There are now many organisations and individuals regularly posting free online content to tide us over the “lockdown”.  Here are some of the ones I’m keeping track of:

Youtube channels.  Best followed by searching for the channel name and then subscribing.  That way you will get notified of new stuff whenever you sign into Youtube.

• Royal Opera House Covent Garden.  Complete operas and ballets plus interviews, trailers and other features.
• Oper Frankfurt.  Interviews about productions, “isolation concerts” by their artists.  It helps if you speak German.
• Canadian Opera Company.  Mostly single arias by recent cast members of single productions or members of the Ensemble Studio.
• Screaming Divas.  Sondra Radvanovsky and Keri Alkema doing silly things (and drinking lots of gin).  The late, great Humphrey Burton would have approved.
• Opera North.  Complete recordings of opera including their Ring cycle.  Also trailers and so on.
• Arts Anyway.  Aaron Durand and friends performing and talking about how they are coping (or not).
• Opera Revue.  A weekly tongue in cheek look at life in isolation from Danie Friesen and Claire Harris.
• Pacific Opera Project.  Loads of complete operas from a rather ff the wall west coast outfit.
• Stratford Festival.  Not opera but good stuff including, as of now, Robert Lepage’s excellent production of Coriolanus starring my old mate André Sills .
• Natalya Gennadi.  The lady herself singing and also dancing to Handel’s Rejoice Greatly in Church Slavonic while a rather bemused looking Mchael Shannon handles piano duties (seriously…)
• Colin Ainsworth.  Hosting the ISO Recitals series.  Some feature him, some don’t.

And something a bit different… Canada Performs.  This is a series of short concerts sponsored by the National Arts Centre.  There are concerts every day from 11am to early evening in a very wide range of genres.  The actual delivery mechanism is sometimes Youtube and sometimes Facebook.  Youtube works as you would expect but Facebook is tricky.  The link from the NAC schedule will usually take you to the performer’s Facebook page.  Look for a menu that includes “video” and wait for “live” to appear in red.  Click that!

Anyway, there’s loads more on Youtube than just food porn and reruns of ancient cricket matches (although that’s mostly what I’m watching).