The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Musical America offers an exhaustive and helpful guide to international FREE streaming of operas, concerts and recitals, complete with program notes and links for listening

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By Jacob Stockinger

During the COVID-19 pandemic, so much music is being streamed – through both live streaming and delayed pre-recorded streaming – that it can be hard to keep track of it all.

After all, the events are taking place locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.

How do you know what operas, orchestral concerts, chamber music concerts and individual recitals will take place? Where and when they will take place? What time is it in your time zone? And where do you find links to the performances, such as those by the famed Berlin Philharmonic (below)?

Getting so much information can be daunting.

But one loyal reader has helped The Ear by sending word about the most exhaustive compilation or online guide to FREE streaming of classical music events he has seen so far.

It is done by Musical America, and The Ear highly recommends it. 

The Musical America website advises users that the guide will be updated twice weekly, and that Central European Time (CET) is six hours ahead of Eastern Daylight time (EDT) — or seven hours ahead of Central Daylight Time (CDT).

It also tells you how long many of the streamed videos are available for. A full 23 or 24 hours after the initial airing seems pretty average. But many appealing events – by some of the most prestigious organizations and individual performers in the world — will be available for the entire duration of the coronavirus pandemic.

You also get concise notes about the performers and the programs.

Today and tonight, for example, you could take in productions by the Berlin State Opera, the Zurich Opera and Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera (below) and the Vienna State Opera.

You could also take in the historical performances from the ongoing Cliburn Watch Party from the Cliburn International Piano Competition, and the twice weekly concerts by the six musically talented children in the acclaimed Kanneh-Mason family in England, now dubbed “The Von Trapp’s of classical music.” (Below is cellist brother Sheku Kanneh-Mason performing at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.)

And you could listen to award-winning cellist Alisa Weilerstein (below) will also discuss and play all 36 movements of the six solo cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach that she recently recorded and just released.

The guide lists some of the more outstanding paid websites such as Medici TV but also lists events that took place much earlier but are still available for free watching and listening.

The guide has a link so that organizations can submit their own events for listing or users can make suggestions.

In short, the Musical America guide is extremely useful. You should probably bookmark it if you are planning to listen to a lot of musical events online through streaming.

But don’t take The Ear’s word for it. Take a look and check it out for yourself.

Here is a link: https://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?storyid=44766&categoryid=1&archived=0

What do you think of it?

Do you find it useful and think you will?

Do you see any major shortcomings or overlooked events?

Recommendations of your own?

The Ear wants to hear.