medici.tv streams Verbier, Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals
The first opera production by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 2012 Salzburg Festival will be a 100th-anniversary staging of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos conducted by Daniel Harding – and medici.tv will be filming the event in partnership with Rolex. The free webcast will stream live at 11:15 a.m. EST on August 5, and will be available for subsequent viewing for 90 days. Ariadne auf Naxos had its world premiere in 1912 at the Salzburg Festival, and this new 100th anniversary production directed by Sven-Eric Bechtolf serves as a centennial homage to the festival’s three founders: Strauss, Ariadne librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt, the dedicatee of the opera. The cast includes Emily Magee as the Prima Donna/Ariadne, along with Jonas Kaufmann as the Tenor/Bacchus. This is the second time medici.tv has webcast a live Ariadne auf Naxos; this past March, music lovers enjoyed watching a live stream of the Strauss opera from Baden-Baden with Renée Fleming starring in the title role.
The medici.tv audience reached a historic peak on Monday night, July 30 – with 22,180 connections for the Verbier Festival webcast of Martha Argerich and Joshua Bell performing with the Verbier Festival Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi (the 156th live concert Webcast by medici.tv). This was the largest audience for a medici.tv live event in six years. The total viewing figure for the Verbier Festival concerts on the medici.tv Web site and app now amounts to 242,240 – and will continue to grow until the festival’s end on August 5. and notably with the highly-anticipated all-Mozart recital of Rolando Villazón to be broadcast live on Saturday, August 4 at 12 p.m.; the tenor will be accompanied by the Verbier Festiival Chamber Orchestra conducted by Marc Minkowski.
And in other news, medici.tv will webcast Claudio Abbado conducting Mozart’s Requiem live from the Lucerne Festival on August 8 at 4:30 p.m. GMT, with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Choir and an all-star cast of vocal soloists – Anna Prohaska, Sara Mingardo, Maximilian Schmitt and René Pape. Along with the Requiem (in the Beyer/Levin version), the program features Beethoven’s rarely performed incidental music to the play Egmont, with soprano Juliane Banse and recitations by famed German actor Bruno Ganz.
Ariadne auf Naxos from Salzburg on medici.tv:
Daniel Harding, conductor
Sven-Eric Bechtolf, stage director
Rolf Glittenberg, set designer
Marianne Glittenberg, costume designer
Heinz Spoerli, choreographer
Ronny Dietrich, dramaturgy
Jürgen Hoffmann, lighting designer
Vienna Philharmonic
Emily Magee (The Prima Donna/Ariadne)
Elena Moșuc (Zerbinetta)
Jonas Kaufmann (The Tenor/Bacchus )
Eva Liebau (Naiad/A Shepherdess)
Marie-Claude Chappuis (Dryad/A Shepherd)
Eleonora Buratto (Echo/A Singer)
Gabriel Bermúdez (Harlequin)
Michael Laurenz (Scaramuccio)
Tobias Kehrer (Truffaldino)
Martin Mitterrutzner (Brighella)
Peter Matić (The Major-Domo)
Cornelius Obonya (M. Jourdain)
Thomas Frank (The Composer)
Michael Rotschopf (Hofmannsthal)
Regina Fritsch (Ottonie/Dorine)
Stefanie Dvorak (Nicolina)
Johannes Lange (Flunky)
Critical praise accrues to medici.tv with each passing month. The Toronto Star called the site “a seismic shift in the world of classical music,” and The Baltimore Sun said: “This is an amazing site for lovers of classical music.” Alex Ross said on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, that “the hits keep coming at medici.tv,” while offering “treasures aplenty” was how Gramophone editor-in-chief James Jolly put it, naming medici.tv as one of the Web’s best classical experiences.
The medici.tv webcast of the New York Philharmonic’s Philharmonic 360 event earlier this month was a tremendous success. The Philadelphia Inquirer declared: “Besides being a logistical feat, the project had true event status in a city where even everyday life can be an event.” More than ever, classical music lovers have reason to make visiting the site an habitual pleasure, as the best classical videos according to fans of medici.tv – concerts, operas, documentaries and archival treasures – are available for rental, just $3.99-$4.99 until September 15. See this array of the most viewed programs on medici.tv.
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 12 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 and for the Android) that makes it possible to experience world-class artistry on iPads, iPhones and the Android.
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 that has been watched more than 347,500 times (live and on-demand) by visitors from 150 countries. Other recent popular offerings from medici.tv include the New York Philharmonic’s “Philharmonic 360” concert conducted by Alan Gilbert, Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition Final Round at Beijing’s NCPA, the Berlin Philharmonic summer concert at the Waldbühne in Berlin, Renée Fleming in Ariadne auf Naxos at Baden-Baden Festival and Rossini’s Otello starring Cecilia Bartoli.
Building on the success of webcasts from the Verbier Festival in 2007, medici.tv has offered high-definition Webcasts from other leading festivals, including Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Denis, Aspen, Glyndebourne, Salzburg and Lucerne; 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 and Beijing’s NCPA. 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) for a limited time – 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, Renée Fleming, John Eliot Gardiner, Valery Gergiev, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, Anna Netrebko, Maurizio Pollini, 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 100 live concerts each year, medici.tv has partnered with the world’s top artists and music institutions to offer subscriptions that give music lovers the opportunity to watch more than 1,000 VOD programs. They include concerts, operas, recitals, documentaries, master classes, artist portraits and archival material by 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. Recently, medici.tv added reference opera productions to its library, including Don Carlo starring Rolando Villazón at the Royal Opera House and The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne conducted by William Christie; also new to the library are archive performances of Van Cliburn.
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medici.tv is produced by MUSEEC, in partnership with ROLEX.