In Brief: Assumption Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

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  If you really wanted to go to the Salzburg Festival this year to hear Janáček's The Makropulos Affair, you can listen to it online, with Angela Denoke and Brandon Jovanovich and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting. Also, the Academy of Ancient Music performing Mozart's La finta giardiniera at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; Evgeny Kissin playing Liszt at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon; Céline Frisch (pictured) and Café Zimmermann performing an all-Buxtehude program, and Collegium Vocale Gent performing Bach cantatas, both at the Festival de Saintes; L'Arpeggiata performing music of Luigi Rossi at the Festival de Saint-Denis; Rossini's 1817 opera Adelaide di Borgogna from the Pesaro Festival; the Ensemble Gilles Binchois performing Reginald Liebert's 15th-century Missa de Beata Virgine in the medieval Abbaye du Thoronet; pianists Julia Kociuban and Einav Yarden at La Roque d'Anthéron; and Frank Braley, Eric Le Sage, Emmanuel Pahud, and others playing chamber music in the Château de l'Empéri de Salon-de-Provence. [France Musique]


• An excellent slate of concerts from London this week: Amanda Roocroft and Christine Rice in a Britten program; Valery Gergiev conducts the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake; Yuja Wang and her short dress will perform Bartók with the Royal Philharmonic; Lisa Batiashvili will play Shostakovich with the Philharmonia Orchestra; Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley give the world premiere of a new concerto for violin and cello by Thomas Larcher, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; Emanuel Ax and Bernard Haitink perform Brahms with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; Angela Hewitt plays more Brahms; the BBC Singers and London Sinfonietta perform music by Peter Maxwell Davies, Georges Aperghis, and Harrison Birtwistle; and Ian Bostridge and friends in a concert in tribute to Richard Hickox. [BBC Proms]


• In online video, watch Aldo Ciccolini and Michiyoshi Inoue at La Roque d'Anthéron. [ARTE Live Web]


• Also, you can watch Nicholas Angelich play Liszt's Les années de pélerinage, also from La Roque d'Anthéron. [ARTE Live Web]


• Don't forget Mahler's seventh symphony and Alisa Weilerstein playing Haydn's first cello concerto, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in Wiesbaden. [ARTE Live Web]


• Danish classical radio has some online music to be streamed, although I am still figuring my way through the Danish-only site. [DR Klassisk]


• The big news this week was a brilliant and acerbic letter from Stephen Sondheim to the New York Times, excoriating Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks for their new production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. At issue was changes to the opera, which they claimed would improve the work. If you have not read the letter, you should, for its vitriolic pleasures, but the opera could certainly be improved. Whether this production does that is not clear yet, because directors can think they are improving a work while actually making matters worse. Making changes is not the problem, but what the changes are can be. [New York Times]


• More laughs -- What are the Ten Douchiest Colleges in America? #3 is Yale, the "red-hot center of secret societies [including] the chronic masturbators' club, also known as the Whiffenpoofs." [GQ]