Aurelia Butler

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    Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2024-25 Season

    Our critics choose highlights, including concerts featuring Mitsuko Uchida as a Perspectives artist and Gabriela Ortiz as the hall’s composer in residence.The Latino experience will be a focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter’s leadership announced on Wednesday, with a festival inside and beyond the hall’s walls called “Nuestros Sonidos” (“Our Sounds”) and a slate of concerts featuring artists with ties to Latin America.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview that the festival was meant to respond to the underrepresentation of Latino people and Hispanic culture in American classical music.“We thought,” he said, “we ought to make sure we address that balance.”Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor who was born in Venezuela, will open both the 2024-25 season and the festival in October, by leading his Los Angeles Philharmonic in three concerts. He will have a growing presence in New York next season: Aside from his Carnegie appearances, he will lead several weeks of programming with the New York Philharmonic, where he takes over as music and artistic director in 2026.The Mexican-born composer Gabriela Ortiz will be in residence at Carnegie all season. Five of her works, including a concerto she wrote for the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, will have their New York premieres.Carnegie’s season lineup — about 170 performances — will also feature the pianists Lang Lang and Mitsuko Uchida, the violinist Maxim Vengerov and the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.Here are 12 highlights from the season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZWe 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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    Da’Vine Joy Randolph: Major Prizes, Major Attention, Major Unease

    The “Holdovers” star Da’Vine Joy Randolph has had a charmed run through awards season so far: Considered the favorite for the supporting actress Oscar, she has already taken the Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award and prestigious trophies from both the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association.The 37-year-old actress is well-aware of the power of those prizes, and knows that even being in the Oscar conversation can change the course of a career. But does that mean her awards season has been easy to navigate?“It’s overwhelming, if I’m being really honest,” Randolph told me in a candid conversation last week. “You really do earn your stripes going through this awards-season thing.”A monthslong Oscar campaign can be more arduous than people realize: a pileup of Q. and A.s, wardrobe fittings, round tables, photo shoots, interviews, red carpets, ceremonies, movie premieres, cocktail parties and festival appearances that demand always-on levels of poise and adrenaline. Everyone you meet at these events wants something from you — a conversation, a selfie, an autograph, an acceptance speech — and at the end of these glitzy and exhausting nights, there’s not much left over for yourself.Randolph is no novice: Tony-nominated for her role in “Ghost the Musical” (2012), she earned Oscar chatter for her breakout film performance in “Dolemite Is His Name” (2019) and has worked steadily in films like “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021) and TV shows including “Only Murders in the Building,” “The Idol” and “High Fidelity.” Still, nothing she has experienced so far compares to the white-hot awards spotlight shone on her in the wake of “The Holdovers,” and Randolph is still figuring out how to adjust to its glare.Clockwise from top left, Randolph in “Ghost the Musical”; “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” with Andra Day; “The Holdovers,” opposite Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa; and “Dolemite Is His Name,” starring Eddie Murphy.Clockwise from top left: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Takashi Seida/Paramount Pictures and Hulu; Seacia Pavao/Focus Features; François Duhamel/NetflixWe 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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    Israel Chooses a Eurovision Act as Boycott Campaigns Swirl

    Eden Golan will represent the country in May, in a contest that looks set to be overshadowed by the war in Gaza.The singing contest’s glitzy lights and glittering dresses were supposed to be a respite after another depressing, hostage-filled news day on Israeli TV.Yet a somber mood hung over the finale of “Rising Star,” the show that selects Israel’s representative for the Eurovision Song Contest, as it pitted four young pop singers against one another on Tuesday night.This year’s winner, Eden Golan, 20, dedicated her performance of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith to the more than 100 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. “We won’t truly be OK until everyone returns home,” she said.As the victor, Golan will travel to Malmo, Sweden, in May to represent her country in Eurovision, a high-camp spectacle watched by tens of millions and decided, in part, by a public vote. It is not an obvious proxy for war. But as the civilian death toll in Gaza has mounted, there have been growing calls for Israel to be banned from this year’s event.Several prominent, artist-led campaigns argue that recent decisions to exclude Russia and Belarus set a precedent, and that Israel should be banned for human-rights violations. Eurovision officials reject those comparisons, but when Golan performs in Malmo, it seems certain that many voters will be thinking about more than just her singing.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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    ‘Perfect Days’ Review: Hanging On

