Classical video streams

Here's a list of some links to sites offering free video streams of complete performances (concerts / recitals / opera / ballet). Some provide live transmissions "only", but most have a backlist of performances available on demand.

Rana and I would appreciate it if folks can add more links in the comments and let us know when any stop working.

A permanent link to this post can be found under the "Extras" tab on the left.

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Live video webcasts from this summer's classical music festivals

Much of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence is on liveweb.arte.tv.

Some of the Festival de Beaune is on also on liveweb.arte.tv.

Much of the Verbier Festival is on medici.tv.

Some of the BBC Proms will be on the iPlayer.

Six concerts from the Festival de Saint-Denis are still available on liveweb.arte.tv.

Pretty much all concerts are available on demand for a while (between a week and several months) after the event.

Please add other video webcasts of classical music festivals in the comments. READ MORE...

Beethoven's Friends - Consortium Classicum

Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838)
Octet for winds, strings & piano in F minor, Op. 128
Karl Czerny (1791-1857)
Notturno Brilliant for piano & ensemble in E flat major
Reichsgraf Moritz von Lichnowsky (1771-1837)
Seven variations for piano on Paisiello's "Nel cor più non mi sento"
Louis Ferdinand Prinz von Preussen (1772-1806)
Octet for piano, clarinet, 2 horns, 2 violins & 2 cellos,
Op. 12
Consortium Classicum, Dieter Klöcker
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J.S. Bach, WTC I & II - S. Richter (live in Innsbruck, 1973)

Thought I had offered this one here before but I can't find it now so probably I didn't ...

It's another older upload that's on the cusp of disappearing unless someone wants it:

Great Legacies of Sviatoslav Richter

J. S. BACH: THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER
BWV 846-893

Recorded live on 7 & 10 August 1973 in Innsbruck (Austria)
Many thanks to DanseDePuck for the original rip!
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The Hoffnung Festival of Music (1988)

This CD set was distilled from a 1988 gala at London's Royal Festival Hall by the Philharmonia Orchestra and a multitude of guests, all performing in a satiric salute to Gerard Hoffnung and the peculiar brand of classical music satire that the cartoonist and humorist devised in the 1950s.

It contained Reizenstein’s Concerto populare, which starts out with Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto in the orchestra while the pianist is wrestling with Grieg's. Not only are the themes intertwined but imaginative additional touches abound. On to Rachmaninov 2, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, Pop Goes the Weasel and Roll Out the Barrel, played in various styles, and back to the Tchaikovsky against the Grieg, except now piano and orchestra are transposed ...

And it included Malcolm Arnold's Grand, Grand Overture (dedicated to President Hoover), of which also the video of a recent performance is available here (illustrating the dedication more clearly than the audio-only version).




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Oh, the irony!

The major record labels Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal are on the hook for up to $6 billion USD in damages after being accused of pirating 300,000 tracks.

The report says that the labels continually make compilation CDs without first securing the rights to the music, simply putting it on a "pending list" to deal with later. That "later" has yet to come. So far, since the mid-80's, the pending list has ballooned to over 300,000 tracks.

Says David Basskin, the President and CEO of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd, via Michael Geist: "The record labels have devoted insufficient resources to identifying and paying the owners of musical works on the Pending Lists."

A group of musicians in Canada have now filed a class-action lawsuit against the Big 4, and the CRIA (Canada's RIAA), over illegal use of thousands of tracks.

“The conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers,” says the suit.

Each infringement can bring in $20,000 USD (on average), so multiplied by 300,000 the potential liability is $6 billion for the labels.


Source
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Let them eat wood

Can a relatively cheap violin produced from modern wood sound like a good Stradivarius? Apparently, yes - if the wood has been exposed to fungi that cause a particular kind of decay (reducing wood density but leaving the middle lamellae intact), as Francis Schwarze of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) has demonstrated.

Here's the recent Empa press release:

At the 27th "Osnabrücker Baumpflegetage", one of Germany’s most important annual conferences on all aspects of forest husbandry, Empa researcher Francis Schwarze’s "biotech violin" dared to go head to head in a blind test against a stradivarius - and won. A brilliant outcome for the Empa violin, which is made of wood treated with fungus, against the instrument made by the great master himself in 1711.

September 1st 2009 was a day of reckoning for Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer. The violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus was to take part in a blind test against an instrument made in 1711 by the master violin maker of Cremona himself, Antonio Stradivarius.

