Aurelia Butler

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    Maria Callas Was Opera’s Defining Diva. She Still Is.

    Her voice is the shadow that remains after shock, after anger: the sound of a woman realizing she has nothing left to live for.It is the second act of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” Violetta and Alfredo, a prostitute and a wealthy young man, have fallen madly in love. But his father confronts her, demanding she drop the disreputable affair to salvage the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s sister.For Violetta, it is an unbearable sacrifice, but she’ll do it. “Dite alla giovine,” she sings, in a broken murmur: Tell your daughter that I will abandon the one good thing I have, for her sake.Singing that passage on May 28, 1955, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the soprano Maria Callas reached the phrase about how “bella e pura” Alfredo’s sister is — how beautiful and pure — and inserted the tiniest breath before “pura.” It’s a barely noticeable silence, but within it is a black hole of resignation. Callas’s split-second pause achingly suggests Violetta knows that if she, too, were pure, her happiness would not be expendable.Tiny details like this are how Callas — who would have turned 100 on Dec. 2 — gave opera’s over-the-top melodramas a startling sense of reality, and her characters the psychological depth and nuance of actual people. Tiny details like this, captured on hundreds of recordings, are how this most mythical of singers has stubbornly resisted drifting entirely into myth.Maria Callas rehearsing “Medea” in 1953 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla ScalaThe defining diva of the 20th century, Callas is not so far from us in some ways; a normal life span would have brought her well into the 21st. Those many recordings — endlessly remastered, repackaged and rereleased — have kept her in our ears, the benchmark of what is possible in opera, musically and emotionally. Her dramatic art and dramatic life, often intertwined, have made her an enduring cultural touchstone: a coolly glamorous stare in Apple ads and the inspiration for plays (including a Tony Award winner), performances by Marina Abramovic (bad) and Monica Bellucci (worse), a coming film starring Angelina Jolie (we’ll see), even a hologram tour (sigh).Yet Callas can also seem like a figure of faraway history. Her lonely death was back in 1977, when she was just 53 — and by then, her days of true performing glory were almost 20 years behind her. The number of people who saw her live, particularly in staged opera, is dwindling, and her short career was just early enough that precious little of it was filmed.So she has been for decades, for most of us, a creation of still images and audio. We have to use those tools to conjure what her performances were like, to complete them.But when you hear her, this is surprisingly easy. You listen to that “Dite alla giovine” and immediately see, in her voice, the blankness of her face, the mouth barely moving and the rest a mask of surrender, the shoulders collapsed. At the end of her classic 1953 “Tosca” recording, you can again “see” that indelible face, this time shifting in a couple of seconds from hushed excitement to catastrophic loss. (Listen to the sudden fear in that second cry of “Mario!”) With Callas, the aural always presses toward the visual; the voice, with its specificity and pungency, its weirdly death-haunted vitality, makes you imagine her body, moving in space.In her performances, there was never a sense of opera as mere entertainment, a night out with pretty music. She took every note seriously, where others fudged and coasted; she was refined where others were vulgar. In her powerfully expressive voice and magnetic presence, opera really, truly mattered.Watch her perform “Tu che le vanità” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” in concert in 1962, near the end of her career. You are aware even before she opens her mouth of opera’s founding paradoxes. She is grand, and honest; epic, and intimate.Opera in the modern era is at its core an exhumation of the past, a literal revival. Callas is the essential singer — she is opera — not because of her instrument or her acting, but because, with a combination of born intuition and carefully acquired skill, she imagined and reconstructed a vanished world.She took on a whole repertory — the bel canto of the early 19th century, notably operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini — that had been ignored or distorted for generations. And she approached pieces that had never left the public, like “La Traviata,” Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma,” as if they were being done for the first time. The title character of “Lucia,” then widely assumed to be a chirpy cipher, was in Callas’s throat a morbid, ecstatic gothic heroine — more intense, and more believable. In the wake of World War II, she showed that Europe’s patrimony could emerge from the rubble.Born in New York to Greek immigrants, Callas grew up listening to Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and, at 13, returned with her mother to Greece. Just a year later, she was singing Carmen’s “Habanera” and Norma’s “Casta diva” as a conservatory student in Athens.She had no real apprenticeship. There were no supporting parts, no young-artist programs. By her early 20s, she was singing some of the most challenging roles in the repertory; by her early 30s, she was singing them all over the world.She made her name with outlandish feats like doing Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Die Walküre” and Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” — which few sopranos paired in the same lifetime — in the same week. And once she became an object of worship, scratchy pirated recordings of a passionate “Traviata” from Lisbon were passed around like religious relics; ditto a Mexico City “Aida,” in which Callas stretched an old but rare interpolated high E flat to