With the celebrated and long awaited return of Chief Conductor Kirill Karabits the concert, which featured the UK premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s piece Absence as well as Beethoven’s only ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, was a huge success. This unique listening experience would not have been possible, however, without the hard work and expertise of our digital team alongside BBC Radio 3 presenter Martin Handley.

We spoke to Chris Caton (Sound Engineer) to find out a little more of what was going on behind the scenes on the night:

“The planning for this event started many weeks before the actual broadcast, liaising with the Radio 3 team to ensure a seamless setup on the day. The guys from Radio 3 were great to work with and it was fantastic for this concert to reach a wider radio audience. In terms of the technical side, we have a very high quality recording setup for the live stream, installed at Lighthouse especially for these concerts. We integrated the BBC outside broadcast truck directly into our digital audio network, allowing their team to have direct access to our live feed and each of our individual microphones; they were able to rely on this for the broadcast. We have had such great feedback about the audio for not only this concert, but the entire series. It’s lovely to hear that people are enjoying the concerts so much during these challenging times.”

 Claire Rawles (Communications Manager) said:

We have been lucky to work with such a talented team of presenters for this series. For this particular programme we had the brilliant Martin Handley expertly introducing both audiences to the performance. The BSO livestream audience joined us to hear an interview with Kirill, before we welcomed the BBC Radio 3 listeners onto the audio feed at 7.30pm. Each week, we find new ways of presenting these fantastic orchestral performances and it was wonderful to have our BBC Radio 3 colleagues with us that night.”

If you weren’t able to watch the concert live you can view it on our website here until 11 December. You can also listen to the Radio 3 broadcast here until 11 December.