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.

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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.

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.

sundry items of streaming

The main part of Virtual Boston Early Music Festival may be done, but it's archived through July 11, so you can still catch the things you missed. Meanwhile, the virtual Fringe part is in full swing. Check out the nightly schedule here.

While the theaters remain closed by order of the Master of the Revels, anyone with a jones for Shakespeare history plays should check out the Royal Shakespeare Company's Henry VI Open Rehearsal Project. It's an up-close experience as they tackle everything from the challenges of metrical speechifying to creating fight choreography to how to do a coronation in a plague year. They stream live and archive, all accessible for free (you have to sign up), until the final day (June 23) when they do a complete run-through of the Henry VI part 1 they've been building before our eyes for the last few weeks -- this part requires a paid ticket (£20 or about $25 right now). Henry VI is like a three season HBO series unto itself, covering the ground between Henry V and Richard III, so it's probably worth it to read a synopsis before going in if you haven't been this way before. But this project is all about the process of making theater and it's absolute gold.

virtual Boston Early Music Festival starts today!

Boston Early Music Festival goes virtual this year -- starting today -- for its biennial week-long extravaganza. While this is in some ways the same tragic situation we've been dealing with for everything, there are some silver linings, among which are:

1) You can tune in from anywhere on the planet!
2) Tickets are about 80% cheaper! (Seriously, you can do the whole thing for $150 bucks, and most of the individual concerts are $10.)
3) They're posting the Fringe festival the week after, so you get twice the festival with no scheduling conflicts or trying to get from somewhere in Back Bay to somewhere in Cambridge in five minutes! (Traditionally the Fringe is tip jar or nominal ticket price, so presumably there will be virtual tip jars and all you'll miss out on is the experience of dropping a fiver in someone's theorbo case.)
4) Performances are archived (for a limited time) so you can access them later.
5) As much as we love Jordan Hall and environs, you get to check out other venues beyond the Bostonsphere -- special mention to ACRONYM, who recorded their bit at Troy Music Hall of the perfect acoustics.
6) Amanda Forsythe

All that plus master classes and a virtual version of the famous trade show, so if you're in the market for a virginal or a crumhorn or a portative organ or a crwth, you can probably find a maker to Zoom in on.

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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.

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.

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.

sundry items

So by now our schedules are overflowing with All The Online Things -- leaving us to wonder what they did for fun during lengthy pre-internet quarantine periods, but I'm sure historians have weighed in on this elsewhere on the intertubes -- so, apart from the standard issue binge-watches and nightly opera streams, we'll highlight three items for this week:

The NTLive stream on YT (to sometime Thursday GMT) is A Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson, worth catching if you missed it in theaters and/or in the theatre;

Complicité's The Encounter, which originally streamed on The Space website when they were still doing that kind of thing, is up through tomorrow -- you will need headphones but the soundscape work is more than worth the price of admission;

and Folk On Foot's Front Room Festival 2 goes live tomorrow at 9am ET -- the first one was pretty excellent, went smoothly, and raised a bucket of cash for UK artist relief, and the lineup for the second round is just as stellar. Will likely be housed on YT for a time, if you're bound for other plans.

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.

The truth of what we are: Richard II @ NTLive

A few weeks ago we took advantage of a lull in the snow to take in the NT Live of Simon Russell Beale's Richard II, in a very stripped down and streamlined version from the Almeida Theatre directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons. RII is a wordy play with a big cast and a lot of complicated ground to cover, so clocking in at two hours is quite a feat of editing.

And edit they did. The play is stripped of props, costumes, a lot of its text, and doors. Three walls and a floor of riveted industrial steel plates contain every scene, with a luminescent ceiling that provides most of the lighting. Nobody leaves or enters -- nobody can leave or enter, which is pretty much the point -- and the whole cast (in street clothes except for a gold paperboard crown) is on stage at all times. Everyone but Richard and Bolingbroke shuffle roles. Saskia Reeves, who starts the play as Bushey, plays all her other roles smeared in the blood of her first character's execution. There is something poetic, if uncomfortable, in that, nor is anyone spared: buckets line the walls marked Water, Soil, and Blood, and over the course of the play, used for various purposes, their contents mire this scepter'd isle and her people in an inescapably vile slough of ambition, betrayal, and murder. Nowhere is this better brought home than in the comedic yet horrifying lightning-round of internecine accusation and gratuitous gage-casting that Bolingbroke (Leo Bill), newly-crowned, realizes he is completely powerless to stop. He looks very tired by then.

Given the lack of frills and extras, blocking and choreography count for a great deal. Much is accomplished by various clusterings of the secondary characters, whose function is often chorus-like and underscores the precarious nature of allegiance under duress. You can't always tell who any of them are or where they're placing their bets, but in the end of course it doesn't matter.

Simon Russell Beale gets to start the play with Richard's ending soliloquy, a device that frames history as theater and makes everything flashback until the speech comes around again toward the end of the play. Certain other changes are deftly managed, like the garden scene where normally the Queen would be in conversation with her ladies - the ladies' lines are given to Richard here. So it becomes a dialogue in which Richard's sense of self as king is briskly torn down as each frivolous pastime he offers, each remnant of his days of safety, is rejected in favor of some grim alternative in this new reality.

SRB made his name as an actor on his keen sense of detail in a line, and he is no dogmatic follower of inherited interpretation or straitjacketing adherence to meter. So, in any text you think you know well, he can make a chasm open up suddenly at your feet. Here, in the Westminster scene, it was when he's asked leave to go "Whither you will, so I were from your sights", and Bolingbroke says "Go some of you and convey him to the Tower." There's a moment's hesitation as Richard processes what that means, and we feel some of that sudden vertigo - that palmer's walking staff would never be an option.

carpe scaenam

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.

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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?

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.

suspected luters

Seattle Soundcloud addendum

Including mezzo Deborah Nansteel, who just made her Met debut on Thursday as Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor (and who turned in a memorably scorching O don fatale at a Young Artist recital at Glimmerglass a few years back).

box of bleeding chunks

Some of these chunks are pretty well minced, but if you have time to kill and a twitchy mouse hand, Seattle Opera's Soundcloud has some rewards for diligent scrolling.