She collaborated on the melodies for signature commercials that sang the praises of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other brands.Ginny Redington Dawes, a songwriter whose compositions included memorable advertising jingles like the chipper McDonald’s declaration “You, You’re the One” and Coca-Cola’s boast that “Coke Is It,” died on Dec. 31 in Manhattan. She was 77.Her companion and only immediate survivor, James McCullar, said the cause was complications of hepatic cirrhosis.Ms. Dawes never became well known herself, but she helped maintain or boost the popularity of the products she promoted. And she insinuated infectious tunes into the nation’s repertoire that Americans whistled and hummed as much as the songs played on Top 40 radio.She hooked listeners with melodically and rhythmically catchy jingles that accompanied slogans for everything from Tide detergent to Hartz’s tick and flea-fighting pet collars, Kit Kat candy bars and Johnson’s baby powder.“When I’ve got a really great lyric,” she told Charles Osgood of CBS in a 1977 television interview, “I put a very simple melody to it.”Ms. Dawes started writing the music and lyrics for commercials in 1975 after the firm of Sidney E. Woloshin — who composed the original McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” jingle in 1971 — was commissioned to do one for the chain’s new “You, You’re the One” advertising campaign.Mr. Woloshin invited about 20 jingle writers to submit proposals. Ms. Dawes produced the winning tune. Adopted by the ad agency Needham, Harper & Steers, it was suddenly everywhere.In 1979, she married a jingle-writing competitor, Thomas W. Dawes, whose credits included Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” and “7Up, the Uncola.”They later collaborated on the music for, among other campaigns, American Airlines’ “Something Special in the Air” and the familiar “Coke Is It.” Mr. Dawes died in 2007.The jingle that underscored Coke’s claim to be “It,” introduced in 1982, was described as a “piece of dynamite” by John F. Bergin, the worldwide director of the Coke account at the McCann-Erickson agency.While David Ogilvy, a founder of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, was credited with the credo “If you don’t have anything to say, sing it,” Mr. Bergin argued that the musical accompaniment to the Coke commercial was anything but an afterthought. If soda drinkers paused to parse the ambiguity of what “It” was, the tune was intended to define the term and embellish it.“It’s like a football fight song,” Mr. Bergin told The New York Times. “Usually you get a languid ballad. We were looking for a big, bold sound, and a big, bold statement. This isn’t an ipsy-pipsy drink, and the music says that loud and clear.”The song, composed by Ms. Dawes and arranged by her husband, was one of 18 jingles and 36 proposed slogans presented to Coca-Cola executives to succeed “Have a Coke and a Smile.”The music and copy were tested separately in consumer focus groups and individual interviews until the agency and company reached a consensus that “Coke is it” was, indeed, it.Ms. Dawes also wrote pop songs, including “Hurtin’ Song,” recorded by Eddy Arnold, and “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (written with Rose Marie McCoy), recorded by Sarah Vaughan.She began her musical career as a singer, to glowing reviews.When she appeared in 1975 at the Coriander, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, John S. Wilson of The Times called her a “startling performer” who sang “in a deep, strong, beautifully controlled voice that is filled with vivid colors, as she moves from low, sexy passages to an open, lusty shout.”Virginia Mary Redington was born on May 13, 1945, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bay Ridge section of the borough. Her father, Joseph, was a naval architect. Her mother, May (O’Brien) Redington, was a teacher.Virginia attended Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn and graduated from St. Josephs College, also in Brooklyn, with a degree in English in 1966.She and Mr. Dawes — a founder of the folk-pop group the Cyrkle, best known for its 1966 hit single “Red Rubber Ball,” written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of the Seekers — married in 1979 and, merging their talents, formed TwinStar Music to produce jinglesThe couple also wrote the book, music and lyrics for “The Talk of the Town,” a show about the fabled literary round table at the Algonquin Hotel, whose members included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman. First produced in 2004, it ran nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater before it moved as a cabaret show to the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room.Reviewing the show for Bloomberg News, John Simon wrote that its music and wit matched “the infectious energy and sophistication of the real-life luminaries it is based on.”Ms. Dawes was also a collector of antique jewelry and the author, with her husband (who took the photographs) and others, of several books on the subject, including “The Bakelite Jewelry Book” (1988), with Corinne Davidov, and “Georgian Jewellery 1714-1830” (2007), with Ms. Dawes’s fellow collector Olivia Collings. More