gleaming length at the end of the Triumphal Scene.Her voice, matchlessly articulate and often quite beautiful but also idiosyncratic and fragile, didn’t hold out too long, and her career was brief; there was maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, it was essentially over.Brief — and unbelievably dense and tumultuous. Who knows the root of Callas’s restlessness, her insane commitment, her ferocity, her rivalries? There was clearly a deeply ingrained sense of unworthiness that you could trace back to her difficult childhood, with a mother who openly preferred her prettier sister. Self-buttressing, self-hating, self-defeating, Callas needed the stage desperately, and yet she always needed to be pushed onto it.Her loss of some five or six dozen pounds in the early ’50s, slimming into one of the century’s most stylish women, made news, as did her dropping out midway through a “Norma” in Rome in 1958. The year before, she had pleaded illness before missing a performance of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” in Edinburgh, then was photographed at a swank party in Venice. A lifetime later, it all seems so petty, but the venom that greeted these cancellations — hard to imagine today — helped usher in the end of Callas’s career.Callas in 1958 on a train in Rome. She had maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, her career was essentially over.Alfredo Miccoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe left her husband for the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, largely giving up performing in the process. When Onassis eventually married Jackie Kennedy instead, Callas was alone and bereft, without either the vocation that had given her purpose or the man who had replaced it. Living mostly in seclusion, though always harboring hopes of returning to the stage, she became for many a kind of saint or martyr, an embodiment of the hopelessly loving, direly abandoned characters she had played.“Until the end,” a friend said, “she continued her vocal exercises.”As Callas’s life fades ever further into the distance, her voice is more and more what we are left with. “Generally, I upset people the first time they hear me,” she told a biographer, “but I am usually able to convince them of what I am doing.”Francesco Siciliani, an impresario who engaged Callas as she rose in the late 1940s, was right when he said, “Parts of the voice were beautiful, others empty.” But the flaws that grew more prominent over time — the thinnesses and wobbles, the metallic harshness and questionable intonation — were, as she knew, usually convincing, not least because her sound, for all its troubles, was so instantly recognizable, and such a perfect vessel for extreme emotion. There was always that sense of every phrase being considered, without feeling studied — of a voice with a purpose.We can see from photos the amazing ability of her face — and, perhaps just as important, her hands — to capture anguish, authority and charm. But among the most pernicious stereotypes about Callas is that she was an actress who could barely sing, who got by on charisma alone.The records disprove this. Listen to her tender “O mio babbino caro.” Listen to her delicate yet commanding “D’amor sull’ali rosee.” She was always a bel canto singer at heart. In the early 1970s, when she led a series of master classes at the Juilliard School, a student defended herself after a bad high note by saying it was meant as a cry of despair.“It’s not a cry of despair,” Callas shot back. “It’s a B flat.”Callas in “Norma” in Paris, in 1964. She approached operas that had never left the repertory as if they were being done for the first time.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s appropriate that this is the lasting image of her final years, and the theme of Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning play “Master Class”: Callas as a wise but overbearing, even fearsome teacher. She and those hundreds of recordings continue to teach, continue to loom over opera. Singers are still compared to her, especially those with compelling presences and voices on the acidic side.Sixty years after Callas sang “Medea,” the star of a new production at the Met in 2021 said Callas’s legacy hadn’t stopped being the “elephant in the room.” Opera is still asking the question that the writer Ethan Mordden recalled being posed by a friend back in 1969: “Is there life after Callas?”Should there be? She and her flash of a career remain a beacon of artistic integrity and profundity — of the cultivation of tradition and craft, of a desire to bring the past to bear on the present — in a culture that values those qualities less and less.The costume designer Piero Tosi was there for her great “Traviata” at La Scala in 1955. “She scarcely seemed to be singing,” he said of her “Dite alla giovine.” “Yet everyone heard.”Impossibly distant, yet immensely present: At her centennial, Callas still occupies a position in opera something like the sun.Audio and video courtesy of Warner ClassicsProduced by More

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    New York City Ballet and Its Orchestra Reach Contract Deal

