“Sun & Sea,” which won top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2019, will make its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bringing the beach to you.The star of its fall season, announced Thursday, is a theatrical installation — a surreal opera set at an indoor imitation beach — that paints a portrait of sunbather tranquillity with menacing undercurrents (did you catch the aria about a boyfriend drowning in the ocean?). The production, “Sun & Sea,” which will open at BAM Fisher and run for two weeks before touring the country, won the top prize when it debuted in the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. This will be the American premiere.“It’s an incredible spectacle,” David Binder, BAM’s artistic director who saw it in Venice, said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “The beachgoers are just passing the day away as things are coming to an end.”Those attending will watch from a 360-degree balcony as 13 singers and approximately 25 local community members who act as beachgoers scroll on their phones, play cards and fill in Sudoku puzzles. In Venice, lines stretched down the canal and around the piazza to see it. In a New York Times review of that installation, Joshua Barone wrote that the opera, created by the filmmaker and director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the writer Vaiva Grainyte and the artist and composer Lina Lapelyte, has a “haunting simplicity that insinuates itself into your memory and, possibly, your opinions.” The audience watched from above on the upstairs mezzanine of a warehouse, he wrote, “as if observing animals at a zoo or creatures under a microscope.”“Within a single hour of dangerously gentle melodies, it manages to animate a panoramic cast of characters whose stories coalesce into a portrait of an apocalyptic climate crisis that goes down as easily as a trip to the beach,” Barone wrote.The fall season continues with creations by artists from Japan, Brazil and Portugal, all of them New York premieres.Later in September, the Japanese sound artist ASUNA will perform his site-specific sound installation, “100 Keyboards,” in which the same note is simultaneously played and sustained on 100 battery-operated toy keyboards arranged in a circle, creating waves of overlapping notes until they climax to what BAM calls “a singular resonant reverberation.”In October, the Portuguese playwright-actor Tiago Rodrigues will stage his collaborative theater experiment “By Heart,” in which 10 audience members are asked to memorize a poem. It will be his first performance in the United States since being appointed the next director of France’s Avignon Festival, the storied annual arts festival that turns the city into a giant theater each July.“The theme is that if we can remember words or texts by heart, they can never be taken away, or suppressed, or censored, or destroyed,” Binder said. “It’s very simple, but also deeply political.”It will be followed in November by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll’s dance piece “Cria.” Ripoll and the 10-member group Suave, an all-Black company that includes transgender performers, will mix funk, samba and break dance with passinho, the dance craze that grew out of Rio’s favelas, in the company’s first United States performance. It is billed as an experience that “relocates the wild exuberance of adolescence.”While BAM typically announces its fall season all at once, Binder said that, this year, additional programs will be announced on a rolling basis as details are finalized.“There’s just a huge appetite, I think, for artistic adventures right now,” he said. “And I’m so excited to see how artists respond to that hunger.” More

A public dispute between band members and the head of their agency has revived concerns about whether South Korean entertainment agencies exploit young musicians.Members of the K-pop group Omega X seemed to be riding high a few weeks ago when their first international tour ended with a successful gig in Los Angeles.But that feeling of triumph was short lived.After the October show, an executive from their management agency screamed at the group at an L.A. hotel and pushed one band member to the ground, footage of the encounter appeared to show. The band members then flew home to Seoul at their own expense and later took their entertainment agency to court.At a hearing on Wednesday, a South Korean judge will consider the request of the group’s 11 members to be released from their multiyear contracts with the agency, Spire Entertainment. Lawyers for the band have said the executive’s behavior in Los Angeles was the latest episode in a yearlong pattern of verbal, physical and sexual abuse. The executive, Kang Seong-hee, resigned last month but has denied any wrongdoing.