Music: How to catch the season’s classical wave
many classical music organizations have made their concert archives available online. “It’s enough to keep a critic happily overwhelmed. If anything, I’m taking in more music than before.”
Listeners have so much to choose from, said Rosie Pentreath in ClassicFM.com. Some of the organizations offering livestreams or archival concerts include the New York Philharmonic ( nyphil.org/playson), the Metropolitan Opera ( metopera.org), and the Philadelphia Orchestra ( philorch.org/ virtual). Looking abroad, there’s the Berlin Philharmonic ( digitalconcerthall.com), the London Symphony Orchestra ( play .lso.co.uk), and the Sydney Opera House ( sydneyoperahouse.com). And don’t miss Living Room Live, a platform where soloists stream recitals from home. The current king of pandemic livestreams has to be Andrea Bocelli, said Nusmila Lohani in CSMonitor.com. On Easter Sunday, the acclaimed Italian tenor made history when a peak audience of 2.8 million viewers watched as he stood alone in and outside Milan Cathedral, and accompanied by an organist performed a half-hour concert
that included “Ave Maria” and “Amazing Grace,” often while drone footage showed empty streets in cities around the world. The performance, which has since attracted more than 39 million views, “seems to speak to many of us. It offers a profound sense of calm; a moment to stand still and reflect on our strength and solidarity.”
Many listeners, no doubt, are turning to classical music at this moment because they find it relaxing, said Michael Brodeur in WashingtonPost.com. But it’s so much more. I recently spent a week absorbing an online performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and “I feel like I’ve had the full panoply of my longings and terrors reflected back at me from my laptop.” In other words, “I feel understood.” Even at its most clamorous and cathartic, “classical music gives us an experience of certainty, a structure we trust, a way things should go.” To watch a video collage of 49 members of the Colorado Symphony playing in unison from 49 different locations is not merely an entertaining distraction, or even just an impressive technological feat. “The scattered togetherness of these performances is reassurance that, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some things last.”