    The agreement, which includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, ends months of tense negotiations.After months of wrangling, New York City Ballet and the union representing its musicians announced on Tuesday they had reached a deal for a new contract.The three-year contract, which is expected to be ratified by members of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, a central demand of the musicians, who had argued that they were underpaid because of salary cuts made during the pandemic.City Ballet and the musicians’ union praised the agreement, which came just after the company began its holiday run of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” typically the most lucrative production of the season.“The marriage of music and dance is a hallmark of N.Y.C.B.,” the company and the orchestra said in a joint statement. “We are thrilled that this agreement has been finalized and we look forward to a successful season featuring our wonderful musicians and dancers who are among the greatest performers in the world.”The contract was the first that City Ballet and the orchestra have negotiated since the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the cancellation of hundreds of performances and the loss of about $55 million in ticket sales. City Ballet, like other cultural institutions, reduced the salaries of dancers and musicians as it worked to weather the crisis.Under the deal, the company will restore a salary cut of about 9 percent made during the pandemic, as well as offer a raise of 13 percent over three years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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    Jean Knight, Who Struck Platinum With ‘Mr. Big Stuff,’ Dies at 80

    Her anthem of female strength topped the Billboard R&B chart and reached No. 2 on the pop chart in 1971. Its appeal has endured.Jean Knight, a soul singer whose memorable single “Mr. Big Stuff,” a brassy anthem of female strength, rose to No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart in 1971, died on Wednesday in Tampa, Fla. She was 80.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Mona Giamanco, a publicist for Ms. Knight’s family. She did not specify the cause.The gutsy narrator of “Mr. Big Stuff,” which was released on the Memphis-based Stax label, tells a wealthy ladies’ man — with his “fancy clothes” and “a big fine car” — that she will never love him:Mr. Big StuffWho do you think you are?Mr. Big StuffYou’re never gonna get my love.When she sang “Mr. Big Stuff” on the television show “Soul Train,” Ms. Knight exhibited the narrator’s disdain for the wealthy man in her facial gestures and in the way she defiantly planted her hand on her right hip and wagged her right index finger. But her strong voice softened when she sang that she would rather have a “poor guy that has a love that’s true.”Ms. Knight received a Grammy Award nomination for best female R&B vocal performance (Aretha Franklin won for “Bridge Over Troubled Water”), and “Mr. Big Stuff” was nominated for best R&B song (Bill Withers won for “Ain’t No Sunshine”).“Mr. Big Stuff,” written by Carrol Washington, Ralph Williams and Joseph Broussard, topped Billboard’s R&B chart and rose to No. 2 on the magazine’s Hot 100. It was also certified double platinum for selling at least two million units.The music historian John Broven, the author of “Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans” (1978), said in an email that “Mr. Big Stuff” “marked the end of the Golden Age of New Orleans R&B and helped to kick-start the city’s funky soul era.”He added, “It was also remarkable for being recorded on the same day as an earlier No. 1 R&B hit, ‘Groove Me,’ by another New Orleans artist, King Floyd, by talented producer Wardell Quezergue” at a time when “New Orleans was suffering from a dearth of big hits.”In 2002, before singing “Mr. Big Stuff” at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Ms. Knight told the audience that the royalties she received from it had helped sustain her financially.“‘Mr. Big Stuff’ is better for me now than 31 years ago,” she said. “All I have to do is sit at home and wait for the mailman.”It would be her only major hit, but it had a long afterlife. It can be heard on the soundtracks of numerous movies and TV shows. It has been sampled by Heavy D, Eazy-E and John Legend.Ms. Knight at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2003. She was a regular at the festival and last appeared there in 2016.David Redfern/Getty ImagesMs. Knight was born Jean Audrey Caliste on Jan. 26, 1943, in New Orleans. Her father, Louis, was a storekeeper, and her mother, Florence (Edwards) Caliste, was a homemaker.After graduating from high school, Ms. Knight sang at a cousin’s New Orleans bar. In 1965, she recorded a version of Jackie Wilson’s hit 1960 song “Doggin’ Around” as a demo. That led to a contract with the Jet Star/Tribe record label. Around that time, she changed her surname to Knight, because she believed that Caliste was difficult to pronounce.She earned money in the 1960s as a baker’s assistant at two New Orleans universities.After she recorded “Mr. Big Stuff,” according to a tribute to Ms. Knight on the Stax Museum website, the song was shopped to national labels, but each entreaty was rejected — until “Groove Me” became a hit and “a producer at Stax Records remembered Knight’s recording of ‘Mr. Big Stuff’ and released it.”Ms. Knight had another hit single in 1971, “You Think You’re Hot Stuff,” which rose to No. 19 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 57 on the Hot 100. Fourteen years later, her cover of the zydeco musician Rockin’ Sidney’s novelty song “My Toot Toot,” recorded for the Mirage label, peaked at No. 50 on the Hot 100 and No. 59 on the R&B chart.Ms. Knight graduated from nursing school in the 1980s and was a licensed practical nurse for about 15 years. She also continued to perform around New Orleans, but she was displaced from her home by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and lived in a FEMA trailer for about six months.She was a board member of the Louisiana Music Commission and was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2007.Ms. Knight was a regular at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, last appearing there in 2016. Its producer and director, Quint Davis, said she had been integral to the event.“Jean Knight is a core artist in R&B, certainly in New Orleans and Gulf Coast R&B,” Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t only a singer and artist; she was a performer who knew how to reach the crowd and work it.”She is survived by her son, Emile Commedore; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her marriages to Thomas Commedore and Earl Harris ended in divorce.During her performance at the 2007 festival, Ms. Knight told the story behind “Mr. Big Stuff.” First she sang its melody as originally written; then she demonstrated how she had changed it.“That ain’t got no bite to it,” she recalled telling one of the songwriters, in response to which he said, “Jean, everybody knows how sassy you are” and encouraged her to alter it.“It worked — in one take, she insisted,” The New York Times quoted her as saying. And when the song is played, she added, “The checks come to me.” More

