Met Opera on the web

We've been taking an extended live music break here in the Hot Zone, but the Met's new season starts next week with Sondra Radvanovsky's Medea, so...for any who will, you can find the free audio-stream schedule for 2022/23 on the Met website. (And yes, for USians Met Opera Radio on SiriusXM is also still an option.)

sundry items of Met streaming

For anyone who missed it and is so inclined, the 911 Memorial Verdi Requiem performance from the Met is up on the PBS website for another day or two -- the first live performance in the house since back when. Pérez, DeYoung, Polenzani, Owens, YNS conducting, worth a look in. (After 9/26 it goes to PBS Passport and you'll need to pony up a membership.)



Now they've blown the cobwebs out of the hall with a proper Dies Irae or three, the new season starts on Monday with the premiere of Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Baritone Will Liverman's got a voice like polished oak, here's a too-short snippet



You can hear the audio stream on the Met website starting at 6:25pm ET, and on SiriusXM satellite radio by subscription (and I think this is still US/North America only?). It'll show up in the Live in HD series on October 23.

virtual airwaves

It's late September, time to dust off the SiriusXM account and tune in to live Met broadcasts, should a person be so inclined. You can find the whole live Met webcast schedule for Sirius here, and the weekly free livestreams on the Met website here. Note: for the first two months of the season, some webcasts will be hosted on Sirius and others on the Met Opera site. There is a reason for this, but suffice it to say if you're a USian completist opera nerd, you should probably subscribe to SiriusXM's online service.

off the clock

The Met streams the opener of its new production of La Traviata this Tuesday, 12/4, at 7:55pm ET, with Diana Damrau, Juan Diego Flórez, and Quinn Kelsey, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. You can check it out here if they remember to put the player back up.

details details

The Met season has ticked off its first two performances while we were otherwise engaged, but oh well, there are worse things than missing Boheme number million and twelve. While we're all scrambling to locate our tattered copies of Orientalism in honor of the new production of Samson, you can check out the free live webcast schedule for the whole season here.

The weekly schedule for the SiriusXM webcasts, which sometimes correspond to the Met site webcasts and sometimes don't, is available here. SiriusXM is a subscription satellite radio service available in the US and last I looked they were still offering a web-only streaming service for about $16/month, with a free trial period to check it out. The player also has a useful rewind feature if you show up late to the game (which I see they have updated to make it clunkier, but beggars can't be choosers).

For those of you who have only one item of interest on the agenda, the JDD Tito is April 3 at 8pm ET. Though you may want to stop in again on May 3 for Dialogues, bc srsly Leonard/Pieczonka/Morley/Cargill/Mattila/Portillo/D Croft, c. YNS, can there be any better way to start your weekend?

new regime

Mr. Nézet-Séguin said he was excited to mount several operas that have never or rarely been performed at the Met, including Handel’s “Agrippina” and “Alcina”; Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in the original French (the company has only performed the Italian version); Cherubini’s “Medea,” in Italian; and Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel.”

Read all about it... ...except for the casting, so place your bets.

aisling

In case you forgot to set your atomic JDD/AC countdown clock, the Met Cendrillon prima is tomorrow at 8pm ET, and you can listen to it on the Met Opera website. Don't let it all turn into a pumpkin.

more streaming intertubes

Elektra, with Christine Goerke in the tr, opens tonight at the Met. Catch the audio stream here, or on SiriusXM, at 8pm ET. (NYT puff piece as YNS turns conducting into an Olympic sport here.)

Yuletide rhizomes

The Met celebrates the solstice early with this season's Norma 2.0, aka Angela Meade and Jamie Barton. Check it out pretty much anywhere at 1pm ET today, but you can find it at WQXR, OE1, and BBC 3 if you're short of local options.

Update: archived here for the next couple of weeks.

Gallia in tres partes: Norma encore at OperaMall

Welp [spoiler alert], so Adalgisa doubles down on Irminsul, so I guess Clotilde is elected to harness up the getaway chariot. I got no problem with that. She probably has a sister/friend/ex over at the Fortress of Shadows and they could probably use one druid priestess, slightly singed, even if she will have to adapt to using more sensible diety names.

Actually, the whole time Pollione was going on about how great the Roman pantheon is in comparison, all I could think of was Eddie Izzard's thing about Crap Roman Gods viz. Jeff the God of Biscuits.

Random other notes and observations:

Dude, nobody does the hand slice thing anymore, that's so last century.

Ew. What a shark. Totally wicker basket that guy, Gaulish people.

The Inevitable Woad

Druid banda!

Enthusiastic Axe Dude's torc designed by Beatz by Dre?

