Free on medici.tv Next Tuesday, Nov 18: Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter Leads Mutter Virtuosi Live in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from Carnegie Hall
“The closest thing to a classical Netflix.” — New York Times on medici.tv
Following the inaugural webcast in the partnership between Carnegie Hall and medici.tv of a recital by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, the free series continues live on Tuesday, November 18 at 8pm EST with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, winner of multiple Grammy Awards along with many of the other highest honors in music. She leads the Mutter Virtuosi – an ensemble of 14 young students and professional string players from around the world who are alumni of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation – in a program that includes Bach’s Double Concerto for Two Violins and the U.S. premiere of André Previn’s Violin Concerto No. 2, as well as one of the most popular works in the canon: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The concert is part of Mutter’s Perspectives series this season at Carnegie Hall. Commenting on this performance, the violinist says: “The Mutter Virtuosi, my little string ensemble, consists of current and former scholars of my foundation. Bringing them to Carnegie Hall is particularly exciting, because these are future goodwill ambassadors. Music is such a wonderful language that embraces all of us.”
The Carnegie Hall lineup on medici.tv continues Saturday, November 22 at 8pm with the dream team of violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Yuja Wang performing music by Schumann, Brahms, Respighi and Ravel. This initial series culminates on Tuesday, December 9 at 8pm with young Russian piano virtuoso Daniil Trifonov in works by Bach (arranged by Liszt), Beethoven and Liszt. Following the free live webcasts, replay of these concerts will also be available at no charge to online audiences on medici.tv for another 90 days, playable worldwide on all internet-enabled devices, including smart phones, tablets, Chromecast, computers and smart TVs.
Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Mutter Virtuosi from Carnegie Hall, Nov 18, 8pm EST
In Mutter’s Carnegie Hall program of daring string writing through the ages – Bach’s Double Concerto for Two Violins, Strings and Continuo in D minor (BWV 1043), André Previn’s Violin Concerto No. 2 and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons – each of the scores resonates with the others. Although Bach wrote numerous violin concertos, only three have come down to us: two for solo violin and the ever-popular Double Concerto in D minor, all scored for an orchestra of strings alone. Bach modeled his concertos on those of Vivaldi. Although the Italian composer wrote hundreds of concertos, his name is virtually synonymous with the set of them known as The Four Seasons, published in 1725 in a collection of 12 concertos titled The Contest Between Harmony and Invention. Scintillating pyrotechnics and subtle tonal effects make Vivaldi’s masterpiece a feast for the ears.
Previn’s Second Violin Concerto, with a strings-and-harpsichord scoring that also reflects Vivaldi’s concertos, is his second dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. Previn’s piece occupies a Baroque footprint, and much in the actual writing has a Baroque feel as well, including the stepwise movements of the parts and the collective behavior of the accompanying ensemble, which itself includes a group of soloists.
Leonidas Kavakos & Yuja Wang from Carnegie Hall, Nov 22, 8pm EST
The New York Times has praised violinist Leonidas Kavakos’s playing for its “balance of pyrotechnics and lyricism,” while the San Francisco Chronicle declared Yuja Wang “quite simply the most dazzlingly, uncannily gifted pianist in the concert world today.” At Carnegie Hall, the star duo will perform Schumann’s impassioned Violin Sonata No. 2 and Brahms’s lyrical Violin Sonata No. 2; also on the program is Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A Minor and Respighi’s lush Violin Sonata.
Daniil Trifonov from Carnegie Hall, Dec 9, 8pm EST
A sensation before he was 20, pianist Daniil Trifonov has proven that he is more than just a young phenomenon, including with acclaimed performances on the Carnegie Hall stage. His latest Carnegie program includes works by Bach (arranged by Liszt), Beethoven and Liszt. About Trifonov’s Liszt, the Financial Times said: “It was in the Liszt…that he came into his own – a titanic performance, projected with a confidence and relish that masked the music’s ferocious technical challenges beneath a mastery of its tempestuous surges and swings of mood.” Audio recording for this webcast is provided by WQXR.