Felipe Lara’s sensational Double Concerto, with Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding, was played by the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki.Placing an old piece in new surroundings can make you think about it in a fresh way. Until the New York Philharmonic played Charles Ives’s short, indelible “The Unanswered Question” on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall under Susanna Mälkki’s baton, I had never thought of it as a tiny double concerto.It isn’t, exactly. A double concerto adds two soloists to the orchestra, and the Ives has five: four flutists and a trumpeter. But its structure — in which soft expanses of consoling strings are the ground for interjections of somber trumpet and bursts of talkative flute — suggests the flutes are a single many-headed unit. It’s a kind of double concerto, then, in which two solo forces have a relationship to one another and to the main ensemble.It’s no surprise that my thoughts went to this form. Felipe Lara’s sensational Double Concerto, exuberant if not always sunny, had its New York premiere on Wednesday after the Ives.Written in 2019 and given its premiere in Helsinki under Mälkki two years later, this is a true double concerto, featuring a pair of soloists, Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding. But this piece, too, complicates the form, since they each use multiple instruments: Chase, a battery of flutes — another reason the Ives was a wise juxtaposition — and Spalding, a double bass and her bright, pure voice.

HKO Screen – Felipe Lara: Double Concerto from Helsinki Philharmonic on Vimeo.Unlike “The Unanswered Question,” which maintains a demure separation between the trumpet (for Ives, representing “the perennial question of existence”) and the flutes (attempts at answers), Lara intertwines his soloists into what Chase calls in a program note “a many-tentacled creature.”The two often play together, with the trail of one — a whipped breath of flute, a cool curve of voice, a slightly bending reverberation of bass — audible only as a comet’s tail off the joint sound. Neither stops for long over the work’s half-hour length.Which is not to say that either player is homogenized by combination. The vocabulary here is sprawling and idiosyncratic on both sides. Chase makes virtuosically parched, percussive exhalations; she can be sheerly sweet on the standard flute and has, on the enormous contrabass flute, the milky penetration of a whale’s deep-sea call.Spalding’s mellow, dancing bass plucks are a sound we know best from jazz, but are totally at home here, and her singing is guileless without being childlike. She mostly vocalizes, sometimes on the syllable “ah,” sometimes on “mm” and sometimes — most memorably at the end — on “shh.” She briefly sings a Portuguese text Lara wrote about life’s blessings, though to listeners that can blur into incantatory vocalizing, too. (From the audience it’s also hard to perceive a secret of the score: Chase is sometimes producing sound by singing into the flute.)The music is mostly notated, but in a large-scale dual cadenza Chase and Spalding improvise together, remarkably responsive, unified and relaxed, creating a miniature universe of sounds — whispery, earthy, otherworldly-woozy, underwater-translucent, simple and raucous: a paean to the joy of collaboration, of play.The orchestra, led by Mälkki with focused confidence on Wednesday, tends to be active but subdued, the way you can perceive seething activity even in a seemingly still jungle. There are hazy effusions of brass; little thickets of rattling, shivering percussion; and whooshing, glistening strings that were a textural link to the Ives, as well as to Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” which came after intermission.Performed in the pared-down orchestration Stravinsky made in 1947, decades after writing the piece, “Petrushka” here seemed both to echo and to have generated the Lara concerto’s off-kilter abruptness, fearless colors and wry enigmas.The Philharmonic, sounding poised throughout the concert, was especially evocative in Stravinsky’s humid third tableau. Alison Fierst brought nuance and a sense of mystery to her crucial solo on, yes, the flute. (The instrument could hardly get a more profound showcase than this program.) Under Mälkki, “Petrushka,” more than any