“I took care of all of them like their mother,” Ms. Kang told The New York Times in a phone interview, adding that Kim Jaehan, 27, the band member who fell at the hotel, had collapsed on his own. She said she hoped the band would resume its normal activities with the agency.Experts on K-pop say the band’s accusations against their agency, if true, would be consistent with other stories from industry insiders and whistleblowers. They say some management companies, especially smaller ones, routinely exploit young artists who are desperate to become K-pop idols by imposing strict controls on their behavior and in some cases subjecting them to verbal and physical abuse.Since the 1990s, “the level of exploitation has been systematized and also normalized because the K-pop industry has become dominant” and more ambitious young people have been drawn to it, said Jin Lee, a scholar of Asian pop cultures and a research fellow at Curtin University in Australia.“Everyone wants to be an idol,” she said.The Fine PrintWorkers in South Korea, a deeply hierarchical society, are increasingly speaking up about bosses who abuse their authority. But experts say that most working K-pop artists don’t publicly criticize their agencies because they fear the consequences of violating their contracts.Omega X onstage during their international tour in October.Omega XKim Youna, an entertainment lawyer in Seoul, said smaller agencies in particular have tended to sign rising musicians to contracts that don’t define work hours or set limits on what the artists can be reasonably asked to do.Regulations governing contracts between artists and their agencies have been around for only about 25 years in South Korea, Ms. Kim said. Other industries in the country have robust labor laws. “In this context, it seems that idols, considered the less powerful parties, have no choice but to suffer a little loss,” she said.Some of the losses are financial. It is common, for example, for agencies to ask artists to pay back the costs of the training they received, such as dance lessons, vocal coaching and other preparation. But there are often questions about how transparently those debts are calculated, said Lee Jongim, a scholar of South Korea’s entertainment industry and the author of “Idol Trainees’ Sweat and Tears.”Aspiring K-pop stars “debut in their teens, but entertainment agents are adults,” she said. “So they start out in a structure in which it is difficult to establish an equal relationship.”Speaking OutSome K-pop musicians have waited until their contracts ended to accuse their agencies of mistreatment.In one example, Heo Min-sun, a member of the former group Crayon Pop, told the YouTube channel Asian Boss in 2019 that the band’s agency had withheld band members’ salaries for a year and half after their debut. She said it had also forced them to go on diets and prohibited them from socializing without the agency’s permission.“Our private lives were strictly controlled. Even if I wanted to make a new friend, I couldn’t,” Ms. Heo said in the 2019 interview. Crayon Pop’s agency, Chrome Entertainment, did not respond to a request for comment.In a 2019 criminal case, two K-pop musicians successfully took legal action against their agency before their contracts had expired.Those musicians — Lee Seok-cheol, now 22, and Lee Seung-hyun, now 20 — are brothers who performed in the boy band The East Light as teenagers. They accused their producer, their agency and its chief executive of assaulting and verbally threatening them. A court fined the agency, Media Line Entertainment, about $15,000 and sentenced the producer to 16 months in prison for child abuse. The chief executive received eight months for aiding and abetting child abuse.Another case, though technically successful, is widely seen as a cautionary tale.Three former members of the group TVXQ struggled for years to appear on television after ending their contract with SM Entertainment, one of South Korea’s most powerful agencies.. The country’s antitrust regulators eventually ordered SM Entertainment to stop pressuring cable channels to blacklist members of the band from appearing on TV.The agency denied the commission’s findings. But CedarBough T. Saeji, an expert on the K-pop industry at Pusan National University, said that the band members had been “unofficially blacklisted from the K-pop industry.” The episode sent “a chilling message to younger idols that crossing a powerful company could be the end of their career, even if they achieve a legal goal,” she added.‘A Lot of Anxiety’After Kim Jaehan’s altercation with Ms. Kang at the hotel in Los Angeles on Oct. 22, a South Korean television network published blurred-out footage of the episode that a bystander had filmed. When the band returned to Seoul, its members took the rare step of creating an Instagram account without permission from their agency, as would normally be required. In another rare step, they aired their allegations of abuse at a news conference.