In Brief: Cold Snap Edition

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

L'Arpeggiata, dir. Christina Pluhar, Los Pajaros Perdidos, with P. Jaroussky

• Paul McCreesh directs the Gabrieli Consort in a performance of Haydn's The Seasons, with soprano Christiane Karg, tenor Allan Clayton, and bass-baritone Christopher Purves, from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. [France Musique]


• The perfect date night for Valentine's Day: snuggle up for the production of Richard Strauss's Salome from Brussels, streaming online starting on February 14. "Ah, ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan" -- make it a special night! [Théâtre de la Monnaie]


• We noted the passing of conductor Paavo Berglund last month. You can listen to Berglund at work with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, back in 2007, leading Sibelius's fourth symphony and the Brahms violin concerto with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist. [France Musique]


• Watch the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, play music of Shostakovich (Song of the Woods, with tenor Dimitri Voropaev and bass Sergei Leiferkus) and Prokofiev (excerpts from Romeo and Juliet), under the baton of Vasily Petrenko. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• From the Auditorium de Dijon, the Tokyo String Quartet plays music by Haydn, Bartók, and Debussy. [France Musique]


• Watch flutist Sooyun Kim and pianist Juho Pohjonen playing a recital in the Auditorium du Louvre. [Medici.tv]


• Listen to a recital by the winners of the Concours Opéra d’Arles 2011. [France Musique]


• With the Filarmonica della Scala in Milan, Daniel Harding conducts Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. [Medici.tv]


• The other half of the Filarmonia della Scala concert features Lars Vogt as soloist in Brahms's first piano concerto. [Medici.tv]


• Josep Pons leads the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse in Richard Strauss's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro, with soprano Raquel Lojendio, tenor Gustavo Peña, and baritone Joan Martin Royo. [France Musique]


• Bernard Haitink conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Beethoven's fourth and seventh symphonies. [Medici.tv]


• The Maîtrise de Radio France joins the Choir and Orchestra of the Teatro Regio di Torino in a performance of Puccini's Tosca, from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. The cast is led by Svetla Vassileva (Floria Tosca), Riccardo Massi (Cavaradossi), and Lado Ataneli (Scarpia). [France Musique]


• Watch more videos of performances from the Folle Journée de Nantes. [ARTE Live Web]


• Take a look at the winners of the World Press Photo competition. Some outrageously beautiful and sometimes tragic images. [Le Monde]


• Another Liszt recital, anchored on the second year of the Années de pèlerinage, with pianist Andrei Korobeinikov in the Auditorium du Louvre. [France Musique]


• A very interesting performance interweaving Schumann's Dichterliebe, song for song, with Oscar Strasnoy's song cycle Heine. Mezzo-soprano Mareike Schellenberger and tenor Christoph Prégardien are accompanied by pianist Michael Wendeberg, at the Théâtre du Châtelet for the Présences Festival. [France Musique]


• Talk about setting yourself up for an unfavorable comparison: again for the Presences Festival, Oscar Strasnoy's Six songs for the unquiet traveller paired with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, in the arrangement by Schoenberg. Mezzo-soprano Ann-Beth Solvang and tenor Tom Randle join the Ensemble 2e2m under conductor Pierre Rouillier. [France Musique]


• Hungarian, Berlin-based director David Marton has made a theater work set to the music of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, for the festival Le Standard idéal at the Théâtre MC93 de Bobigny. Trained as a classical pianist, Marton studied conducting and theater at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin, where he began to collaborate with Christoph Marthaler and others. The work layers Bach's music over the narrative frame of László Krasznahorkai's novel The Melancholy of Resistance, about the rise of chaos and fascism in a small town in southeastern Hungary. [Le Monde]


• Pianists Wilhem Latchoumia and Fuminori Tanada perform a program combining music by Gérard Pesson, Haydn, and Brahms, from the Auditorium Saint-Germain. [France Musique]


• Pablo Picasso's iconic painting Guernica is 75 years old. To celebrate, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid is digitalizing the painting in a high-resolution scan. A robot nicknamed "Pablito" has been working nights, when the museum is closed, since January 25, going over the painting inch by inch, taking an estimated 1,000 photos of the surface each hour. [L'Express]