Classical music and opera in your home concert hall

Nothing equals the in-person experience of attending live opera and classical music performances, but while we’re all hunkered down at home, there are some free or not outrageously expensive opportunities to have the best seats in the house (in this case, your living room) for a growing number of performance telecasts. More and more organizations are making material available online, with scheduling specifics usually announced a week to 10 days ahead of time. All the listings below are free of charge, except where a specific subscription fee is listed. The Metropolitan Opera launched its Live in HD broadcasts almost 15 years ago, so it has an extensive library to draw from. It’s now offering a daily free streaming of a broadcast available on its website (look for the Nightly Opera Stream banner on their homepage, metopera.org) and via the Met Opera on Demand apps for Apple, Amazon, and Roku devices, and on Samsung Smart TV. Each broadcast is available starting at 5:30 p.m., local time, through 1:30 p.m. the following day.

If an opera a day isn’t a strong enough prescription to satisfy your craving, there’s the Met’s unlimited subscription plan, called Opera on Demand. It’s $14.99 per month or $149.99 per year, with a 33 percent discount on the annual plan for Metropolitan Opera members. There are more than 200 performance videos available, most from the HD series but also some from Live at Lincoln Center telecasts, plus audio broadcasts going back as far as the 1930s. Hint for binge-watchers: There’s a seven-day free trial option available.

The Met is the only American company to telecast productions, but many European opera houses do so and are now offering free streaming as well. This is a terrific opportunity to see productions from some of the world’s most renowned companies. Here are some of the most intriguing options.

OperaVision is a collaborative project involving 29 European opera companies that are making production videos available for viewing free of charge. An especially nice touch — when you enter via operavision .eu/en/library/óperas, the broadcasts display English-language titles automatically.

Some of the companies are from the biggest-of-the-big-names arena (Royal Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, to name three), while others are important, high-quality groups that aren’t quite as prominent, such as Prague’s National Theatre, the OpéraComique in Paris, the Komische Oper Berlin, and the Hungarian State Opera. There are currently 21 complete operas available for viewing, ranging from less-familiar works like Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violanta, Franz Schreker’s and Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka

many standard repertory titles. Go to operavision.eu/en/library/óperas and you’ll find them all.

The Vienna State Opera streaming program is replicating as much as possible the daily repertory that ticketholders would have seen in its sumptuous theater this spring. It’s at staatsoperlive.com. Rossini fans who want to go beyond the usual suspects, like

and The Italian Girl in Algiers, should check out the Rossini Opera Festival‘s broadcasts. Their repertory so far has included such rarities as La scala di seta, Zelmira, Sigismondo, and Head to rossinioperafestival.it, click on the “EN” in the upper-right corner (unless you’re fluent in Italian), and then on “Soirées musicales.”

Munich’s Bavarian State Opera is offering a series of live concerts on Mondays, featuring lieder, solo instrumentalists, chamber music, and dance, as well as archival broadcasts of opera and ballet performances. They’re at staatsoper.de/en/stream.

There’s not quite as much available in terms of classical music concerts in telecast mode, but there are some high-quality possibilities.

The Berlin Philharmonic is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest orchestras, and it performs in a stunning contemporary hall. You can access a large library of concerts featuring top-shelf conductors and soloists by going to digitalconcerthall.com/en/news and clicking on the “Redeem Voucher” button. That takes you to a registration page with an email confirmation of your account.

There’s also first-rate material available from France’s arte.tv, including jazz, world music, and hip-hop, as well as classical music and operas. Items in the latter two categories include a concert by the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Valery Gergiev (Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 and Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs) and a staging of Astor Piazzolla’s tango opera María de Buenos Aires. Go to arte.tv/en/arte-concert/ and then scroll down until you see the “Classical Music” and “Opera” buttons. Not everything on the site can be streamed in the United States, so it takes a bit of trial and error to find what’s available here.

Santa Fe Symphony and Performance Santa Fe announced their 2020-2021 seasons on March 24. It wasn’t an unfortunate coincidence or a case of bad planning, but an intentional decision reflecting a new spirit of collaboration.

Next March, the two groups are co-presenting one of the most compelling offerings on the upcoming cultural calendar, the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 75th anniversary presentation of its groundbreaking ballet The symphony is furnishing the 13-member group that will play Aaron Copland’s original score for chamber orchestra, as well as accompanying by Augusta Read Thomas, a 2019 ballet piece written specifically to be paired with the Copland.