    Directed by Wim Wenders, this Oscar-nominated Japanese drama gently excavates the life of a toilet cleaner, and the shadows that lurk inside.Pay attention to the shadows in “Perfect Days.” Pay attention also to the trees, to the ways Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) looks at them. They’re as much a character in the story as he is.Hirayama cleans Tokyo’s public toilets for a living, rising before dawn to gently water the seedlings he grows in his home and then drive off to begin his shift. On the way to work, he picks a cassette tape — Van Morrison, the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone — and listens while driving down the highway. Tokyo’s Skytree skyscraper looms in the distance.Hirayama clearly derives enjoyment from performing his work well, but there’s more to his life than labor, and more to this movie than a simplistic celebration of manual toil. He keeps to a simple routine, the kind so carefully constructed you start to wonder if it’s a bulwark against chaos. He exits his apartment and breathes deeply, once, at the same time every morning. He drinks the same coffee, eats the same sandwich, snaps the same photos of the tree canopy. He frequents the same restaurants and bars, public baths and bookstores, places where everyone knows who he is.Pivotal to his peace is Hirayama’s collection of physical media, a surprising sight in a digital world: In addition to his extensive collection of cassettes, he has shelves of used paperbacks and boxes of tree photographs filed and stashed in his small, neat apartment. They are anchors in time, companions throughout his days, riches rounding out his life. When he brings a book to the bar on the weekend, the proprietor tells him admiringly that he’s such an intellectual. “I wouldn’t say that,” he says.In fact, Hirayama says very little. (The first time I saw the film, the subtitles were mistakenly turned off, and the audience didn’t even realize for about half an hour.) Instead he is an observer, attending to Tokyo and to the people in it with a tenderness and forbearance that, if you’re not paying attention, you’ll ascribe to a simple nature. It’s only when you watch his expression, at times, that something else flickers, a pain that flashes only briefly. “Perfect Days” chronicles only a couple of weeks — one easy and placid, the other full of disruption — and slowly, exquisitely hints that the structure of Hirayama’s life enables him to exist in the present, representing a choice that may have come after a long trauma. There are clues in his encounters with family members and strangers and, later, in his rattled response to an unexpected sight.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 Minutes That Will Make You Love John Coltrane

    Coltrane changed the game in American music a few times over. Here’s a guided tour to his career, courtesy of 15 musicians, scholars, poets, writers and other experts.Yes, it’s time for this series to focus on John Coltrane — perhaps the most sanctified musician in the whole Black American tradition, who other artists sometimes refer to simply as “St. John.”Born in Hamlet, N.C., and raised in High Point, Coltrane arrived on the New York scene in the 1950s, by way of Philadelphia and the Miles Davis Quintet. In the short years between that arrival and his death, in 1967, the world around Coltrane would change dramatically. He reached the peak of his creative forces as a saxophonist just as American society was bursting apart in the 1960s, and as freedom movements drummed colonialism out of the African continent. Though introspective and soft-spoken, singularly allergic to grandstanding, Coltrane felt powerfully concerned with the fate of the world, and he was sure that music had a role to play in turning the tides.He closely studied spiritual and musical systems from Africa and India, sensing that ancient, non-Western traditions might light the path toward a new creative approach. For many of his contemporaries, Trane’s saxophone became synonymous with a liberated mind and body. And, however ineffable, it carried a message. As A.B. Spellman wrote in a poem after the saxophonist’s death, “trane’s horn had words in it.”Coltrane changed the game in American music a few times over: first, with a style that felt like such a force of nature, one critic labeled it “sheets of sound,” as if he were commanding monsoon rains. Then, in 1960, the flipbook-fast harmonies of “Giant Steps” upped the expectations for jazz improvisers by a big margin. Swinging in the other direction, Trane brought his whirling-dervish attack to a more stationary style of music: raga-like, harmonically planted “modal” tunes such as “Impressions,” “Africa” and “India.”In the mid-60s, compelled by his own spirituality, by the outward-bound “free jazz” being made by artists like Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, and by the music he’d been playing at home with his second wife, the pianist and composer Alice (McLeod) Coltrane, the saxophonist wrote and recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme.” A paean to God, it also sounds like an attempt to unleash purifying flames on a world gone wrong. And from there, he went even further; his last two years saw Coltrane pushing rhythm and tone beyond their breaking points.Below you’ll find a guided tour of Coltrane’s career, courtesy of 15 musicians, scholars, poets, writers and other experts whose lives have been cleansed, and made brighter, by the sheets of sound.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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    A Critic Who Strives to Hit the Right Note

