Showing posts with label SiriusXM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SiriusXM. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
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.)
Friday, September 24, 2021
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
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.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
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?
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?
Tuesday, September 26, 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).
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.
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| 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.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
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.
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.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
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.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Margaret Juntwait 1957 - 2015
News posted yesterday that Margaret Juntwait, the voice of the Met broadcasts for the last 10 years, has died of complications from ovarian cancer. She was 58 years old.
The opera grapevine extends far, but often not so far as this blog. But in our age, at once media-saturated and cancer-saturated, there's a cancer-shaped lacuna that begins to form when a media personality (I hate to use that term for her, but there it is for lack of a better) abruptly disappears, and for an extended period. It's the foremost of likely causes, and, as Mary Jo Heath's casual addition "filling in for Margaret Juntwait" began to harden into a constant refrain, it also, in time, acquired an air of tribute, and of soldiering on. Which I suppose is the long-winded way of saying we are not altogether surprised, but we are no less saddened by the loss.
From the perspective of an audience member, I think it's safe to say that Margaret Juntwait got handed a job of work in 2004. First, she had to fill the microphone presence of Peter Allen, who had been the unmistakable voice of the Met broadcasts for almost 30 years. His style was hieratic, some might say mannered, but it had a stylistic retro cool that was performative in and of itself. He could speak words, in that Voice of his, and you would find yourself taking the plot of La Gioconda seriously. It was like his X-Men superpower.
And by 2004, it was what we had been used to for a long time. Then he retired, and Juntwait's task was to step in and alter our expectations, not only of the type of voice behind the mic, but of the type of things that voice would say. If you listen back, you can hear the cautious beginning, the Classical Radio voice, carefully on script, carefully modulated, no digressions. It was all very accomplished, professional, proper at the beginning. Smooth. A little slick, maybe. Not Peter Allen's theatricality, but, you thought, they could have done worse. And you figured she'd grow into it if she stuck around.
She did stick around, and she did grow into it. And there was another aspect to Juntwait's tenure which was unprecedented: we only ever heard Peter Allen on Saturdays from December to May. But Margaret Juntwait ushered in the Sirius broadcasts, which run the whole season from late September, and which, in the beginning, ran four live performances a week. That ended up being a whole lot of mic time.
The Met has gradually scaled back its live Sirius presence, but that robust start gave them a lot of time to experiment, invent a groove, and settle into it. They moved to two commentators (William Berger during the week, Ira Siff on Saturdays), interviews were introduced, things got (mostly) way more relaxed and conversational. Margaret Juntwait, the voice of Met Opera broadcasts, developed along with the audience she shepherded, through performance after performance, from a radio booth often directly connected to that audience through email or social media. Connected, not abstractly, as in the days of old, but in realtime, in a very real way.
So you could say she was a pioneer at a fascinating period in the history of opera. You could say that, when opera entered the 21st century, she was there at the head of the vanguard. No one else will occupy the airspace she did, at that first moment that brought the Met stage and the Met audience closer than it had ever been before. That moment has already gone.
The opera grapevine extends far, but often not so far as this blog. But in our age, at once media-saturated and cancer-saturated, there's a cancer-shaped lacuna that begins to form when a media personality (I hate to use that term for her, but there it is for lack of a better) abruptly disappears, and for an extended period. It's the foremost of likely causes, and, as Mary Jo Heath's casual addition "filling in for Margaret Juntwait" began to harden into a constant refrain, it also, in time, acquired an air of tribute, and of soldiering on. Which I suppose is the long-winded way of saying we are not altogether surprised, but we are no less saddened by the loss.
From the perspective of an audience member, I think it's safe to say that Margaret Juntwait got handed a job of work in 2004. First, she had to fill the microphone presence of Peter Allen, who had been the unmistakable voice of the Met broadcasts for almost 30 years. His style was hieratic, some might say mannered, but it had a stylistic retro cool that was performative in and of itself. He could speak words, in that Voice of his, and you would find yourself taking the plot of La Gioconda seriously. It was like his X-Men superpower.
And by 2004, it was what we had been used to for a long time. Then he retired, and Juntwait's task was to step in and alter our expectations, not only of the type of voice behind the mic, but of the type of things that voice would say. If you listen back, you can hear the cautious beginning, the Classical Radio voice, carefully on script, carefully modulated, no digressions. It was all very accomplished, professional, proper at the beginning. Smooth. A little slick, maybe. Not Peter Allen's theatricality, but, you thought, they could have done worse. And you figured she'd grow into it if she stuck around.
She did stick around, and she did grow into it. And there was another aspect to Juntwait's tenure which was unprecedented: we only ever heard Peter Allen on Saturdays from December to May. But Margaret Juntwait ushered in the Sirius broadcasts, which run the whole season from late September, and which, in the beginning, ran four live performances a week. That ended up being a whole lot of mic time.
The Met has gradually scaled back its live Sirius presence, but that robust start gave them a lot of time to experiment, invent a groove, and settle into it. They moved to two commentators (William Berger during the week, Ira Siff on Saturdays), interviews were introduced, things got (mostly) way more relaxed and conversational. Margaret Juntwait, the voice of Met Opera broadcasts, developed along with the audience she shepherded, through performance after performance, from a radio booth often directly connected to that audience through email or social media. Connected, not abstractly, as in the days of old, but in realtime, in a very real way.
So you could say she was a pioneer at a fascinating period in the history of opera. You could say that, when opera entered the 21st century, she was there at the head of the vanguard. No one else will occupy the airspace she did, at that first moment that brought the Met stage and the Met audience closer than it had ever been before. That moment has already gone.
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