medici.tv to Air TREE OF DREAMS, Renee Fleming

This weekend, medici.tv offers violinist Renaud Capuçon performs Henri Dutilleux's gorgeous L'Arbre des songes (The Tree of Dreams), with conductor Tugan Sokhiev and the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse. The Toulouse program also presents Tchaikovsky's great "Pathétique" Symphony. On February 25 at 2:15 pm, medici.tv will present the opera Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss, starring soprano Renée Fleming and conducted by Christian Thielemann, in a production from Baden-Baden, Germany.

Premiered in the 1980s by the eminent violinist Isaac Stern (who commissioned the work), Dutilleux's L'Arbre des songes is a rare classic among contemporary concertos. Scored for a large orchestra that includes a piano, cimbalom, and five percussionists, the work is a wonder of the imagination: from the color-rich instrumentation to the exotic melodies and harmony, brought from dream to life by the French composer. Soloist Renaud Capuçon won a Diapason d'Or for his 2002 recording of Dutilleux's piece on Virgin Classics. The program's second half features Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique." Since Tugan Sokhiev has been music director of the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, the ensemble has been acclaimed for its performances of Russian music – from Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. The orchestra's recordings of Tchaikovsky's Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 on the Naïve label have earned just praise for their idiomatic flair.

Those who had the pleasure of witnessing the production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus still talk about the joys of that rare theatrical experience. The driving forces behind that lauded Rosenkavalier – soprano Renée Fleming and conductor Christian Thielemann – have teamed again for Ariadne auf Naxos, the 1916 follow-up to Der Rosenkavalier by Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Ariadne auf Naxos showed once again that Strauss was a lover of the female voice in all its lyrical refinement and emotional beauty. The young Cavalier to Fleming's Marschallin in the Baden-Baden Rosenkavalier was Sophie Koch, who also returns to co-star as the Composer to Fleming's Ariadne. The stage director and set designer of the Festspielhaus production is Philippe Arlaud. In 2011 medici.tv also broadcast a Strauss program featuring Renée Fleming and Christian Thielemann live from the prestigious Salzburg Festival.

Live in February at medici.tv

Feb 24, 2 pm EST

Renaud Capuçon and Tugan Sokhiev in Dutilleux and Tchaikovsky

Renaud Capuçon, violin; Tugan Sokhiev, conductor; Orchestre National du Capitole

Feb 25, 2:15 pm EST

Renée Fleming and Christian Thielemann in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos

Renée Fleming (Ariadne/Prima Donna); Sophie Koch (The Composer); Christian Thielemann, conductor; Staatskapelle Dresden

About medici.tv: 

Since its official launch in May 2008, medici.tv has gained international recognition, bringing together a community of music and arts lovers from 182 countries – online viewers who have watched over twelve million videos to date. The site currently averages more than 80,000 individual visitors each month. In addition to offering live concert hall events that music lovers can experience on their computers and entertainment systems, medici.tv now offers a free application (available at the Apple App Store) that makes it possible to experience world-class artistry on iPads and iPhones.

One of the biggest successes to date at medici.tv has been the webcast of a Lucerne Festival concert featuring Gustavo Dudamel and the Vienna Philharmonic. This has been watched more than 347,500 times (live and as video-on-demand) by visitors from 150 countries. Other recent popular offerings from medici.tv include an evening of chamber music at the Atelier Lyrique de l'Opéra de Paris; Georges Pretre conducting La Scala Orchestra in a program of Franck and Respighi; Daniel Harding conducting the same orchestra in Strauss's Alpine Symphony; and an all-Brahms evening featuring Leonard Slatkin and the Orchestre National de Lyon.

Building on the success of webcasts from the Verbier Festival in 2007, medici.tv has offered high-definition webcasts from many other leading festivals, including Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Denis, Aspen, Glyndebourne, Salzburg, and Lucerne; from such Parisian venues as the Opéra National de Paris, Auditorium du Louvre, Cité de la Musique, and Salle Pleyel; and from Milan's famed La Scala. Many operas and concerts performed by the world's top artists and orchestras have been webcast as live events and later as video-on-demand (VOD) – all available for free. The list of artists presented at medici.tv is a "who's who" of today's stars, including Claudio Abbado, Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Plácido Domingo, John Eliot Gardiner, Valery Gergiev, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, Anna Netrebko, Maurizio Pollini, Thomas Quasthoff, and Simon Rattle. Among the featured orchestras are such renowned ensembles as the Berlin Philharmonic, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, FilarMonica Della Scala, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. 

In addition to webcasts of more than 80 live concerts each year (94 in 2011 and 100 planned for 2012), medici.tv has partnered with the world's top artists and music institutions to offer subscriptions giving music-lovers the opportunity to watch more than 1,000 VOD programs, and 200 new programs to come in 2012. They include concerts, operas, recitals, documentaries, master classes, artist portraits, and archival material. Featured artists include such legendary musicians as Leonard Bernstein, Maria Callas, Glenn Gould, Herbert von Karajan, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Arthur Rubinstein, Georg Solti, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as well as such leading film directors as Bruno Monsaingeon, Paul Smaczny, and Frank Scheffer. In November, medici.tv added to its library the invaluable film record of Daniel Barenboim performing all 32 of Beethoven's piano sonatas in the 1980s in Vienna. 

As of January 1, 2012, the number of medici.tv registered members has grown to more than 100,000, with 3,000 paid subscribers and 35,000 medici.tv followers on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In 2011 medici.tv had 704,000 unique visitors and 563,500 videos viewed.