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    Suleika Jaouad Revisits Bone Marrow Transplant in “American Symphony”

    This month, writer Suleika Jaouad revisits her second bone marrow transplant in the documentary “American Symphony.”In the months following her second bone marrow transplant, Suleika Jaouad’s TikTok algorithm started serving her videos of bearded dragons shedding their skin. For a writer whose work deals in ambiguities, that metaphor was tidier than she’d have preferred.Ms. Jaouad quotes Joan Didion and Emily Dickinson in casual conversation. She is the author of “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted,” a best seller which documents her first bone marrow transplant and its aftermath. Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in this paper.“Why am I drawn to these?” Ms. Jaouad, now 35, wondered of the reptilian videos. She posed the question while settling into the crook of her couch at her home in Brooklyn, with a lunch spread laid out over a low table in front of her. Her dog River ogled some baba ganoush from his perch near her feet.More than time-tested sonnets and snippets of Buddhist wisdom, it was molting bearded dragons that seemed to tell the truth about what Ms. Jaouad called, “the experience of forced renewal.” She too had molted — twice now. And like the lizards, she had no choice but to be vulnerable. “I was so stripped bare, I felt larval,” said Ms. Jaouad.Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in The New York Times.via Penguin Random HouseThis month, Ms. Jaouad will revisit the raw period of her cancer recurrence and second transplant when the feature documentary “American Symphony” premieres on Netflix in collaboration with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. The work follows Ms. Jaouad and her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, as the couple faces what Ms. Jaouad has called their “life of contrasts.” Both Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste serve as executive producers.Just how stark are the contrasts? In November 2021, Ms. Jaouad learned her cancer had returned. That same week, Mr. Batiste earned 11 Grammy nominations — the most of any artist. The night before Ms. Jaouad checked into the hospital for her transplant, the two — who met as middle schoolers at band camp and later reconnected — married at home and swapped twist-tie rings.Meanwhile, Mr. Batiste continued both to serve as bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and to compose a one-time performance at Carnegie Hall in New York (also called “American Symphony”) that would distill the whole of American history into sound. In her sterile room, Ms. Jaouad started to paint and papered her walls in vibrant, sometimes gruesome watercolor.None of this was supposed to happen.As in the lead-up to her initial diagnosis, Ms. Jaouad had been negotiating persistent fatigue for months when she went to see her doctors for tests.It had been over a decade since Ms. Jaouad’s first bone marrow transplant. Her own medical team was so convinced of her durable health that the biopsy she insisted on was deemed a kind of indulgence. Minutes before the procedure, a nurse told her she didn’t have to do it. “I felt embarrassed,” Ms. Jaouad said. “I felt like I was being a hysterical, melodramatic hypochondriac.” She almost backed out, but the writer Elizabeth Gilbert — a friend and mentor — had driven her to the appointment. She didn’t want Ms. Gilbert to feel she had wasted her time.“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”Netflix“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said of his wife.NetflixDoctors ground into Ms. Jaouad’s spine to extract a sample of her marrow. Ms. Gilbert stood watch, calling the ordeal “grisly as hell.” The relapse “simply wasn’t supposed to happen,” she wrote in an email. “There was no template for it, which was why nobody was looking for it.”“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”The filmmaker Matthew Heineman had already started production on what would become “American Symphony” when Ms. Jaouad’s results came in. Mr. Heineman, who directed “Cartel Land” and “A Private War,” had been interested in shadowing Mr. Batiste as he devised the Carnegie Hall piece. Ms. Jaouad’s recurrence necessitated — as Mr. Heineman put it — a “pivot.”Ms. Jaouad was not sure she wanted to function as a plot twist.“I never want to be flattened into ‘the sick girl,’” Ms. Jaouad said of her deliberations. “I said to Matt outright, ‘I don’t want to be the dramatic counterpoint to Jon’s meteoric success.’” Mr. Heineman insisted he too was uninterested in the tropes of the illness plot. In “American Symphony” no one feels an errant lump. Ms. Jaouad doesn’t have a dramatic phone call with her oncologist. Viewers discover she has cancer in the middle of a fierce snowball fight in which Ms. Jaouad — struck and faux-outraged — protests: No hitting the girl with leukemia.Ms. Jaouad came around on the project as she did on “Between Two Kingdoms.” Then too, she had been hesitant. Ms. Jaouad recalled an encounter with the writer Cheryl Strayed not long after her first transplant. She told Ms. Strayed she wanted to write a book, but not one about illness. Ms. Strayed told her she had once been determined to avoid writing about the death of her mother. Then she turned in the manuscript for “Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”“It’s about the hike, but it’s all about her dead mother,” Ms. Jaouad said with a smile.Ms. Jaouad’s book, and to some extent, “The Isolation Journals,” a popular newsletter she launched at the outset of the pandemic, explores how to re-enter the world after devastation. “American Symphony” follows up: How to keep going when there’s no straightforward “after.”So when it came time to watch an initial cut of the film (drawn from 1,500 hours of footage), Ms. Jaouad queued it up alone. “I feel a bit desensitized to it now,” she said. “That specific time is not representative of how I live or who I am.” But she has “no qualms” about her depiction or the decision to let Mr. Heineman film the crucial appointment three months post-transplant in which she would learn if her transplant worked. Mr. Heineman thus found out at the same time she and Mr. Batiste did that the procedure had been a success — and that Ms. Jaouad would have to be in treatment to outwit her cancer for the rest of her life.