In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer - two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number - 90 persons - felt the tone of the fungally treated violin «Opus 58» to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that «Opus 58» was actually the strad! «Opus 58» is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.

Judging the tone quality of a musical instrument in a blind test is, of course, an extremely subjective matter, since it is a question of pleasing the human senses. Empa scientist Schwarze is fully aware of this, and as he says, “There is no unambiguous scientific way of measuring tone quality.” He was therefore, understandably, rather nervous before the test. Since the beginning of the 19th century violins made by Stradivarius have been compared to instruments made by others in so called blind tests, the most serious of all probably being that organized by the BBC in 1974. In that test the world famous violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman together with the English violin dealer Charles Beare were challenged to identify blind the «Chaconne» stradivarius made in 1725, a «Guarneri del Gesu» of 1739, a «Vuillaume» of 1846 and a modern instrument made by the English master violin maker Roland Praill. The result was rather sobering - none of the experts was able to correctly identify more than two of the four instruments, and in fact two of the jurors thought that the modern instrument was actually the «Chaconne» stradivarius.

Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the “Little Ice Age” which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly - ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities.

Horst Heger of the Osnabrück City Conservatory is convinced that the success of the “fungus violin” represents a revolution in the field of classical music. “In the future even talented young musicians will be able to afford a violin with the same tonal quality as an impossibly expensive Stradivarius”, he believes. In his opinion, the most important factor in determining the tone of a violin is the quality of the wood used in its manufacture. This has now been confirmed by the results of the blind test in Osnabrück. The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity. “Compared to a conventional instrument, a violin made of wood treated with the fungus has a warmer, more rounded sound,” explains Francis Schwarze.


There's also a short report from Swiss radio (in English):
http://worldradio.ch/wrs/bm~doc/20090901_violinmold.mp3
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Not everything by WAM is great

The identification of two 'new pieces' by Mozart sounds like a great musical event. It is actually nothing of the sort.

By Damian Thompson

The tiny keyboard piece and miniature concerto movement, both in G, were probably written in 1763-4, when the composer was seven or eight years old. And they are quite an achievement – for a small boy. Musically they are worthless.

The concerto movement in G, NMA 51, is the longer of the two pieces and can be heard on the website of the Mozarteum played on the composer's own fortepiano. It is written in the show-off style of CPE Bach, with facile, flowery passagework set above a thumping bass. The scholar Robert Levin has made an "orchestra version" that will be premiered during the Mozart Week in Salzburg next January. Why has he bothered? Both of these pieces were thought to be by Mozart's father Leopold, but have been re-identified because they contain "clumsy mistakes" that Leopold would not have made. And you do not have to be a musicologist to hear them.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the most famous child prodigy in history, but he did not begin to produce really fine music until his late teens, and nothing in his boyhood output is as good as Mendelssohn's Octet, written at 16. This new "discovery" (the pieces have always been known about, simply misidentified) is being trumpeted by the Mozart industry, which periodically turns up juvenilia. In comparison, there is no tourist-driven Bach industry – which is why there was so little excitement when a glorious soprano aria, Alles mit Gott (lasting an amazing 50 minutes in performance), was properly rediscovered in 2005 and heard for the first time in nearly 300 years.

This is not to deny that Mozart's mature concertos are one of the supreme achievements of the creative spirit. But reviving amateur jottings does the composer's memory no favours, and simply gives ammunition to those misguided souls who think that his entire output is overrated.

Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/5960507/Commentary-new-Mozart-pieces-do-him-no-favours.html

The link for the Mozarteum report:
http://www.mozarteum.at/00_META/00_News_Detail.asp?ID=15286

But as the site is hopelessly overloaded at the moment, here are the direct download links for the two pieces:
http://coblitz.codeen.org/dme.mozarteum.at/DME/objs/audiorecs/50.zip
http://coblitz.codeen.org/dme.mozarteum.at/DME/objs/audiorecs/51.zip
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Gershwin, part II. By himself

Between 1915 and 1927, George Gershwin made 140 player piano rolls - the earliest ones at age 17. He was paid $35 for six rolls in a Saturday afternoon session (the average weekly salary of Americans at the time being $15).

