Concert capturers: Bringing classical music to life on screen from the Opéra Garnier to the Philharmonie de Paris

Paris. City of lights, city of love, and most importantly for the world’s mélomanes, city of music venues. For lovers of classical music, the French capital represents an embarrassment of riches spanning the gamut of shape, size, and architecture.

From the belle époque intimate grandeur of the Fondation Singer Polignac, where Winnaretta Singer once hosted her influential salon, to playfully ship-like La Seine Musicale, apparently sailing down the river on the site of the Île Seguin’s former Renault factory, there’s something for every genre and mood.

But the city’s twin crown jewels are arguably the pair that coincidentally are both marking major anniversaries in 2025.

The Opéra Garnier at 150: A legendary stage for opera and ballet

Celebrating its 150th year is the Opéra Garnier. Home along with the Bastille to the Opéra de Paris, this 1,979-seat, opulently neo-Baroque masterpiece by Charles Garnier, with its famous ceiling by Marc Chagall, first opened in 1875 and remains one of the world’s most atmospheric places to hear opera, ballet, and orchestral concerts.

The Philharmonie de Paris at 10: A modern masterpiece of acoustics

Then celebrating its tenth birthday is the Philharmonie, Jean Nouvel’s 2,400-seat feast of floating curves, home most notably to the Orchestre de Paris, with warmly high-definition acoustics by Sir Harold Marshall and Yasuhisa Toyota. Both halls draw well over a million visitors each year.

But for those who can’t physically get to their performances, or the rest of the city’s rich classical programming, there’s medici.tv. Among the 160 performances it streams across 17 different Paris venues, 78 are from the Philharmonie – including Daniel Harding’s first as Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, in 2016 – and 14 from Garnier, including the 2010 world premiere of Patrice Bart’s ballet, Degas’ Little Dancer. Watch them, and your attention is inevitably on the performances. But it’s worth remembering that, for this to be the case, there has been further musical artistry and collaborative sensitivity behind the cameras.

Filming classical music: The art behind the camera

“Whatever the performance, it’s the music that guides us” emphasises Guillaume Klein, a director whose name you’ll see in the production credits to many a classical music broadcast. “Just as for the musicians, our first priority is to know the music by heart, so as to be able to be ready at the exact moment a key instrument will play. Only then can you begin to have fun showcasing the venue and bringing your own personal artistic vision to your filming.”

Indeed, any given symphonic concert represents a plethora of musical, interpretive, and performing detail to be harnessed by a film director into enhancing the viewer’s understanding and perception of the musical score, and of the artistry of instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. Yet don’t go thinking that a chamber or piano recital is any easier to film.

“It’s not technically difficult, in that nothing is moving, and there’s no risk of missing an instrument,” begins Klein, “but the danger instead is that the audience will get visually bored. So that’s where you have to be quite clever and innovative, letting the music define the lighting – maybe something colder for darker music –, or the camera movements – such as using machinery to create a beautiful, sweeping shot that makes you breathe.”

Further artistic creativity might be required for contemporary works, “creating an atmosphere for a music that not everyone finds easily approachable.”

Venues themselves come with challenges and pleasures too, not least the Philharmonie. “It’s an amazing room to walk into,” says Klein with admiration. “The way its architecture envelops you… But that’s not an easy impression to reproduce on camera. Also, it tends to be the case that the best positions for the camera are also the best, most expensive seats in the house!”

Still, one positive outcome from the COVID period he cites is that, with halls and artists alike having gotten used to all the beautiful filming angles that were possible when filming a performance to an empty room, there’s now a desire to get those shots earlier, during the rehearsal, which can then be edited into the film of the public performance.

Another exciting development is how conductors, especially the younger generation, are gradually becoming as interested in the visual side of the filming as they have traditionally been with the audio, from having a view on how to visually bring their interpretations to life onstage, to being amenable to filming further backstage color that can help demystify the genre to new, younger audiences. All of which, of course, gives a camera director further scope for artistry.

Sound engineering in classical music: Finding the perfect balance

The most beautiful, intelligent filming would be for nothing, though, if its sound weren’t equally beautifully captured by sound engineers such as Thibaut Maillard, and his work equally represents a multi-layered process.

“Regardless of which hall, most engineers work a double system,” he begins. “First, you have omnidirectional copperhead mics overhead to capture the global acoustic, i.e., the overall sound of the room as experienced by the audience sitting in it. Then into this you add further, closer mics for detail.”

At which point, it’s again a marriage between technical know-how and familiarity with the music itself.

“For a symphonic concert, there will be various mics in the orchestra with which we can then bring out, say, an oboe solo,” continues Maillard. “This in turn may briefly involve adjusting the balance, and then readjusting it when the score is tutti again.”

Of Paris’s various concert halls, the Philharmonie is one Maillard especially enjoys for its precise, but natural and generous acoustic. “Some halls can be too dry, or too resonant,” he explains, “but the Philharmonie acoustic represents the ideal, where we can really work well between the direct sound of the orchestra and the natural overall sound.”

Thanks to advances in filming techniques, audiences worldwide can now experience the magic of Parisian concert halls from their screens. Today, orchestras and conductors are more involved than ever in how their performances are filmed, ensuring that their artistic vision is reflected not only in the music but in the visual storytelling.

From the historic halls of the Opéra Garnier to the cutting-edge design of the Philharmonie, medici.tv continues to bring the best of Paris’s classical music scene to a global audience.

So, next time you click play on medici.tv, take a moment to appreciate the invisible artistry behind the camera.