Aurelia Butler

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    7 New Collaborations You Should Hear Now

    Hear music from pairings that include Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, and Post Malone and Chris Stapleton.Post MaloneThea Traff for The New York TimesDear listeners,It’s time once again for your monthly digest of recommended new music, culled from the Friday Playlists that Jon Pareles and I compile each week. This month’s collection has a twist: It’s composed entirely of collaborations.I try to keep these new music compilations relatively brief, so you can stay up-to-date on recent releases without investing too much time. Consider today’s playlist especially efficient. Over just 7 tracks, you’ll get to hear 14 different artists.Some pairings are like peanut butter and jelly, in that they make perfect sense: Of course Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sound good together. Chloe and Anderson .Paak? I can absolutely hear that in my head before I even press play. But I’d categorize a few of these collaborations as peanut butter and bacon: Unexpected, a bit of a head-scratcher on paper, but surprisingly enjoyable in execution. I never thought I’d hear, say, the rapper ASAP Rocky and the folk singer Jessica Pratt on a song together, but now I have and you know what? That’s a tasty sandwich.You wanna guess if we’re serious about this song,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars: “Die With a Smile”Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars each have the sort of highly adaptable talent that transcends genre and trend; they also pride themselves on professionalism sprinkled with a healthy dose of pizazz. (For what it’s worth, they’re also the exact same age: 38.) Each brings the appropriate amount of firepower to “Die With a Smile,” a romantic torch song accentuated by dreamy guitars. It’s likely a one-off, but Gaga did reference a forthcoming seventh album when she announced this single. Little Monsters, you’ve been warned.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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    By Day, Sun Studio Draws Tourists. At Night, Musicians Lay Down Tracks.

    The day’s last batch of tourists filed out of an exhibition space and entered a room overflowing with the sound of Johnny Cash’s “Cry! Cry! Cry!”They’d spent the late afternoon soaking up stories about this small space with an outsize weight — Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tenn. — where the nascent sound of rock ’n’ roll took shape in the mid-1950s. It’s where Elvis Presley became Elvis and Sun Records made household names of Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and others. It happened between the same well-worn acoustic tiles that still line the studio walls and its rolling, wavelike ceiling, and on top of the same linoleum where a hand-taped “X” marks the spot where Sun vocalists once stood.The visitors took turns with a nonfunctional but studio-original Shure 55-series microphone, made available under two conditions: no stealing it and no kissing it. They settled for photos instead before exiting into the hot, late-July evening.Then, almost as soon as the front entrance was locked, the back door opened and the local indie-rock band Blvck Hippie began to trundle in with gear.The no-kissy mic was swapped for a working one and cables were threaded across the studio floor in an electric web, as the drummer screwed down cymbals and riffs rang from warming fingers on two guitars and a bass.Before long a room intended to keep alive the memory of old songs had transformed, and was wired to capture new ones.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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    5 Breakout Artists at the Salzburg Festival

    The Salzburg Festival is synonymous with excellence and fame. But it’s also a place where artists on the cusp of stardom can shine.The Salzburg Festival has, since its founding more than 100 years ago, been known as a gathering place for the world’s finest musicians.That’s still true: During a visit there earlier this month, I heard Grigory Sokolov play Bach with unfussy authority; Jordi Savall lead his period orchestra in magisterial accounts of Beethoven’s final two symphonies; Igor Levit muscle through another Beethoven symphony, the bacchic Seventh, with just a piano.But Salzburg is also a proving ground for artists on the cusp on stardom. The soprano Asmik Grigorian, for example, was busy but hardly world famous until she gave a career-making performance as Salome there in 2018.This year, there were breakthroughs to be found throughout Salzburg’s theaters. If you looked past the top billing, past the Cecilia Bartolis and Teodor Currentzises, they were even at some of the most high-profile events this summer. Here are five of them.Lukas SternathThe pianist Lukas Sternath performing with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, under the conductor Adam Fischer.Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIn a bit of scheduling serendipity, Levit’s recital took place during the same weekend that the Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath, his former student, was debuting with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. It was touching to see Levit in the balcony of the Mozarteum’s ornate Grosser Saal, looking down as Sternath eloquently performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466) under the baton of Adam Fischer.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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    ‘Femme,’ ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ and More Streaming Gems

