A beloved Mexican singer, Mr. Fernández was known for his powerful operatic range and marathon performances, delivered in a signature charro outfit and intricately embroidered sombrero.Vicente Fernández, the powerful tenor whose songs of love, loss and patriotism inspired by life in rural Mexico endeared him to generations of fans as “El Rey,” the king of traditional ranchera music, died on Sunday morning. He was 81.His death was announced in a post on his official Instagram account, which did not give a cause or say where he died. He had been hospitalized for months after a spinal injury he sustained in August, according to previous posts from the account.Accompanied by his mariachi band, Mr. Fernández brought ranchera music, which emerged from the ranches of Mexico in the 19th century, to the rest of Latin America and beyond. In his signature charro outfit and intricately embroidered sombrero, a celebration of the genre’s countryside origins, he performed at some of the largest venues in the world.He recorded dozens of albums and hundreds of songs over a career that spanned six decades. His enduring popularity was reflected in a series of industry accolades, including a place in the Billboard Latin Music Hall of Fame, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Grammy Awards and eight Latin Grammy Awards. He sold tens of millions of copies of his albums and starred in dozens of movies.He was known for giving epic, hourslong concerts, communing directly with his fans and taking swigs from bottles of alcohol that were offered to him. Known fondly as “Chente,” he would tell his audiences that “as long as you keep applauding, your ‘Chente’ won’t stop singing.”Reviewing a 1995 performance at Radio City Music Hall for The New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote that Mr. Fernández “sang with operatic power and melodrama,” flexing his “ardent tenor” to “prodigious crescendos and a vibrato that could register on the Richter scale.”He continued to give marathon performances well into his 70s. At a 2008 concert at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Fernández held court for three hours. A lingering note, delivered in his “lively, if slightly weathered tenor,” could render the audience silent, Jon Caramanica wrote in his review in The Times.Vicente Fernández was born on Feb. 17, 1940, in Huentitán El Alto, in the state of Jalisco in western central Mexico. His father, Ramón Fernández, was a rancher and his mother, Paula Gómez de Fernández, stayed at home to raise their son.He grew up watching matinee movies featuring the Mexican ranchera singer Pedro Infante, an early influence. When he was 8, he received his first guitar and began studying folk music. He left school in the fifth grade and later moved with his family to Tijuana after their cattle business collapsed. He told The Los Angeles Times in 1999 that he took whatever work he could, laying bricks and shining shoes, and even washing dishes.“I’ve always said I got to where I am not by being a great singer, but by being stubborn, by being tenacious, by being pigheaded,” Mr. Fernández said. He gravitated to a public square in Guadalajara called Mariachi Plaza, where he performed for tips, he told The Los Angeles Times. His career took off after he won a competition called La Calandria Musical when he was 19, he said in a 2010 interview with KENS 5 of San Antonio. He moved to Mexico City where he sang at a restaurant and at weddings, and unsuccessfully pitched himself to local record labels.The labels came calling soon after the death in 1966 of Javier Solís, one of the most popular Mexican singers who specialized in bolero and ranchera music. Mr. Fernández then recorded his first albums, including hits like “Volver, Volver,” which elevated him to a level of fame that he had never envisioned, he told KENS 5. Other hits, including “El Rey” and “Lástima que seas ajena,” would follow.“When I started my career, I always had the confidence that I would one day make it, but I never imagined that I would reach the heights at which the public has placed me,” Mr. Fernández said.His public statements occasionally got him into trouble in his later years, such as when he said in a 2019 interview that he had refused a liver transplant because he feared that the donated organ might have come from a gay person or a drug addict. Earlier this year, he apologized after he was seen in a video touching a female fan’s breast without her consent while they posed for a photo.Mr. Fernández married María del Refugio Abarca Villaseñor in 1963. She survives him, as do the couple’s children, Vicente, Gerardo, Alejandra and Alejandro, a Grammy-nominated ranchera performer.Asked if a routine or exercise was a key to his longevity as a performer, Mr. Fernández told KENS that he walked every day for an hour and rode horses when he was home on his ranch. But when he was on tour, he said, “I don’t leave the hotels.”“Still, that keeps me healthy,” he said. “My voice is well rested. When I hear the public’s applause, I don’t know where the voice comes from, but it does for three hours. You’ll have to ask God to find out how he blesses me every time.” More