    Zachary Woolfe, the classical music critic for The New York Times, shared how he endeavors to make his writing accessible to both neophytes and experts.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Zachary Woolfe grew up in a musical household. His parents were big fans of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and often played their music throughout their Long Island, N.Y., home.So when he, as a teenager, hung a picture of the dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson above his bed, they were supportive, he said, if a bit confused.“I was a serious cellist from elementary school through high school,” said Mr. Woolfe, 39, the classical music critic for The New York Times. He began taking private lessons when he was about 9 and played in all-county and all-Long Island orchestras, and his love of the genre has only grown.Now, 13 years into a career as a music critic at The Times — he began as a freelance critic in 2011 — Mr. Woolfe has carved out a niche among classical music critics. His goal is to make the genre accessible to readers new to the art form, as well as interesting to aficionados who may be attending their 25th performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.“I think what people are interested in is passion,” Mr. Woolfe said. “Even if you didn’t understand every word, my goal is for you to be drawn into my pieces because you can tell that I really care about what I’m writing about.”In a recent phone conversation, shortly before he attended a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Mr. Woolfe reflected on the importance of covering classical music across the globe and the future of the genre. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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    2024 Grammys, Dissected: Taylor, Miley, SZA, Tracy, Joni and More

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicAt Sunday’s Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift won album of the year for “Midnights” and, for good measure, announced a new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” due in April. Other big winners included Victoria Monét, Phoebe Bridgers (and boygenius), Killer Mike, Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish.The show featured several moving live performances from elders: Tracy Chapman duetting with Luke Combs on “Fast Car,” a striking Joni Mitchell singalong and a closing stomper from Billy Joel.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation on whether this was the year the Grammys got it correct, whether there was a gap between what the awards indicated and what the speeches were saying, and the grounded joy of seeing worthy stars brought back into the spotlight properly.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, a New York Times pop music criticConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Toby Keith’s Music and Politics Were More Complicated Than You Might Think

    His choice to become a post-9/11 culture-war champion overshadowed the work of a musician who was funnier, subtler and more politically slippery than his most famous work let on.It is important to note right from the beginning that Toby Keith, when presented with the opportunity to become the music industry’s jingoist-in-chief, leaned in. At the turn of the millennium, just after the Sept. 11 attacks, Keith, who died Monday at 62, released a string of songs that were notable for their political stridency, commitment to American exceptionalism and flexed-bicep threat.Keith had a three-decade career in country music, selling more than 20 million albums and releasing 20 No. 1 Billboard country singles. But he will indisputably be remembered first and most intently for this era of songs: “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American),” a thunderstorm of pro-war propaganda peaking with the exclamation “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way”; “American Soldier,” a warm hum of bombastic treacle; and even “The Taliban Song,” a cheeky ditty in the Jimmy Buffett mold aiming to satirize, if not quite sympathize with, life in Afghanistan under the repressive Taliban regime.These songs, released in 2002 and 2003, made Keith a culture-war champion. He understood instinctually that culture is politics, and politics is theater, and for this fraught period in American history, he was determined to provide the soundtrack.Nonetheless, Keith’s career was also an object lesson in how one incandescent and hard-to-ignore moment can shine so brightly that it obscures more nuanced truths below. For most of the rest of his career, Keith was a sly humorist, a good-natured blowhard, a chronicler of what really happens below thick skin.Much of his best music was about how masculinity is performance. Take “As Good as I Once Was,” one of the great country songs of the 2000s, which is delivered from the perspective of a man in decline, physically and sexually:I got a few years on me nowBut there was a time, back in my primeWhen I could really lay it downAnd if you need some love tonightThen I might have just enoughThe semi-rapped “I Wanna Talk About Me” manages to wrap a critique of male petulance in a song superficially about a woman who doesn’t come up for air. And then there’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” which is perhaps Keith’s most blustery song, a victory march in search of a Ford F-150 commercial.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