Under the leadership of Tomer Zvulun, Atlanta Opera powered through the pandemic, has tripled its budget and is producing ambitious work.Walking through a repurposed industrial space in Atlanta one recent afternoon, Tomer Zvulun gestured toward a cafe table in the middle of a wraparound stage covered in graffiti.Zvulun, the general and artistic director of Atlanta Opera, described how the action in his contemporary-dress production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” which was a few hours from opening, would swirl around the audience, providing an immersive experience for some of the 500 ticket buyers.“If people need neck braces at the end,” he said, “we’re doing our job.”Not only was Atlanta Opera presenting an unusually intimate, head-swiveling “Bohème,” it was also doing the show on alternating nights with — and on the same set as — “Rent,” the 1996 musical based on the Puccini classic. When the combination occurred to Zvulun and his team, they assumed that another company had already had the idea.“But we Googled it,” he said, “and no one’s ever done it.”The company’s production of “Rent,” in repertory with “La Bohème.”RaftermenAtlanta Opera’s production of “La Bohème.”RaftermenJuxtaposing the pieces was a coup that embodied an organization trying to make opera vibrant and accessible — and succeeding in the bottom line. Over the past decade, Atlanta Opera has been on a very different trajectory from many American companies: It has been growing rather than shrinking.Under Zvulun — an Israeli-born stage director who started at Atlanta Opera in 2013 when he was in his mid-30s, having never held an administrative position anywhere — its budget has tripled to roughly $15 million. (Only about 10 companies in the country are larger.) It braved the pandemic with a burst of programming.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

The last time Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons,” the stomping, biting number from her 2016 album, “Lemonade,” was at that year’s C.M.A. Awards, in a blistering rendition alongside the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks).Not everyone in country music embraced Beyoncé’s experimentation. “I did not feel welcomed,” she wrote in album notes leading up to the release last year of “Cowboy Carter,” her eighth solo album, an exploration of the many tendrils of American roots music and their connections to Black music of all stripes and generations.So it was meaningful, and pointed, that at the opening night of the Cowboy Carter Tour at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Monday, Beyoncé played “Daddy Lessons” for the first time since that rejection. It came right after she sang her renovated version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” — approved by the country royal herself — while soaring over the rapturous crowd in a flying horseshoe.At almost three hours long, her seventh solo headlining concert tour was a characteristic Beyoncé epic.The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show featured the debut of many of the album’s songs, but also brought back tracks from across her catalog.The New York TimesFull-circle moments don’t just happen — they are the products of intention and diligence and allergy to loose threads. Throughout this roisterous and clever show, there were suggestions that loop-closing has been very much on Beyoncé’s mind, along with culmination.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

Voices are of primary importance to the 82-year-old musician, who is delivering her first album of original songs this month.It’s been nearly six decades since Leonard Cohen challenged Judy Collins to start writing her own songs. Now, at 82, the folk singer is finally delivering “Spellbound,” her first album of entirely original material. “I can’t tell you why it took me so long,” Collins said. “Probably because I didn’t have a pandemic to keep me at home.”Slowing down has never come naturally to Collins. She has been wildly prolific since emerging as a pre-eminent voice of the Greenwich Village folk scene with her beautiful cover versions of friends’ songs, including Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” in 1968. “Spellbound” (out Feb. 25) finds Collins reminiscing about old lovers, her Colorado childhood and, yes, that iconic era. The bygone romance on “So Alive” unfolds between downtown landmarks like the Bitter End and Jackson Square, summoned up in Collins’s signature crystalline soprano.