“Every one of us is experiencing a lot of anxiety,” Mr. Kim said at the news conference last month. The band members say that a few months after Omega X debuted in June 2021, Ms. Kang, Spire Entertainment’s chief executive at the time, began habitually making sexual remarks, touching their thighs, hands and faces against their wishes, and regularly forcing them to drink alcohol after rehearsals. Lawyers for the band have also said that Spire, a small agency founded in 2020, ordered each band member pay the agency about $300,000 in debt incurred from their training. ‌So far the band’s lawyers have not filed a criminal complaint or presented any physical evidence to corroborate their accusations, citing concerns that doing so would suggest they were trying to influence the civil proceedings that begin on Wednesday. They said their current focus was on getting the band out of their contract, not pressing charges.In an interview last week, Ms. Kang denied the band members’ accusations. Her request for them to cover her agency’s debts was justified, she added, and she believes that the band members have accused her of abuse in order to justify moving to a larger agency.“In their opinion, our company does not have enough to nurture them,” Ms. Kang said, referring to the company’s financial resources. “So they are conducting a witch hunt.”Looking AheadOmega X’s fate may depend on how the South Korean public reacts to the band’s side of the story, said Ms. Lee, the pop culture scholar. If the dispute escalates and its members can rally more public support, she said, Spire Entertainment may allow them to break their contract.At least two companies that work with Spire abroad have cut ties since the scandal broke: Helix Publicity, which had been responsible for Omega X’s public relations in the United States, and Skiyaki, the company that held the license for Omega X’s activities in Japan. A number of people who worked or volunteered at concert venues on its recent two-month, 16-city tour of the United States and Latin America have also spoken up for Omega X. Gigi Granados, 25, a cosmetologist who attended a show at Palladium Times Square in New York City, said she had witnessed Ms. Kang screaming at members of the band at their hotel after the performance. “No one deserves to be yelled at that way,” she said. More

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Megan Thee Stallion featuring Beyoncé, ‘Savage Remix’[embedded content]With “Hot Girl Summer,” a catchphrase became an inspiration for a song that became an occasion for Megan Thee Stallion to rap alongside one of her idols, Nicki Minaj. The results were mixed, a too-timid color-by-numbers exercise. The remix for her track “Savage” arrives via a similar path — the chorus to “Savage,” from Megan’s recent album “Suga,” became a TikTok dance-challenge sensation, elevating the song from amusing album cut to legitimate phenomenon. That made it an ideal vehicle for a collaboration with fellow Houstonian Beyoncé, a pairing that has been a long time coming. “Savage Remix” is fantastic, far more involved and intricate than most blink-and-you’ll-miss-it collaborations. Beyoncé rises to the challenge, rapping heartily about staying silent even when mad, the kinship of curves (“If you don’t jump to put jeans on, baby, you don’t feel my pain”) and, in a flamboyant demonstration of cultural acuity, the Demon Time series of private Instagram strip clubs that’s been a quarantine-era distraction for hip-hop and sports celebrities. Proceeds from the collaboration go to Bread of Life’s coronavirus relief efforts. JON CARAMANICAHaim, ‘I Know Alone’On the songs Haim has been teasing out from its next album, now due June 26, its three sisters have been turning to less sparkly, more subdued productions than in the past, suiting the misgivings that have always been in the lyrics. “I Know Alone” portrays longtime depression and isolation — “Nights turn into days/That turn to gray” — while the instrumental intricacies turn inward, like obsessive thoughts. The video clip is a TikTok-ready sync-dance sequence, with the sisters at a social-distance separation and a recurring move that suggests scrolling through social media. JON PARELESOasis, ‘Don’t Stop’In the mid-1990s, Oasis reigned as proud inheritors of a British rock continuum from the Beatles through the Smiths and the Stone Roses. The band split up in the late 2000s over the long-running filial conflict between Noel Gallagher — the band’s songwriter — and Liam Gallagher, its lead singer. During pandemic isolation, Noel rediscovered a demo of “Don’t Stop…,” a song that was previously known to die-hard fans from a bootlegged 2005 soundcheck performance. It’s a waltz sung by Noel, backed by guitars and a tambourine, saying goodbye and urging a positive spirit: “Take a piece of life/It’s all right to hold back the night.” It’s a kindly postscript from a contentious band; who knows if it’s the final one? PARELES More

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The famous cellist plays his instrument as he waits for his turn to get his second dose of the vaccine, treating the crowd to performance of ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Cello Suite No. 1’

Mar 15, 2021
AceShowbiz – As many still have doubt about the COVID-19 vaccine, Yo-Yo Ma gave a little support to fellow inoculated at Berkshire Community College vaccine clinic. The famous American cellist treated everyone at the health center to his first-class performance.
