Aurelia Butler

He opened Baby’s All Right and three other nightclubs, a restaurant and a record store in a dozen years, helping the city maintain its cultural verve.As a recent college graduate in the early 2000s, Billy Jones lived with his parents in Richmond, Va., but his fantasy life was elsewhere: in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that had become the world capital of indie rock. The closest he could get was visiting his local Barnes & Noble, where he would read magazines covering New York’s music scene.Then one day in 2002, he made the leap: He was leaving home, he told his father. He and the high school friends who made up his band, Other Passengers, had decided to try to make it big in New York.In Williamsburg, Mr. Jones began working as a barista, with dreams of indie-rock stardom. It wasn’t so far-fetched. At a cafe down the block, another barista, Kyp Malone, would soon gain renown as a singer and guitarist with the group TV on the Radio.There was passion in the moans of Mr. Jones’s singing, but he did not become a rock star. In time, the Williamsburg concert venues that had launched some of his peers — clubs like 285 Kent, Glasslands, Death by Audio — all closed. Rents in the neighborhood had skyrocketed. Aspiring young musicians left.And instead of achieving his own dreams, Mr. Jones wound up doing something else: He made it possible for other people to keep dreaming.In 2013, he and a friend, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby’s All Right, a club at 146 Broadway in Williamsburg. It became, as The New York Times wrote in 2015, the “nightlife preserver” of the neighborhood. It was a small enough venue to offer major acts an indie spirit that they could no longer find elsewhere in New York City, yet big enough to make unproven musicians feel that they had made it.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

Hear 10 songs from yeule, Momma, Four Tet and more.yeulePatrick LeDear listeners,A week ago, I went to two backyard barbecues and two rooftop hangs in the span of 24 hours. This past weekend, I crisscrossed from a block party to the beach to an outdoor concert to a different block party.In general, it has been a gray and mild summer in New York City, which has felt like treachery. We’re not supposed to do mild here. So I’ve relished the occasions this month when days of unfettered sun have trailed one after the other. Endorphins from UV rays gallop through my bloodstream. Blue skies hypnotize me out of my inhibitions. Agendas slip away like steam from a hot spring. At last, Lizard Season.Lizard Season, to borrow a term from my friend Morgan, is that stretch of mid-July and August when summer is at full force. Those of us who celebrate feel our moods soar along with the sun’s highest and longest route across the sky. Embracing Lizard Season means welcoming its sweet, hot sting against your skin; leaning into the melt; basking in the too-muchness, knowing that one day soon there won’t be nearly enough.This week, as guest host filling in for my culture desk colleague Lindsay Zoladz, I’ve made a playlist of 10 new songs that channel the spirit of peak summer. Tracks by Fade Evare, Wishy and yeule shimmer with the languorous luxury of an afternoon picnic. It closes out with more up-tempo jams by Georgie & Joe, Deki Alem and deBasement — music for dancing on a rooftop under a 9 p.m. sunset.Find me outside,ReggieListen along while you read.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

It was the morning of the dress rehearsal for Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” at the Baths of Caracalla, the ancient ruins that are the traditional summertime venue for the Rome Opera, and the show’s director, Damiano Michieletto, was concerned.“Some of the Jets have problems with precise pronunciation,” he said.After deciding to do the musical in English rather than in translation, he did not have the funds to hire a full American cast for the Jets, a gang rumbling to take the streets of New York. You could tell, he fretted. (The diction was less of a problem with the Sharks, the rival Puerto Rican gang, he said, “because Italian, you know, that works.”)That might have been his least concern. This year, Michieletto was given free rein to come up with the program for the Rome Opera’s summer Caracalla Festival, which runs until Aug. 7, keeping in mind that 2025 is a Jubilee year for the Catholic Church expected to draw millions of pilgrims with varying musical tastes to Rome. In a break from past programming, he decided that the first major new production would be “West Side Story.” A musical — gasp — was headlining one of Italy’s most highbrow cultural stages and was an unusual choice in a country where musicals are considered a minor genre and often dismissed.A musical headlining one of Italy’s most highbrow cultural stages is an unusual choice in a country where musicals are often dismissed.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThat did not faze Michieletto, who over the past 20 years has built a reputation as a visionary, nonconformist, at times over-the-top, director whose work is in demand across Europe. In September, he will make his debut at a major American opera house with Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims” at Opera Philadelphia. There he will be presenting a revival of a much-lauded version first staged in Amsterdam in 2015 and reprised several times since.For his new work at the Caracalla Festival — which this year is titled “Between the Sacred and the Human” because it casts a wide musical net, from a staged production of Handel’s oratorio “The Resurrection” to “West Side Story” — he opted to focus on the electric energy of a work that was directed and based on an idea by Jerome Robbins, one of the great choreographers of his generation.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

Peter Eotvos’s “Three Sisters,” based on the 1900 play by Anton Chekhov, is at the festival this year for the first time.On a hot, drizzly afternoon in late June, a rehearsal of Peter Eotvos’s “Three Sisters,” one of the four new opera productions at this summer’s Salzburg Festival, erupted in dainty tinkling.The opera’s cast members sat in the middle of a rehearsal room and tapped spoons against empty teacups. The conductor Maxime Pascal, flanked by two pianos, nodded approvingly at the sounds of clinking, clattering and rattling. On the large copy of the score that lay in front of him, each tap was precisely notated, and there was a visual key illustrating different techniques: tapping with the tip or the stem of a teaspoon, continuous stirring, and setting a spoon down on a saucer.“Peter wrote this moment because it’s a bit boring,” Pascal explained with a slight chuckle during a break in the rehearsal. “The three sisters are very bored, and there is this kind of melancholy.”Based on Anton Chekhov’s 1900 play about siblings in a Russian provincial town who dream of a better, more fulfilling life in Moscow, the opera is unconventional in ways that are, by turns, playful and daring.The four main female characters — Olga, Masha and Irina as well as their sister-in-law, Natasha — are performed by countertenors, the highest male voice type. In addition to china and cutlery, the score calls for two musical groups: a pit band (referred to as the ensemble) of 18 instruments that are identified with specific characters, and a 50-piece orchestra that plays from elsewhere in the theater. (For the Salzburg performances, the orchestra will play from a large hidden balcony that is behind and above the rows of seating in the Felsenreitschule, a cavernous indoor theater that is carved into a cliff.)Alphonse Cemin conducting instrumentalists during a “Three Sisters” rehearsal. Eotvos wrote the score for two musical groups, a pit band featuring 18 instruments, and a 50-piece orchestra that plays elsewhere in the theater.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe 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

Asmik Grigorian will return to the role of Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth” and present her pop-infused comic recital “A Diva Is Born.”When the soprano Asmik Grigorian took on the title role of Strauss’s “Salome” at the Salzburg Festival, in 2018, the summer event found a new reigning diva.With a voice of lush power and a raw authenticity that shines through in every character, the Lithuanian artist has become one of today’s most sought operatic performers, in Vienna, currently her home city; London; Milan; and beyond.But she has flouted conventions of stardom and challenged audiences’ expectations. Onstage, she pushes well-known characters to dramatic extremes; offstage, she often stares into the camera with a defiantly non-glamorous expression.In August, she will return to Salzburg as Lady Macbeth in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s staging of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” first seen there in 2023. And on Aug. 24, with the pianist Hyung-ki Joo, she will present the comic recital “A Diva Is Born.”The “Diva” show debuted in May of last year at the Vienna State Opera — where it will return this December — and was recently performed in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Grigorian was born and raised.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

A new, intimate album will include 13 previously unheard songs and a rewrite of “This Land Is Your Land.”In 1951, Woody Guthrie’s publisher gave him a newfangled piece of equipment: a Revere T-100 Crescent home tape recorder. It was primitive: mono and running at a noisy, lo-fi, 3 ¾ inches of tape per second, with a little mono microphone. Yet it allowed Guthrie to record his songs without visiting a studio, without recording engineers or time pressures, while he was at home in Beach Haven, Brooklyn, keeping an eye on three young children.On Aug. 14, Guthrie’s estate and Shamus Records will release “Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2.” It collects 20 songs and two spoken-word interludes, including a version of “This Land Is Your Land” that adds extra verses, as well as 13 newly unveiled songs. Guthrie’s own version of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” — a song that became a folk-revival standard with a new melody by Martin Hoffman but that Guthrie had only recorded at home — is being released on Monday, his birthday.With the help of newer audio software and antique reel-to-reel tape machines, engineers have been able to make the tapes sound best for playback to make digital copies. Vincent Alban/The New York TimesGuthrie is revered nowadays as a model for singer-songwriters: plain-spoken, casually tuneful, pointedly topical or slyly humorous. As a storyteller, he was able to compress narratives into terse rhymes while he empathized with an extraordinary range of narrators. And he was hugely prolific: He wrote lyrics for more than 3,000 songs.“Woody represents the American spirit in such a noble and fierce way,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley, who is working with the Guthrie family on a collection of lyrics. “You learn to live and love and work, to fight to have a democratic society and to never feel you’re too highfalutin, or that your money makes you better than somebody else. We’re just discovering this tape and some of these lyrics, but they still have zest to them — and they matter.”Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie, a lifelong advocate and guardian of her father’s work, said, “In looking through 3,000 lyrics, only a handful are about his personal life.” She spoke via video from the offices of Woody Guthrie Publications in Mount Kisco, N.Y.; Anna Canoni, her daughter, is the company’s president. “He uses ‘I’ all the time, but he’s an actor. I’ve never run into a songwriter that was able to put himself into so many different characters.”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