Specific Live Streams (Scroll down for ongoing series):
Thursday, May 7 10pm EDT: The Noe Music Listening Club features composer Jake Heggie discussing and performing his music and that of his music heroes. Sign up here.
The Metropolitan Opera streams live performances for 25 hours. This week’s schedule is:
May 6 Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin
May 7 Strauss’s Capriccio
May 8 Puccini’s La Bohème
May 9 The Opera House
May 10 Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
Through May 7, the Alexander String Quartet
San Francisco Opera is catching up with the Met with weekly Saturday broadcasts from its archives. The first, on May 9 at 10am PDT, is Boito’s Mefistofele: www.facebook.com/SFOpera/ and Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify. Future Saturday broadcasts: Upcoming streaming titles will include Vincenzo Belllini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues) with Joyce DiDonato and Nicole Cabell, the 2012 Company premiere of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick and Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia from 2011 starring Renée Fleming and Michael Fabiano.
Opera Philadelphia’s Digital Festival O features live recital by countertenor John Holiday Friday May 8 7pm EDT and the premiere of “We Shall Not Be Moved” May 10 2pm EDT, available through August 31. Also operaphila.org.
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s virtual gala takes place May 9, 6pm PDT . The ensemble also performs its Sheltering Music concert of Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Elliot Carter, Jörg Widmann, and others on Monday June 1 7:30pm PDT.
Opera Philadelphia Digital Streaming Festival with four world premieres:
We Shall Not be Moved (May 10)
Barber of Seville (May 15)
Sky on Swings (May 22
Breaking the Waves (May 29.)
All opera premiere 8pm EDT. Available on-demand for various lengths of time through August 31. Operaphila.org and YouTube (address unspecified).
Pacific Opera’s video-game-inspired interactive Magic Flute Watch Party/ Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 8pm EDT
More Information: www.pacificoperaproject.com/superflute,
www.facebook.com/pacificoperaproject/, and www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSRxnvRhi5T3zR2H8AiOqg
The Guggenheim announces Works & Process Virtual Commissions. Artists from a wide variety of genres create new works, less than 5 minutes long, while observing social distancing guidelines, that premiere every Sunday and Monday at 7:30pm EDT at www.facebook.com/worksandprocess/, www.instagram.com/worksandprocess/, and www.youtube.com/user/worksandprocess.
May 10 – Karma Styles and Omari Wiles
May 11 – Gus Solomons, Jr.
May 17 – LaTasha Barnes
May 18 – Evita Arce.
American Pianists Association Awards finalists join with past competition winners for conversations and short performances on Sunday afternoons.
May 10 – Kenny Broberg with 1981 Awards winner Jonathan Shames
May 17 – Mackenzie Melemed with 2006 Awards winner Spencer Myer
May 24 – Michael Davidman with 1981 Awards winner Sara Davis Buechner
May 31 – Sam Hong with 1985 Awards winner Frederic Chiu.
London’s famed Wigmore Hall releases one full-length concert per week featuring Warner Classics artists. Concerts available for 24-hours only starting 2:30pm EDT. This in addition to the dizzying array of concerts available 24/7 in the video library.
May 11: The magnificent duo of Marianne Crebassa and Fazil Say in Debussy, Ravel, Satie…
San Francisco’s Noe Valley Chamber Music is hosting live “Love Music Listening Clubs” on Zoom every other Thursday at 10pm EDT (7pm PDT). Register for free here: nvcm.org/nmlc. May 7 – Composer Jake Heggie (Dead Man Walking, Moby Dick, etc.) May 21 – Composer Nick Britell (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, Succession)
The 2015 world premiere broadcast of Max Richter’s 8-hour Sleep performance is available for streaming until May 10th from the BBC. Thanks to John Atkinson for this one.
Music of Remembrance: Music inspired by the Holocaust. I have attended and reviewed some of these events and recommend them highly.
May 4-10: Camp Songs. In a new dramatic realization conceived and directed by Erich Parce, American composer Paul Schoenfield’s setting of defiant words that dissident Polish journalist Alexander Kulisiewicz dared to write as a prisoner in Sachsenhausen, with sarcastic humor and bitter irony that lay bare the fury seething beneath the camp’s terrors.
