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.)

more from Boston

Boston Baroque is spending this weekend with Handel's Amadigi di Gaula, live and online, with a cast including Anthony Roth Costanzo, Amanda Forsythe, Daniela Mack, and Camille Ortiz. Details at baroque.boston. The April 22 performance gets a livestream, via Idagio, ticketed on a sliding-scale and available for a month.

item of streaming

Boston Early Music Festival has been running in-person concerts this year but taping them for delayed streaming -- which is really nice for those of us who used to go to things and now cannot. Their latest, with soprano Carolyn Sampson and fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout in a program of Mozart, Haydn, et al., goes live on Saturday, April 9th. You can find the details at bemf.org, along with info about the rest of the BEMF season.

Meantime here's a taster of the album Songs of Separation, out now on the Bis label.

David Surette

The passing of New Hampshire guitar and mandolin player David Surette is a tremendous loss to the folk community in New England and beyond. He had the most elegant guitar style, and a way of fitting Celtic tunes to a six-string neck that made those tunes really live and breathe, as witness here on a couple of Breton dance tunes...



...and here on the O'Carolan tune Planxty Fanny Power, which has seen countless guitar arrangements in its time but none better than this one...



Our deepest condolences to his family and his friends.

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.

Nanci Griffith, 1953 - 2021

One of the greats...

sundry items of streaming

A couple of nice sets from Kate Lindsey (for La Scala) and Joe Jencks (for Old Songs). These are short-timers, so avail yourselves before they go, and don't forget to tip your musos whenever you can.

A little Michael McGoldrick for the day - slightly truncated but entirely worth an ear

A few tunes on Uilleann Pipes for St Patricks Day in the beautiful setting of my local refurbished Stretford Public hall.Thanks to Kate and staff for letting me wonder in off the street.

tunes are called O'farrells welcome to limerick and the connaught heifers. pic.twitter.com/UmlPO0ofQI

— Michael McGoldrick (@mcgoldrickflute) March 17, 2021

Retro Proms and Folk on Foot

Late to the game, but BBC 3 is making up for the cancellation of Proms 2020 by trotting out some pretty great archival material, and archiving it for a month. You can feast away right here.

The Folk-on-Foot Festival 3 is up on Monday, August 31. The first two iterations had mostly solo artists or those co-habiting in lockdown. This version they get to meet up with bandmates and make some noise at the requisite 2 meters. Start time 2pm BST, or whatever that translates to where you're at. Lineup and other details here, as well as a link to their fundraising -- like the others, this is a 50/50 fundraiser, with half going to participating artists and the other half going to the UK charity Help Musicians.

casting out

Philip Schuyler’s coming down. By the ruling of the mayor, who is listening to members of her staff who know enough history to know that, yes, he was our local general in the Continental Army, but also yes, he was a slave owner. As were many local prominent people of his day, and many Continental Army generals. And that point, though not newly discovered, has finally been elevated from biographical footnote to chapter heading.

This follows Christopher Columbus losing his head and/or his pedestal in more than one location, and the Italian-American Governor of New York defending him (or his bronze representations) as points of pride for Italian-Americans. Some people have suggested replacing him (the statue, not the Governor) with Verdi. But Verdi, by some accounts, though artist and philanthropist, was also a Type A asshole and not above using the word Jew as a negative epithet in his personal correspondence, and people will eventually figure that out.

Of course in other areas of the opera world we’ve had our own recent seasons of iconoclasm, mostly to do with living people with careers and now rap sheets to go with them. Time will tell how all that levels out. But opera people, given the long run, are pretty good at parsing art from artist – just ask any liberal lefty Wagnerite. In the short run, the hammer of justice swings hard, as it should.

