In Brief: le 14 juillet Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.)

• From the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the world premiere of George Benjamin's new opera Written on Skin -- cue the cacophonous clusters! [Medici.tv]


• Today don't miss the live Internet broadcast of the production of Götterdämmerung from Munich, starting at 11 am EDT. [Bayerische Staatsoper]


• From the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Mozart's La Finta Giardiniera and Marriage of Figaro (with Kate Lindsey, Patricia Petibon, and others) performed by Le Cercle de l’Harmonie. (Experiencing technical problems with both of these feeds at time of writing.) [ARTE Live Web]


• Listen to a performance of Georges Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles from the Opéra Comique, with Leo Hussain conducting the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the Accentus choir. [France Musique]


• Listen to (and watch!) the opening concert of the 2012 Proms from London, a celebration of all things British with Elgar, Tippett, Delius, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and soloists Susan Gritton, Sarah Connolly, Robert Murray, Gerald Finley, and Bryn Terfel. Also on this week -- John Eliot Gardiner conducting Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (July 15), Alice Coote singing French chansons (July 16), John Adams conducting his own City Noir (July 16), Anne Schwanewilms singing Strauss's Four Last Songs with the BBC Philharmonic (July 17), Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel in an all-Handel program (July 17), the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment performing Handel's Judas Maccabaeus (July 18), and Mahan Esfahani and the Academy of Ancient Music perform Bach's Art of Fugue (July 21). Streams are available online for only seven days after each performance. [BBC]


• Listen to Dvořák's Stabat mater with Nikolaus Harnoncourt leading the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Arnold Schoenberg Chor, from the Styriarte Festival. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Renaud Capuçon and friends join the Orchestre National de Montpellier for an all-Mozart program, from the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• Also from the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, Renaud Capuçon joins the Orchestre National de France for the Brahms violin concerto. [France Musique]


• Hear Marlis Petersen star in the soprano roles of Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, from the Theater an der Wien, Riccardo Frizza conducting. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Pianist Béatrice Rana, the winner of the 1er Prix at the Concours International de Montréal 2011, plays Chopin's op. 28 preludes, at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• Joyce DiDonato, Michael Schade, and Vadim Repin join the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich for the "Sommernachtsgala" from Grafenegg. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival de Saint-Denis, cellist Edgar Moreau and pianist Pierre-Yves Hodique perform Schnittke, Brahms, Debussy, and Fauré. [France Musique]


• From the Lugano Festival, Gautier Capuçon, Maria João Pires, and friends join the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana for music of Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Bernstein. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Arnold Schoenberg Chor join forces for an intriguing program of music by Schubert, Brahms, and Bartók, from the Styriarte Festival. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Forget Hemingway -- when you want to read about Paris in the 1920s, Louis Aragon is your man. In March, the city of Paris finally named a corner of the city for this great surrealist writer, who used to live on the île Saint-Louis. While working at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, I used to eat my lunch in the beautiful park on the eastern end of the island: the new Place Louis Aragon is a little square at the western end of the island, just across from the building where the title character in Aragon's novel Aurélien lived. The honor, long seen as politically inconvenient because of the author's communist leanings, was made possible by Jean Ristat, the president of Société des Amis de Louis Aragon et Elsa Triolet, who lives on the island himself and almost never leaves it. [Le Nouvel Observateur]


• "Vintage," indeed -- Herbert von Karajan conducts Bach's B Minor Mass at the 1950 Bachfest in Vienna, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Kathleen Ferrier, among others, as soloists. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• And, because I forgot to link to it last week, congratulations to the contrada capitana dell'Onda, winner of this year's Palio di Provenzano in Siena on July 2, the annual horse race that is medieval pageantry at its best. Condolences to Lupa, la nonna, which has not won a Palio since 1989. [YouTube]


• From a recording made in Moscow in 1970, a performance of Borodin's Prince Igor at the Bolshoi Theater. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]