Nothing can replace the pleasure of attending a live Portland Symphony Orchestra concert at Merrill Auditorium.  Every aspect of the experience helps to make it special. While we await the return of in-person performances, though, we can, with a little help from technology, see and hear the PSO play again on its home stage.

The first two in a series of new performances, recorded at Merrill, are available for limited streaming runs. These slightly edited online productions offer an opportunity to experience the music making from different angles and to perhaps appreciate the PSO in new ways.

Reduced to a number that would meet social distancing requirements and all masked (save the wind instrument players, who were behind plexiglass), the musicians seemed at the start, for just a brief moment, forlorn. But conductor Eckart Preu quickly brought them to order and the music began in their one-hour classical series opener titled “Recomposed: The Four Seasons” (streaming through Wednesday).

After a sturdy rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by the orchestra, the concert began with the taut, Baroque-era Symphony #5 by William Boyce.  With a crisp elegance, the performance captured the formal values of the work’s era (trumpets and timpani in the fore, as Preu noted in a separately recorded talk).  The orchestra’s ability to summon the energy required to bring the composition to life quickly confirmed their return to, albeit downsized, form.

Throughout the concert, the various camera angles employed allowed the individual and collective performances to be experienced as if sitting not only in the front row or, alternately, in the balcony, but also on stage. Looking over the shoulder of a violinist or being up close with a pair of cellists helped to contextualize the music making on an intimate level. Onscreen subtitles offered information that, in person, would have required struggling with a printed program in the darkened auditorium.

The main work of the concert was an interspersing, as Preu put it, of Antonio Vivaldi’s poetry-inspired “The Four Seasons” with contemporary composer Max Richter’s respectful recomposition of the popular 18^th-century work.

Richter, a post-minimalist who has become a bit of a rock star (by classical music standards) in recent years for lending his often somber, meditative work to movie soundtracks, apparently found a formal and spiritual connection with the Vivaldi work. Though it can be argued whether Vivaldi needed any freshening, the mixing of the Richter sound with that of the old master made for a compelling musical conversation between eras and sensibilities.

Beginning with the bright exaltations of the first movement of Richter’s take on “Spring,” violinist Amy Sims, with a flower in her hair, leaned into the piece’s spirited, barely-able-to-contain-itself evocation of the season of optimism.  The Vivaldi movements that followed inevitably took things back to a statelier sense of vigor.

Violinist Sarah Atwood stepped up next for “Summer” movements which reached a harmonious peak during a split-screen violin/cello duet that highlighted Richter’s delicate take on the warmest season. Vivaldi’s presto storm added turbulence to offset the quieter, modernist reflections that preceded it.

Violinist Sasha Callahan put the music to sleep, but in a good way, as “Autumn” descended. Beautiful, fleeting harmonies suggested a drifting off and led to a harpsichord (John McKean) and violin moment before morning brought Vivaldi’s autumn hunt.

PSO concertmaster/violinist Charles Dimmick finished the piece with evocations of the pleasures (pizzicato raindrops) and perils (slippery rhythms) of the colder season by both composers.

PSO POPS!

The first PSO Pops! concert of the season (available online through Nov. 17) has legendary folk singer Noel Paul Stookey, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, joining the orchestra for a concert revealing plenty of past roots and suggesting a few new shoots.

Guest conductor Lucas Richman from the Bangor Symphony wasted little time in having the orchestra go right into works from two main figures in American music: Scott Joplin and Aaron Copland.

A rendition of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” captured the work’s signature syncopations and all-around jaunty spirit with each section of the ensemble getting moments to shine.  A move toward more modern harmonies was illustrated with Copland’s “Down a Country Lane” and, a little later, his “Variations on a Shaker Melody,” the latter piece long ingrained in American cultural memory. Richman’s own composition, “Scenes of Youth,” revealed these two major figures’ influence on the conductor/composer.

Finger picking his acoustic guitar and with occasional accompaniment from bass, keyboard and, of course, the orchestra, guest artist Stookey revealed his deep roots within the American folk music tradition. Songs of protest and uplift filled his program of half a dozen or so songs.

Lyrical playfulness and an inclination toward the pursuit of tranquility characterized such tunes as his “Love in the Uppercase” and “Cue the Moon.”  “Wedding Song” and “Facets of the Jewel” offered differing reflections on blissful togetherness, as did “Cabin Fever Waltz,” which he noted has gained a new resonance in the current times of isolation.

The orchestra added a lushness to several of the pieces which brought them closer to a soft, pop/folk feel, but the edge of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” paired with Stookey’s “In These Times,” still cut through to today’s challenges.

Toward the end of the concert, the 82-year-old singer’s appeal to “lift the spirit in this land” seemed to both recall and call again for lives dedicated to trying to do just that.

Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.

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