Set off by a scene in a movie, a critic reflects on cultural baggage: “The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again.”The physical objects that represent pop-culture obsessions: A.O. Scott’s books and DVDs at home.Like a lot of other people, I enjoyed Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” a young woman’s coming-of-age story that’s also a spiky romantic comedy of sorts. But the reason I can’t stop thinking about this movie (which I can’t discuss further without risking spoilers, so be warned) has to do with its status as a Gen X midlife cri de coeur.The full cry — appropriately laced with self-mockery, self-pity and highly specific pop-cultural references — arrives in a single devastating scene near the end of the film. Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a graphic novelist who like the director is in his mid-40s, is dying of pancreatic cancer. Julie (Renate Reinsve), the film’s official protagonist, who had earlier broken his heart, comes to visit him in the hospital. She finds him playing furious air drums as “Back to Dungaree High” by the Norwegian death-punk band Turbonegro blasts in his headphones.“It’s such a trip just to survive,” the singer howls, and Aksel is preoccupied with matters of life, death and popular culture. He tells Julie that he spends most of his time listening to familiar music and rewatching his favorite movies, including “The Godfather,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and the films of David Lynch. “The world I knew has disappeared,” he laments.What was that world? It was “all about going to stores.”Scott writes, “I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away.”Or in at least one case, destroyed by something else precious to him.That description isn’t meant to trivialize his youthful pastimes and passions, but rather to convey their magic and meaning to a millennial whose primary experience of shopping is likely to consist of clicking on an icon rather than rifling through bins. Aksel goes on to rhapsodize about the record, comic-book and video emporiums he used to frequent.His pilgrimage stops may be particular to Oslo, but they have counterparts in every city. Julie, who works in a bookstore and dabbles in writing, is hardly oblivious to the utility and charm of physical media. But she doesn’t quite understand the intense emotion — the longing, the meaning, the sense of identity — that Aksel attaches to memories of an earlier style of consumption. This isn’t necessarily a difference of taste or sensibility. It’s more a contrasting relationship with the material aspects of culture, a different way of living in a world of things, and it defines the generational schism between them.I know which side I’m on. I don’t think of myself as a shopper, but the truth is that in my time on this earth I’ve rarely been able to walk past a book or record store without going in, or to walk out empty-handed. I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away. As Aksel says, “I’ve spent my life doing that — collecting all that stuff,” but not because of its monetary or even its sentimental value. Those objects begin as vessels of meaning and tokens of taste, but their acquisition becomes a kind of compulsion, emptied of its original passion. “I kept doing it when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions,” Aksel reflects. “Now it’s all that I have left: memories of useless things.”The comic books, action figures and artwork collected by George Gene Gustines, a senior operations manager for The Times and our comics correspondent.I don’t completely identify with Aksel. He is kinder, cooler (it took me some Googling to identify that Turbonegro song), a few years younger and a lot better looking than I am. But it isn’t enough for me to say, as people do these days, that watching him made me feel seen. The effect was more intimate, more shocking, more shameful, as if Trier had dumped out a laundry bag full of my favorite vintage band T-shirts on Aksel’s hospital bed for the whole movie-loving world to rummage through. Seen? I felt smelled.Not that this is all about me. What Aksel says to Julie confirms him as an especially sympathetic and self-aware specimen of a recognizable, not always beloved type: not a fan, exactly, but a highly opinionated hybrid of connoisseur, collector and critic. You might know a version of this guy from the novels of Nick Hornby (or the films adapted from them), notably “High Fidelity” and “Juliet, Naked.” Or maybe from movies by Kevin Smith, Noah Baumbach, Judd Apatow and other Gen X auteurs. He could be your older brother, your ex- or current partner, your best friend or the long-lost buddy you’re sort of in touch with on Facebook. Your dad, even. But then again, if you’re like me, the teen spirit you smell may be your ownIn real life, this kind of person isn’t always a guy. Popular culture often assumes as much, and assumes his whiteness, too, which is partly a failure of collective imagination, and partly a matter of whose cultural