‘Quarantine soirees’: classical music and opera to stream at home
With concert halls and opera houses closed due to corona virus, organisations and musicians across the world are live-streaming concerts from their homes, or from empty halls, and opening up their digital archives so that every one can still access their music.
• Established opera streaming platform operavision.eu has a wonderful archive of productions from across Europe all available free. The site might be short of live operas to stream at the present time, but instead it has announced an increase in its archival offerings, with a mini Mozart festival running up to the end of March. You can also watch via their youtube channel.
• The Teatro Massimo in Palermo has several concerts and recent opera productions recorded live available to watch on demand. At time of writing the operas include Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, a Barber of Seville (check out the witty animated opening) and a Cav and a Pag. And there’s more to come, we are promised.
• The Teatro Regio in Turin has set up a youtube channel “Opera on the Sofa” and is making available past productions from the historic theatre. The opening offering is Nabucco, staged last February.
• Bavarian State Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper) might have had to cancel Monday 16 March’s orchestral concert, but few can have felt hard done by when, instead, the Munich opera house live-streamed – to an empty auditorium – a chamber music programme that included Schumann, Mozart and Beethoven and world-class performers, amongst them Christian Gehaher and Igor Levit. The concert can be watched on demand here. The opera house has also made available (until 26 March) Katie Mitchell’s Judith, a multimedia take on Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Concerto for Orchestra with Nina Stemme and John Lundgren, and a 2013 recording of Il Trovatore, starring Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann (until 28 March).
Sir Simon Rattle, whose concert with the Berlin Philharmonic was recorded in an empty Philharmonic and can be live streamed on demand for free. Photograph: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
• The Berlin Philharmonic has opened up its digital concert hall for this next month, giving free access to hundreds of past concerts in its famous Berlin venue and the chance to watch forthcoming events live, albeit played behind closed doors. Registration is required, and the voucher must be redeemed before 31 March.
• Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra will be livestreaming nightly chamber concerts in a series they have called Quarantine Soirées on 16, 17 and 18 March, at 1945pm (6.45pm GMT).
• Vienna State Opera has opened its archives and is offering a different opera available to watch each day, for free, via its streaming platform. Today’s offering (16 March) is Adam Fischer conducting Das Rheingold in a performance recorded in 2016; you can catch the rest of the Ring cycle later this month, plus from Falstaff to Figaro and Eötvös’s Tri Sestry (Three Sisters) – not staged in the UK since 2001 – there’s a mouthwatering array.
• Pianist Igor Levit is broadcasting nightly “House Concerts” on Twitter. Boris Giltburg, likewise – follow him on @BorisGiltburg to find when the next one is.
• New York’s Metropolitan Opera is streaming past productions from its award-winning Live in HD series of cinema transmissions while the opera house is closed. Productions will be available from 7.30pm EDT (11.30pm GMT) for 20 hours.
• Many UK organisations livestream concerts and make them available via YouTube or other channels. Check out the Wigmore Hall, which has a huge array of their past chamber music concerts free to watch, or try the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra or the London Symphony Orchestra’s YouTube channels.
Jennifer Clark as Flora and Tim Gasiorek as Miles in Opera North’s production of Britten’s The Turn Of The Screw, available to stream on opervision.eu Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian