While I’m not inter­ested in pro­mot­ing con­sumerism, I do like to sug­gest music worth spend­ing your money on, and this time of year, that often means rec­om­mended record­ings (and the 2011 Best of Year lists will be appear­ing this week here at The Big City). But I want to offer an intrigu­ing idea for a gift for some­one you care about, includ­ing your­self, and that’s ideal for last minute shop­ping, since it requires no pack­age and can be sent, and received, any­where in an instant. That gift is medici.tv.

Medici.tv is what you get when peo­ple who really know what con­tent is cre­ate some­thing for the web. In other words, it’s one of the lead­ing exam­ples of how clas­si­cal music pro­duc­ers have taken full advan­tage of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. The DIY dis­tri­b­u­tion of dig­i­tal music is com­mon­place these days, less so is dig­i­tal access to live and recorded media events, things that appeal to the eye as much as the ear. Medici.tv pro­vides live stream­ing of musi­cal per­for­mances, as well as an exten­sive cat­a­logue of recorded per­for­mances; con­certs, opera, dance, doc­u­men­taries. The ‘tal­ent’ con­sists of the finest musi­cians from across the globe; a quick browse of the cat­a­logue notes Clau­dio Abbado, Jonas Kauf­mann, Svi­atoslav Richter, Yehudi Menuhin, Alisa Weil­er­stein, The Berlin Phil­har­monic, and a quick look through the list of com­posers brings up choices such as Kurt Sander­ling lead­ing Das Lied von der Erde, Glenn Gould play­ing Schoenberg’s Suite Op. 25, Boulez lead­ing The Rite of Spring, a 2003 Ring cycle using four dif­fer­ent direc­tors, and Otto Klem­perer con­duct­ing Beethoven’s Ninth. This is what we crit­ics call an embar­rass­ment of riches.

The con­tent is the equiv­a­lent to an excel­lent core clas­si­cal music library, live on your screen at any time. The effect is of bring­ing con­cert halls that are often thou­sands of miles, mul­ti­ple time-zones and sev­eral lan­guages and cur­ren­cies away into your home, or your lap. I know we were promised jet packs, but this is some­thing both more pro­saic and more cre­ative, which is why the futur­ists, obsessed with gad­gets and not human expe­ri­ence, never thought of it. For­tu­nately, the clas­si­cal music nerds did.

Arg­erich, Previn: Prokofiev on medici.tv.

Medici.tv is offer­ing gift cards cov­er­ing three– and six-month and one year sub­scrip­tions, start­ing at what seems to me is the ridicu­lous bar­gain of $40. If you buy by Christ­mas Eve, the recip­i­ent will be able to enjoy pre­vi­ously unre­leased per­for­mances of Martha Arg­erich play­ing the Tchaikovsky Con­certo No. 1 and the Prokofiev Third Piano Con­certo. See for your­self on Box­ing Day, when the site offers a free day of viewing.

UPDATED: With the Arg­erich con­tent direct from medici.tv