other quality, had unexpected intimacy.As did Lara’s concerto. Even as it builds to flourishes of gleaming Hollywood-golden-age grandeur, and even with substantial forces — there are two full string sections onstage, one tuned slightly higher than the other — Lara has the maturity to resist doing too much.He also has the skill to shape a gorgeously varied but unbroken single movement that evolves organically over its 30 minutes to a final lullaby, pricked by starry harp. This is a complex but legible, lovable piece; a funky yet elegant ritual; thrilling and taut, if also fundamentally unhurried and unpressured.Spalding performed in a jumpsuit printed, in bold capital letters, with “LIFE FORCE,” and I felt that way about the music, too.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

The British musician has had several brushes with death in her 74 years. But Covid-19 and its long-haul symptoms didn’t derail her latest project: a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets.Several times in her 74 years of life, Marianne Faithfull has boomeranged from the brink of death.First there was the summer of 1969, when she overdosed on Tuinal sleeping pills in the Sydney hotel room she was sharing with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger; as she slipped under, she had a long conversation with his recently deceased bandmate, Brian Jones, who had drowned in a swimming pool about a week prior. At the end of their spirited talk, Jones beckoned her to hop off a cliff and join him in the beyond. Faithfull declined, and woke up from a six-day coma.That was before she became addicted to heroin in the early 1970s: “At that point I entered one of the outer levels of hell,” she writes in her 1994 autobiography “Faithfull.” It took more than a decade to finally get clean. Since then she’s survived breast cancer, hepatitis C and an infection resulting from a broken hip. But, as Faithfull told me on the phone from her London home one afternoon in February, her recent bout with Covid-19 and its lingering long-term aftereffects has been the hardest battle she’s fought in her entire life.“You don’t want to get this, darling,” she said. “Really.”She said it, of course, in That Voice, coated with ash but flickering with lively defiance underneath. As it’s matured — cracked and ripened like a well-journeyed face — Faithfull’s voice has come to possess a transfixing magic. It’s a voice that sounds like it has come back from somewhere, and found a way to collapse present and past. She can find the Weimar Berlin decadence in Dylan, or breathe William Blake’s macabre into a Metallica song.Right before she contracted the virus in March 2020, Faithfull was working on an album she’d dreamed of making for more than half a century: “She Walks in Beauty,” due April 30, a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets, who had first inflamed her imagination as a teenager. In the mid-1960s, the demands of Faithfull’s burgeoning pop career pulled her out of her beloved Mrs. Simpson’s English literature course, “but I went on reading the books,” Faithfull said. And through the ups and downs of her life, those poems stayed with her like well-worn talismans: “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shalott’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?”Faithfull had recorded recitations of seven Romantic poems, from Byron (“She Walks in Beauty”), Shelley (“Ozymandias”) and Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”). After she was hospitalized with Covid-19 and fell into a coma, her manager sent the recordings to Faithfull’s friend and frequent collaborator Warren Ellis, to see if he would compose music to accompany them. Neither was sure Faithfull would live to hear the finished product.Ellis was told, “‘It’s not looking good,’” he recalled, on a video call from his Paris home. “‘This might be it.’”But — ever the Lady Lazarus — Faithfull pulled through. Only once she began to recover did her son, Nicholas, tell her what they’d written on the chart at the foot of her bed: “Palliative care only.”“They thought I was going to croak!” Faithfull said, likely for not the first time in her life.“But,” she added with a wizened chuckle, “I didn’t.”Faithfull said she wanted to attend Oxford and immerse herself in literature. But she was discovered by the music manager Andrew Loog Oldham instead.John Pratt/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMARIANNE’S FATHER, Glynn Faithfull — yes, that improbably perfect surname is real — was a British spy in World War II, and the son of a sexologist who invented something called “the Frigidity Machine.” Her mother, just as improbably, was the Austrian Baroness Eva von Sacher-Masoch — the great-niece of the man who wrote the sensationally scandalous novella “Venus in Furs” and from whose name we are blessed with the word masochism. Put all those things together and you get their only child, born a year after the end of the war.Her parents split when she was 6, and at 7, her mother sent her to boarding school at a Reading convent. (“Glynn begged her not to,” she writes in “Faithfull.” “I remember him saying, ‘This will give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life.’”) When she visited her father, who was living and teaching in a commune, she got a glimpse of the polar opposite end of the spectrum. At 18, she married the artist John Dunbar and gave birth to Nicholas shortly after.