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. Dana Golan for The New York Times“To describe it as a roller coaster would be an insult to roller coasters,” Ms. Jaouad said of her emotional whiplash. “The idea of indefinite treatment thrust me into a whole different kind of in-between place, and it’s one that I’m still learning to swim in.”“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said in a phone interview. (He called hours after still more Grammy nominations. This year, he earned six, including one for “Butterfly” — the song that plays in the “American Symphony” trailer and which he wrote for Ms. Jaouad.) “She’s able to look into what she’s facing and see not only how she can find God and find healing through it, but also provide that insight to hundreds of thousands and millions of other people out there whom she’s never met.”Necessary OptimismAfter the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Ms. Jaouad recalled that someone in the crowd approached her and said how relieved she was: “You’re still here.”“When it comes to illness stories, we tell them from the vantage point of having survived,” Ms. Jaouad said. In that sense, “American Symphony,” which stops short of a white-text-black-screen epilogue and offers no update on Ms. Jaouad’s health, is a corrective. “It wasn’t clear that I was going to survive the shooting period of this,” she said. The credits roll, but there is no neat ending for Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste.“None of us know if we’re going to exist in the future, but I have a heightened fear of not existing in the future,” Ms. Jaouad said.In “Between Two Kingdoms” Ms. Jaouad writes about her exchanges with a man named Quintin Jones. Mr. Jones, who introduces himself to her as “Lil GQ,” read her columns while on death row. He’d written from a place of recognition — one trapped person to another. After her transplant, she visited him in prison. But the week her book was released, he was given an execution date. Ms. Jaouad was devastated. She threw herself into the movement to get his death sentence converted into a life sentence. It didn’t work.On the morning of his execution, Mr. Jones was granted four hours of phone calls. He spent them with Mr. Batiste and Ms. Jaouad. “It was unbelievable because we were talking in the future tense, knowing that the future wasn’t going to come to pass,” Ms. Jaouad said. “He talked about coming to visit us, hanging out in our garden. We were all just choosing to live in that space.” She tried to explain the suspension. Their conscious decision to be outside of time.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. One will be a work of painting and prose that Ms. Jaouad has titled “Drowning Practice.” The second will be a book about journaling, incorporating writing prompts. She will show her work at the art center ArtYard next summer.A few weeks ago, Ms. Jaouad traveled to Seattle and was walking outside, suddenly under a torrential rain. Someone rushed to offer her an umbrella. “I was like, ‘No, I’m good,’” Ms. Jaouad remembered. She wanted to feel the rain on her face. Back in New York, she let herself fantasize. Not about prizes or red carpets, but about some unspecial rainstorm a decade from now. How incredible it would be not to feel new, she said. “If I’m around, I’ll want the umbrella.” More

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    Dolly Parton (Really) Rocks

    “Rockstar,” the country icon’s new double album of rock songs, is now the highest charting LP of her career. But her history with the genre runs deep.Rick Diamond/Getty ImagesDear listeners,At age 77, and with nearly 50 (!) solo studio releases to her name, Dolly Parton just scored the highest charting album of her career, the mammoth double LP “Rockstar,” which debuted on this week’s Billboard 200 at No. 3. (Darn those young whippersnappers Drake and Taylor Swift for standing in the way of Parton’s first No. 1!)“Rockstar” is not an album so much as a referendum on how incredibly well-liked Parton is at this moment. She seems to have drafted up a long scroll of dream collaborators, and — anything for Dolly! — each one of them picked up the phone: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Joan Jett, Miley Cyrus, Lizzo, Elton John, Rob Halford from Judas Priest … I could go on. And “Rockstar” does go on, for an indefatigable 30 tracks, clocking in at 2 hours and 22 minutes. When I finally finished listening to it, I expected someone to hand me one of those foil blankets you get after you run a marathon.While “Rockstar” might end up one of Parton’s most commercially successful albums, it’s not one of her best. (And isn’t that how it always goes?) My main quibble is the premise itself. Last year, when Parton was nominated for inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she initially tried to take her name off the ballot because she didn’t consider herself a rock artist. “This has, however, inspired me to put out a hopefully great rock ’n’ roll album at some point in the future,” she wrote in a statement. (She ended up changing course and accepted her induction.)I disagree with the notion that Dolly Parton wasn’t a rock star until