“As an artist, you’re always in the midst of memory,” she said via phone from her Upper West Side apartment, which she shares with her husband, Louis Nelson, and their three Persian cats. “The older brain is capable of a lot of things. For instance, handling grief and creativity at the same time. That was a hard mountain to climb when I was younger. I don’t really find it hard anymore.”In 2016, Collins and the folk-pop musician Ari Hest were nominated for a Grammy for their album “Silver Skies Blue,” and Hest joins her here for “Hell on Wheels,” a rowdy rock track about a nearly tragic joy ride taken by an inebriated teenage Collins. “I became a wild child at 17,” she said. “That kicked off my drinking history.” Collins got sober in 1978, which she partially credits for her abundant energy: She devotes a third of her year to performing live, tries to walk 10,000 steps per day and just last year launched an Audible podcast, “Since You’ve Asked.” “I haven’t reached my peak yet,” she said, “but it’s coming.”Collins pulled out her journal to discuss the cultural inspirations and pastimes that have sustained her long career. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Yellowstone”My sister says, “Oh, it’s just a soap opera.” It is, but it’s very amusing. It’s set in Montana, so it gave me a chance to spend some time in the mountains during the pandemic. The mountains do it for me. And I love a mystery, so I want to know who did what. And I love Kevin Costner. He has made some awfully good movies. We watched “Dances With Wolves” again recently. He’s always done a good job in terms of Western history.2. Deng Ming-Dao’s “365 Tao: Daily Meditations”Carol, one of my best friends growing up in Denver, sent me “365 Tao,” and it is a resource that I treasure. It’s my Zen connection. Every day for about half an hour in the morning I try to read Thomas Merton, Emmet Fox, Marcus Aurelius and “365 Tao.” It has wonderful quotations. I’ve read it for years. Maybe I don’t have a good memory, but it always seems new.3. FlyingI love to fly. It doesn’t matter where I’m going. I went through a period in the ’60s and I was terrified. I was traveling with my old friend Eric Weissberg, the great banjo player from “Deliverance.” I bet I was jumping into his lap. He was like a pilot. He said, “Let me explain to you what happens when an airplane takes off, what happens in the air and what happens when the plane lands.” And my fear disappeared. Every day I pray for all the pilots, the mechanics, air traffic control, the people who throw the bags around, the people who drive me to the airports. Anyone who whines and complains — well, I have to knock wood when I say this. I do fly first class.4. Jimmy WebbThe songs of Jimmy Webb drive me nuts. They’re so wonderful and I love singing them. Jimmy always says, “You take my hardest songs.” I recorded “Paul Gauguin in the South Seas” and it taught me more about singing than I had learned since I studied it. It’s like climbing without a rope. What Jimmy Webb does in “Gauguin” is the musical version of “Free Solo.”5. Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie is third in line behind Shakespeare and the Bible. I just finished 40 of her audiobooks, all of them read by the great Hugh Fraser. She was dynamic, she was particular, she was elegant. She described the buildings and the water and what was served at tea. I mean, sometimes she could go on and on until you got tangled in the web of language and scenario. She was a relentless writer. She was 80 when she wrote her last book.6. Audiobook ReadersWe have very strong opinions in my family about a lot of things: politics, literature and always the voice. I need to have a good reader or I can’t listen to an audiobook. Peter Grainger is a favorite writer of mine, and he has Gildart Jackson, who may be the best reader that I’ve ever heard, second only to Hugh Fraser. And I love listening to Robert Caro read his books. They are phenomenal. I remember his voice on television when he was talking about Robert Moses and what he did to the public landscape by tearing down communities to build the freeways. His books about Lyndon Johnson are read by another reader whom I cannot bear. But I can hear them in my own voice, so that’s fine.7. Monty PythonMonty Python were the first group of comedians that I got in touch with when I was in England in the ’60s, and they always had a way with humor. Nothing we can do quite matches it. There was the show “Beyond the Fringe” and then they made a movie, “Behind the Fridge,” and nobody else seems to have seen it. It was Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. They were hysterical. The humor is quite