With a widespread return to indoor, in-person performances nonetheless a methods off, listed below are 10 highlights from the flood of on-line music content material coming in April. (Times listed are Eastern.)
‘St. John Passion’
April 2 at 9 a.m.; dg-premium.com; out there by April 4.
This live performance sells itself: John Eliot Gardiner, one of many most interesting Bach interpreters on this planet, main his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists within the “St. John Passion” — on Good Friday, no much less. Not at all times as fashionable, and at all times more controversial, than its sibling “St. Matthew Passion,” the “St. John” is nonetheless a piece that Gardiner feels passionately about. As he wrote in his guide “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” it’s “as bold and complex an amalgam of storytelling and meditation, religion and politics, music and theology, as there has ever been.” JOSHUA BARONE
Attacca Quartet
April 6 at 7 p.m.; millertheatre.com; out there indefinitely.
The Attacca gamers appear incapable of placing on a boring live performance; one of many closing dwell performances I heard earlier than final 12 months’s lockdown featured them in joyous mastery of Caroline Shaw’s string quartets. That was on the Miller Theater, which is internet hosting this livestream of picks from John Adams’s “John’s Book of Alleged Dances”; Gabriella Smith’s rhapsodic jam session “Carrot Revolution”; and “Benkei’s Standing Death,” a 2020 work by Paul Wiancko, whose “Lift” teems with understanding of and affection for the string-quartet custom. JOSHUA BARONE
‘Pelléas et Mélisande’
April 9 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; out there by Oct. 9.
We often affiliate the phrase “period instruments” with the Baroque period. But adjustments in musical expertise have been steady and profound by the ages, such that there will be revelatory performances of “period Beethoven” or “period Wagner” — or interval Debussy! François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, have lengthy tailor-made their interpretations — and the devices they use — to completely different works they play. They have recorded Debussy as he may need sounded on the flip of the 20th century, and now tackle his epochal 1902 “Pelléas” for Opéra de Lille, directed (and with starkly elegant sets designed) by Daniel Jeanneteau. ZACHARY WOOLFE
The Orchestra Now
April 10 at eight p.m.; theorchestranow.org; out there on demand from April 15 by May 30.
This spectacular ensemble of graduate college students at Bard College presents a characteristically adventurous program, performed by Leon Botstein. It opens with Tania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, adopted by Bernstein’s “Serenade”: a rumination on Plato’s “Symposium” that takes the type of an intense, episodic violin concerto, with Zongheng Zhang as soloist. The good pianist Blair McMillen seems in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a terrific however seldom carried out piece. The program ends with Mendelssohn’s spirited “Scottish” Symphony. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Benjamin Appl
April 12 at eight a.m.; wigmore-hall.org.uk; out there by May 12.
When this German baritone sang Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” cycle on the Park Avenue Armory two years in the past, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times that he “had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice.” If you, like me, missed that efficiency, one other alternative beckons with this livestream from Wigmore Hall in London. Appl can have, within the pianist James Baillieu, the identical associate as on the Armory, so we’ll see if he can solid the identical spell over the display screen. ZACHARY WOOLFE
‘In the Penal Colony’
April 15 at 12:01 a.m.; philipglasscenterpresents.org; out there indefinitely.
In the previous, I’ve discovered the recording of this Philip Glass “pocket opera,” tailored from Kafka’s brief story, to be a bit of a slog. But a staging could make all of the distinction, notably when dealing (as right here) with a talky libretto. This 2018 manufacturing by Opera Parallèle — introduced as a part of this 12 months’s digital version of Glass’s Days and Nights Festival — has turned me round on the work. Thanks to a powerful pair of lead performances and a easy but efficient black-box set, Kafka’s bureaucratized dystopia shines by with a contemporary lacquer of bleak humor. SETH COLTER WALLS
San Francisco Symphony
April 15 at 1 p.m.; sfsymphonyplus.org; out there indefinitely.
The pandemic waylaid this orchestra’s splashy plans to welcome Esa-Pekka Salonen as its new music director. But with its personal streaming service now up and working, San Francisco is giving Salonen an opportunity — nonetheless curtailed — to start out defining his tenure. For this SoundBox program, he’s specializing in concepts of musical patterning. While this system consists of some well-worn Minimalist favorites by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, probably the most intriguing merchandise is a premiere from Salonen himself: “Saltat sobrius,” a fantasy on Pérotin’s medieval “Sederunt Principes.” SETH COLTER WALLS
Jeremy Denk
April 15 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; out there by July 14.
The first guide of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” was to have dominated this pianist’s 2020 efficiency schedule. That, in fact, was to not be, however final spring, he nonetheless produced a series of streams associated to the capacious work. He returns to it in its totality for this live performance, introduced by Cal Performances. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Hallé Orchestra
April 29 at 7 a.m.; thehalle.vhx.tv; out there by July 29.
All three of the Hallé’s streams this month might be price watching, together with the premiere of Huw Watkins’s Symphony No. 2, out there from April 15. But this final program of the season is probably the most formidable: an account of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” filmed on location throughout the orchestra’s hometown, Manchester, England. Composed amid the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Stravinsky asks for small forces: simply seven instrumentalists backing three actors and a dancer. Mark Elder conducts, and Annabel Arden and Femi Elufowoju Jr. direct. DAVID ALLEN
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
April 29 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; out there by May 6.
This program is billed as “Monumental Trios,” and that’s no exaggeration. Beethoven’s Trio in E-flat (Op. 70, No. 2) is an imposing, looking out and, at instances, alluringly quizzical work. The excellent pianist Juho Pohjonen joins the violinist Paul Huang and the cellist Jakob Koranyi in a efficiency taped in 2015. Brahms’s Trio No. 1 in B, composed in 1854 and revised in 1889, provides music by this composer in his brash early days — then modulated some 35 years later, as soon as he was a probing, mature grasp. The efficiency by the pianist Orion Weiss, the violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Carter Brey is from 2017. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