she released an album called “Rockstar” — it feels like too narrow and literal an understanding of genre. Sure, Parton is a country artist at heart, but she’s also a dynamic, take-no-bull cultural icon with a powerful voice and a flair for spectacle. And, as I argue with today’s playlist, she’s been reshaping rock ’n’ roll in her own style for her entire career.The songs I’ve chosen put some of the best moments of “Rockstar” (featuring duet partners like Stevie Nicks and John Fogerty) in conversation with older songs in Parton’s vast catalog. They also highlight her history of covering — and completely transforming — rock songs from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Collective Soul and Neil Young.Parton is a living legend, and it’s wonderful that she’s continuing to reach fresh milestones and new audiences seven decades (!) into her career. But we certainly didn’t need approval from the notoriously suspect Rock Hall to confirm that Dolly Parton rocks. She’s been telling us that, in her own way, all along.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Dolly Parton: “Shine”One of Parton’s great stylistic pivots came in the late ’90s, when she revisited her bluegrass roots for the appropriately titled album “The Grass Is Blue.” This imaginative rework of Collective Soul’s 1993 alternative-rock hit “Shine” — which earned Parton a very deserved Grammy for best female country vocal performance — comes from her second return-to-bluegrass album, “Little Sparrow,” released in 2001. Say it with her now: “Yeah.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Dolly Parton featuring John Fogerty: “Long as I Can See the Light”One of the best tracks on “Rockstar” is this soulful duet on a Creedence Clearwater Revival classic. Parton and Fogerty’s voices mesh well together, and both sound at home emphasizing the original song’s gospel influence. (Listen on YouTube)3. Kesha featuring Dolly Parton: “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You)”There’s a special reason that Kesha included a cover of this 1980 Parton hit on her 2017 album “Rainbow”: It was co-written by her mother, the singer-songwriter Pebe Sebert. The original is a delicate ballad, but this later version features more of a rock arrangement, with chugging electric guitars and smoldering vocals from Kesha and Parton. (Listen on YouTube)4. Dolly Parton: “Dumb Blonde”“Just because I’m blonde don’t mean I’m dumb,” Parton sings on her first charting single, “and this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” Released in 1966, “Dumb Blonde” is technically a country tune, but it also proves she had a saucy rock-star attitude from the start. (Listen on YouTube)5. Dolly Parton featuring Stevie Nicks: “What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”For her contribution to “Rockstar,” Nicks offered Parton a previously unreleased track she’d written for Fleetwood Mac. It’s fun to hear it get a second life here — and to hear Parton and Nicks’s chummy chemistry on the spoken-word parts. (Listen on YouTube)6. Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris: “After the Gold Rush”Man, what a cover. Parton famously teamed up with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris for the hit 1987 album “Trio,” and this chill-inducing interpretation of a Neil Young classic appeared on the sequel, “Trio II,” from 1999. Their harmonies are otherworldly. (Listen on YouTube)7. Dolly Parton: “Stairway to Heaven”Though on “Rockstar” Parton includes a more traditionally “rock” cover of “Stairway to Heaven” (featuring Lizzo and … her flute, “Sasha Flute”), I prefer this one, from her 2002 bluegrass album, “Halos & Horns.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Dolly Parton featuring Linda Perry: “What’s Up?”Parton seems to find something personally resonant in her “Rockstar” take on this ’90s anthem, as she transforms a song about a quarter-life crisis into a deeper meditation on time passing. Bonus points for the way she enunciates the word “peculiar.” (Listen on YouTube)9. Dolly Parton: “Baby I’m Burnin’”Though many purists decried Parton’s pivot to pop in the 1980s, in the rearview it’s easier to appreciate it as a demonstration of her range, and an occasional foray into more rock-oriented sounds. Gotta love those laser sound effects, too. (Listen on YouTube)10. Dolly Parton featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Free Bird”Dolly Parton covering “Free Bird.” Backed by members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. This is now something that exists, and the world is better for it. (Listen on YouTube)If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Dolly Parton (Really) Rocks” track listTrack 1: Dolly Parton, “Shine”Track 2: Dolly Parton featuring John Fogerty, “Long as I Can See the Light”Track 3: Kesha featuring Dolly Parton, “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You)”Track 4: Dolly Parton, “Dumb Blonde”Track 5: Dolly Parton featuring Stevie Nicks, “What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”Track 6: Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, “After the Gold Rush”Track 7: Dolly Parton, “Stairway to Heaven”Track 8: Dolly Parton featuring Linda Perry, “What’s Up?”Track 9: Dolly Parton, “Baby I’m Burnin’”Track 10: Dolly Parton featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird”Bonus TracksIf you’re looking for even more Dolly reading, might I suggest this essay I wrote in 2019 on Parton’s uncommonly high approval rating? It has a special place in my heart, since it’s the first thing I ever wrote for The Times. And yes, all these years later, I’m still wondering about those tattoos. More

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    ‘Amid Falling Walls’ Review: Songs of Resilience From the Holocaust Era