May 11-17: Veritas. Shinji Eshima’s soulful musical reflection on the tragic consequences of religious intolerance, in a multimedia work incorporating vivid visual images of sculptor Al Farrow’s works from his “Vandalized Doors” series.
May 18-24: For a Look or a Touch. Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer’s pathbreaking musical drama illuminating the Nazi persecution of homosexuals through the story of two idealistic young men whose lives and love were torn apart under the Third Reich.
Ongoing Live Stream Series:
Opera Australia launches free online streams with Joan Sutherland in the starring roles: tv.opera.org.au.
Music of Remembrance, dedicated to commissioning and performing music about the Holocaust, streams its wonderful commission, Camp Songs by Paul Schoenfield.
NPR’s all-genre Tiny Desk concerts are quite wonderful.
Timo Andres Carnegie concert at home.
The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process Artists (WPA) Virtual Commissions presents the premiere of playwright, composer and lyricist Michael R. Jackson’s “Your Silence” and other works in the series: www.facebook.com/worksandprocess/, www.youtube.com/user/worksandprocess, www.instagram.com/worksandprocess/.
The Cliburn Piano Competition’s Cliburn Watch Party takes place Wednesday and Saturday at varied times: www.facebook.com/thecliburn/ and www.youtube.com/thecliburn
Choral group Stile Antico’s virtual performance of Thomas Tallis’ forty-part motet, Spem in alium, using smartphones and tablets.
Bachtrack has links to a huge number of on-demand mouth-watering classical streams.
Qobuz’s Monday evening modern jazz cocktail hours are 7:30pm EDT.
Musical America’s exhaustively comprehensive guide to free classical streams. Get on their mailing list to receive each week’s list free-of-charge.
NY Philharmonic’s weekly streaming schedule.
Stephen Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration
Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Heroic Performances 8-week video series to honor front-line workers starts Sunday, April 26, 3pm EDT. Performances are available for 45 days at bso.org/athome. Sunday concert features Andris Nelsons and the BSO in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 with Yefim Bronfman and Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, Suite No. 2
Tuesdays and Thursday at 2pm EDT. Live with Carnegie Hall features some of the world’s finest artists s sharing behind-the-scenes stories, excerpts from past performances, and live musical moments.
At Home with Gustavo [Dudamel], a unique series created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chick Corea’s Daily Workshops.
Ongoing: the Live from Our Livingrooms Festival and Fundraiser, with an extraordinarily lineup of musicians.
Early Music Vancouver has some lovely clips of live performances available on YouTube.
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra’s Bergenphilive (www.bergenphilive.no/) offers new and archival concerts conducted by Chief Conductor Edward Gardner or guest conductors. CEST offers a new digital chamber music series, ‘Close up – at a distance’, featuring orchestra musicians in one-hour performances on Thursday evenings, when the orchestra would have performed.
Performances on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s YouTube channel with new live concerts every evening at 5, 5:30, and 6pm PDT.
Boston’s Grammy-nominated self-conducted chamber orchestra, A Far Cry, live streams performances from Criers’ homes and continues to post archival concert recordings on YouTube. The next live stream is Thursday night 7:30pm EDT, with another Saturday at the same time. Monday 11am brings a children’s concert.
Ongoing: Atlas Touring presents the Quaran-Stream Music Festival. I don’t know these bands—Little Stranger? Stoop Kids? The Vegabonds? Schema? Rare Creatures?—but this sounds like lots of fun anyway.
The Bay Area’s Gold Coast Chamber Players offer evening live Noe Valley Listening Clubs with musicologist Kai Christiansen at 9:30pm EDT.
Fans of approachable young British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason can hear him perform with other members of of the Kanneh-Mason family every Wednesday and Friday at 1:30pm eastern time on Sheku’s Facebook page.
MQA’s British Music Embassy sessions of artists scheduled to perform at SXSW, available in HD Video encoded with MQA Audio. Audio-only versions are available on Tidal.
Jazz at Lincoln Center Live Stream–a great lineup.
If you, with Billy Idol, enjoy Dancing With Yourself—or if you just want to take in the music and the scene—New York nightclub Nowadays offers live virtual DJ sets from 8pm to midnight local time.
