PSO conductor Eckart Preu outside Merrill Auditorium Wednesday. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

It’s going to be awesome and awkward, and maybe a little frightening. But Eckart Preu, music director of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, is both eager and a little anxious to return to the podium of Merrill Auditorium to conduct musicians as they perform a reimagining of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” by composer Max Richter intermixed by Vivaldi’s masterpiece, as well as William Boyce’s Symphony No. 5.

The concert, scheduled to be recorded live on Sunday, will happen without an audience and with fewer than two dozen musicians on stage with Preu. There will, however, be camera operators and sound technicians, and as part of its new new season, the orchestra will make the concert available to the orchestra’s subscription-based PSO Passport holders, as well as single-ticket holders, beginning Monday. The PSO will follow up with a pops concert with Maine resident and folk music icon Noel Paul Stookey, who lives in Blue Hill. He will join PSO musicians and Lucas Richman, music director of the Bangor Symphony, who will sub for Preu on the pops concert. The concert with Stookey will be recorded at Merrill on Oct. 17 and available for streaming the next day.

The concerts are part of a grand new experiment to meet the realities of an uncertain world. The orchestra cannot convene an audience, but it can perform with up to 25 people on stage, including Preu and a tech crew that will record video and audio of the concerts. Instead of selling tickets to concerts at Merrill, the orchestra is selling digital “passports,” a new subscription offering that includes access to concerts, conversations, concert programs and other perks through a new platform, portlandsymphonytv.com, and a new PSO app for tablets and smartphones, coming later this month. From either platform, subscribers will be able to simulcast the concerts on their TVs.

For its classical concerts, the PSO has contracted with New Hampshire-based Parma Recordings, a Grammy Award-winning and internationally recognized sound-engineering company. Two people will operate cameras manually and a third person will capture the audio. There are also will be two robotic cameras. For the debut concert, that means that Preu will have 21 musicians to work with – far fewer than the 60 to 80 who usually perform, depending on the requirements of the music.

The musicians, who will be tested for the virus, will sit or stand at least 6 feet apart from each other, and they will wear masks. The horn players, who cannot wear masks, will be isolated from each other and other musicians behind plastic glass barriers. The orchestra consulted with the state public health officials on their performance plan, said the orchestra’s executive director Carolyn Nishon.

It’s been six months since Preu and the musicians were forced to the sideline because of the pandemic. In a phone call, the conductor said he was ready to return to performance. “I haven’t had a break like this in 30 years,” he said. “It’s going to be an emotional event. We haven’t seen each other in six months. I will want to hug or shake hands with all the musicians. It will be hard to break those habits.”

Sitting apart will challenge the musicians’ usual communication skills, “and having masks on will further limit our communication. You will see how big the ears of all us can be, because that is all we’ve got – big ears and big eyes.”

Noel Paul Stookey, a member of the legendary trio Peter, Paul and Mary, will perform in a pops concert with the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal Buy this Photo

Like Preu, Stookey said he couldn’t recall a longer pause in a performance career that dates to the early 1960s. He described the prospect of returning to stage without an audience and social distanced from other musicians as surreal. “Singing with performers under constrained circumstances is awkward,” Stookey said. “We will be looking for ways to make the awkwardness of elbow-bumps feel more alive. If you want to indicate real affection, you could do a double-elbow bump, but then you resemble a chicken with its wings out. It’s all part of the surreality of our circumstances.”

Preu has reprogrammed the season for smaller musical ensembles, and will re-evaluate the programming and plans every three months. For now, it’s safe to assume Magic of Christmas will be available for streaming from the comforts of home, he said. “It’s such a family affair. Now you can sit in your living room with your Christmas tree on and watch on your TV,” Preu said, adding that he thinks the audience will enjoy the perspective of watching the orchestra perform from vantage points that are different from the seats they have become accustomed to over the years. “For the first time, they will be able to see the inner workings of the orchestra, up close.”

The challenge, he said, will be spreading out the work among all the musicians and instrument sections, so the brass, woodwinds, percussionists get the same or similar opportunities as the string players. Instead of flying in guest artists, the PSO will feature its own musicians as soloists, as well as other musicians who live within driving distance. For Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” the orchestra will feature Charles Dimmick and Amy Sims, concertmaster and assistant concertmaster, as well as Sarah Atwood, principal second violin, and Sasha Callahan, assistant principal second violin.