obsessions are taken as representative. Chuck Klosterman, perhaps the emblematic white male cultural critic of his (which is to say my) generation, somewhat inadvertently makes this point in his new book, “The Nineties,” when he implies that the release of Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” was a more significant world-historical event than the fall of the Berlin Wall.The bootleg concert T-shirts, vintage Macs and VHS tapes collected by Caryn Ganz, The Times’s pop music editor, and Richard the cat.In typical ’90s fashion, the claim is hedged with knowingness and booby-trapped with irony. Klosterman understands that there were plenty of people in the ’90s — and not only in Berlin — who never cared much about “Nevermind.” The appeal and the annoyance value of his book arise from the same source, namely his unapologetic, extravagant commitment to generalizing from his own experience. “The Nineties,” with the modest, generic subtitle “A Book,” is neither history nor memoir, but rather uses each genre as an alibi for the shortcomings of the other. Of course this is just one guy’s recollection of the stuff he saw, thought about, listened to and bought in the last decade of the 20th century. But it’s also, Klosterman periodically insists, an account of what that decade was really like, a catalog of what mattered at the time and in hindsight. You can argue with the second version — how can you write a cultural history of the American 1990s without so much as an index entry for “Angels in America”? — but not so much with the first. What the ’90s meant is open for debate. What the decade felt like, maybe less so.This is what makes Klosterman, who was born in 1972, a cheerful, mainstream American counterpart to Aksel’s gloomy, alternative-minded Nordic intellectual. They are both ’90s guys, driven to explain something that seems in danger of being forgotten or misunderstood to people who weren’t there. To a degree it’s the same something, but not quite the something either one thinks it is. Klosterman seeks to illuminate the reality of a unique and crucial period; Aksel tries to share with Julie the sources of his own sensibility. But the cultural reference points are red herrings. The deep motive is a longing to arrest and reverse the movement of time, to recover some of the ardor and bewilderment of youth.The art at the home of Roberta Smith, The Times’s co-chief art critic, and Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s senior art critic.The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again. The reluctant acceptance of this fact is the source of nostalgia, a disorder that afflicts every modern generation in its own special way. Members of Generation X grew up under the heavy, sanctimonious shadow of the baby boom’s long adolescence, among crates of LPs and shelves of paperbacks to remind us of what we had missed. Just as baby boomers’ rebellion against their Depression- and war-formed parents defined their styles and poses, so did our impatience with the boomers set ours in motion. But I’m not talking so much about a grand narrative of history as about what Aksel might call the useless stuff — the objects and gadgets that form the infrastructure of memory.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

The album opens with the equivalent of 169,000 sales, while BTS remains atop the singles chart with “Butter.”Tyler, the Creator notches his second No. 1 on the Billboard album chart this week with “Call Me if You Get Lost,” while BTS remains atop the singles chart with “Butter.”“Call Me if You Get Lost” had the equivalent of 169,000 sales in the United States in its opening week, including 153 million streams, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Its take also counted 55,000 copies of the album sold as a complete package, many from box sets sold through Tyler’s website. According to Billboard, 40,000 copies of the “Call Me” were sold on CD, 10,000 on cassette and 5,000 as digital downloads.Tyler’s last album, “Igor,” opened at No. 1 two years ago, and his previous four solo studio LPs all reached the Top 5.Also this week, Doja Cat’s new “Planet Her” opened at No. 2 with the equivalent of 109,000 sales, including 132 million streams and 10,000 copies sold as a complete package. The album features guest spots by the Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Young Thug and SZA.Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour,” last week’s top seller, fell to No. 3 in its sixth week out. Lil Baby and Lil Durk’s “The Voice of the Heroes” is No. 4, and Polo G’s “Hall of Fame” is in fifth place.On the Hot 100 singles chart, which tracks the popularity of songs through streaming, radio plays and downloads, BTS’s “Butter” holds the No. 1 spot for a sixth week, largely as a result of download sales.“Butter” has had the longest run at the top in 2021 since Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” which was No. 1 for eight weeks at the start of the year. More

