The Princeton Festival will save you from the usual streaming content this summer, by offering a free online performance series during the month of June.
As an alternative way of delivering the inspiration of the performing arts to the Greater Princeton Area, Executive and Artistic Director Richard Tang Yuk shared When the coronavirus threat forced cancellation of our regular season, we responded by creating ‘Virtually Yours’. It includes new material prepared especially for them by leading artists, plus performances from their recorded archives.
The Princeton Festival’s digital stagings, coined “Virtually Yours”, will provide hours of musical and educational content, streaming previous full-length opera productions, lectures, poetry, podcasts, radio broadcasts, and more. There will be one event daily to insure you have the opportunity to watch or listen to every offering.
Whether you have missed recent opera productions or are excited to revisit one or more, this will be your opportunity to catch Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, John Adams’ Nixon in China, and Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in their entirety (click the links for previous reviews).
The performances and events in the past have been stellar and tickets have always been reasonably priced. Being able to try out The Princeton Festival in the comfort of your home at no charge is definitely a golden opportunity. If you are new to opera, I recommend watching Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, aka The Marriage of Figaro, which ranks as one of the top ten most popular operas. Madama Butterfly lands in the top 20 tier, and is also a good “beginner’s” opera to watch.
In a compilation of videos made especially for the Festival, twelve renowned poets from the U.S., Japan, and China will be reading poems on the theme of women. Airing Fridays at 8 PM on WWFM Radio, 89.1 FM and on The Classical Network at www.wwfm.org, will be broadcasts of 2019 Festival concerts by Concordia Chamber Players, Van Cliburn competition pianist Rachel Cheung, and the Princeton Festival Baroque Orchestra and Chorus.
For a full roster of “Virtually Yours” events, plus periodic updates to the schedule, visit https://princetonfestival.org/virtually-yours/