    A new musical from National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene stitches together music written and performed in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.With the war between Israel and Hamas keeping much of the world on tenterhooks, and the tide of antisemitism evidently rising, now is either a perfect time, or far too painful a time, for “Amid Falling Walls,” a new Yiddish-language musical set during the Holocaust.Onstage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, it is a theatrical act of remembrance and defiance stitched together from Yiddish songs written and performed in the ghettos, cabarets and concentration camps of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.Directed by Motl Didner for the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, “Amid Falling Walls” deftly acclimates the audience before the performance even starts. On banks of monitors hanging on either side of Edmond J. Safra Hall, and on two other screens built into the set, we see black-and-white films and photos of ordinary Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the war.It isn’t idyllic, just placidly quotidian — parents, children, babies, friends, in the city and the countryside. A gaggle of girls hold hands and dance in a circle; a group of men throw their arms around one another, smiling. Families, so many families, pose for the camera; so do little kids, milling around outside. Then, menacingly, the presence of Nazis intrudes.Underscored by music, the montage of images has a visceral impact; we don’t need language to understand it, or to think and feel in response. (Projections are by Brad Peterson, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier.) “Amid Falling Walls,” though, relies heavily on lyrics and spoken text, almost all of it in Yiddish; non-Yiddish speakers, like me, will spend the performance reading supertitles, which are in English and Russian.The placement of those titles, far above the actors’ heads on a set by Jessica Alexandra Cancino, fundamentally thwarts this fast-paced pageant, whose arc takes it from the Vilna Ghetto, in what is now Lithuania, to a displaced persons camp in Germany. It becomes a fragmented experience: Take our eyes off the titles and we’re lost for meaning, but read only the titles and we miss the show. Either way, the fullness of the production’s emotion and artistry remains out of reach.Curated by Avram Mlotek, who wrote the libretto, and his father, Zalmen Mlotek, who is the show’s music director and arranger as well as the company’s artistic director, “Amid Falling Walls” sounds gorgeous. Its 28 musical numbers — folk music and cabaret, elegies and anthems — are played by a nine-piece orchestra tucked away upstage. And the show has an ace in its fine eight-person ensemble: Steven Skybell, who starred as Tevye in the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene’s excellent Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”One of Skybell’s songs here, Reuven Lipshitz’s “Motele From the Warsaw Ghetto,” is the rare number in the show with a tempo slow enough to allow both reading the titles and watching the performance, which in its restraint is absolutely searing: the story of a boy, not yet 13, doing his part to resist the Nazis — sneaking in and out of the ghetto — and dying for it.“Humanity’s most true history is written only in blood,” Skybell says in English near the top of the show, and it is an arresting line. But before bloodshed comes the process of dehumanization that features in all ethnic hatred, and “Amid Falling Walls” delineates that vividly.The stripping away of rights, one by one. Global passivity in the face of mass suffering and slaughter.It’s an old story. Timeless, too.Amid Falling Walls (Tsvishn Falndike Vent)Through Dec. 10 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; nytf.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    Gotham Awards 2023: ‘Past Lives’ and Lily Gladstone Win Big

    The movie prize season kicks off with honors for the A24 drama and for the star of “The Unknown Country” (who’s better known for “Killers of the Flower Moon”).“Past Lives,” the elegiac drama about a young Korean immigrant and the romantic path not taken, won best feature at the 33rd annual Gotham Awards, which were handed out Monday night at Cipriani Wall Street in New York.The A24 film from the writer-director Celine Song stars Greta Lee as a married writer in New York who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart from South Korea, a meeting that has her contemplating the Korean concept of inyeon, about fated connections between different people.“Thank you for believing in me when all I had was a script written in two languages,” Song said to the cast and crew members lined up behind her during her acceptance speech. “Everybody on this stage is my inyeon.”Considered the first notable awards ceremony of Oscar season, the Gotham Awards have the advantage of corralling contenders while they’re still fresh, before the thank-you lists in their acceptance speeches become rote and the golden dreams of some nominees have been ground into dust.This year’s show was particularly well-positioned since the actors’ strike had, until recently, thwarted many contenders from full-scale campaigning. At the Gothams, A-list attendees like Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Driver were finally permitted to partake in an unabashed, shoulder-rubbing schmoozefest.As a harbinger of future Oscar success, the Gothams can be a mixed bag. Two of their last three best-feature winners, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Nomadland,” went on to win top honors at the Academy Awards, but the Gothams are chosen by small juries that consist of a handful of film insiders, while the Oscars are voted on by around 10,000 people.The Gothams also tend to lean indie: Though the $35 million budget cap for eligibility was waived this year, jurors only found blockbuster representation for “Barbie” star Ryan Gosling, nominated for outstanding supporting performance. The Gothams’ adoption of gender-neutral categories have reduced the acting races from four to two — here, there are only categories for lead and supporting performance — while also expanding the list of nominees in each acting category from five to a somewhat unruly 10.Still, it never hurts to be seen winning, and the Gothams offer contenders a high-profile place to break out of the pack and deliver a memorable speech.One unique example of that was the Gothams win for Lily Gladstone, who triumphed in the lead-performance category not for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” her big-budget breakthrough, but for her role in the indie “The Unknown Country,” about a woman who embarks on a road trip after the grandmother she was caring for passes away.