Billy Joel performed the final show of his 10-year residency at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, his 150th performance at the venue overall and the most for any performer there. The Times was on hand to capture the moments leading up to the concert, which amounted to a victory lap.Joel and his band after soundcheck on Thursday afternoon, hours before the performance.At soundcheck, Joel went over a setlist that drew from his five-decade career.Joel’s daughters Della and Remy joined him onstage after soundcheck.One fan opted to play Billy Joel songs outside the arena.Fans posed for photos inside the arena …… and outside, too.Concertgoers were encouraged to write messages for Joel. A banner to celebrate Joel’s 150th performance at the Garden was raised during the concert. More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTwo Friends, Two Continents, Very Different PandemicsSteven LaBrie is a freelance baritone in New York. Jarrett Ott has a full-time job singing in Germany. As the coronavirus spread, that made all the difference.The singers Jarrett Ott (left, in Stuttgart, Germany) and Steven LaBrie (right, in New York City) are friends whose careers were hit very differently by the pandemic.Credit…Roderick Aichinger for The New York Times; Michael George for The New York TimesJan. 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETAs two singers rising through the close-knit world of Philadelphia’s most acclaimed conservatories, Steven LaBrie and Jarrett Ott knew each other in passing. But on one raucous night in 2009, when Mr. Ott joined the celebration of Mr. LaBrie’s 21st birthday — an evening of tequila, dancing and after-hours pizza — their friendship was sealed.Both baritones, Mr. LaBrie, now 32, and Mr. Ott, 33, stayed close as their opera careers began to blossom. They and their partners lived near each other in Astoria, Queens, for a time, and Mr. LaBrie and Mr. Ott worked out at the same gym. In 2018, with fellow baritone Tobias Greenhalgh, they released “Remember,” an album of songs by American composers.That year, their paths split. Mr. Ott started a full-time job in the ensemble at the respected opera house in Stuttgart, Germany. Mr. LaBrie remained based in New York, a freelance artist with a growing reputation.This divergence made all the difference when the coronavirus hit. With performances canceled around the world, Mr. LaBrie’s income fell to nothing; he hasn’t had health insurance for years. But across the Atlantic, support from the German government meant that Mr. Ott’s position was safe, his pay almost unchanged and his benefits secure.In separate interviews, they spoke about the impact of the pandemic — and political responses to it — on their lives and future plans. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Steven LaBrieA freelance baritone, Mr. LaBrie made his European debut in late 2019 in “Rusalka” at the Erl Festival in Austria. Plans to have him return to the festival were canceled because of the pandemic.Credit…Xiomara BenderI started when I was a teenager as a mariachi singer. My mother is Mexican, and she encouraged it. We would drive around Dallas to all these restaurants, and there were bands you could go up and sing with. And once I became a professional singer, I loved the lifestyle. I loved traveling; I loved being different places with different colleagues.A year ago, in December 2019, I was making my European debut. (I had sung in Paris, but on tour with New York City Ballet, so I’m not counting that.) I had gone on a German audition tour, and the head of the Erl Festival in Austria hired me to sing the Hunter and Innkeeper in “Rusalka” at the end of 2019.At the opening night party, I was immediately rehired for an obscure opera by Offenbach that hadn’t been performed since its premiere in Austria. It was a huge role, a huge thing for me. But since Covid happened, they decided that because of budgetary reasons they were cutting the show. And my hope for my singing career in Europe dwindled away. I was going to make my debut on the main stage at Carnegie Hall, and that flew away, too. A career is built one milestone at a time, so what now? I streamed a video performance, but I found it’s really difficult to get people to commit to watching any self-produced online content.I’ve been a lucky person in some ways. I have a partner, who’s also a musician but has a steady income as a coach at Juilliard, a pianist on the Met’s music staff and a recitalist. And losing my income — most years I probably made about $50,000 before expenses and paying my manager — wasn’t as much of a blow as some people who have a house they own, or children. I qualified for pandemic relief, and got the $1,200 stimulus.I don’t feel like the government has ever supported the arts. I pay high taxes, because I’m a self-employed person. That comes with many expenses and it’s difficult to get ahead financially when there are so many people a singer needs to employ to help him succeed. Since the beginning of my career, I’ve been told that the opera industry has been facing hardships and that fees have gone down, which makes me wonder if opera at some point will just be a hobby for people who already