Only *Girls* Fight With Swords These Days

Your audio link to the Bastille Don Carlos, courtesy of francemusique



addendum: we so heart the French versions of this score, they are so fantastically weird.

Kill the overmediated visual and listen

sundry items

Jonas Kaufmann's new Puccini album is posted in its entirety here for the moment. It's earned Lucy's seal of approval, so I'm guessing it's worth a listen. UPDATE: It's turned into a pumpkin, so now to your noise purveyor of preference.

The Monteverdi operas from this year's Boston Early Music Festival will be posted up at WCRB's website for on-demand streaming (audio only), starting with Orfeo, which is already there. I assume they'll post up one a week as WCRB runs them on their Sunday opera program.

If you missed Stemme's Elektra from Vienna, Sveriges Radio's got your back.

Finally, Met Opera has their free audio streaming schedule up on their eye-catching but slightly aggravating new website. The festivities begin September 21 at 6:30pm ET with that most metal of all operas, Otello. Will it be the barn-burner it's supposed to be? I saw the Maestro yesterday, he was looking a little dubious.

a blood red parachute

Oh hey, so Matthias Goerne happens to be in town to jump into tonight's Wozzeck, replacing Thomas Hampson, who has apparently contracted the House Plague.* AND it's streaming free right here at 7:30 ET. Other fun points are Deborah Voigt making her role debut as Marie, and James Levine back on the podium.

*This may or may not be the same plague that took Kaufmann out of Werther on Monday and replaced him with this guy, who, from the vantage point of SiriusXM, was pretty excellent.

Massenet x (Goethe - irony) + sax =

the Met premiere of the new Richard Eyre production of Werther, with Jonas Kaufmann and Sophie Koch, will be live-streamed tomorrow, 2/18, at 8pm ET via the Met website here.

lenten entertainments

No point in giving Wagner up for Lent, the next free (audio only) webcast from the Met is the Parsifal we've all been waiting for, on Friday, Feb 15 at 6:00 pm ET. (That's Kaufmann, Dalayman, Mattei, Nikitin, Pape, in case you're wondering just why we've all been waiting.)

Medici.tv has today's Teatro Real world premiere of the new Philip Glass opera The Perfect American, with Christopher Purves and David Pittsinger, available for viewing to non-paying registrants for the next 88 days. (Non-paying registrants means it'll play for a couple of minutes and then ask you to log in or register. There's no fee for registration -- you only pay them if you want access to the archives...which actually might be worth doing as there's some really cool stuff in there.)

Audio of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra's recent Beethoven 9th at Carnegie Hall may be found here. That's with a pick-up quartet of soloists who happened to be in town for other stuff -- (ahem) yeah, Diana Damrau, Kate Lindsey, Piotr Beczala and Rene Pape.

Arte Live Web (de) has Joseph Calleja doing his Mario Lanza thing currently working on the main page, but not from its own, so if you're so inclined, follow the link to the main page and pick it off the right-hand menu.

If you're not giving up Wagner for Lent, don't give up Shakespeare either. Four hour-long episodes here, with all sorts of interesting people, but here's the thumbnail:

Watch Trailer: Shakespeare Uncovered on PBS. See more from Shakespeare Uncovered.

The Work of Art in the Age of...

Digital Reproduction, wherein the FT goes all Benjaminian on the concept of HDcasting from the opera house, and

Historical Reproduction, wherein the FT talks technical on the record industry's new-found interest in shellac. Which in Benjaminian terms is pretty funny, since the medium -- and its mechanical reproduction -- is now a component of the art itself.

Late addition: Over at the NYT, Jonas Kaufmann talks to Peter G Davis about the tyranny of Fach.