will give classical music fans all over the world the opportunity to experience all nine Beethoven symphonies live from the Beethovenfest in Bonn.

“This is the first time that the entire cycle of symphonies will be presented live in a digital concert hall,” says DW Director General Erik Bettermann. “Germany's international broadcaster is giving people from Shanghai to Moscow and Cape Town the opportunity to experience an extraordinary concert event from the birthplace of Beethoven.”

Deutsche Welle will be broadcasting the concerts by the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Bremen under conductor Paavo Järvi from September 9-12, 2009. Fans can tune in live by going to www.dw-world.de/beethoven and excerpts from the concerts will also be available afterward as podcasts.

In addition, the four concerts with the nine Beethoven symphonies will be shown live at selected cinemas across Europe in cooperation with a partner media company. Moviegoers in Germany, Belgium, France, Iceland, Spain and the Czech Republic can watch the concerts live via satellite in HD quality.

As media partner, Deutsche Welle once again is turning Bonn’s Beethovenfest into a global event – via radio and the Internet in 30 different languages, and on television in English, German and Spanish. Since autumn 2008, more than 600,000 music lovers from around the world have logged on to DW’s Beethovenfest portal at www.dw-world.de/beethoven.

Music documentary "The Beethoven Project" from DW-TV

Live transmissions of these symphonies are an integral part of the concept for large, new Deutsche Welle music productions in high definition (HDTV) called “The Beethoven Project”. The 90-minute documentary by the same name, produced under the auspices of DW-TV, features Paavo Järi and the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Bremen. The film is a narrative about the vision of an orchestra, providing an inside view of the life of a “musical organism” and accompanied by live recordings played at Bonn's Beethoven Concert Hall.

The nine Beethoven symphonies are being recorded for DVD during the live broadcast and will be prepared for worldwide TV marketing and release. “The Beethoven Project” will be broadcast worldwide on DW-TV in 2010 in German, English, Spanish and Arabic. In Germany, the music documentary and all live concert recordings will be shown on Premiere CLASSICA, the digital television channel for classical music.

“The Beethoven Project” is a co-production of UNITEL CLASSICA in cooperation with the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Bremen and the Beethoven Festival Bonn.

“The Beethoven Project” is a continuation of Deutsche Welle’s prize-winning series of music productions for television. In 2007, DW-TV presented the series “Monuments of Classical Music” with Kent Nagano and the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin (DVD “arthaus” available from dw-world.de/store). The production, “The Promise of Music”, a documentary of Gustavo Dudamel, was released in 2009, along with “The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela” (DVD “Deutsche Grammophon”, available from dw-world.de/store).

For Saturday, September 12, 2009, Deutsche Welle and the Beethoven Festival invite music lovers to attend a public viewing on Bonn's Market Square of Beethoven's eight and ninth symphonies performed by the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Bremen. The concert is sponsored by Deutsche Post/DHL and retailers in Bonn’s city center. Some 4,000 Beethoven fans attended last year’s event.