APP REVIEW

Every issue we explore a recent digital product

Octava FREE

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is trialling a new app, Octava, to help audience members starting to discover classical music. During the concert, pertinent short paragraphs about the music are sent to your phone, cued by someone following the score, so in theory each piece of text is fully co-ordinated to the actual performance. You need to log into the venue’s guest Wi-fi and switch off your phone’s autolock – otherwise the text will freeze when your phone tries to ‘sleep’. RPO personnel are in charge of writing the texts and deciding how many cues there are per work: on the evening I reviewed, Sibelius’s Violin Concerto got just one cue per movement – no explanation, for instance, about the first movement cadenza – yet Prokofiev’s Third Symphony got at least three or four cues per movement, all pertinent and helpful if sometimes clumsy in describing the music itself. No doubt, given time and audience feedback, this will be refined. Daniel Jaffé