This Month, medici.tv Offers Grand Tour of Great European Orchestras – From Amsterdam and St. Petersburg to Vienna, Barcelona, and Lyon

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“The hits keep coming at medici.tv.” — Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise

April offers a grand tour of great European orchestras as medici.tv presents concerts by top ensembles from Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Barcelona, and Lyon. Available now is a concert with the Vienna Symphony from the famed Musikverein, in a colorful springtime program of music by Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Gershwin and more, led by Bertrand de Billy. April 14 showcases the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya led by prize-winning young conductor Vasily Petrenko, in a program of Montsalvatge, Elgar, and the Brahms Violin Concerto with world-class soloist Midori. From April 15 to 25, viewers can enjoy four concerts with the ever-exciting Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev performing signature repertoire: the complete Prokofiev symphonies and four of his five piano concertos. In the concerto performances the Mariinsky is joined by pianists Daniil Trifonov, winner of the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition (April 15); Gergiev’s frequent collaborator Alexander Toradze (April 16); St. Petersburg native Alexei Volodin (April 24); and American-Armenian Sergei Babayan (April 25). Live on April 19, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra presents Beethoven’s towering Missa Solemnis under one of the orchestra’s great kindred spirits, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. And on April 26, the Orchestre National de Lyon and music director Leonard Slatkin offer moving works by Arvo Pärt and Tchaikovsky, as well as Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 with virtuoso cellist Sol Gabetta.

At 2:15pm EDT on April 19, the live medici.tv presentation of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – recently voted the world’s greatest orchestra by a panel of critics from Gramophone magazine – sees the Dutch ensemble team with longtime partner Harnoncourt for Beethoven, one of the specialties of this revolutionary conductor. They perform the composer’s vast, intense Missa Solemnis, often called “the Mount Everest of sacred choral music,” with the Netherlands Radio Choir and an all-star lineup of vocal soloists: soprano Marlis Petersen, tenor Werner Güra, alto Elisabeth Kulman and bass Gerald Finley.

Hervé Boissière, founder of medici.tv says: "This is a very exciting time for medici.tv and our growing audience. To have some of the top European orchestras like the Concertgebouw, the Mariinsky, and the Weiner Symphoniker with us is a wonderful new development in our progress – and in the progress of classical music online. Now music lovers can tune in to one place on the Web to experience symphonic music performed from France and Spain to Russia, Amsterdam, and Vienna. This international art can now have an international audience, anytime, every day.”

Beyond this month’s new orchestral offerings, the extensive library of on-demand programs on medici.tv contains performances, documentaries, and archival features, available via subscription. These programs spotlight leading musical institutions and world-class artists – from golden-age legends to today’s top stars. Along with its must-see new opera productions, medici.tv makes available the 30-plus films by documentarian Christopher Nupen. These include not only priceless documents of cellist Jacqueline du Pré (such as Elgar’s Cello Concerto and a number of all-star chamber performances) but also films of Evgeny Kissin, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Nathan Milstein. And now, complete on medici.tv are all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas as performed by Daniel Barenboim in 1983-84.

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