Science, music and optimism: How Utah Symphony and Utah Opera brought back live music amid the COVID-19 pandemic
The show must go on, the saying goes — but as the COVID-19 pandemic continues around the world, figuring out how to make the show happen safely has been a monumental challenge.
I wrote two stories about how Utah Symphony and Utah Opera are working to welcome audiences — much smaller than capacity — to Abravanel Hall and Capitol Theatre, respectively. It’s meant changing repertoire, shortening programs, and leaving empty rows in the audience.
It’s also meant employing science. Two chemical engineers from the University of Utah studied the airflow on the stages of both venues, creating computer modeling to figure out the best configuration for musicians so the droplets and aerosol particles they exhale — and could carry the coronavirus — are expelled from the stage and not allowed to linger.
Read about the Utah Symphony’s opening here, and Utah Opera’s opening — and the engineers’ work — here, both at sltrib.com.
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Here are more stories I’ve written about the COVID-19 pandemic in the last month:
• Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes attended — without a face mask — a campaign rally for President Donald Trump on Sept. 13, in a warehouse outside of Las Vegas. Reyes, who is running for re-election, was criticized for it by his Democratic challenger, Greg Skordas. Such rallies have come under even more scrutiny since Trump himself contracted the virus.
• On Sept. 18, the state of Utah for the first time recorded more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19 in a single day — part of a surge of cases in the state over the last month. Since then, the state has gone over 1,000 a day eight more times. (For updates on COVID-19 in Utah, read my colleagues’ work at sltrib.com/coronavirus.)
• The Eccles Theater announced that the national touring production of “Hamilton” was pushing its December/January run in Salt Lake City back to next July — an appropriate time to be considering our Founding Fathers.
• The Slamdance Film Festival, the upstart kid brother to the larger Sundance Film Festival, announced it will skip Park City next January. Instead, it will hold a two-week online festival in February.