Sirius fun
As La Cieca predicted a fortnight ago, the Met Opera today announced a partnership with SIRIUS Satellite Radio to broadcast live and archival Met performances. The series will begin on Monday, September 25th, with a live broadcast of the Met’s opening night gala performance of Madama Butterfly, conducted by Music Director James Levine and directed by Anthony Minghella.
The format for the new Sirius channel, 85, will include four live broadcasts a week during the season plus 10 archival saturday matinee broadcasts. Amusingly, the NYT piece announcing the new channel says the programming “will range widely, including the likes of a 1937 performance of Carmen, starring Rosa Ponselle, and a performance of La Traviata in 2004 with Renée Fleming.” Yes, “widely” is definitely the operative word here.
La Cieca must admit that she is not an early adopter of satellite radio. So clue her in, cher public, what are your experiences with Sirius? (And for those of you who are as clueless about Sirius as she is, here’s a video that is obviously targeted precisely at La Cieca’s core audience.)
Sirius is very easy to listen to online but not easy to listen to in a NYC apartment – the antenna needs a clear view of the sky to get a strong signal or a clear southern view – not easy to accomplish – the radios are mainly boomboxes or docking stations that send the signal to an FM radio -finicky at best -the Internet version is the easiest way for aprtment dwellers but Sirius insists that users buy a unit to get service
One day some months ago I was bored flipping through channels in front of my TV and discovered that my Dish Network subscription came with several Sirius music channels, including the Classical Voices channel, which will now become Metropolitan Opera Radio. Right now I’m listening to NPR World of Opera, a program I could not listen to otherwise since none of the stations in the DC suburbs carry it.
So, it might be worth it for some of you to check with your locally available cable or satellite (TV) companies to see if one of them carries these Sirius music channels and then switch accordingly. As I see it, I’m already paying for “cable” TV channels anyway. The sound quality is excellent.
On a side note: about 5 years ago I had a boyfriend who gave me an XM receiver and gift subscription as a present after about 2 months of dating. I still don’t know what to make of that or where he was going with this, especially since at the time satellite radio had been around for about two days. Better than a live animal, I guess (which I got on a different occasion). Anyway, some months later both boyfriend and subscription ran out but to this day I still get an email once a week from their VOX channel. They are heartbroken that Sirius got the deal. In the email this week, Robert Davis’ summary of the negotiations goes like this: “Naturally, the Met needed to make a choice based on economic imperatives, and as a growing industry (still) it is difficult at all times to prioritize how assets and investments will flow”. Sounds like he’s both dissing the Met for choosing the best offer “after years of back-and-forth negotiations” (it’s all about the money to that whore, naturally!) and excusing his XM higher-ups for not having balls and passing on it.