There has been debate over what should go on the pedestal in place of Philip Schuyler. And no doubt it has already prompted people to survey the inventory of city monuments, so here is our incomplete list:

• Moses in the park -- more than a bit campy in light of the tulip beds surrounding him and legions of little kids climbing over the rocks at his feet, and a bit ironic when considered in an Old Testament context. Commissioned by the prominent husband of a prominent wife who felt women had no right to a public voice (aka the vote) and used her prominent wifely platform to say so a lot;

• Spanish-American War Guy – nobody here really remembers what that was about but you get extra points if you don’t confuse it with the Spanish Civil War and gold star if you mumble something about remembering the Maine;

• American Civil War cenotaph -- not presently arguable, but long a point of contention between history nerds and skateboarders;

• Police memorial –- unimaginative, derivative in style, ruined a really nice park fountain, and memorializes a PD that has a long, well-documented history of racism and general cack-handedness. So, entirely representative of what it seeks to represent, really. But restore the fountain to the community and find some other way;

…and

• Nipper. Our Nibbles Woodaway. Unofficial mascot of the city, parked on a building downtown that used to belong to RCA. A grass-roots movement to replace Schuyler with Nipper is gaining momentum, but would eventually clash with whoever owns the trademark now. And what does this dog represent? If Schuyler points to the region’s proud and problematic Revolutionary War history, Nipper points to the region’s better-than-average music scene. Cast that in bronze.

Altamont

If you've hung around the Third Floor long enough, you'll know that usually this weekend we've bugged out to Altamont, NY for the Old Songs Festival of Traditional Music and Dance. However, due to the usual suspect, "the fester" (as it's been lovingly referred to for some while) has moved to an online, audio-only version -- find it here. This afternoon has archival recordings from festivals past, many of them great things unheard since back when. A cracking tune from Bua's on right now. And tonight they'll replicate the main stage concert with sets the scheduled performers recorded at home. Other things to follow Sunday, including some plans for a virtual Shape Note sing. Watch that space.

The Wreckers at Annandale redux

The Fisher Center, that Frank Gehry manifestation at the north end of the Bard College campus, is usually an epicenter of happening in the summer, but the grip of Covid reaches even to the perimeter of the Enchanted Forest, so...they're making up for the cancellation of Bard Summerscape and the Bard Music Festival this year with video from festivals past, housed under the rubric #Upstreaming. The latest is Dame Ethel Smyth's 1906 opera The Wreckers, available for streaming here.

and what we wrote about it back when is here.

Every round goes higher

Juneteenth has been celebrated in downtown Rens-wijk for more than a decade, in a neighborhood-funded, door-to-door, word-of-mouth way without the imprimatur of Officialdom. Sort of like the history of Juneteenth itself. Now Officialdom is catching up. Whether it heralds real change or just a new set of curtains remains to be seen, but...

Jessye Norman, 1945 - 2019

I really have nothing to add to the cascade of tributes these last few days. Instead, while her Strauss and Wagner are getting plenty of social media airtime, I thought I'd post a bit of her Carmen documentary. She took a lot of critical heat for this project at the time -- her involvement with the role upset the gatekeepers -- but I like this clip (and the doc in general) because it shows her exercising her tremendous art in the less-guarded environs of the recording studio...which is to say, having fun.

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.

icymi

BBC 3's Music Matters recent ep. on transgender opera singers, plus Deborah Warner on Billy Budd, can be found here.

Cathy Barton 1955 - 2019

Cathy Barton's compendium of songs and tunes was pretty much inexhaustible, and she was a killer banjo player, and she had a voice you could listen to all day. Everything in her cover of Gail Davies' Grandma's Song applies, except the "old" and swap out Oklahoma for Missouri. Over forty years, she and her husband Dave Para taught those old folk songs (and some newer ones), and those old tunes, to countless people. And if you wanted to know how a reindeer got into a song from the Ozarks, they could surely tell you. A rock-solid legacy, but gone too soon.

"No man is greater than his mother..."

The Library of Congress has posted up a collection of Women's Suffrage-related sheet music (both pro and anti, it should be noted) just in time for enterprising USian musos who need a few chunes for the 19th Amendment ratification centennial.

Febb Burn writes a letter to her Senator. Image via teachtnhistory.org

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Conductor Jane Glover reads from her book Handel in London in five 15 minute episodes currently posted up on BBC 4's Book of the Week website.

Kevin Puts' Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night, which has been touring houses in the worldwide operatic hinterlands and had quite a spectacular production at Glimmerglass this past summer, is posted up on the BBC Radio 3 website in Opera North's recent concert outing. This young opera has already had multiple productions, but look for Tomer Zvulun's especially breathtaking one at an opera house near you.

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.