“I wanted to go to Oxford and read English literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. That was my plan,” she said. “Anyway, it didn’t happen. I went to a party and got discovered by bloody old Andrew Loog Oldham.”Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first manager, hadn’t heard Faithfull sing a note; he just took a long look at her and decided this striking young blonde was destined to be a pop star. He had Mick Jagger and Keith Richards write a song for her, the melancholy ballad “As Tears Go By.” It was, in her words, “a commercial fantasy” that pushed “all the right buttons.”Which is to say she didn’t take this accidental pop career of hers that seriously, not at first. On her debut tour, she always seemed to have her nose buried in a book, “poring over my reading list for English literature as if I were going back to school.”But that wasn’t happening. In swinging, psychedelic London, Faithfull was a beautiful girl suddenly in the eye of a cultural hurricane. She met everybody. She left her husband and child behind, dabbling in everything the men did without apology. She and Richards dropped acid and went looking for the Holy Grail. She wrote in her autobiography that Bob Dylan tried to seduce her by playing her his latest album, “Bringing It All Back Home,” and explaining in detail what each track meant. (It didn’t work. “I just found him so … daunting,” she wrote. “As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.”)Jagger had more luck, and for a few seemingly glamorous years they were a generational It Couple. But there were tensions from the start, and Faithfull wasn’t sure she was cut out for the wifely muse role that, even in such bohemian circles, she was expected to play. Then there was the Redlands drug bust.Tipped off by a sanctimonious British tabloid in February 1967, the police raided Richards’s Sussex home during a small party, and found a modest amount of drugs. Faithfull had just taken a bath when the cops arrived, and the only clothes she brought were dirty, so without thinking too much about it she flung a rug over herself.Jagger and Richards’s subsequent drug trial is now generally seen as a pivot in mainstream acceptance of certain countercultural behaviors. But Faithfull bore the brunt of the backlash. One headline blared in all caps: Naked Girl at Stones Party. “I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug,” Faithfull wrote, “while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.” It certainly wouldn’t be the last rage-inducing double standard she’d endure. “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shallot’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?” Faithfull said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesA FEW YEARS ago, over a Christmas dinner, Faithfull gave Ellis’s teenage children a long, anecdote-filled talk about why they should stay away from drugs. She spoke about the infamy at Redlands as though it was something they would be familiar with.“My kids had no idea what she was talking about,” Ellis said. “But when I drove her home, my son just looked at me and goes, ‘[Expletive], she’s awesome.’”Ellis — who Faithfull affectionately described to me as “a sexy old thing” — conducted his interview from a low-lit, brick-walled room that looked like it may or may not be a dungeon. This is where he was holed up for long hours last spring, listening to the voice of his dear friend, who may or may not have been dying, read him Romantic poetry.He said he found the poems “so incredibly beautiful and uplifting, a total balm for all this turmoil and sadness that was going on in the world.” This was new: When he read them as a schoolboy in Melbourne, Ellis had found the Romantics mostly “impenetrable.” But listening to a masterful interpreter like Faithfull intone them, he said, “suddenly they felt ageless. They felt freed of the page. Because of this authority and absolute belief in them. She believes what she’s reading.”In composing the tracks, Ellis wanted to shy away from the expected “lutes and harpsichords” approach. Instead he studied some of the records he thought most successfully blended spoken-word and music, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “I’m New Here,” Sir John Betjeman’s “Late-Flowering Love” and Lou Reed and Metallica’s “Lulu.” Like Faithfull’s fiery readings, Ellis’s meditative compositions — featuring contributions from Nick Cave and Brian Eno — accentuate the poets’ enduring modernity. (The Romantics might not have yet lived to see rock ’n’ roll, but they certainly knew a thing or two about sex and drugs.)Before Ellis was finished, he got the news that Faithfull had woken up from her coma, left the hospital — and, in time, recorded four more poems. “She survived Covid, came out, and recorded ‘Lady of Shallot,’” Ellis said shaking his head, referring to the 12-minute Tennyson epic. “She’s just the best, Marianne.”The remarkable — and even fittingly spooky — thing about the record is that you cannot tell which poems Faithfull recorded before or after her brush with death. Perhaps only Faithfull herself can hear the difference. “I was quite fragile, but I didn’t start to do it until I was better,” she said. “And I liked it very much, because I sound more vulnerable — which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.”Faithfull has fashioned sticking around into a prolonged show of defiance — a radical act, for a woman. She did not come into her own musically until her mid-30s, with the release of her punky, scorched-earth 1979 masterpiece “Broken English.” In the subsequent decades, her artistry has only deepened, and she has gradually, grudgingly earned her respect (“I’m not just seen as a chick and a sexy piece anymore — though I should think not, I’m 74!”). Her anger about the industry and the media subsided a great deal in the time between her 1994 and 2007 memoirs. What happened?“Just time, you know. From everything I know about life in general — which is probably not much — is that you have to get over those things, or they eat you up,” she said. “And I’m not going to let that happen. So I let it go. I don’t hold resentment anymore about the press.” She laughed, genially. “But of course I don’t let them near me, really!”She has a lighter attitude, but Faithfull has not made it out of her latest battle without some lingering scars. She lost her dear friend and collaborator Hal Willner to the virus. And after initially feeling better, a few months ago she started feeling worse. She has since been experiencing the stubborn symptoms of long-haul Covid, which for her include fatigue, memory fog and lung problems.She has been working diligently on her breathing; a close friend comes by weekly with a guitar to lead her in singing practice — her own version of the opera therapy that has shown promising results in long Covid patients. She’s been spending quality time with her son and grandson, reading (Miles Davis’s autobiography, among other things), and counting the days until she can once again go to the movies, the opera, the ballet. When she first got out of the hospital — après Covid, as she likes to call it — it seemed like Faithfull may never sing again. Now, she is looking forward to writing new songs, and envisioning what a return to the stage might look like.“I’m focusing on getting better, really better — and I’m beginning to,” she said. “I’ll certainly never be able to work as hard as I was, and long tours are not going to be possible. But I do hope to do maybe five shows. Not very long — 40 minutes perhaps.” Still, she admitted, “It’s a long way away.”Ellis said, “If anyone can do it, it’s Marianne, because she just doesn’t give up. She constantly surprises you.”Sometimes she even surprises herself. Earlier in our conversation, Faithfull had let me know, in her admirably no-nonsense way, that she hadn’t called me up to chat for fun, but because she had an album to promote. But she ultimately admitted to finding it vivifying to talk about her life, her art, her past and future. “It’s good for me to remember who I really am, not just an old sick person,” she said.“Of course,” I replied. “You’re Marianne Faithfull, damn it!”She mulled it over for a long moment. “It’s true, I am.” Then, with an unexpected surge of strength, like a hammer’s blow, she added, “Damn it.” More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBryn Terfel Returns to the Metropolitan Opera. (Sort Of.)A holiday recital, streamed live from Wales, will be this star singer’s first headlining performance for the Met since 2012.The bass-baritone Bryn Terfel near his home in Wales.Credit…Clementine Schneidermann for The New York TimesDec. 