His first rolls were improvisations of Tin Pan Alley publishers’ tunes. The titles of these songs were sometimes quite ridiculous and reflected the carefree, Gatsby-era sentiment of the time: Arrah Go On I’m Gonna Go Back to Oregon, When Verdi Plays the Hurdy-Gurdy, and You’re a Dog-Gone Dangerous Girl are three of the stranger titles among the early Gershwin rolls.

The producers must have been impressed with Gershwin’s abilities, for after just ten months’ work, Gershwin made rolls of his own first published song, When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em, When You’ve Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em (what a title!) and his first solo piano instrumental work, Rialto Ripples Rag.

Piano rolls were usually made and released very quickly after songs were published in sheet music form in order to capitalize on their current public popularity. By fortunate coincidence, Gershwin came of age when player piano design was improving dramatically. Essentially, there were two types of vacuum-powered player pianos. A standard player mechanism allowed the pianolist (the name of the person operating the player mechanism) to move levers or push buttons that could change the expression of the songs (soft/loud, slow/fast, sustaining pedal).

The second type of player, a reproducing player piano was more technologically sophisticated (and costly) and supposedly automatically reproduced the recording artist’s personal interpretation via expression holes cuts into the margins of the paper roll. These holes operated the pedals, controlled dynamics (soft/loud) and attempted to balance registers and notes within chords (voicing). All of this was achieved without the pianolist’s participation and was a remarkable engineering achievement considering the primitive materials used (rubber tubing, leather valves and bellows, felt bushings) and lack of electronic technology. Electric motors were used to create the vacuum needed to drive high-end model player pianos however.

Upright player pianos with standard mechanisms numbered in the millions thanks to their relatively modest cost (in 1924 they retailed for about $600). Reproducing grand pianos however were well out-of-reach for many middle class households, costing from $1,850 for an Aeolian baby grand to $4,675 for a Steinway 7-foot model in 1924. By late 1927 (the peak of player piano sales), a walnut-cased Steinway XR Duo-Art (6-foot model) retailed in New York for $7,000! Standard system rolls cost between 40 to 80 cents each, Aeolian Duo-Art reproducing-style rolls $1.25-1.75. The combined effect of the stock market crash of 1929, the invention of the electric microphone, and the consequent improved fidelity of phonograph recordings killed the market for player pianos by 1932.

Roll producers quickly realized that three- and four-hand arrangements of songs made a “bigger and better” impression than normal two-handed versions. Trademark stock devices included marimba-style broken chord tremolos and a plethora of repeated notes in the treble, and doubled octaves in the bass to give an enriched textural impression of a mini orchestra, a style that was so pervasive that it eventually became clichéd. Consequently, many roll labels show two artists’ participation. George Gershwin worked with several other pianists for these duet-arranged rolls, twenty-three in all.

Nevertheless, most of the piano rolls Gershwin made are duet arrangements he played himself. In cutting the initial master roll it was possible to “overdub” a second run of playing in order to add more notes. Thus, Gershwin was also able to play three- and four-hand arrangements by himself without need of an additional pianist (especially in the famous 1925 roll version of Rhapsody in Blue).

Needless to say, these manipulations of material raise questions about the authenticity of Gershwin roll “performances.” Rolls were frequently marketed as “hand-played,” especially by headliner classical artists such as Horowitz, Paderewski, and Hoffman, and by popular artists such as Zez Confrey and Gershwin. However, standard and reproducing piano roll “recordings” are not necessarily faithful reproductions of a pianist’s performance. Besides the artificially manufactured duet arrangements, the two-handed piano solos were also heavily edited by roll producers and artists to correct mistakes and to add in “extra” notes.

More importantly, rolls were “quantized” to insure a uniform pulse. Quantization is a term used to describe the equal parsing of beats within a song to insure an even, metronomic beat. Popular player piano music (as opposed to classical piano music on rolls) was frequently used for dancing and singing, thus it was imperative that rhythmic liberties (rubato) be kept to a minimum. The pianolist could vary the tempo by moving a hand-controlled lever, but the pulse would always remain steady, no matter the chosen speed.

Fortunately, Gershwin’s arrangements (improvisations?) on piano roll are so inventive that they help cover the noticeably altered and mechanical aspect of the quantized pulse. Gershwin adds unique introductions and codas, jazzes up harmonies, adds inner voice melodies and obbligato counterpoint to bring simple sheet music song publications to a level where they become wholly new compositions. Although we have no written manuscripts of his arrangements and little documentation about editorial procedure, it is very likely that Gershwin himself aided in the manipulation of roll recordings to include desired “extra” notes.