And while performing with a smaller orchestra may limit the richness and depth of sound, it also opens up programming possibilities, Preu said. “There is a lot of repertoire that we as regional orchestras neglect, because we tend to focus on the big blockbusters. A lot of music falls into that 30-musicians category that we just don’t do,” he said. “This gives us the opportunity to explore music that we don’t get to play.”

That does not mean at the expense of recognized works, he added. “Keep in mind that Beethoven symphonies were not written for big orchestras,” he said. “We can and will still do those major works, but in a different way than we normally do. It can be really interesting. The fewer people you have, the more intense it becomes. So I am really looking forward to that, some one-on-one music making.”

And as challenging as they are, these times have also forced the orchestra to move to a depth of digital programming it has often talked about but never pursued. By offering concerts for streaming, the orchestra can reach new audiences regardless of geography. The PSO will work with several audio and video vendors, including Parma, which has recorded the finest orchestras in the world, Nishon said. If not for the pandemic, she said the PSO might never have found a way to work with Parma.

She declined to discuss the PSO’s investment in digital programming, because it is ongoing and involves several vendors, but said it was significant and necessary “to bring our absolute best to our patrons. … We are so moved and touched by how many people have said they would be willing to sign up and give this a try. We want to be sure we are providing patrons and supporters the best possible experience. We want to make sure the visual experience can match the level the players are bringing to the stage artistically.”

Preu concurred, and said he was pleased the orchestra is making the commitment to get the sound just right. “No matter how good the band is, if the recording is bad, it just doesn’t sound right. This will go out into the world, so it’s important to get the sound right. I think it’s a good investment to have the best possible company we can have, and it so happens they are nearby in New Hampshire. Now if we get to the point that we want to release something digital or a CD, we have established a relationship and work that we have done together.”

Stookey has performed quite a bit online during the pandemic and is easing back out into the world of performing with others. The same weekend he tapes the concert with the PSO in Portland, he will be in Boston to tape a concert, also without an audience, with his friends and fellow folksingers Tom Rush and Jonathan Edwards.

His PSO performance will consist of several songs he’s been singing nearly all his life, including Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and newer songs like “Cabin Fever Waltz,” which he debuted with the Bangor Symphony. ” ‘Cabin Fever’ is a winter song, but we all have cabin fever now,” he said. “I am thinking of writing a new verse that includes something about COVID-19.”

He also will perform “America the Beautiful,” with two new verses that he wrote a few years ago to reflect issues of immigration and climate change. One of his new verses goes like this:

“Oh, nation of the immigrant
The slave and native son
Whose loyal families labor still
That we may live as one
America, America
Renew thy founder’s call
Let liberty and justice be
The right of one and all”

As a member of Peter, Paul and Mary, Stookey was at the fore of America’s civil rights movement in the 1960s. He was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King Jr. when he delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963. He said progress on social issues has come with peaks and valleys over the decades, and it’s his job as a musician to both remind people how far we have come and what’s still ahead.

“Folk music has this ability to, in a sense, take a time capsule and break it apart and make it all relevant again. At the same time, these messages, both of the past and the one concurrently, are not lost on the younger generation,” he said.

Stookey believes, “corny as it sounds,” he said, that if people simply found a way to love others more, the world would be a kinder and better place for all. “We are all being called to love another, and that is not always easy. But if you really believe it, it will unlock the door to the community of humankind.”

Lucas Richman, conductor for the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, will lead the PSO’s pops concert. Photo courtesy of Lucas Richman

Richman has worked with Stookey many times over the years, and calls him “a person of deep spirit, gracious and kind, whose songs speak to a personal experience that everyone can relate to.” He said the PSO Pops! concert would be an experience like no other. For Richman, it will be almost a full year since he last performed on stage.

“I have a feeling, because there will not be an audience in the chamber, it will feel like we are making music for ourselves, which is a lovely thought, and I fully expect the joy of coming back together will translate well to the video for the audience’s appreciation,” he said.