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, NYC, offers Joe’s Pub Live! From the Archives Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8pm.
Jazz pianist Fred Hersch performs a “Tune of the Day” live daily at 1pm EDT, “for the duration. You don’t have to be on Facebook to watch,” he writes. “Just ignore the prompts to create an account and go to the livestream.” The Ballad of Fred Hersch, an intimate filmed portrait by Charlotte Lagarde and Carrie Lozano, is also available for streaming, courtesy of the directors.
The Metropolitan Opera offers nightly live streams of Live in HD broadcasts recorded over the past 14 years. Each opera remains available for 23 hours, from 7:30 pm EDT to 6:30 pm the following day.
La Boheme may be canceled, but the Seattle Opera offers programming via Opera at Home.
Tune in to Americana Highways on Facebook for live streaming from Americana artists in 30 minute sets every evening except Sunday, from approximately 7pm until 10pm EDT.
Deutsche Oper Berlin posts free streams of live performances. Available now, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, shown in three parts without subtitles.
Classic Album Sundays presents Classic Albums at Home. Each Sunday at 8pm GMT on the Classic Album Sundays Facebook page, one of the CAS worldwide hosts will present a live session, telling the story behind the featured album. Sessions start March 29 when CAS founder Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy presents Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. After the presentation, participants can play the album in their own home in any available format, but following the CAS listening session guidelines: That means not interrupting the performance and refraining from all other activities, including talking.
During the pandemic, the Berlin Philharmonic grants free access to all concerts and films in the Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall. Redeem voucher code BERLINPHIL.
NPR offers free Tiny Desk Concerts before they’re available on YouTube.
Period instrument ensemble American Bach Soloists posts a short snippet daily on Facebook and Twitter.
The Vienna Staatsoper, aka Vienna State Opera, broadcasts different concerts daily online, starting at either 7:00 pm or 5:00 pm CET. Opera lovers may get dizzy when they see the line-up of stars.
Boston-based jazz pianist Yoko Miwa will perform live every Friday and Saturday night at 9pm EDT until Boston’s jazz clubs reopen. If you don’t have a Facebook account, ignore the prompts to create one; just scroll down to the “live” post.
New York’s famed 92nd St. Y concert series replaces many of its scheduled concerts with live streams from artists’ apartments.
San Francisco Symphony’s SFS Media Digital Concert Series is releasing live concert recordings from the 2019–20 season on Apple Music. Individual recordings are available “on all major digital streaming and download stores,” including HDTracks, Idagio, Primephonic, Amazon, and Spotify. Think Mahler orchestral and vocal (with mezzo Sasha Cooke), Stravinsky and Haydn (with cellist Oliver Herbert), Berlioz, Ravel, Beethoven (with pianist Emanuel Ax), and Wagner from MTT’s final season as Music Director of SFS.
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein is in the midst of playing and discussing all 36 movements from Bach’s Cello Suites.
Seattle Symphony posts live concert recordings in lieu of performances.
Live-streamed concerts by Laith Al-Saadi, who, outside of Michigan at least, is probably best known for his 2016 run to the finals on the CBS show The Voice.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s #songofcomfort has joined a host of others.
Yellow label Deutsche Grammophon livestreams full-length performances with DG artists. To be informed of new videos, sign up for the DG email newsletter.
Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony, violinist Itzhak Perlman, tenor Matthew Polenzani, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a host of other entities post videos of live concerts at hashtag #keepthemusicgoing on Twitter. You can find some on Facebook, too. Not all of these videos are musical, but when Michael Feinstein posts his favorite dance sequences from Fred & Ginger, why would you stay away?
NPR presents a variety of daily live streams in multiple genres.
You’ll find lots of classical music videos, as well as your fill of classical gossip, at Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc.
A whistler close to my heart offers this nerve-fraught set from 2019.
Lincoln Center at Home speaks, sings, plays, and dances for itself. Or, you can directly access videos of performances by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
It is with a performance from this series—Schubert’s great Cello Quintet, one of the most transcendent pieces of chamber music ever composed—that we at Stereophile wish you and yours health, peace, and contentment in the days and weeks ahead.
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