Regular online offerings from ballet, symphony, choral groups and much more
As Aristotle said “nature abhors a vacuum,” music and dance lovers at the time of the coronavirus will not stand for silence when concert halls and opera houses are shuttered.
The explosion of video and audio streaming is exponential.
Just one example from the torrent of data: Compared to the 2020 season’s sold-out San Francisco Ballet presentation of George Balanchine’s rarely produced “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the 3,146-seat Opera House (closed by The City on March 7 after one performance), the weekly SF Ballet@Home streams of various programs have been viewed some 350,000 times. That’s 110 sold-out houses; if only the company could collect ticket revenue!
This week’s free San Franicsco Ballet streaming offering is “Snowblind,” Cathy Marston’s one-act adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novella “Ethan Frome,” which depicts a heart-rending love triangle. This dance from the troupe’s 2018 Unbound Festival of new works has toured with to acclaim at the Kennedy Center in DC and Sadler’s Wells in London. Visit https://www.sfballet.org/sf-ballet-home/.
Opera, ballet and concert performances on YouTube and various organization websites get hits in the millions. Andrea Bocelli’s Easter recital of sacred-music favorites drew more than 2.8 million concurrent viewers, and the latest count on the video is nearly 40 million. Visit https://youtu.be/huTUOek4LgU to see it.
