I attended the Berlin Philharmonic’s 3D experience at my local cinema along with the grand total of 8 other people (3 of whom came with me!). It was showing for 2 days and the previous day a friend of mine went and was “Billy No Mates”; he had it the cinema all to himself! The cinema I attended is in a provincial town and it may have been different in a more cosmopolitan city.

The programme itself was everything you want it to be: technologically it worked well; the sound production was incredible, albeit with what I though limited dynamic range, the filming was well edited and the choice of Mahler 1 and Rachaninov Symphonic Dances worked well. The pity was that either nobody knew about it, or the format is fundamentally flawed. I suspect it was more to do with the lack of promotion given the Met’s success.

It will be interesting to see if they repeat the exercise.