August medici.tv webcast to feature Renée Fleming

In its fifth summer, medici.tv is the go-to venue on the Web for classical music lovers to enjoy the world’s greatest artists performing at the most exclusive festivals. August offerings on medici.tv include America’s top soprano, Renée Fleming, singing an all-Strauss program from the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann. The concert represents the first collaboration between medici.tv and the Salzburg Festival. Other August medici.tv highlights include eight concerts from France’s Annecy Classic Festival, with such compelling artists as conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, pianists Denis Matsuev and Khatia Buniatishvili, violinist Renaud Capuçon, cellist Gautier Capuçon, and conductor Yuri Temirkanov with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic.

In the Salzburg concert, available August 8 on medici.tv, Renée Fleming will perform much of the repertoire from her acclaimed 2008 Decca album of Strauss songs and arias recorded with Thielemann. The upcoming program will also include Thielemann leading the incomparable Vienna Philharmonic in one of his signatures works, Strauss’s epic symphonic poem An Alpine Symphony. “It’s a great honor to start our collaboration with the Salzburg Festival, one the most fascinating places for classical music aficionados,” comments Hervé Boissiere, CEO and founder of medici.tv. “After Verbier, Aix-en-Provence, Aspen, Lucerne or Glyndebourne, this outstanding concert represents a very special achievement in the medici.tv adventure. We are grateful to the Salzburg Festival, the unique Vienna Philharmonic, the artists and our partner Rolex, without whom this project would not have been possible.”

Beginning August 24, medici.tv will webcast eight concerts from the Annecy Classic Festival, set in France’s Rhône-Alps region. The first concert will feature Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Grieg works, with Valery Gergiev leading his Mariinsky Orchestra and soloists Gautier Capuçon and Denis Matsuev. Capuçon and Matsuev will perform in separate concerts with Yuri Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and Matsuev will perform a solo recital. A full list of Annecy concerts is below.

The medici.tv free app for iPads, iPhones and other digital devices – available from the Apple store – was recently named one of the top five classical-music apps by New York City classical music station WQXR. The medici.tv app is now available as an Android application. Android users can now watch free of charge medici.tv’s classical music programs, including more than 20 concerts from the Verbier Festival in high definition. The freshly redesigned medici.tv has reaped acclaim as one of the Web’s leading classical music experiences on any device. A column by Gramophone editor-in-chief James Jolly in June detailed the medici.tv experience at length, marveling over the site’s “treasures aplenty.”

August events at medici.tv

August 8, 2011, 3pm EDT

Salzburg Festival, Austria

Vienna Philharmonic

Renée Fleming, soprano; Christian Thielemann, conductor

All-Strauss program

Annecy Classic Festival

(with the support of AV Cheglakov Foundation)

August 24, 2011, 3pm EDT

Valery Gergiev, Denis Matsuev, Gautier Capuçon, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra

Opening concert of the Annecy Festival

August 26, 2011, 3pm EDT

Michael Corboz conducts Handel and Bach with Ensemble Vocal Lausanne

August 27, 2011, 3pm EDT

The Apollon Musagete Quartet and Philippe Berrod

Works by Shostakovich, Mendelssohn and Mozart

August 28, 2011, Noon EDT

Jean Guillou, organ and Patrick Marco, conductor

Recreation of Gounod’s Saint Francis of Assisi and Liszt’s Psalm XIII arranged for organ, choir and soloist by Jean Guillou

August 28, 2011, 3pm EDT

An evening with Denis Matsuev

Chamber music by Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Bartók and Beffa

August 29, 2011, 1:30pm EDT

A piano evening with Khatia Buniatishvili, Ingolf Wunder, Hyo Joo Lee and Kotaro Fukuma

August 30, 2011, 3pm EDT

Renaud Capuçon, violin and Yuri Temirkanov perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 5 with St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra

August 31, 2011, 3pm EDT

Denis Matsuev, piano and Yuri Temirkanov perform Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Brahms’s Symphony No. 2

About medici.tv: Since its official launch in May 2008, medici.tv has gained international recognition, bringing together a community of music and arts-lovers from 182 countries – online viewers who have watched more than 14 million videos to date. The site averages more than 100,000 individual visitors each month. In addition to offering live concerts that music-lovers can experience on their computers and entertainment systems, medici.tv offers a free application for iPads, iPhones and Androids.

One of medici.tv’s biggest successes has been the webcast of a Lucerne Festival concert in September 2010 featuring Gustavo Dudamel and the Vienna Philharmonic, watched more than 347,500 times by visitors from 150 countries. Other recent popular offerings from medici.tv include an evening of chamber music at the Atelier Lyrique de l’Opéra de Paris; La Scala Orchestra concerts with Georges Prêtre conducting Franck and Respighi and Daniel Harding leading Strauss’s Alpine Symphony; and a Brahms evening with Leonard Slatkin and the Orchestre National de Lyon.

Building on the success of webcasts from the Verbier Festival in 2007, medici.tv has offered high-definition webcasts from festivals in Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Denis, Aspen, Glyndebourne and Lucerne; from such Parisian venues as the Opéra National de Paris, Auditorium du Louvre, Cité de la Musique and Salle Pleyel; and from Milan’s famed La Scala. Many operas and concerts by the world’s top artists and orchestras have been webcast live and later as video-on-demand – all available for free. The list of artists at medici.tv is a “who’s who” of today’s stars, including Claudio Abbado, Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Plácido Domingo, John Eliot Gardiner, Valery Gergiev, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, Anna Netrebko, Maurizio Pollini, Thomas Quasthoff and Simon Rattle. Renowned ensembles include the Berlin Philharmonic, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, Filarmonica della Scala and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

In addition to offering 80 live webcasts each year, medici.tv partners with top artists and music institutions to offer subscriptions to more than 600 video-on-demand programs, growing to 1,000 programs in the next two years. They include concerts, operas, recitals, documentaries, master classes, artist portraits and archival material. Featured artists include such legendary musicians as Leonard Bernstein, Maria Callas, Glenn Gould, Herbert von Karajan, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Arthur Rubinstein, Georg Solti and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as well as leading film directors Bruno Monsaingeon, Paul Smaczny and Frank Scheffer.

Subscriptions to medici.tv start at $10.90 monthly, and $99 for a one-year subscription.

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August medici.tv webcast to feature Renée Fleming