    A handful of low-key but formidable dramas dominate this month’s under-the-radar recommendations on your streaming subscription services.‘Femme’ (2024)Stream it on Hulu.It’s a deceptively simple premise: The drag performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is badly beaten in a homophobic attack, only to find the main attacker (George MacKay) cruising for companionship months later. Unrecognized out of drag, Jules decides to entrap and humiliate his attacker, and if you think you know where this is going, you’re in for a surprise. Rather than rehashing the tired, simplistic tropes of the revenge thriller, the writing and directing duo Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping explore the emotional complexities of the trap Jules must set — and in doing so, pose compelling questions about Jules’s own sense of self-worth. Stewart-Jarrett is marvelously understated, carefully choosing when to let his character’s carefully cultivated persona slip, while McKay is chillingly convincing in his tricky characterization of a closeted, self-loathing gay man.‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a new sixth-grade teacher who finds out exactly how fragile her sense of trust and idealism is in this harrowing drama from the director Ilker Catak. An atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia pervades this German school, thanks to a rash of petty thefts that have teachers and students alike side-eyeing each other. Carla entraps the seemingly clear culprit, and immediately regrets it. Catak, who wrote the screenplay with Johannes Duncker, squeezes the classroom and faculty spaces like a vice, expertly building operatic tension and discomfort (Marvin Miller’s gripping score does much of the work) out of everyday stress, seemingly careening toward an inevitable, violent conclusion; “I wish it had all worked out differently,” Carla says near the end, and by that point, you’re likely to agree.‘I Smile Back’ (2015)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.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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    This Is My Voice One Year on T

    A transgender music critic explores the change in their singing voice after taking testosterone.When I started taking testosterone last year, I was eager for the effects it would have on my speaking voice. I imagined talking in a voice that was low, smooth, soothing. But my high singing voice felt somehow sacrosanct. I didn’t really want it to change.Maybe that’s because growing up listening to opera I was always drawn to the sound of countertenors — the highest of male voice types — like Anthony Roth Costanzo and Klaus Nomi. In that ethereal, almost genderless sound, I recognized myself.What is it about the voice that carries such emotional weight? Such potential for self-recognition? The word “voice” is so tied up with identity as to be nearly synonymous with it. My writing has a voice. The cello, my primary instrument, is sometimes described as closest to the human voice.All voices evolve over the course of a lifetime. Boys’ voices drop during puberty. Opera singers have noticed how their voices change during and after pregnancy. And menopause brings hormonal changes that can lower voices. Our voices can even fluctuate in pitch over the course of a day, depending on whom we’re speaking to, whether that’s a child or a friend.When I started taking testosterone as part of my transition, I wondered not just how my voice would change, but also what that shift would mean. Would I be the same person with a different voice?I’m a cellist-turned-critic but I’ve always sung for pleasure. It wasn’t until two years ago, though, at 26, that I started voice lessons with a countertenor. I was already thinking about taking testosterone, but before that I wanted to experience my voice, as it was, at its full potential.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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    Harold Meltzer, Composer of Impossible-to-Pigeonhole Works, Dies at 58