Joyce DiDonato’s “Journey Through Venice” from Carnegie Hall, webcast Nov 4 and available at medici.tv for free until Feb 3, 2015
With the city’s mix of age-old beauty and the existential threat of a rising sea, Venice has fascinated artists for centuries. In Joyce DiDonato’s program, only Vivaldi represents the native Venetian; with his opera Ercole su’l Termodonte, he definitively showcased the glories of the Venetian operatic style of the Baroque era. Each of the other composers – Fauré, Rossini, Head, Hahn – were tourists smitten by the city. An idyllic vacation in Venice helped Fauré rekindle his creative fire to write one of his greatest song cycles, Cinq mélodies “de Venise.” Living in comfortable retirement in Paris, Rossini remembered fondly the city for which he had composed so many operas early in his career with La regata veneziana, written in Venetian dialect. Hahn was a frequent visitor to Venice; in his song cycle Venezia, he adopted both its local dialect and the lilt of its folk songs. Writing at the end of his career, Englishman Michael Head captured the sadness that lies behind all the beauty and the sense of death hovering on every wave in his Three Songs of Venice.
About medici.tv
Since its official launch in May 2008, medici.tv has gained international recognition, bringing together a community of 200,000 music and arts lovers from 180 countries. In addition to offering live concert hall events that music lovers can experience on their computers and entertainment systems (Chromecast, Airplay, Smart TVs), medici.tv offers a free application (available at the Apple App Store and at Google Play for Android) that makes it possible to experience world-class artistry on all mobile devices. In addition, more than 80 client universities around the world take advantage of medici.tv, including Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music.
New partnerships include the distribution of a selection of medici.tv content through major digital platforms including iTunes, Samsung, Amazon, Canal +, GVT in Brazil, and Shanghai Media Group, confirming medici.tv’s role as the leading digital provider and aggregator of audiovisual classical music programs worldwide.
In addition to webcasts of more than 100 live events 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 1,400 video-on-demand programs. They include concerts, operas, recitals, documentaries, masterclasses, artist portraits and archival material by such legendary musicians as Maria Callas, Glenn Gould, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Arthur Rubinstein, Georg Solti and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
About Carnegie Hall
Since 1891, New York City’s Carnegie Hall has set the international standard for excellence in performance as the aspirational destination for the world’s finest musicians and ensembles. Carnegie Hall presents a wide range of performances each season on its three stages – the renowned Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, intimate Weill Recital Hall and innovative Zankel Hall – including concert series curated by distinguished artists and composers; citywide festivals featuring collaborations with leading New York cultural institutions; orchestral performances, chamber music, new music concerts and recitals; and the best in jazz, world and popular music.
Over the decades, Carnegie Hall has been the setting for numerous television and radio productions, including Leonard Bernstein’s famous Young People’s Concerts in the 1950s with the New York Philharmonic. Many Carnegie Hall concerts today are heard by listeners worldwide each season via the Carnegie Hall Live radio and digital broadcast series, created in partnership with WQXR. Performances from the Hall have also been broadcast periodically to national television audiences over the years on PBS’s Great Performances, produced by Thirteen for WNET. In addition, a seemingly endless list of acclaimed recordings, by leading artists of all genres performing on Carnegie Hall’s stages, have become an integral part of the Hall’s history.
Complementing these performance activities, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute (WMI) creates extensive music education and community programs that annually serve nearly 450,000 people in the New York City area, nationally and internationally. As part of this, WMI has long been a leader in utilizing technology to share Carnegie Hall programs, educational materials and professional development resources with teachers, students and partner organizations around the globe.
Follow medici.tv on:
www.facebook.com/medicitv
https://twitter.com/medicitv
medici.tv is produced by MUSEEC, in partnership with ROLEX and is supported by the European Community (MEDIA) and the CNC.
# # #
© 21C Media Group, November 2014
