Greg Stepanich

Medici.tv music site is addictive

Years ago, some friends of mine and I idly considered founding a classical music cable TV enterprise in which we could run concert videos and interviews, news and documentaries.

We didn’t get very far, and as it turns out, plenty of other people have had the same idea.

Word of a music channel called medici.tv arrived in my e-mail this week (thanks to Louise Barder at 21C Media Group), and I have to say this site looks pretty good to me.

Medici.tv is produced by a company called Medici Arts, which works with Germany’s EuroArts and France’s Ideale Audience, according to 21C. What they’ve got here is a nice selection of new and vintage performances from a wide variety of sources.

What’s most interesting to me is that they’re preparing to webcast live performances from the upcoming Aspen Music Festival, starting June 20 with Joshua Bell in the Chausson Poeme and Ravel’s Tzigane.

Calling up medici.tv this evening, I’m treated immediately to pianist Grigory Sokolov in the third movement of the Prokofiev Seventh Sonata, and it’s a good performance. Yesterday, I caught Simon Rattle in the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements, from Moscow, and then surfed over to a 2003 performance by Anna Netrebko and Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the love duet from Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci.

I’ve already found this site addictive, and much of this material — the Aspen Festival, for instance — is free. Subscribers can also stream stuff from their library for a day, a month or six months; six months will cost you 50 euros, which is around $77 today.

Most of the video streaming I saw today was very jumpy, but the sound was fine; the logo on the site indicates it’s still beta, so maybe that will clear up (or it might be just an inadequate high-speed connection on my end). There’s a box on the site that also indicates there will be more to come, including magazines and blogs.

But for now, I find medici.tv well worth checking out, and I’m eager to catch some parts of the Aspen broadcasts in the coming days.