“At the heart of it, we have Native voices, because Morrisa shot reality,” said Gladstone, praising writer-director Morrisa Maltz. “You listened, like Marty did.”The supporting-performance award went to an overcome Charles Melton, the former “Riverdale” star at the burning heart of the Todd Haynes drama “May December.” The Korean American actor was one of many Asian winners at the Gothams, which also handed out TV awards to the Netflix limited series “Beef” and one of its lead performers, Ali Wong.“Anatomy of a Fall,” the Justine Triet courtroom drama that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, took home best international feature and best screenplay for its examination of a marriage after a man dies in a family’s remote home in the French Alps. The award for breakthrough director went to A.V. Rockwell, the filmmaker behind the mother-son drama “A Thousand and One.”“I really did not see this coming,” Rockwell said, tearing up as she talked about the fight to make her first film as a Black woman. “Just to be frank, it is very hard to tell a culturally specific story when you look like this.”Though most of the show ran smoothly, presenter Robert De Niro was visibly irritated when a portion of his speech during a tribute to “Killers of the Flower Moon” was “cut out, and I didn’t know about it,” the actor said. Peeved not to find it in full on the Telepromptr, he doubled back and read it on his own.“In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit,” De Niro said. “The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease: The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.’”De Niro also used his speech to criticize Donald Trump, a frequent bête noire of the actor: “Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal,” he said. “But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur.”De Niro noted that he had planned to wrap his speech by thanking the Gothams and Apple, the studio behind “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but had now changed his mind: “I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually.”In addition to the competitive honors, the Gothams paid tribute to Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Greta Gerwig, Michael Mann and George C. Wolfe.Here is a complete list of winners:Best feature: “Past Lives”Outstanding lead performance: Lily Gladstone, “The Unknown Country”Outstanding supporting performance: Charles Melton, “May December”Best documentary feature: “Four Daughters”Best international feature: “Anatomy of a Fall”Best screenplay: “Anatomy of a Fall”Breakthrough director: A.V. RockwellBreakthrough series (over 40 minutes): “A Small Light”Breakthrough series (under 40 minutes): “Beef”Outstanding performance in a new series: Ali Wong, “Beef” More

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    Rob Reiner Teases Details of ‘Spinal Tap’ Sequel

    Speaking on a podcast this week, the director said Paul McCartney and Elton John will appear in the film, among other real musical stars.The director Rob Reiner has said that an upcoming sequel to his 1984 documentary parody “This Is Spinal Tap” is scheduled to begin shooting in late February and will feature Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks, among other stars.“Spinal Tap” satirized a bungled tour by a fictitious British heavy-metal band of that name, as well as the process of documenting it. The film, which was mostly improvised, was inspired by “The Last Waltz,” a Martin Scorsese documentary about the rock group the Band.Plans for “Spinal Tap II” were first announced last year. The entertainment news outlet Deadline reported at the time that the members of the fictitious band — the actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — would all return for the sequel. Over the years, the three have played real-life concerts as their Spinal Tap characters.Reiner announced new details about the “Spinal Tap” sequel during an episode of a podcast hosted by the comedian Richard Herring that was released on Monday. The film had initially been scheduled for release in 2024, but that was before strikes that disrupted filming schedules in Hollywood. No updated release date has been announced, according to Variety.Without elaborating, Reiner said that there would also be a few other surprise appearances in the film.For most of the podcast episode on Monday, Herring and Reiner mostly talked about Reiner’s new podcast, “Who Killed JFK?” But they also discussed the original “Spinal Tap” movie, his directorial debut, which Herring said was his favorite film of all time.Asked if he regretted anything about what was and wasn’t in the 1984 film, Reiner said no. And did he anticipate how influential it would prove to be? Also no.“When we first previewed it, we previewed it in a theater in Dallas, Texas, and people … they didn’t know what the heck they were looking at,” Reiner said.“They came up to me afterward and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why would you make a movie about a band that nobody’s ever heard of? And they’re so bad! Why would you do that?’” Reiner recalled. “They said, ‘You should make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.’”“I said, ‘Well, it’s a satire,’” Reiner said on the podcast. “I tried to explain, you know. But over the years, people got it, and they started to like it.”Reiner’s comments on Herring’s podcast were reported earlier by the music magazine NME and other outlets. More