priceless. You see a reflection of it in “Downton Abbey.”8. Shawn ColvinI’m very picky about my singers, and I am crazy about Shawn Colvin. I’ve actually written a song about her, which I didn’t put on this album. I played it for her, though. She’s the best. She and I played together in the mid-’90s. The brilliant album that she made with John Leventhal, “Steady On,” is mysterious and extraordinary. We did an artist weekend for three days in Greece in 2016 and we had the best time. That’s where I basically fell in love with her singing, her writing, her spirit.9. PBSWe watch the “PBS NewsHour” and “Masterpiece,” anything. “Professor T” is a Belgian series, which is now on PBS. It was our lunchtime television watching. It’s very offbeat. That’s a fabulous show. I love “Endeavour.” And “Inspector Morse” and “Inspector Lewis.” Inspector Lewis is not as brilliant as Morse, but, you know, he’s good.10. CatsI’ve always had cats. My first cat was named Fluffy. She gave birth on my bed one morning. “Mommy!” I screamed. “Fluffy fell apart!” Now I have three cats. They’re all Persian longhairs. Rachmaninoff is a devotee of my husband. He follows him everywhere he goes. Coco Chanel is always busy. She purrs and purrs and wants to be petted. Tom Wolfe is so exquisitely beautiful and he knows it, so he poses a lot. He claimed the Christmas tree this year, because he knew that people would come and take his picture More

Hear tracks by Sofia Kourtesis, Remble, Caetano Veloso and others.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 [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Sofia Kourtesis, ‘La Perla’At first, Sofia Kourtesis’s “La Perla” develops like a Polaroid shot of a white sand beach. This is earnest, pulsating deep house: ripples of synths, oceanic drum loops, feather-light hums, the iridescent touch of piano keys. But when the Peruvian producer’s voice arrives, the track transforms into something less picture-perfect. “Tú y yo/En soledad/Igual acá/Tratando de cambiar/Tratando de olvidar,” she intones. (“You and I/In loneliness/Same here/Trying to change/Trying to forget.”) Kourtesis composed the song with the water and her father, who was dying from leukemia, in mind; he used to say that staring at the sea is a form of meditation. Lying somewhere between hope and melancholia, “La Perla” embodies mourning: the on-and-off work of confronting your own suffering, while harnessing fleeting moments of solace when you can. ISABELIA HERRERAYoung Stunna featuring Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, ‘Adiwele’This eight-minute track from South Africa is a collaboration by the singer Young Stunna and the amapiano producer Kabza De Small, from Young Stunna’s debut album, “Notumato (Beautiful Beginnings).” It materializes slowly and methodically, with just an electronic beat at first, then hovering electronic tones and blipping offbeats, then syncopated vocal syllables. Eventually Young Stunna’s lead vocal arrives, breathy and increasingly insistent, tautly bouncing his lines off the beat. “Adiwele” roughly means “things falling into place”; it’s a grateful boast about his current success, but it’s delivered like someone racing toward even more ambitious goals. JON PARELESBabyTron, ‘Paul Bearer’“Bin Reaper 2” — one of three very good albums BabyTron released in 2021 — has several high points. There’s “Frankenstein,” built on a sample of an old Debbie Deb song, and the disco-esque “Pimp My Ride.” But “Paul Bearer” might be the best. BabyTron is a casually talky rapper from Michigan, and in keeping with the rap scene that’s been germinating there for the past few years, he’s a hilarious absurdist, flexible with syllables and also images: “Point it at his toes, turn his Yeezys into Foam Runners,” “High as hell on the roof, dripping like a broke gutter.” JON CARAMANICAMabiland, ‘Wow’For the Colombian artist Mabiland, living with the injustice of anti-Black violence is so surreal, it resembles the worlds of sci-fi and neo-noir films like “Tenet” and “Oldboy.” On “Wow,” she draws comparisons to these cinematic universes, offering a macabre reflection on those who were killed in recent years: George Floyd, but also the five of Llano Verde, a group of teens who were shot in Cali, Colombia, in 2020. Over trap drums and a forlorn, looped guitar, the artist recalibrates her voice over and over, shifting between raspy soul, high-pitched yelps, wounded raps and sweet-tongued singing. It is a subtle lesson in elasticity, creating an expansive vocal landscape that captures her pain in all of its depth. HERRERARemble, ‘Touchable’One of