medici.tv offers free day of viewing on Dec 26
The go-to site for experiencing world-class classical performances on the Web – medici.tv – will be offering all music lovers in the U.S. an unlimited free day of viewing on December 26 of the myriad programs in the site’s pay-per-view library. Much of the live programming on medici.tv is available free throughout the year, but on the day after Christmas, the pay-for-view archival programs will be free, too – as a gift to the site’s fans and new friends. What’s available on medici.tv now includes more opera than ever before – including acclaimed productions from the UK and Paris with such top stars as Jonas Kaufmann, Natalie Dessay, and Gerald Finley. There are also live Webcasts of top-tier orchestral concerts, vocal performances, and chamber recitals, along with vintage documentaries and music films – including the much-lauded Christopher Nupen catalog. For the holiday season, medici.tv is also offering subscription gift cards; for three months (at $39), six months ($69), or 12 months ($119). The cards will be available for online purchase at medici.tv, to be mailed directly as gifts.
Two live Webcasts just announced for this month present Russian classics and the French Baroque. On December 15 at 2 pm EST, France’s Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse makes its debut on medici.tv, with Music Director Tugan Sokhiev. The nascent, rising star conductor will lead the orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, as well as Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death with the great Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina (in her first collaboration with the Toulouse orchestra). Rounding out the program is Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. On December 16 at 2 p.m. EST, Paul Agnew will lead Les Arts Florissants in Monteverdi’s Madrigals, Book II as part of this peerless Baroque ensemble’s complete Monteverdi madrigal series.
More and more praise accrues to medici.tv with each passing month. New Yorker writer Alex Ross said on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, that “the hits keep coming at medici.tv.” Offering “treasures aplenty” was how Gramophone editor-in-chief James Jolly put it, designating medici.tv as one of the Web’s leading classical experiences. The medici.tv app for iPads, iPhones, and other digital devices – available for free at the Apple app store – was named one of the top five apps for classical music by WQXR, the classical music station of New York City.
In addition to its live webcasts, medici.tv also offers an extensive library of video-on-demand programs, available via subscription. These performances, documentaries, and archival features spotlight leading musical institutions and world-class artists – from golden-age legends to today’s top stars. Along with star-studded 2010 productions of Massenet’s Werther (with Jonas Kaufmann), Bellini’s La sonnambula (Natalie Dessay), and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Gerald Finley) that are newly available online this month, there will be Rameau’s Platée in a 2009 production from Opéra National de Paris (starring Mireille Delunsch and led by Marc Minkowski), and Verdi’s La traviata from Opéra de Lyon. There are also such vocal treats as a recital by countertenor Philippe Jaroussky from the 2009 Verbier Festival and a masterclass led by the great Teresa Berganza. The 30-plus Christopher Nupen films available at medici.tv include not only the priceless du Pré documents (complete with Elgar’s Cello Concerto and a number of all-star chamber performances) but also films of Evgeny Kissin, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Nathan Milstein. All 32 Beethoven piano sonatas recorded by Daniel Barenboim in 1983-84 will be available by the year’s end.
December events live at medici.tv
December 15, 2pm EST
Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Brahms
Tugan Sokhiev, conductor; Olga Borodina, mezzo-soprano; Orchestre National du Capitole Toulouse
Halle aux Grains, Toulouse, France
December 16, 2pm EST
Monteverdi: Madrigals, Book II
Paul Agnew, conductor; Les Arts Florissants
Cité de la Musique, Paris
Opera-on-Demand at medici.tv
Massenet: Werther
Opéra National de Paris, France, 2010
Jonas Kaufmann (Werther), Sophie Koch (Charlotte), Ludovic Tézier (Albert); Benoit Jacquot, staging; Michel Plasson, conductor
Bellini: La sonnambula
Opéra National de Paris, France, 2010
Natalie Dessay (Amina); Javier Camarena (Elvino); Marco Arturo Marelli, staging; Evelino Pidò, conductor
Mozart: Don Giovanni
Glyndebourne Festival, UK, 2010
Brindley Sherratt, Anna Samuil, Luca Pisaroni (Leporello); Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Jonathan Kent, staging; Vladimir Jurowski, conductor
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 over twelve million videos to date. The site currently averages more than 80,000 individual visitors each month. In addition to offering live concert hall events that music lovers can experience on their computers and entertainment systems, medici.tv now offers a free application (available at the Apple App Store) that makes it possible to experience world-class artistry on iPads and iPhones.
One of the biggest successes to date at medici.tv has been the webcast of a Lucerne Festival concert featuring Gustavo Dudamel and the Vienna Philharmonic. This has been watched more than 347,500 times (live and as video-on-demand) 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; Georges Pretre conducting La Scala Orchestra in a program of Franck and Respighi; Daniel Harding conducting the same orchestra in Strauss’s Alpine Symphony; and an all-Brahms evening featuring 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 many other leading festivals, including Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Denis, Aspen, Glyndebourne, Salzburg, 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 performed by the world’s top artists and orchestras have been webcast as live events and later as video-on-demand (VOD) – all available for free. The list of artists presented 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. Among the featured orchestras are such renowned ensembles as 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 webcasts of more than 80 live concerts each year, medici.tv has partnered with the world’s top artists and music institutions to offer subscriptions, giving music-lovers the opportunity to watch more than 700 VOD programs – growing to 1,000 programs over 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 such leading film directors as Bruno Monsaingeon, Paul Smaczny, and Frank Scheffer. In November, medici.tv added to its library the invaluable film record of Daniel Barenboim performing all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, in Vienna in the early 1980s.
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medici.tv is produced by MUSEEC, in partnership with ROLEX.
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© 21C Media Group, December 2011