Aurelia Butler

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    Review: Philharmonic Returns to Classics, at Its Own Expense

    Led by Manfred Honeck, the orchestra all too quickly revisited Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and, with Vikingur Olafsson, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1.A risk of programming standard repertory works over and over is that an orchestra is practically begging to be compared with its own recent performances — not to mention a huge and ever-growing body of recordings. Why should someone buy a ticket to a concert if they just heard the same group do the same piece, or if they can stay home and listen to dozens of masterly versions online?That question came to mind on Friday, when the New York Philharmonic played Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall. Just over a year and a half ago, the ensemble did Beethoven’s Seventh at Geffen under Esa-Pekka Salonen — a stirring rendition that balanced accented force and long-lined legato into a propulsive, joyful whole.If the work came around every five or 10 years, it would be easier to judge each arrival in a vacuum. But the Philharmonic’s choice to perform it again so soon — its programming this season is particularly uninspired — meant that Friday’s concert, conducted by Manfred Honeck, was inevitably going to be held up against the last one.Honeck, who led without a score, is experienced in Beethoven’s classic; his 2015 recording with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, of which he is the longtime music director, is one of the finest in a crowded field. But under his baton, the Philharmonic didn’t come close to matching its February 2023 self, let alone Pittsburgh’s rich, vigorous example.In the first movement, Honeck lingered over pastoral passages, perhaps to try and provide respite from — and intensification of — the relentlessly rhythmic surrounding music. But the orchestra negotiated these transitions of speed and atmosphere in a way that was stiff, not agile. An unusually drawn-out tempo in the third movement’s contrasting Trio section could have conveyed wistful longing if the Philharmonic had fuller, creamier tone, but as it was the orchestra just seemed strained by the slowness.Honeck always approaches standards like this with fresh ideas. He presented the second movement as a hushed hymn rather than the traditional sturdy dirge, a choice that elicited extraordinarily soft, silky sound from a group that generally doesn’t like to whisper.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

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    Marvin Schlachter, Record Executive Who Championed Disco, Dies at 90

    In the 1960s, he helped get wide exposure for Black artists like Dionne Warwick. A decade later, he brought dance music from the clubs to radio success.Marvin Schlachter, a music executive who helped launch Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles in the 1960s and who a decade later created one of the world’s most influential disco labels, bringing acts like Musique and France Joli to the masses, died on Sept. 19 in Manhattan. He was 90.His son Brad said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was intestinal cancer.Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Schlachter played a crucial role in the emergence of Black musicians from genre-based appeal to become a force in the American music mainstream.Mr. Schlachter in 1962, a year after he became executive vice president of Scepter Records.Record World magazine, via Schlachter familyHe spent nine years as an executive with Scepter Records, a New York label comparable in some ways to Motown in Detroit (although much smaller). The label brought in Black songwriters, producers and musicians and promoted their albums among white audiences — still an unusual idea at the time.Among Scepter’s biggest successes was Ms. Warwick, whom the label paired with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The Bacharach-David team wrote many of Ms. Warwick’s early signature hits, including “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk On By” and “Alfie.”Dionne Warwick’s first album was released by Scepter Records in 1963, early in her long association with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David.Scepter RecordsWe 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

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    Al Pacino Is Still Going Big

    Al Pacino has been one of the world’s greatest, most influential actors for more than 50 years. He’s audacious. He’s outrageous. He’s Al Pacino, and I’m pretty sure you know what that entails.Listen to the Conversation With Al PacinoA conversation with the legendary actor about, well, everything.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppSo I’d like to talk about some aspects of him that merit fresh discussion. Did you know, for example, that he is cinema’s greatest-ever swearer? (This is fact, not opinion.) He delights in those words. He lustily chomps on them. This zest for delivering colorful language, I suspect, is a source of the criticism that he has become a scenery-chewer. Which isn’t nearly the whole picture. Fans of his layered, subtle work in “The Godfather” or “Dog Day Afternoon” need to immediately see more recent films like “The Humbling” or “The Insider” or “Manglehorn” to understand his enduring range. But also, the parts of Pacino movies where Pacino goes big are always the best parts of Pacino movies! Did anyone want him to underplay Satan in “The Devil’s Advocate”?Though he can go small and internal, Pacino’s ability to really emote is one of his singular gifts. That’s why, secretly, the best Pacino is crowd-pleasing Hollywood movie star ’90s Pacino. Given the revolutionary work he did in the ’70s, this is akin to claiming that the key work of a critically acclaimed, groundbreaking band occurred after it went pop. But ’90s Pacino is when his gargantuan skill, volcanic charisma and joyful desire to entertain all coalesced magically.“Hoo-ah!”The first time I ever consciously noticed a Pacino performance was also the first time I ever consciously saw an actor in a movie and thought, That’s good acting. It was 1990, I was only 8 years old and I’d just seen Pacino play the grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice in “Dick Tracy.” (Don’t scoff. Pacino earned an Oscar nomination for the part.) Hidden under garish makeup and a hunchback, Pacino was kinetic and uninhibited and, most of all, believable in a way that registered to even a child. That lusty emotionality and passionate exuberance — his sense of being truly alive to each moment in his character’s life — is what Pacino brought with such distinction to his movies in that period, which was also the period when I grew from a child to a young man.Pacino’s engagement with his art was a model for how passionately — and variously — you could engage with the world. He has always been brilliant at playing cops and criminals like Big Boy. But he has also played biblical kings, cockney sociopaths, sharkish salesmen, a short-order cook and a Gucci. He’s done Mamet and Brecht and Shakespeare. (His majestic, tragic Shylock was the best theatrical performance I’ve ever seen.) He has played Phil Spector, Jimmy Hoffa, Jack Kevorkian, Joe Paterno, Roy Cohn and, on two occasions, versions of himself. He did it in the artfully self-reflexive documentary “Looking For Richard,” then in the somewhat-less-artful Adam Sandler vehicle “Jack and Jill.” Has he always been perfect? No. He strives for something riskier and more alive than perfection. Is he always perceptive, free, unmissable? God, yes. More