the year’s signature rap stylists, Remble declaims like he’s giving a physics lecture, all punching-bag emphasis and tricky internal rhymes. An inheritor of Drakeo the Ruler, who was killed this month — listen to their collaboration on “Ruth’s Chris Freestyle” — Remble is crisp and declamatory and, most disarmingly, deeply calm. “Touchable,” from his vivid, wonderful 2021 album, “It’s Remble,” is one of his standouts, packed to the gills with sweetly terrifying boasts: “Came a long way from pre-K and eating Lunchables/I just took your life and as you know it’s unrefundable.” CARAMANICAMorgan Wade, ‘Wilder Days’“Don’t Cry,” which Morgan Wade released at the end of 2020, cut right to the quick: “I’ll always be my own worst critic/The world exists and I’m just in it.” “Wilder Days,” from her lovingly ragged debut album “Reckless,” is about wanting to know the whole of a person, even the parts that time has smoothed over. Wade has a terrific, acid-drenched voice — she sounds like she’s singing from the depths of history. And while this song is about wanting someone you love to hold on to the things that gave them their scrapes and bruises, it’s really about holding on to that part of yourself as long as is feasible, and then a little longer. CARAMANICALady Blackbird, ‘Collage’There’s a deep blues cry in the voice of Lady Blackbird — the Los Angeles-based songwriter Marley Munroe — that harks back to Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Billie Holiday. “Collage,” from her album “Black Acid Soul,” rides an acoustic bass vamp and modal jazz harmonies, enfolded in wind chimes and Mellotron “string” chords. It’s a song about colors, cycles and trying to “find a song to sing that is everything,” enigmatic and arresting. PARELESCaetano Veloso, ‘Anjos Tronchos’Recorded during the pandemic, “Meu Coco” (“My Head”) is the first full album on which Caetano Veloso, the great Brazilian musician whose career stretches back to the 1960s, wrote all the songs without collaborators. “Anjos Tronchos” (“Twisted Angels”) is musically sparse; for much of it, Veloso’s graceful melody is accompanied only by a lone electric rhythm guitar. But its scope is large; the “twisted angels” are from Silicon Valley, and he’s singing about the power of the internet to addict, to sell and to control, but also to delight and to spread ideas. “Neurons of mine move in a new rhythm/And more and more and more and more and more,” he sings, with fascination and dread. PARELESCico P, ‘Tampa’The year’s pre-eminent hypnosis. Put it on repeat and dissociate from the cruel year that was. CARAMANICACassandra Jenkins, ‘Hard Drive’“Hard Drive,” which includes the lyrics that provided the title for Cassandra Jenkins’s 2021 album, “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” plays like Laurie Anderson transported to Laurel Canyon. With unhurried spoken words and an occasional melodic refrain, Jenkins seeks insight and healing from people like a security guard and a bookkeeper, who tells her “The mind is just a hard drive.” The music cycles soothingly through a few chords as guitars and piano intertwine, a saxophone improvises at the periphery and Jenkins approaches serenity. PARELESFatima Al Qadiri, ‘Zandaq’On “Zandaq,” Fatima Al Qadiri looks 1,400 years into the past to illuminate a view of the future. Inspired by the poems of Arab women from the Jahiliyyah period to the 13th century, the Kuwaiti producer arranges plucked lute strings, echoes of bird calls and dapples of twisting, vertiginous vocals, fashioning a kind of a retrofuturist suite. The song draws on classical Arabic poetry’s ancient reserve of melancholic longing, considering the possibilities that emerge by slowing down and immersing oneself in desolation. HERRERANala Sinephro, ‘Space 5’The rising United Kingdom-based bandleader Nala Sinephro plays harp and electronics, with a pull toward weightless sounds and meditative pacings, so comparisons to Alice Coltrane are inevitable. But Sinephro has her own thing going entirely: It has to do with her lissome, contained-motion improvising on the harp, and the game versatility of the groups she puts together. Her debut album, which arrived in September, contains eight tracks, “Spaces 1-8.” On “Space 5,” she’s joined by the saxophonist Ahnasé and the guitarist Shirley Tetteh; it’s a jeweled mosaic of a track, with the components of a steady beat — but they’re distant and dampened enough that it never fully sinks in on a body level. Instead of head-nodding, maybe you’ll respond to this music by being completely still. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emile Mosseri, ‘Moonweed’“Moonweed” is only two minutes long, but contains all the reverie and tragedy of a big-screen sci-fi drama. (It’s a collaboration between the experimental artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the film composer Emile Mosseri.) With its unhurried piano and slow gurgle of galactic synths that arrive like an extraterrestrial transmission sent from the stars, the track manifests as both earthen and astral bliss. HERRERAJohnathan Blake, ‘Abiyoyo’The jazz drummer Johnathan Blake is used to playing as a side musician in all-star bands; when he leads his own groups, he also tends to field a formidable squad. On “Homeward Bound,” his Blue Note debut, Blake is joined by the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, the vibraphonist Joel Ross, the pianist David Virelles and the bassist Dezron Douglas — today’s cats, basically. Blake has a swing feel that’s both densely powerful and luxuriously roomy, and he deploys it here across a set that includes some impressive original tunes. On “Abiyoyo,” the South African folk song, he strikes the drums softly, with a mallet in one hand and a stick in the other, while Virelles handles a similar balance, using the full range of the piano but never overplaying. RUSSONELLORan Cap Duoi, ‘Aztec Glue’Vertigo alert: Ran Cap Duoi, an electronic group from Vietnam, aims for total disorientation in “Aztec Glue” from its 2021 album, “Ngu Ngay Ngay Ngay Tan The” (“Sleeping Through the Apocalypse”). Everything is chopped up and flung around: voices, rhythms, timbres, spatial cues. For its first minute, “Aztec Glue” finds a steady, Minimalist pulse, even as peeping vocal samples hop all over the stereo field. Then the bottom drops out; it lurches, slams, races, twitches and goes through sporadic bursts of acceleration. It goes on to find a new, looping near-equilibrium, spinning faster, but it doesn’t end without a few more surprises. PARELES More

This composer’s latest work, for Lincoln Center, is in conversation with Robert Schumann’s music and mental health struggles.“Violent congestion, inexpressible terror, failure of breath, momentary unconsciousness — these overtake me in quick succession, though I am better than I was,” the composer Robert Schumann wrote in a letter to his mother in 1833. He was 23, and the recent deaths of his older brother and sister-in-law surely cast a pall on his state of mind. “If you had any notion of the lethargy into which melancholia has brought me,” he continued, “you would forgive my not writing.”Hannah Kendall, a prominent young British composer based in New York, was struck by that passage a little more than a year ago, while reading Schumann’s letters, which provide glimpses of a decades-long struggle with mental illness, diagnosed during his life as exhaustion, and posthumously as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.“It felt as though there was a very direct, personal connection to his state at the time, which I found particularly fascinating as a composer,” Kendall, 40, said in a recent interview at Lincoln Center — where her new work, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” will premiere on Aug. 9. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Kendall’s piece on a program that also includes Schumann’s Second Symphony.What it takes to be an artist today, Kendall explained, is a regular topic of discussion among her circle of friends and peers. “Our well-being, mental and physical, is something that crops up on a daily basis,” she said. Some composers, like Julia Adolphe, Nico Muhly and Aaron Helgeson, have begun to air mental-health concerns and struggles in public, in blog posts and on podcasts.Kendall was urged to read Schumann’s letters by a longtime friend, the conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra, who admittedly had an ulterior motive. For his first summer with the ensemble, he had her commissioned to write a piece for a concert that would also feature Schumann. He envisioned Kendall responding to not only Schumann’s music, but also issues of mental health and this moment when performing arts organizations are still struggling to lure back audiences lost during the pandemic.The coming program, which also includes two works by Bach, is surrounded by contextual offerings. “Ghost Variations,” an augmented-reality installation piece in the lobby at David Geffen Hall, explores how Schumann found solace in Bach’s music. And a preconcert discussion will address the question “Can music express mental health?”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