Two Free Live-Streams Worth Considering

Over the last few days I have received notice of new opportunities to experience free streamed performances. One of these is local, the latest new category introduced by San Francisco Performances (SFP) under its Front Row rubric. The other is the Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Following up on the revival of archival material in the Front Row Classic series and the focus on individual soloists in the Front Row Premium series, SFP will take a more geographical approach with its Front Row Travels series. This will be a series of three solo guitar recitals, each recorded in a country that is significant to the guitarist. Thus, while David Russell was born in Scotland, his family moved from Glasgow to Menorca; and, thanks to the likes of Andrés Segovia, he cultivated an appreciation of the Spanish guitar repertoire and now resides in Galicia

He has prepared a program of music by seventeenth-century Walloon Jacques de Saint-Luc, Welsh guitarist Stephen Goss, and the “German master,” Johann Sebastian Bach. Each of these pieces will be performed in a different twelfth-century church, all of which are located along the Camino de Santiago the path of pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The video for this offering lasts a little less than an hour.

The Meany offering is decidedly more secular in content. Sō Percussion is a particularly adventurous quartet of percussionists, as interested in compositional experimentation as in sonic richness. They have also prepared a program to showcase three composers, presenting movements excerpted from a large work by each of them.

They will begin with the first movement of Angélica Negrón’s gone. This will be followed by the second and third movements from Vijay Iyer’s Torque. The concluding selection will be the third, fourth, and fifth movement from Caroline Shaw’s Narrow Sea. For this final performance they will be joined by soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gilbert Kalish. Meany has created a Web page with a hyperlink for viewing the video, which will be available until next week at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, May 14.