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    Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” Is a Different Kind of Flop

    Plenty of movies bomb, but Francis Ford Coppola’s latest is part of a different class of box office failures.Just before previews began at a Lower Manhattan theater on a recent Saturday night, Tazer Army reflected on the Francis Ford Coppola movie “Megalopolis” before even seeing it.“There’s just so much lore,” Army said.She wasn’t wrong. The lore dates back more than 40 years, to when Coppola, the director of the “Godfather” films and “Apocalypse Now,” conceived the project. Now 85, he finally made this long-gestating project a reality by selling part of his wine business to finance the film, which cost roughly $140 million to make and market. There were allegations of on-set misconduct, and a suit by Coppola over the accusations. There was even a trailer with made-up quotations from famous movie critics. And the biggest piece of lore: the fact that “Megalopolis,” as its title does not bother to deny, is a grandiosely personal vision that seemed fated to lose a lot of money at the box office — something its dismal opening weekend haul of $4 million confirmed.The upshot is that “Megalopolis” is a film both about a tortured-genius artist (the architect Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver) overcoming obstacles to realize his solitary vision and the product of one. It appears destined to be remembered as the latest instance of a Hollywood archetype that is every bit as key to the industry’s mythology as its biggest hits: the auteurist flop.“It seems you either have the epic, beautiful win of a film that is beloved, or the one that is wrapped up in ego and is scandalous,” said Maya Montañez Smukler, the head of U.C.L.A.’s Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center. “It’s the perverse pleasure in seeing somebody fail on such an enormous magnitude.”Even at the peak of Hollywood’s studio era, there were flops — ambitious, big-budget spectacles that got out of hand during production and crashed upon contact with the viewing public. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic, “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, brought 20th Century Fox near bankruptcy and failed to recoup its $44 million budget, then a record.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

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    Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Different Kind of Flop

    Plenty of movies bomb, but Francis Ford Coppola’s latest is part of a different class of box office failures.Just before previews began at a Lower Manhattan theater on a recent Saturday night, Tazer Army reflected on the Francis Ford Coppola movie “Megalopolis” before even seeing it.“There’s just so much lore,” Army said.She wasn’t wrong. The lore dates back more than 40 years, to when Coppola, the director of the “Godfather” films and “Apocalypse Now,” conceived the project. Now 85, he finally made this long-gestating project a reality by selling part of his wine business to finance the film, which cost roughly $140 million to make and market. There were allegations of on-set misconduct, and a suit by Coppola over the accusations. There was even a trailer with made-up quotations from famous movie critics. And the biggest piece of lore: the fact that “Megalopolis,” as its title does not bother to deny, is a grandiosely personal vision that seemed fated to lose a lot of money at the box office — something its dismal opening weekend haul of $4 million confirmed.The upshot is that “Megalopolis” is a film both about a tortured-genius artist (the architect Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver) overcoming obstacles to realize his solitary vision and the product of one. It appears destined to be remembered as the latest instance of a Hollywood archetype that is every bit as key to the industry’s mythology as its biggest hits: the auteurist flop.“It seems you either have the epic, beautiful win of a film that is beloved, or the one that is wrapped up in ego and is scandalous,” said Maya Montañez Smukler, the head of U.C.L.A.’s Film and Television Archive Research and Study Center. “It’s the perverse pleasure in seeing somebody fail on such an enormous magnitude.”Even at the peak of Hollywood’s studio era, there were flops — ambitious, big-budget spectacles that got out of hand during production and crashed upon contact with the viewing public. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic, “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, brought 20th Century Fox near bankruptcy and failed to recoup its $44 million budget, then a record.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