The renowned musician came to the vaccine center on Saturday, March 13, to get his second dose of the vaccine. He came with his wife Jill Hornor and brought along his cello. On their Facebook page, Berkshire Community College posted videos of the cellist sitting against the wall with his instrument in hand.

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During the 15-minute stay in the observation room, Yo-Yo Ma played Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and the prelude to Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1”. Berkshire wrote, “Today at the #MyBCC vaccine clinic, folks waiting in the observation area were graced by the musical talents of amazing cellist Yo-Yo Ma!” with three smiley emoticons ending the thanking post.
The post was later swarmed by many comments and the community showed their gratitude. “WOW, what a treat!! How lucky for all those who were there. Getting protected physically by the vaccine and then boosted spiritually by none other than Yo-Yo Ma, one of the greatest musicians of our time,” Emily Chuo wrote.
“Beautiful!! Great way to help with some vaccine anxiety too!” Rachel Deschamps added. “Yo-Yo Ma is such a wonderful soul. He has been entertaining us throughout the pandemic. Check out his videos over the past year on YouTube,” Charlotte Libov noted.
Born in Paris, France, on October 7, 1955, Yo-Yo Ma reclaimed his fame after winning 18 Grammy Awards and recorded more than 90 albums. Yo-Yo was The Juilliard School and Harvard University graduate. He has made so many outstanding performances and one of them was his concert at the 2001 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal Awards. Some artists who have made collaborations with him are Carlos Santana, Odair, guitarist James Taylor and Sergio Assad.

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José Mauro’s first LP, originally released in 1970, became a cult classic. Far Out Recordings is now putting out its follow-up under very different circumstances.In 2016, the British record label Far Out Recordings reissued the debut album by José Mauro, a mysterious Brazilian singer and guitarist whose 1970 LP, “Obnoxious,” had become a cult classic in his home country and with the famed crate diggers Madlib, Floating Points and Gilles Peterson. The album’s press materials noted that the conditions of Mauro’s death, presumed to have occurred in the 1970s, were unexplained. Maybe he perished in an auto accident, or was killed by the military for making what they thought were protest songs.Just one thing, though: Mauro is still alive.He never tangled with Brazil’s military dictatorship and didn’t craft anything close to political music, though his radiant art was seen as an escape. “I was a student, a music student who devoted himself to composing. Simple as that,” Mauro, 72, wrote in an email through a translator. “Nature, that was my thing. Nature and beauty.”On Friday, Far Out, which specializes in Brazilian music, is returning to Mauro’s catalog, reissuing his second and only other album, “A Viagem Das Horas” (“The Journey of the Hours”) — a masterful blend of psychedelic folk and orchestral soul that, while recorded along with Mauro’s debut, wasn’t originally released until six years later. Where “Obnoxious” offered a more straightforward set of guitar-driven bossa nova, the follow-up represented a musical and spiritual awakening for Mauro and his songwriting partner, Ana Maria Bahiana, an author and journalist now living in Los Angeles. Its arrival has forced the label, and others who presumed Mauro dead, to reckon with their mistake.“From a label standpoint, we genuinely believed Mauro was gone, that’s all there is to it really,” Joe Davis, Far Out’s founder, wrote in an email. “There was no reason for us to believe otherwise at the time. As soon as we heard that he was alive, we stopped everything until we spoke with him.” He said the revelation explained the five-year pause between the reissues.Nobody is quite sure why rumors about Mauro’s death began. “I cannot fathom how it came about,” Mauro wrote. “I sort of disappeared due to the vast gap between recording and releasing the albums. But there was no reason to think that I had died!”Davis said that the label learned of Mauro’s supposed demise in 1994, when Mauro’s old producer, Roberto Quartin, informed him of a possible catastrophe involving the singer. “He said he was told that maybe he had a serious motorcycle accident and passed away but wasn’t 100-percent sure,” Davis wrote. Because no one knew where Mauro was — not even the musicians he recorded with — “it led us to believe that was probably the case,” Davis added. (Quartin died in 2004.)But Bahiana knew that wasn’t true. “A motorcycle is the last thing