Basso Michele Pertusi, Wednesday

Pertusi tucks in Natalie Dessay in the Met's Sonnambula

Basso Michele Pertusi, who played the roguish count in the Met's recent production of La Sonnambula, will perform a solo recital at the Pittsburgh Opera in the Strip on Wednesday, April 1. More info at the PG here.

Pittsburgh has too few such concerts-- world class artists in solo recitals-- but tickets are a bit steep at $100 a pop. This includes a dinner and drinks with Pertusi, but I'd prefer the option of buying some tickets for just the performance at a lower price point. Maybe I'm just being cheap and anti-social?

PSO Chamber Orchestra concerts no more!

Mr. Druckenbrod at the PG posted today that, "Two years after the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra made a triumphant return to Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland with its chamber orchestra, the series will be dissolved."

Truly a shame. I saw some nice concerts at Carnegie Music Hall over the years. I wonder if this is due to not only the economy, as explained by PSO president Lawrence Tamburri in the link above, but the early retirement of Andres Cardenes, who's been conducting?

Review: La Sonnambula at the Met: Live in HD

Bottom line: stellar singing from Dessay and Florez couldn't totally compensate for overly conceptual direction by Mary Zimmerman and libretto so irrelevant it borders on the idiotic. I left after the first act, not unsatisfied, exactly-- It's just that 90 minutes of this fluff was enough. I didn't need three hours.

Here's an MP3 of the boos this production received on opening night [via Medicine and Opera blog].

YouTube Symphony

I won't make the PSO this weekend, but in the news, the Youtube Symphony has chosen its members (Reuters) and will debut at Carnegie Hall on April 15. I guess we'll see, but more interesting in the meantime is that YouTube Symphony is hosting A-level content like Lang Lang's encore at the Berliner Philharmoniker on Jan 31st 2009, also available in HD.

This concert was not available at the Berliner Phil's own HD-streaming web site, the Digital Concert Hall, which I hope to review here on Classical Burgh soon.