SC headsup

Dame Sarah Connolly on Front Row, talking her new album, right here at about 19:00.

Real life is what happens while you're forgetting about Proms

The Mahler 3 from Proms with Sarah Connolly, c Haitink, is up for a few more days here, but you have a few weeks yet to catch Das Lied von der Erde with Alice Coote and Gregory Kunde, likewise Rueckert Lieder with mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner b/w Mozart's Great Mass in C with Carolyn Sampson and a bunch of other people.

Links to all available Proms audio can be found here.

sundry items

Some of you may be interested in the talking heads livestreams from the Opera America conference. Bernard Foccroulle, GM of Aix, is up next at 10:45am ET today.

BBC Radio 3 is having a little Shakespeare festival, so they've posted up a new Winter's Tale, with Danny Sapani and Eve Best, and with music by Tim van Eyken (also playing Autolycus), whom the hipster folkies among you will know from before he did the music for War Horse. It's up for another ten days or so.

Next after that is Ian McDiarmid's King Lear, which should be around for a couple of weeks yet.

WNYC's Studio 360 has a segment on the new opera JFK (and also an interview with Tilda Swinton).

Saturday Posting from the Ministry of Noise

O Solitude

sundry items

If you've been to see The Lady in the Van, and you're in an Alan Bennett frame of mind, BBC 4 Extra is running the 1994 radio version of An Englishman Abroad, with Penelope Wilton as the actress Coral Browne and Michael Gambon as the spy Guy Burgess.

Sure, it's March, you could go see any of a gazillion fine but inevitable Irish bands, or you could check out one of the finest setar/shurangiz players extant, Iranian multi-instrumentalist Sahba Motallebi, who'll be playing this Friday at (le) poisson rouge. Show starts with our local heroes KoriSoron at 7:30pm ET, and for those beyond NYC it will be live streamed somewhere here.

A decade or so and many a touring mile from the first time we saw it at Vergennes town hall, a reworked and expanded Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell's telling of the Orpheus myth, opens in late May, waaay downtown at New York Theatre Workshop. Here's what it looked like five years ago at the aforementioned lpr

while we wait

to see what happens with this sudden lunge into the 19th century, here's Mary-Ellen Nesi (the Penelope of BEMF's Ulisse) with B'Rock at the Proms yesterday.

Celtic Connections

Okay I promise to quit with the folkie stuff for a while but this was recorded yesterday and Norma Waterson is still boss.

home team

Congratulations to Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer for winning Best Trad Song at last night's BBC Folk Awards!