I hear you - in my band we all tune down a 1/2 step, so my E is really Eb. I started doing it because I heard a bunch of my favorite players did it - SRV, Van Halen, etc. and to help my vocals. But since I play with heavy gauge strings, it does help with the bendability…
Cartooniverse, I’m an operator myself as well as a musician so I can definitely see similarities in performance. Not a classical musician though, mostly alternative/traditional rock.
I’m somewhat of a perfectionist in both realms(striving for, not necessarily always achieving). I get more butterflies before a recording session than performing live. As mentioned, it’s for good so it’s got to be just right. I find the stage to be more organic ,more flowing in nature.
So when it comes to shooting, I’d use a narrative as analogous to the studio session. Multiple takes, sometimes complex moves(focus pulls or dollys or tracking pan/tilts) and the pressure is on because of all the elements involved. You don’t want to be the one who messed up causing an extra take. Best it was the actors fault. It comes down to being so sexy when the comp was just right and the focus held and the rhythm was rock solid and the fingering was flawless.
Live TV or doc filmmaking would be the stage. Everyone knows there’s no going back so little goofs are gonna have to fly and indeed it’s a style in itself.
Appropriately one of my favorite things to shoot is musical performance. Especially when I’m not familiar with the band, discovering the patterns of a song and creating moves to accent the music.
My latest challenge is attempting both crafts at the same time. I’m mounting little pinhole video cams on our instruments for live projection.
Oooooooh how cool is that? Please let me know how that goes?
As for the eye contact thingy? My brothers in law are both in the same chamber music quartet. There is quite a bit of silent communication going on onstage while they play- but I suspect that if they were in the studio being recorded, they’d have the same level of eye contact. Then again, a LOT of their recordings are of live performances. Sometimes, as I said, they go in and do some work and play a few bars here and there to “fix” things, but a lot of their catalogue is live.
About a year ago, they played at the Alice Tulley Hall at Lincoln Center in NYC. Not such a big whoop; their group is the quartet in residence at Lincoln Center. One of the pieces that was played was a quartet piece in which all 4 instruments played the identical notes at the identical time for the entire piece.
Nobody in the audience moved. It was almost like watching ballet AND classical music at the same time. They were very, very good and kept almost completely in synch. One became aware of the … the “fullness” of each second of music. A lot of the time the notes arrived perfectly and they had a certain quality. Other times, someone would be just a hair off synch and their tone would stand out. Nobody missed a whole beat, but it’s like in filmmaking when Steadicam operators discuss what happens between the frames of a moving shot. There is a certain cadence that is defined by the music, and hearing 4 instruments playing in synch ( or damned close ) made one appreciate how astonishingly difficult it always must be to play so perfectly in the middle of each beat- because for once, we could hear when a musician was just slightly ahead or behind a given beat.
Quite the thing to hear. It was a slight of hand. I mean, the music was nice enough. But it was really a bravura thing to witness.
The stagecraft and mugging is a lot of fun to watch, and frequently folks forget how incredibly hard it is to play complex passages while mucking around onstage. My fave band is Yes. ( yeah yeah, I know… 
). Steve Howe does not move. He stands there, on his small carpet, and makes magic happen. Rare to take even a few steps. Chris Squire is all over the place. His work is clean and exciting and yet the guy is very much into the performance aspects. Different styles for different folks. I think Steve Howe is the exception- most lead guitarists have a lot more movement to their stage presence and much more interaction. That’s okay. The man is a god. So, what the heck- he doesn’t dance around much.
Frank Zappa said in The Real Frank Zappa Book that he was completely unable to sing and play guitar at the same time. No way he could talk or sing when he was improvising, which was quite a bit of the time. He also didn’t move around on stage a whole lot except to direct the band. <shrug> He was a god. Gods get to make they own rules.
Do you remember who this was by?
Just called the In-Laws. They are absolutely sure it was written by Prokofiev, for David Oistrakh to use with his adult advanced students. When I saw it performed, there were 4 instruments. Since there are no separate “parts”, one cannot really say that they were sharing parts.
I believe it’s Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins in C Major, but I am not sure of that. I’ll keep digging. My brother in law is in The Netherlands on a gig right now and didn’t answer is phone.
Jazz saxophonist-clarinetist-vocalist checking in…
I don’t recall the New Yorker article mentioned above, but I do believe that mechanical reproduction long ago increased the pressure on musicians for technical perfection in live performance. Probably long enough ago that most musicians working today will tell you it was never any different.
When you have to compete with a machine, not just for gigs but for being heard at all, you ironically need to take on some of the qualities of the machine. I think it’s especially true in classical music, and very much so in classical competition. Our ears are now trained to expect machine perfection (or close to it); music education has responded by producing a lot of highly technical young players; and they are the ones who get the breaks most of the time today (barring the odd genius, the kind of exception that proves the rule).