Webcasts

You are in love with one who does not return your love, so to prove how much you love her, you serve her your beloved pet cat for dinner  because there is nothing else in the house. She is impressed by the gesture, and agrees to marry you. Basically that is the story of La Colombe, Charles Gounod's one act comic opera he wrote only a year after setting Faust to music with its triumph of God over Mephistopheles, and its cosmic backdrop. Horace does not serve Sylvie a cat, but he does have an adored dove he tells Sophie he has sacrificed for her dinner.

It's an all Machaut program on this week's Distant Mirror, beginning with his Notre Dame Mass, the first complete ordinary of the mass by a single composer.  Jeremy Summerly conducts the Oxford Camerata in a performance considered by many to be definitive since it was recorded at Rheims Cathedral where the mass was first performed, directed by Machaut, in 1362.  Then you'll hear several of Machaut's secular songs performed by Gothic Voices under the direction of Christopher Page.  Join Allan Kelly Friday night at 10.

This Sunday (8/5) evening we'll hear Thea Musgraves' "Orfeo II" for flute & orchestra, Alfred Schnittke's "Suite in the Olden Style" and Bernard Rands' Triple Concerto.  Music from the past half century, Sunday evening at 11 on Half Past.

Ross Amico invites you to take a nostalgic journey with an hour of British Light Music favorites in vintage recordings, featuring works by Albert Ketèlbey, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Sir Edward Elgar, Richard Addinsell, George Scott-Wood, Haydn Wood, Billy Mayerl and Eric Coates.  Trip the light fantastic, this Sunday at 10 pm.

In late 1995, engineers and producers sat down with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf  at the Abbey Road studios of EMI in London, to remaster her 1956 recording of Der Rosenkavalier for compact disc. The result is described as not just a re-mastering but a re-engineering of the performance originally supervised by Schwarzkopf's husband Walter Legge, and it is always mentioned as one of the best recordings of Rosenkavalier available. This week week on the Lyric Stage we have selections from that recording.