Dramatic Spear Guy watches too much Spartacus.

These Gaulish bros are the hairy antecedents to Rodrigo's tub-thumping highlanders in LDDL.

Srsly is Matthew Rose like 8 feet tall?

"But stray, what was Radvanovsky's Casta diva like?"

Rumbling so loud fr theater next door I thought Alec Guinness wld step forth fr chorus of druids & declare that to be no moon #Norma

— Ministry of Noise (@samizdat2007) October 12, 2017

moreover

Not to be outdone by last night's Bonfire of the Subtexts festivities -- well, a little to be outdone, but still a matter of extreme interest -- tonight, streaming on SiriusXM only, is Tara Erraught's Met debut as Nicklausse (also Erin Morley as Machine Girl).

Tara Erraught as Nicklausse, photo Marty Sohl/Met Opera

Those of you with SiriusXM know where to go. Those of you without know what to do. (Ditto if you want to hear more Bonfires, because, not surprisingly, they're cueing that up quite a bit.)

Update: Of course they are running the 1995 ASvO Rosenkavalier at midnight. Of course they are.

Happy Opening Night at the Met, Pagans!

Tune in to tonight's performance of Norma here.



Update: with a cast so awesome it flattened the cat

warming the tubes

It's that time of year again when opera nerds of North America scrape the oxidation off the contacts, burn the dust off the vacuum tubes, and clear their social calendars of, uh, social things. The Met opens with Norma on Monday, September 25. You'll find it live-streamed on the Met website here, where you'll also find the calendar for everything else they're streaming for free on the website this season.

Those of you with SiriusXM access can find the full calendar of live webcasts here, thus enabling you to plan your social event cancellations months in advance, rather than in the ad hoc weekly fashion of seasons past. Note SiriusXM has moved the channel from 74 to 75, so if you turn on the radio and a guy is telling you he woke up this morning with the blues all around his bed, let him tell you all about it for a few minutes and then skip to the next channel.

sundry items

Just a reminder that the opener for the new Met Rosenkavalier will be streamed on the Met website on Thursday, April 13, starting at 7pm ET.

While you wait, here's Boston's Handel & Haydn Society doing the Monteverdi Vespers at the Temple of Reverb Dendur.



Or there's one of Eliza Carthy's big band projects live in Hull, with a rather killer opening set from Olivia Chaney, right here.

carpe scaenam

The Met premieres its new production of Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin on Thursday, 12/1, and you can listen to it here for free or via SiriusXM at 7:30pm ET. As has probably already been pointed out everywhere, this will be the first opera of a woman composer done at the Met since 1903. (That was Dame Ethel Smyth's Der Wald , which was evidently responsible for certain amount of breathless cognitive dissonance among critics of the day.) The NYT's Zachary Woolfe has a thumbnail here.

Eric Owens, Susanna Phillips Photo: Kristian Schuller

Peter Allen 1920 - 2016

Peter Allen was the announcer for the Met broadcasts from 1975, when he succeeded Milton Cross, to 2004, when Margaret Juntwait took the mic. He had this cool delivery that, while not being stagey, made every plot synopsis, costume description, and singer bio its own bit of theater. His cadences might seem slightly old skool now, but I miss them when the scripted Saturday tag-team act gets a bit too precious. NYT obituary here.

sex, death, and foreign policy for Monday

Tomorrow puts us in the unusual quandary of having to choose between Jerry Springer: The Opera the first [ahem] Presidential Melee Bar Brawl Halloween Frat Party Debate or the Met's opening night Tristan. You can find the latter here, along with the season schedule for the free, once a week webcasts on the Met website. (If you'd like more than that, SiriusXM Radio's online streaming service is your destination.) Met festivities begin at 4:30, because red carpet blah blah woof woof.

small town parades

Right now I'm just nomming on the fact that Mrs Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, Gilded Age One Percenter of Legend and founder of the Metropolitan Opera, helped organize and probably bankrolled a pro-suffrage parade in Manhattan that included a contingent of pro-suffrage men led by Max Eastman, publisher of Ten Days That Shook the World.

sundry items

It's hardly breaking news by now, but Maestro Yannick's got the Met gig. We're fine with that, although we sort of wish he'd spend a little more time making the Philadelphia's summers (and ours) more interesting. Also it will be interesting to see what happens with the Met now officially in the churn of world-wide conductor-dom. UPDATE: Alex Ross has it all in a nutshell.

Thanks to Dr T's headsup, here is the TCE Werther with JDF and JDD from a few weeks back, role debuts for both.

pregame

Peter Gelb moderates a panel discussion with director William Kentridge and the principle cast members of the Met's upcoming Lulu