11, 2020The airy studio where Bryn Terfel practices is set a good few yards from the house in Penarth, Wales, that he shares with his wife and two young children. Given his thunderous bass-baritone voice, which has roared through the great roles of Mozart, Puccini, Verdi and Wagner at opera houses around the world over the past 30 years, this is probably essential to family sanity.A few days before a holiday recital that will be streamed live by the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday from Brecon Cathedral, about 40 miles north of here, Mr. Terfel, 55, was seated at his piano in the room for a video call. Visible behind him was an antique poster advertising a Paris-Wales train route, and another for a production of Verdi’s “Falstaff” in Milan, in which he played the jovial title role.But the opposite wall, he indicated as he turned the camera, is dominated by his achievements in America: posters for a “Sweeney Todd” opposite Emma Thompson at the New York Philharmonic; his 1996 Carnegie Hall recital debut; and, signed by its cast, Wagner’s “Ring” at the Met.Mr. Terfel’s most recent performance in New York, opposite Emma Thompson in “Sweeney Todd” with the New York Philharmonic in 2014.Credit…Chris LeeThis wall of New Yorkiana was particularly poignant to see, since Mr. Terfel has not appeared in the city since that “Sweeney” in 2014. In a review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Mr. Terfel “may be the most richly gifted singer ever to undertake the title role.”His recent Met history has been a dark comedy of errors. Shortly after arriving to start rehearsals for a much-anticipated new production of Puccini’s “Tosca” in 2017, he knew something was wrong with his singing, and dropped out to have a polyp removed from his vocal cords. Then, earlier this year, he fractured his ankle and couldn’t appear in another new staging, this time Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer.”“These are things that you never expect to stop you in your tracks,” Mr. Terfel said.The takeaway: He has not appeared at the Met since 2012, so this holiday recital is a return — even if it’s from some 3,000 miles away. He remains well-loved by the company’s audience for his rich, warm voice, his imposing characterizations — and commanding height — and his relish for the words he sings. Memories are still strong of his barreling through the title role in “The Marriage of Figaro,” sneering as Scarpia in “Tosca” and appearing as both the lecherous Don Giovanni and his manservant, Leporello, in Mozart’s opera. If his star turn as Wotan in Wagner’s “Ring” in 2010-12 felt stunted by the physical limitations on the performers in Robert Lepage’s staging, he still exerted a magnetic presence.Deborah Voigt, left, as Brünnhilde and Mr. Terfel as Wotan in Wagner’s “Ring” at the Met. Because of two last-minute cancellations, Mr. Terfel has not appeared there since singing Wotan in 2012.Credit…Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaHe spoke in the interview about his pandemic year and his plans for the Met recital. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Do you currently have Met engagements beyond this recital?In New York I’ve performed nearly all the operas I do on a new scale, a new production. Of course it’s such a tremendous strain on your family life to be away that long. That’s something that is always difficult in this career, about signing a contract in New York. So I don’t currently have any contracts, not really. I’m just booking two years in advance, maybe.I have certain interesting things with the Royal Opera House in London. And Welsh National Opera, too. I like Vienna and Munich, where you can rehearse two days and do three performances; a week and a half, and you’re home. And in a run of “Tosca,” you sing opposite maybe three different Toscas, each exceptional.How did this holiday concert, which is part of the Met’s series of livestreamed recitals, come about?In the summer, Peter Gelb [the Met’s general manager] rang me at home and offered me a chance to be a part of this series, which I’m incredibly grateful for. It’s a wonderful way to finish off your year, knowing a vaccine is being rolled out as we speak. He immediately said I should be doing a kind of Christmas program, so I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. I wanted something of the birth of Jesus, which comes in “El Nacimiento,” a Spanish carol I’m singing. There are a couple of songs by Robat Arwyn, a friend I was in school with. There’s “Silent Night,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the Welsh song “Ar Hyd y Nos” (“All Through the Night”).A bard here in Wales, Mererid Hopwood, has written these short texts for me to read between the pieces. The arts is all about teams and collaboration, and I’ve tried to assemble a very strong team. My wife, Hannah Stone, will be accompanying me on the harp. It’s a perfect instrument anywhere, but in the cathedral it really feels like it’s come home. I’m so happy to be able to include some young singers, the soprano Natalya Romaniw and the tenor Trystan Llyr Griffiths. And the pianist Jeff Howard, and the folk group Calan. And everyone comes together at the end to start the Christmas spirit.Silence, serenity and peace — that is what I’m going to try and convey. But what will be on my mind will be the frontline workers, and the losses we have all encountered in every country.What was the process of picking Brecon Cathedral?The Met people had this vision they wanted a castle. But in Wales, the castles are either in ruins or the rooms inside are too small. There was the idea of Cardiff Castle, but there’s a wedding there this weekend.