have a safety net.I kept thinking, what can I do with this time? I went straight to the Academy of Vocal Arts after high school; I’ve only ever known singing. What can I do with no degree? What the coronavirus has shown is that we’re not confined to staying put in one location anymore. We can do anything from anywhere in the world. I read a lot about people who made a career transition into tech. And I began looking into software engineering. I started learning a coding language, and did that the entire summer.Now I’m what they call a “resident” at a software engineering immersive program called Codesmith. It’s an intensive program for three months that takes you up to being hired at a high level, mid to senior.I’m not leaving singing. I’m preparing myself for having a skill set in an industry with a lot of opportunities and straddling both worlds. This idea people have, that you’re either a singer or not a singer, it’s just not the truth. And now, more than ever, it can’t be the truth.I really do believe I’m coming out of this feeling so much more empowered. I’m relying on myself to invent my future, as opposed to feeling I’m the victim of a system. I’m not saying I’m always at the computer with glee. I have shed a tear or two for my life and career. But at the same time, you have to keep moving forward. My dream has always been, and will always be, to be a singer. But now I have more than one dream.Jarrett OttMr. Ott, center, as Chou En-lai in John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” part of his full-time job as a member of the ensemble at the State Opera in Stuttgart, where government support has maintained his position, pay and benefits.Credit…Matthias BausThe main thing when you’re in an ensemble is to get so many roles under your belt. You can be singing three at the same time. No matter what training you get in the United States, nothing prepares you to be a full-time singer at a single company. A freelancer can hop among companies, but you’re never rehearsing one show in the afternoon, going into another show at night and in the morning a third. One time, someone got to perform in another house, so I was asked to do two Marcellos in the same day in “La Bohème.” It’s not always ideal circumstances, but it’s such a life-changing experience.It’s a full-time position, salary based. Full health benefits. Singers in Europe can afford to live off this salary, but it’s assumed that you’re also going to have some contracts at other opera houses. But this year, I watched my American engagements go in a dumpster, and I was still able to completely put food on the table and pay my bills. After taxes — about half is taken out — I earn about €2,500 ($3,050) a month.I did my first performance ever of the Count in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” on March 8. Our next performance was going to be the 13th, and we were locked down on the 11th. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be locked down away from my husband and my dog, in New York City, so I flew there on the 13th and did the initial lockdown there.I got the call, I think it was in the middle of May: “Would you want to come back and do a recital?” And at that point I was going crazy in a New York apartment, so it was: “Dear God, yes.” I arrived on June 1 and did a very strict 14-day quarantine. June 15 I could leave that, and the recital was June 19, in front of 100 people. It wasn’t even in the opera house; they didn’t have that figured out yet. It was at the Liederhalle, another performance space which the opera sometimes uses for concerts.Mine was one of the very first recitals. I think three or four other people got to do it, and then they started reducing the audience again slowly. And they did two almost-productions here before another lockdown started in the fall. We thought we might be able to do concert versions of “Madama Butterfly” in December; obviously that went away. We’re hoping to do them in mid-February, but that is also not looking like a possibility right now.But through this uncertainty, we are all paid — by the opera house, but also by the state. None of our benefits have gone away. For two months, we’re on what’s called “Kurzarbeit” — “short work” — when the government pays about 80 percent of our wages and then the opera makes up a various amount for each individual. I’m making 98 percent even during Kurzarbeit. I canceled my American health insurance in June. I’ve been going to the doctors here whenever I’ve needed. And I don’t have to pay extra for that; there are no co-pays or after bills.It’s hard to see my colleagues in the United States not have hope for the spring. Here we luckily still do. And a lot of my friends are doing what Steven is: They haven’t jumped shipped completely, but they’re in the tech world right now, while I haven’t had to really re-evaluate my career.Could I use some extra income? Sure. There was a lot of money lost last year. But I am so incredibly grateful to have this position here. It’s a lot of work, but man, is it worth it.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More