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Classical Music Online: Salonen, Sellars and Mozart

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Esa-Pekka Salonen turns 50 today, and the Swedes stepped in with a wacky birthday tribute.

A concert honoring the L.A. Philharmonic music director and a shocking interpretation of 'Zaide' show the Internet's potential as a window to a wider world.

I do not unconditionally celebrate the Internet, particularly its intrusion into classical music. As replacements for the record store, Amazon and iTunes have become necessary evils. Typical commercial downloads are sonic shadows of the superior sound of CDs. Blogs ghettoize critics. YouTube is pretty much a toy.

But there was no denying the Internet's potential as a genuine window onto the wider world this past weekend. Two recent European events of great interest to Angelenos went online, and that felt like a breakthrough.

Esa-Pekka Salonen turns 50 today. After plans for some kind of Hollywood Bowl celebration fell through, the Swedes stepped in with a wacky birthday tribute by the Swedish Radio Symphony earlier this month. That concert -- which began with a video clip of Salonen scratching his fingernails across a blackboard and ended with him wheeling a squealing Swedish actress offstage in a wheelbarrow and then jogging back to the podium to conduct a celestial performance of the final duet from “Der Rosenkavalier" -- can be seen for the next few weeks on the website of Swedish television channel SVT.

Meanwhile, Friday night, the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France opened with Peter Sellars' shocking interpretation of Mozart's early, unfinished opera, “Zaide," and that too has gone online, courtesy of Medici Arts. Sellars directed the live webcast, and the Medici.tv site also offers his passionate, revelatory 15-minute introduction, in which he brilliantly explains what Mozart means to a modern world beset by poverty and divided between West and East.

The “Zaide" webcast is part of a new expansion of Medici.tv, which now includes selected programs from this summer's Aspen and Aix festivals and which will, beginning July 18, add Switzerland's Verbier Festival. The site also offers downloads of Medici Arts DVDs, including a stunning 1989 Mozart and Chopin recital in London by the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter and a documentary on the premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's “Helicopter" Quartet at the 1995 Holland Festival.

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