    His music, which was performed by many prominent ensembles, mixed melodic themes and rich textures with the sharp-edged angularity of modernism.Harold Meltzer, a composer who set aside a career as a lawyer to create a highly regarded body of energetic, colorful chamber, vocal and orchestral scores that mixed accessibly melodic themes and rich ensemble textures with the sharp-edged angularity of modernism, died on Aug. 12 in Manhattan. He was 58.Hilary Meltzer, his wife, said that his death, in a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, a complication of a variety of medical problems he had withstood since having a stroke in 2019.Mr. Meltzer, who was also a director (first with David Amato, later with Sara Laimon) of Sequitur, a new-music ensemble, cut an imposing figure at contemporary music concerts in the 1990s and 2000s.Bespectacled, with wavy hair, he invariably entertained friends during intermissions with wry observations about the music world in general, or the events of the day. Even after his stroke, when he began using a wheelchair, he was determined to maintain something approximating his earlier level of activity, and after only two months of therapy, he appeared as the narrator for his theater work “Sindbad,” a humorous 2005 setting of a Donald Barthelme story that was one of his most frequently performed works.His music was impossible to pigeonhole, mainly because each work was his response to a different set of challenges. In “Virginal” (2002), for harpsichord and 15 other instruments, he wanted to pay tribute to William Byrd, John Bull and other Elizabethan composers whose works were included in the “Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,” a collection of English Renaissance keyboard pieces. To avoid creating a pastiche, he did not quote from any of their music, focusing instead on the structures and processes (repeating figuration., for example) that made their music distinct.If there was one element that connected many of Mr. Meltzer’s works, it was an imaginative use of tone color. Metalli Studio, via the Civitella Ranieri FoundationWe 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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    Alain Delon, Godfather of the Belted Trench

    As a titan of French cinema, he dressed the part, even when playing a killer.Alain Delon, the French film star who died on Sunday at 88, was not big on smiling.He smiles little in “Le Cercle Rouge,” the 1970 caper in which he plays the mastermind of a jewel heist.He smiles little in “La Piscine,” the sexy 1969 thriller in which he plays the boyfriend of a woman whose friendship with an older man drives him to madness.And he smiles little in “Le Samouraï,” the luscious 1967 noir that cemented his status as a titan of French cinema and arguably does as much to glorify fashion as it does a life of crime.That one opens with a shot of Mr. Delon, as a hit man named Jef Costello, lying fully dressed on his bed, staring at the ceiling as he smokes a cigarette.The room is dim and bare. The suit he wears is a beautiful cadet gray. The double-breasted trench coat he puts on before exiting onto the street — well, that quickly becomes its own character.We see Jef step into a car, which is not his car. We know this in part because he carries a bracelet of keys with which to boost it. The shot of him reaching for the correct one serves as an opportunity to show off the thin leather strap of his Baume & Mercier watch.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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    I ❤️ a Hate-Watch. Don’t You?

    When it premiered in 2017, I quite liked “The Bold Type,” a television series about three 20-something women working at a fictional magazine called Scarlet. Although the show could tend toward after-school special, with the characters learning important lessons about speaking your truth, facing your sexuality or getting regular gynecological examinations, its heartwarming conventions — young women living their editorial dreams in the big city — worked their magic on me.My love began to curdle during the third season. That’s when a new guy is brought into the office to spearhead Scarlet’s weirdly late foray into online publishing (it was set roughly in 2019). For reasons I couldn’t fathom, he referred to the magazine’s website as “The Dot Com.” Over and over and over again.To someone who’s spent her career in digital media, this was a bridge too far. It suggested that the show’s writers hadn’t ever worked in this world, hadn’t talked to anyone who did, maybe had never read a magazine. My annoyance grew in the fourth season, as the star columnist (a fount of bad ideas) got “her own vertical,” by which the show meant “a blog.” What was going on?I found myself declaiming to friends and colleagues about how deranged this turn of events was. I kept watching, but only to get annoyed at the things that I used to excuse as creative license: plot holes, improbable couplings, messed-up New York City geography. What I’d once enjoyed, I now hate-watched.Hate-watching is a weird thing. There is so much to see, do, hear, read: Why spend precious time, in an age of nearly infinite media, plopped in front of a bad show to pick it apart? It’s like gorging yourself on a disgusting meal not because you’re hungry, but because you want to gripe about it later. Or taking a vacation with someone you find excruciating, not because you don’t have any actual friends, but because you want to bellyache afterward about all the stupid things they said and did.Yet hate-watching is now part of the cultural conversation and arguably contemporary life. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity: We start watching a show because it looks appealing, but we keep watching because we want to complain about it at happy hour. It’s fun to be the person who describes a particularly terrible story arc or performance to our friends’ disbelief. Besides, it’s better than whatever is on the news.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