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    GloRilla, Hip-Hop’s Master Motivator, Rounds Out Her Message

    Self-empowerment rhymes catapulted her onto rap’s A-list. On “Glorious,” her debut LP, she’s hoping that showing more sides of her personality will help her stay there.GloRilla is always on the clock these days. Last month, the rapper born Gloria Hallelujah Woods stomped and bounced through her hits “Yeah Glo!” and “TGIF” at the MTV Video Music Awards, then spent the next morning at a photo shoot.By the time she arrived at Jungle City Studios in Manhattan, around 9 p.m., her trademark bravado was in short supply. Nursing a mild cold, she swaddled herself in a thick woolen blanket and laid practically supine on a couch. But, she explained, she intended to keep slogging through her exhaustion. “I don’t take having a lot of work for granted no more,” she said. “I can’t complain about a lot being on my plate when my goal was to eat.”GloRilla, 25, burst out of Memphis in 2022 with the release of her single “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” recorded at the end of a 60-day fast — no men, no liquor — that she said changed the trajectory of her life. Its eminently chantable affirmations about being “F-R-E-E” and “S-I-N-G-L-E” proved ideal fodder for TikTok, radio and that year’s Grammys, where the song was nominated for best rap performance. One viral track begot another: “Tomorrow 2,” with Cardi B, vaulted into the Top 10 less than six months after “F.N.F.” dropped.GloRilla played the months that followed with a relative conservatism. She released an EP, “Anyways, Life’s Great …,” at the end of 2022, and a deluxe edition a few months later. She spent much of 2023 on the festival circuit and earlier this year shared “Ehhthang Ehhthang,” a sprightly mixtape that featured “Wanna Be,” a modest hit she shared with Megan Thee Stallion, who brought her on a global tour this summer. On Oct. 11, she’ll release her debut album “Glorious,” more than two years after becoming a next big thing.Myesha Evon for The New York TimesIt was a bit of a slow burn for a budding star of rap, a genre in which hits bloom and wither with astonishing speed. The relatively patient output was not by design: GloRilla was figuring out the shifting sands of her new stardom and how much she wanted to expand on the sound that launched her.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

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    Saoirse Ronan Has Lived, and Acted, Through a Lot

    “I wish I could live through something,” says the teenage title character in the 2017 movie “Lady Bird,” yearning for a life beyond suburban Sacramento.The actor playing her, Saoirse Ronan, had, at that point, already lived through enough for several lives. Then 23, she’d been acting since she was 9, and had already garnered two Oscar nominations. “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, would earn Ronan a third. Another followed, in 2019, for her role as Jo March in Gerwig’s “Little Women.”This year, Oscars buzz surrounds Ronan once again, thanks to her leading roles in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” which opens in theaters Friday, and Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” out Nov. 1st.Ronan’s career reads as a series of evolutions, pushing into new territory with every role — over the years, she has also played a 1950s Irish immigrant in New York, a child assassin, a vampire, Lady Macbeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now 30, with over two decades of experience in front of the camera, the Irish actress has committed herself in “The Outrun” to a character containing multitudes: a woman raised in a remote island community, who returns to recover from her addiction to alcohol.In “The Outrun,” Ronan’s character, Rona, returns home to the Orkney Islands in Scotland to recover from her alcohol addiction.Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures Classics“It was so much more than just making a film for me,” Ronan said, in a video interview from New York. She described an experience that was both physically and emotionally demanding: “I think actors are sponges, you’re able to open yourself up to everything around you.” For “The Outrun,” that meant swimming in the icy sea, delivering lambs on-camera and going deep into the psyche of a woman in crisis.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

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    Lauren Mayberry’s Lush Pop Ecstasy, and 13 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, the Smile, Ela Minus and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lauren Mayberry, ‘Something in the Air’Lauren Mayberry, the frontwoman of the Scottish synth-pop band Chvrches, strikes a note of defiance on “Something in the Air,” a track from her upcoming debut solo album, “Vicious Creature.” “You come up with your stories, conspiracy theories of why we’re all here,” she sings on a soaring pop chorus, before flinging off all that paranoia with some crescendoing synths and a melody that escalates toward liberation. LINDSAY ZOLADZWaxahatchee, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’MJ Lenderman’s chiming guitar sparks off the warm tone of Katie Crutchfield’s voice on “Much Ado About Nothing,” a previously unreleased track she’s been playing live on the tour for Waxahatchee’s latest album, “Tiger’s Blood.” “Oh no, I’m down and out, I’m tragically amiss,” Crutchfield sings, reaching to her warbling falsetto. But in the face of her desperation, the song’s laid-back and lived-in arrangement offers a safe place to land. ZOLADZBartees Strange, ‘Sober’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