he would have because he hated speed,” she said in a phone interview. “He would drive his father’s car at 20 kilometers per hour.” There was talk that he was arrested and tortured, but “none of this happened,” she said.Bahiana contacted Far Out after the label reissued “Obnoxious”; she knew Mauro was alive but didn’t know where. They eventually contacted Mauro through his nephew, David Butter, who helped facilitate the reissuing of his uncle’s music, and learned Mauro was living on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, spending his days reading and talking to friends.Mauro’s story began in a farmstead in Jacarepaguá, in the West Zone of Rio. He was raised in a musical household; his father liked to sing and his great-grandfather was a small-town maestro. Mauro started playing the accordion when he was 6; nine years later, he was given an acoustic guitar, even though he wanted a piano. “My father was not able to buy one at the time,” he wrote. He fell in love with the guitar and studied piano at ProArte, a prestigious music school in Rio.His guitar teachers included the Brazilian luminaries Baden Powell, Roberto Menescal and Wanda Sá, and he learned how to compose songs from Wilma Graça, the noted concert pianist. At ProArte, Mauro infused classical elements into his guitar playing, taking his music from an understated rustic style and giving it a more robust sound. He fell in love with music and didn’t turn back.“Music became an ally, and I was pleased about that,” he wrote. “There was no bigger joy to me than taking the guitar and composing by intuition. Music came to me as a gift, as a natural gift.”Mauro started listening to American singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan, Jim Croce and James Taylor), and to jazz and blues singers (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan). Among Brazilian musicians, he particularly liked the melodic soul that Edu Lobo, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Milton Nascimento were making. The varied influences helped Mauro forge his own sound, meant to elicit peace and contemplation.“My style is very personal,” he wrote. “I’ve always felt like a natural-born musician, carrying songs inside me. I was willing to give my best to the world without relinquishing my composing style.” He wrote songs in his room, looking out the window, staring at the nearby Atlantic Rainforest, where he observed animals, butterflies and birds: “When I felt in a creative mood, I turned the tape recorder on and started composing.”He impressed Quartin, his would-be producer, by playing a waltz he had just composed on guitar after dinner at a mutual friend’s house. Soon after, he was introduced to Bahiana through a friend of hers, and visited his future collaborator at her house in Ipanema. The two started writing hundreds of songs for what would become “Obnoxious” and “A Viagem Das Horas.”“We clicked right away,” Bahiana said. “I loved his music. It was easy for me to find words to his songs.”Quartin, a local producer and label head who’d released some 20 albums through his Forma imprint, selected the songs he liked and put Mauro and Bahiana in the studio with Lindolfo Gaya, who worked on song arrangements and conducted the orchestra. “Obnoxious” was released to little fanfare; Quartin lost interest in putting out “A Viagem Das Horas” and sold it off.“You know the labels that just do ‘Best Songs from the ’40s,’ ‘Your Favorite Jingles,’ that type of thing?” Bahiana said. “He ended up selling the second album to a company like that, who trashed it, basically. And that was the end of the story for us.” Bahiana went back to college and followed her passion for writing. Mauro stayed in Rio, teaching guitar and composing music for theater.Mauro said that the six-year wait between albums broke his will to compose more songs: “It felt like centuries,” he wrote. He has no doubt that he and Bahiana generated enough music to release another two LPs. Dismayed with the industry, he eventually opted for a quiet existence. As he got older, he had to stop playing the guitar altogether: Mauro was diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson’s disease. Now his trembling hands won’t allow him to strum the instrument at all. (“And to complicate things further, people took me for dead,” he wrote.)Despite losing his creative spark, Mauro isn’t focused on regret. That the music still sounds just as vibrant today as it did four decades ago is good enough for him.The same goes for Bahiana, who relishes the purity of the music. “It is his soul talking,” she said. “There’s no gimmicks there, no ‘I’m going to write this because it’s a trend.’ It’s exactly the way we composed, the way we showed his spirit. His heart is there.” More