A big subscription drive on the part of medici.tv yields a rich harvest of free online listening and watching.
The flagship broadcasts are five best-of presentations by the New York Philharmonic, which start today.
Medici.tv is calling this the I (Heart) New York Philharmonic Festival. The HD audio and visuals begin each day at 3 p.m. (Eastern) and continue to Oct. 31. All the concerts were recorded in previous seasons.
- Today: A multimedia spectacular made up of two ballet scored by Igor Stravinsky: The Fairy’s Kiss and Petrouchka, created with the Giants Are Small company. Alan Gilbert conducts.
- Monday: A concert called Philharmonic 360, where the audience and orchestra under Gilbert explored music (and the opera Don Giovanni) in the round at the Park Avenue Armory two summers ago.
- Tuesday: The most remarkable thing about the orchestra’s main concert in the capital of North Korea in 2008 is the sea of stone-faced government officials filling the seats. Conductor Lorin Maazel must’ve felt as if he was playing to figures in a wax museum.
- Wednesday: Long Yu leads a variety-show-like, star-studded concert in honour of the last Lunar New Year.
- Thursday: Gilbert moved the orchestra into Volkswagen’s Willy Wonka-like glass car factory in Wolfsburg, Germany last May for a concert of new music by Christopher Rouse and Magnus Lindberg.
You’ll find the details here.
There are several other treats still streaming on the site at no charge (it costs nothing to register). My recommendations:
This month, Parisians have been flocking to a spectacular presentation of Gaspare Spontini’s 1807 opera La Vestale at the Théâtre des Champs-Élisées starkly staged by Éric Lacascade and brilliantly led by conductor Jérémie Rhorer. (The final live performance is tomorrow night.)
Opera fans know this work from Maria Callas legend (Luchino Visconti created a production around her at LaScala in 1954), but the original libretto by Étienne de Jouy was in French — and hadn’t been heard in 159 years until it was presented in Paris earlier this month. You’ll find the broadcast of Wednesday night’s performance here.
John Terauds