#markus werba

As someone accustomed to going to live music on a regular basis, going four months without it has felt punitive. I know so many musicians who survive by gigging, relying on income from playing frequently. So the withdrawal I feel as a listener must feel even more restricted on performers.

As a not-fully-satisfactory substitute, I have been watching a lot of concerts online. I enjoyed the Bang On A Can Marathon in June, and enjoyed some really exciting performances - even when Nico Muhly broke the internet midway through the event. The finale, featuring Terry Riley in an appropriately psychedelic visual environment, provided a particularly sweet conclusion to the day’s activity. 

I’ve also spent a lot of time enjoying concerts (and ballets and operas) from Europe, which seems to have a better handle on the whole streaming phenomenon than U.S. orchestras (though our friends in Detroit have been doing a bang-up job!). Watching concerts online, with cameras capable of getting up-close to the performers onstage, had resulted in a number of crushes on key players that I didn’t know before, but whom I look forward to seeing and hearing more in the future.

Let’s start with the folks at the Berlin Philharmonic. The Berlin Phil decided to make its online concert archive (ordinarily a paid subscription) free for a month. So I had a great time listening to programs there, and found a number of the players to be quite adorable. High among these is 1st principal cellist Bruno Delepelaire, who began his career in France before migrating to Berlin. He was featured in solos a number of times, I I’d gladly watch him play anytime. 

The same goes for his colleague in the viola section, Amihai Grosz, who again had a distinguished career before getting to the Philharmonic.

Germans love titles, so I was amused that the hunky bass trombone player in Berlin was one of the few musicians designated as “Professor.” Stefan Schulz has a full-time teaching position, and is a composer as well as a trombonist.

But Berlin wasn’t the only orchestra I spent time watching. The Rotterdam Philharmonic did a wonderful performance of the Mahler Fifth, with their conductor, Yannick Nezet-Seguin. I then watched the same ensemble perform the Mahler Eighth, and promptly fell for baritone soloist Markus Werba. I am apparently not alone in this: he appears prominently on the “bari-hunk” websites, and there are plenty of pictures of him online shirtless (and then some). He can sing in my shower anytime...

And on the topic of opera, I might mention that the new conductor-in-chief of the Amsterdam Opera is the lovely and talented Lorenzo Viotti.

Mostly Mezzo Mondays: a recurring (though not weekly) feature where, on Monday nights, I blog a list of the upcoming broadcasts that have caught my eye on World Concert Hall. My interests: baroque vocal music, art song recitals, and a list of favorite singers.

Ann Hallenberg and Mats Widlund’s recital at the Teatro de la Zarzuela is scheduled for live broadcast on Tuesday. Their program includes works by Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Nikolai Medtner, Gunnar de Frumerie and Gustav Mahler. Tuesday, October 10 on Radio Clásica.

This one’s for Val: the live Met audio broadcast of Mozart’s The Magic Flute can be heard on Tuesday with a cast including Kathryn Lewek (Queen of the Night), Golda Schultz (Pamina), Charles Castronovo (Tamino), Markus Werba (Papageno), and Tobias Kehrer (Sarastro). Tuesday, October 10 on the Met Opera website.

ALSO THE BECKMESSER/SACHS SCENE IS MY EVERYTHING OKAY