“Silence, serenity and peace — that is what I’m going to try and convey,” Mr. Terfel said of his holiday recital, which will be livestreamed by the Met.Credit…Clementine Schneidermann for The New York TimesHave you been able to perform this year?There have been some terrific moments. I did a new “Fidelio” in Graz; I did a “Tosca” in Munich. The arts in Germany is a whole different kettle of fish. It’s not just the federal government; it’s the city, it’s the state of Bavaria. It was important for the opera house in Munich that they brought back audiences very quickly, even if it was just 500 people. It was still bringing the arts to the people who needed nourishment in some musical form.I’ve just recorded “Chestnuts Roasting” for a music festival here close to me. (And maybe in a couple of weeks Santa might bring something that might resemble a microphone.) I did a concert in the Barbican [in London], a 50-minute online concert that had to be devised around a set amount of musicians. I did Bach cantatas and English songs.And I did a little concert to thank the vaccine team in Oxford, with a new carol by John Rutter. The three words at the end: “The angels sing.” And that’s the hope I think. For our profession now, to bring people back, everyone has to have that confidence. And hopefully by next summer we should have some sense of normality.What are some of your future plans?I had been supposed to do my first Bluebeard in Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” in June, and I hadn’t even begun with a coach or language coach. In lockdown I’ve been looking at one-act operas a little bit, with a thought what might help opera houses: Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and “Il Tabarro”; “The Bear” by William Walton; Donizetti has many wonderful one-act operas; “Bluebeard,” of course.And my constant friend, here on the piano, is Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which I hope to be recording for Deutsche Grammophon. I’ve never performed it; the first time I opened the score was during Covid. I was invited many times to hear Jonas Kaufmann sing it, Simon Keenlyside sing it, but I didn’t want to hear it until I did it myself.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis, recent pioneers at the Metropolitan Opera, returned to earlier works in a pair of performances over the weekend.In the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which just had an acclaimed revival in the New York City Center Encores! series, Jelly Roll Morton, a pianist and composer who claims he invented jazz, pays for his hubris. But while the show occasionally excoriates him, its fictionalized tale revels in his real-world achievements.On Saturday, during the final weekend of the run, Nicholas Christopher summoned wave after wave of electricity as Morton — not only during the song and dance numbers, but also during scenes in which he managed to create an affecting portrait of a figure who needed to hustle to receive his due credit.Morton’s biography resonated in two other concerts presented in New York on Friday and Saturday. These performances likewise featured the music of composers who have cut significant profiles in jazz, but with a privilege never afforded to Morton: Their works have made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met, where it will be revived in April. At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday, he began a two-night retrospective with a program that delved into his early experiences playing with Art Blakey as well as his later work scoring films for Spike Lee.Then, at the NYU Skirball on Saturday, some early, sizzling early chamber music by Anthony Davis — whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” arrived at the Met last fall — received a rare airing from the International Contemporary Ensemble in a performance that also featured Davis playing some ferociously elegant solo piano.With their Met premieres, Blanchard and Davis have attained a status for Black jazz artists that would have made Morton, an opera lover, envious. But as these concerts demonstrated, there is much more in each composer’s catalog for audiences to mine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More