Such an inspiring concert: Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Center tonight presented a virtual concert showcasing and celebrating great Black singers, with tenor Lawrence Brownlee as host. Available on YouTube and Facebook for the next 30 days.
Program notes here.
Cast list:
Lawrence Brownlee, Host and Artistic Advisor
Craig Terry, Pianist and Ryan Opera Center Music Director
Whitney Morrison, soprano
J’Nai Bridges, mezzo-soprano
Will Liverman, baritone
Martin Luther Clark, tenor
Lunga Eric Hallam, tenor
Leroy Davis, baritone
Chris Reynolds, pianist
Members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra
This looks intriguing: the first-ever live streaming from the ancient theater of Epidaurus. On 25 July at 21.00 Athens time (GMT +2), a performance of The Persians by Aeschylus will be streamed to a global audience via YouTube (donations welcome). All proceeds will benefit the National Theatre and Greek actors impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
On 18 July at 7:30p.m. (Beijing time), the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra (SPO) closes its season with a concert that will be delay-streamed a week later, starting at 1:00p.m. EST (7:00p.m. Central European Time) on Saturday, 25 July, on Facebook and Twitter. The stream will remain available here for viewing for an indefinite period.
SPO Artistic Director Zhang Yi will conduct the orchestra in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”) — part of the ensemble’s complete Bruckner cycle — and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”), with Song Siheng as the soloist.
On Thursday, 16 July, Tippet Rise launches its monthly streaming series, Tippet Rise & Friends at Home, with a concert featuring pianist Behzod Abduraimov in a program of works by Liszt, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev.
I was able to visit Tippet Rise over the last two summers. Its unique landscape makes an indelible impression that can’t be replicated digitally, but a short film titled Tippet Rise from the Sky (a collaboration with the drone master Blastr) will be included with the stream and should at least suggest something of the flavor of this 12,000-acre art center in Montana. The series will be available on the Tippet Rise website at tippetrise.org/virtual-events.
Here’s a new interview with Olga Neuwirth conducted by Boulez Saal’s Philipp Brieler, discussing Pierre Boulez and Neuwirth’s new piece Naufraghi del mondo que hanno ancora un cuore — one of the new works premiered on Saturday’s program. The entire Festival of New Music: Distance/Intimacy is being streamed live and then archived for 30 days. You can find this program here (Neuwirth’s piece begins at 55:00).
Starting today, Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin is presenting a four-day Festival of New Music, which will juxtapose online premieres with works by the hall’s namesake.
Curated by Daniel Barenboim and Emmanuel Pahud, the programs — presented in the the Frank Gehry-designed space — are being streamed on the Boulez-Saal Facebook page as well as on its YouTube channel. These programs will then remain available, free on-demand, for 30 days.
Quite by accident, early music groups and chamber ensembles have turned out to have a natural advantage during the current pandemic. Their compact size can more easily accommodate distancing requirements as presenters gingerly proceed to reintroduce public performances. Even more, Il Suonar Parlante pointedly homed in on the theme of plague itself for their choice of programme at the Ravenna Festival…
[clip from the earlier incarnation of the James Ehnes Quartet, which launches Seattle’s Virtual Summer Festival this week]
The Seattle Chamber Music Society launches its Virtual Summer Festival this evening. This isn’t just a visit to the archives but a 12-concert series of all brand-new live performances that will be taped before being released to the public as streams.
The concerts will be made available on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule at 7pm PST. These will be “on-demand”: in other words, you won’t have to view them at the specific streaming time but can access all concerts for which you have purchased a pass through 10 August 2020 — as many times as you like.
This is an experiment and a risk. How many will pay for internet performances, as opposed to free streams? Each concert costs $15, or you can purchase a pass to all 12 programs for $125. For the first time, SCMS’s Chamber Festival is thus available to anyone anywhere with internet access, and performances cannot be “sold out.”
I wrote about the planning that went into this approach for the Seattle Times.
Artistic Director James Ehnes and his quartet will perform part two of their complete Beethoven quartet cycle in the three concerts on offer this week. This continues and concludes the journey they began in January — under normal circumstances — at the shorter Winter Festival.
Meanwhile, Ehnes put his quarantine time to use at his home in Florida by recording the solo partitas and sonatas of J.S. Bach and the corresponding Ysaÿe sonatas. He will be releasing these in a series, starting here.
Here’s a chance to get an experience of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s vast cycle of seven operas, LICHT: Die sieben Tage der Woche (“LIGHT: The Seven Days of the Week”). On Sunday, Birmingham Opera is streaming MITTWOCHhere, the program book for which is available online.
You can also see a stream of SAMSTAG performed at the Paris Philharmonie.
And in June 2019, Dutch National Opera presented a version of LICHT spread over three days and condensing the original 29 hours into 15. See a 90-minute overview of this epic undertaking.
Certain music awakens that higher being within us who we constantly want to become. We really always want to become a better person than we are at the moment, otherwise our whole life would have no meaning. — Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1975
UPDATE: Here’s a link to the Zoom panel talk referenced below.
The Great Depression has been repeatedly invoked of late as we try to gauge the enormous impact of the current pandemic and the related economic crisis. But in the 1930s, Americans had a government in place that recognized the importance of the arts through the Works Progress Administration. These programs employed massive numbers of artists, writers, musicians, actors, dancers, and photographers.
On 5 July, together with Naxos and The American Interest, PostClassical Ensemble (PCE) presents the next installment in its More than Music series: Behrouz Jamali’s documentary on The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), which focuses on the Dust Bowl, and The River (1938), a modern ode to the role played by the Mississippi River. With scores by Virgil Thomson, both were the first-ever films created by the federal government for commercial release (i.e., not merely informational or educational films). Both champion a distinctly anti-Hollywood aesthetic.
There will be a follow-up Zoom chat on 9 July at 3pm EST. A panel will explore government funding for the arts during the pandemic: conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez, PCE Executive Producer Joseph Horowitz, historian David Woolner, and film historians Neil Lerner and George Stoney. Also on the agenda is a discussion of how Roosevelt’s New Deal addressed issues of race in the era of Jim Crow. To register, click here.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 