Both organizations have new executive leadership, with Daniel Crupi becoming executive director of the symphony in March 2019 and Chad Hilligus taking the executive and artistic director reins at PSF four months later. The newly announced seasons are therefore the first to fully reflect their visions, and it’s an encouraging sign that both groups are demonstrating increased artistic vigor and engaging in new creative collaborations, in addition to their co-presenting venture.

“We’re performing more works by women and composers of color, commissioning new pieces, and prioritizing 20th- and 21st-century repertory,” says Crupi. “My aspiration is that the symphony lives up to the community’s hope for what it can represent.”

“My vision is to build on PSF’s reputation for bringing extraordinary artists to Santa Fe by offering more variety, more diversity, more collaborations, and especially more performances,” says Hilligus.

“We have 29 in the upcoming season, compared to 18 performances last year.”

Performance Santa Fe’s season opens on July 19 with another high-profile co-presentation, this one with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. It’s based on the acclaimed 2019 multi-genre album

by pianist Lara Downes, which featured music written by female composers including Janis Ian, Clara Schumann, Georgia Stitt, Eve Beglarian, Joni Mitchell, and Paola Prestini, among others.

All the performers were also female, including mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, jazz vocalist Magos Herrera, and cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing, all of whom are slated to join Downes for the concert here. The album and concert title comes from a famous quotation by O’Keeffe: “I want real things — live people to take hold of — to see — and to talk to — music that makes holes in the sky.”

The symphony works with two other partners in its upcoming season. The Santa Fe Opera is providing a quartet of singers from its apprentice program for a

concert of opera excerpts with the orchestra on Christmas Eve, sending the holiday program in a new direction. (The 2019 iteration featured the Mark O’Connor Band in

The Sphinx Organization, which describes itself as “a social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts,” and the symphony have entered into a three-year partnership, during which the Detroit-based group will provide a soloist for one of each year’s concerts. The first is violinist Rubén Rengel, who plays Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor on a March 21, 2021, concert that also features the Symphony No. 1 by African American composer Florence Price. Price is one of classical music’s “hidden figures,” a woman whose important works from the first half of the 20th century are just now being rediscovered.

Several big-name performers are featured in Performance Santa Fe’s plans, including violinist Pinchas Zukerman. He’s joined by the Jerusalem Quartet and cellist Amanda Forsyth for an intriguing April 20, concert that features seldom-heard string sextets by Anton Bruckner, Antonín Dvorˇák, and Johannes Brahms. At the other end of the decorum spectrum, the one-of-a-kind singer/comedienne Meow Meow brings her “kamikaze cabaret” to the Lensic Performing Arts Center on March 26 as part of her Pandemonium tour. (“At last, an evening of pure chaos!” the group’s season brochure notes hopefully.)

Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is never afraid to try something new — witness the impromptu performance of highlights from Jules Massenet’s

that she and tenor Piotr Beczała live-streamed from her living room on March 15, after the production was canceled by the Metropolitan Opera. (It’s still available for viewing on DiDonato’s Facebook page.)

Her Feb. 24 appearance for Performance Santa Fe, titled is quite a bit more pre-planned, but it’s still plenty adventurous. It features Italian opera arias and songs as well as American standards, all reinterpreted through jazz and Latin-based traditions with DiDonato accompanied by a quintet of trumpet, bandoneon, string bass, piano, and drums.

Another interesting initiative is the symphony’s decision to recreate a famous event that took place at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in July 1960. The original concert featured Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, conducted by the composer, who was in town for productions of his Oedipus Rex and at the Santa Fe Opera, along with orchestral works by Haydn (the Sinfonia Concertante in B-flat Major) and Mozart (the imposing Symphony No. 38 in D Major).

music critic in 1960, Robert Bright, praised the Stravinsky piece in particular, calling it an “overwhelmingly beautiful work ... something for all to understand and respond to without the requirements of deep musical learning.” He also noted the cathedral’s “whimsical acoustical conditions.” They’re still whimsical, and in 2021 Guillermo Figueroa, the symphony’s principal conductor, will try to tame them during this April 29 concert.

Reflecting the current unsettling environment, both groups have delayed their on-sale dates to later in the spring than originally planned.

Performance Santa Fe’s 2020-2021 season subscriptions will be available from May 4 to May 31, with single tickets going on sale June 3. For information or orders, call 505-984-8759 or visit performancesantafe.org.

Santa Fe Symphony 2020-2021 season subscriptions also go on sale on May 4, with single tickets available starting July 1. Call 505-983-1414 or go to santafesymphony.org for more information or to order tickets.