As he became more experienced as a pianist and composer, and as he became well-known publicly and garnered respect within the music industry, roll producers most certainly would have granted Gershwin a great deal of creative input into his roll arrangements, especially after the phenomenal success of his song Swanee in 1920.

Unfortunately, the master roll making device on which a pianist “recorded” was not sophisticated enough to track a pianist’s dynamics and expressive inflections during the session. Consequently, while the pianist played, editors listened carefully and made notes about where to add in dynamic shadings and accents after the “recording” was done. In order to mimic a live pianist’s voicing within individual chord clusters, editors would frequently realign the attack point of certain notes to trick the listener’s ear into hearing a particular note “brought out” more strongly.

These manipulations of the pianist’s performance resulted in the oft-noted jerky or ragged performance style of reproducing player piano rolls. These problems are especially evident in the Rhapsody in Blue rolls and have been a subject of controversy for over sixty years. Did Gershwin really play like that?

Rhapsody in Blue was premiered in February 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York and repeated soon afterward at Carnegie Hall in April 1924 due to the stunning impact it had at its debut. A nationwide concert tour of the work immediately followed, as did a disc recording with the Whiteman Orchestra at the Victor Talking Machine Company’s (RCA) studio in New Jersey in June 1924. After a four-year hiatus in roll-making, Gershwin returned to the Aeolian Company in early 1925 to make a piano roll of the Rhapsody.

Because of the length of the work (and perhaps its marketing value?), editors decided to issue the roll in two parts. Part 2 was issued first in May 1925 and begins with the famous Andantino moderato theme (occurring about two-thirds of the way through the piece) and runs to the end. It is very likely that Gershwin “recorded” both parts at the same time during his early 1925 visit. Part 1 however was not released until January 1927.

The problems of length forced the editors to slow down the roll speed of Part 1 to avoid having too large a roll of paper. Unfortunately, this shortening also reduced the amount of paper space available for coded expression holes and contributed to a rather unmusical portrayal of Gershwin’s performance. Part 2 represented a smaller portion of music and was able to run at a faster paper speed which allowed more coded expression information. Consequently, that section is more representative of his playing.

Fortunately, we have two unedited 1924 and 1927 disc recordings of Gershwin playing the Rhapsody with the Whiteman Orchestra (the technology did not yet permit the luxury of editing) that form an interesting basis for comparison with the piano roll version. Unfortunately, the low fidelity of the recordings also makes it difficult to judge Gershwin’s playing. We do know that Aeolian editors consulted with Gershwin after master rolls were made and that Gershwin had an opportunity to express his opinions about the final editing. Thus, the questions of authenticity remain unanswered to this day.

Swanee was Gershwin’s first big hit in 1920 thanks to vaudevillian Al Jolson’s decision to include it as part of his performances on tour. Jolson’s unique interpretation propelled sheet music and disc recording sales of the work into the millions. Gershwin was paid $10,000 in royalties in the first year alone—an enormous sum at the time, especially for an “uneducated” 21-year-old composer. Jolson always ended his rendition of Swanee by whistling a short quotation from another pop tune of the day, Listen to the Mockingbird.

Gershwin quotes the same melody at the end of his Swanee piano roll (and also in Whip-Poor-Will) in obvious tribute to the man who helped make him a success. The considerable financial reward of Swanee in 1920 made it possible for Gershwin to give up roll making for several years and turn his creative attention to full-time composition of his own Broadway shows and serious instrumental works. Once his reputation was established as a successful composer, he chose to make piano rolls only of his own compositions from then on.

(Filched and brutally abbreviated from this source: http://www.richard-dowling.com/GershwinRollsNotes)



A couple of dozen of these recordings can be heard on two CDs from the label Nonesuch:






Tracklists: Volume 1 - Volume 2

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Gershwin, part I. Through the eyes of others

Here's a compilation of Gershwin's compositions in both the "light" and "serious" departments.

It features Miles Davis and Leonard Bernstein, Ella Fitzgerald and Eugene Ormandy, and many of the other artists who were inspired by this man. (I wonder how many dozens of non-operatic takes on "Summertime" alone there are? Apparently more than 2500.)

Take a look at the full list of tracks on this set here.


Among them, there's this classic from 1959 (complete).




To follow: Gershwin, part II. By himself
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