In Brief: Hockey Edition

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

• Watch Paul Agnew conduct Les Arts Florissants in a performance of Monteverdi's first book of madrigals. [Cité de la musique Live]


• Hear the Maîtrise de Radio France sing sacred music by Vaughan Williams, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Rheinberger. [France Musique]


• You can watch some of the competition from the Concours Armel Opéra, where stagings of operas are judged. You can watch videos of some of the operas, including Antigona by Josef Mysliveček, Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Verdi's Rigoletto, Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini, and the world premiere of Michael Dellaira's The Secret Agent. [ARTE Live Web]


• Listen to Kurt Masur conduct the Orchestre National de France in Brahms, Mozart, and Reger, with pianist Helen Huang, at the Théâtre du Châtelet. [France Musique]


• Beloved scholar and musicologist Piero Weiss, who helped create a music history program at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, died this week. His books, especially a classic collection of source readings in music history and his studies on Italian opera, have been invaluable in my education. He was also a kind-hearted and generous man. [New York Times]


• Listen to Enrico Onofri lead soprano Ana Quintans and Divino Sospiro in a program of Baroque music at the Festival d'Ambronay. [France Musique]


• I had an absolutely crazy geology teacher in high school, who used to do all sorts of weird things -- like staging dialogues with himself on a recorded tape -- to keep his students awake. One thing was clear, that he loved rocks, and I learned a lot of great stuff from him. He once told us that, much to his wife's dismay, he had spent a vast sum of money on a large boulder, which was his favorite kind of rock, to have it towed for display in his yard. All of this came back to me upon reading about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's project to install a new outdoor art work called “Levitated Mass” by Michael Heizer, which involves placing a 340-ton, 21-foot-high solid granite boulder in a place "hovering over a cut in the earth on the grounds of the museum." As you can imagine, moving a rock that large from a quarry in Riverside to Museum Mile is quite a production. [New York Times]


• Listen to Les Pages et les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles team up with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin in a fascinating program of sacred music by Guillaume Minoret, Henry Desmarest, Louis Marchand, and Michel-Richard de Lalande made for the chapel of King Louis XIV. [France Musique]


• Eric Bietry-Rivierre reviews the new show at the Grand Palais in Paris, on the artwork collected by the Stein siblings. [Le Figaro]


• Listen to the Ensemble Linea perform the world premiere of Vincent Manac’h's Babel, plus music of Philippe Hurel, Iannis Xenakis, Ivan Fedele, and Wolfgang Rihm, at the Abbaye de Royaumont. [France Musique]


• Hear a group called Ensemble Pygmalion perform music by Leonhard Lechner (1553-1606), the 6-voice motet Si bona suscepimus, and Bach (the funeral cantata Klagt, Kinder, klagt es aller Welt, BWV 244a, also known as the Köthener Trauermusik) in the Église Notre-Dame de Taverny for the Festival d'Ile de France. [France Musique]