Aurelia Butler

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    The Shed Plans to Bring a Modernist Dream to Life

    A spherical concert hall inspired by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ideas will be suspended in the Shed’s McCourt space.At the height of musical modernism, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen conceived a spherical concert hall — the Kugelauditorium — that would surround its audience with dozens of meticulously arranged speakers for an entirely new kind of listening experience.A form of it came to life at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan, where Germany’s pavilion presented works written for the Buckminster Fuller-esque dome, including music by Stockhausen himself. Hundreds of thousands of people visited it, but the idea never caught on.Next month, though, the Shed in Manhattan will erect the Sonic Sphere, a modern realization of Stockhausen’s idea, with listening events and interdisciplinary concerts, the performing arts center announced on Tuesday.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, said in an interview that as he worked with Stockhausen earlier in his career, they often talked about the Kugelauditorium and about “centering the auditory experience.”“We talk about going to see concerts, when we’re probably going to hear them more than we see them,” Poots added. “The idea of centering the sound — I find that fascinating.”This iteration of the Sonic Sphere — the creation of a group founded by Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie — is the 11th and the largest, with a diameter of 65 feet and an audience capacity of roughly 250. Visitors will be surrounded by more than 100 speakers arranged throughout the geodesic frame, which will be suspended within the Shed’s cavernous McCourt space.In a statement, Cooke recalled reading about the Kugelauditorium as a teenager, learning that it was presented in the same fair as the first mobile phone. “In the decades that followed,” he said, “I became increasingly confused that since 1970 our society had created 15 billion mobile phones but no further spherical concert halls.”The sphere’s programming at the Shed will run from June 9 through July 7 and will feature a D.J. set by Yaeji as well as one by Carl Craig, who plans to map the family tree of electronic music through a playlist. There will be listening sessions of the xx’s debut album, released in 2009 but remixed for the Sonic Sphere, as well as of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.”Artists will also perform live, including the pianist Igor Levit, who — in a programming departure from his usual New York appearances at Carnegie Hall — will play Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” with a visual accompaniment by Rirkrit Tiravanija.“I’ve tried to have quite a broad charge in terms of what we’re doing,” Poots said. “I view the Sonic Sphere almost like an instrument. We’re trying to figure out how to play it, but I think it has huge potential.” More

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    Gordon Lightfoot, Hitmaking Singer-Songwriter, Is Dead at 84

    His rich baritone and gift for melodies made him one of the most popular artists of the 1970s with songs like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “If You Could Read My Mind.”Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer whose rich, plaintive baritone and gift for melodic songwriting made him one of the most popular recording artists of the 1970s, died on Monday night in Toronto. He was 84. His death, at Sunnybrook Hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Victoria Lord. No cause was given.Mr. Lightfoot, a fast-rising star in Canada in the early 1960s, broke through to international success when his friends and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.”When Peter, Paul and Mary came out with their own versions, and Marty Robbins reached the top of the country charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Mr. Lightfoot’s reputation soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his style.When folk music ebbed in popularity, overwhelmed by the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot began writing ballads aimed at a broader audience. He scored one hit after another, beginning in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” inspired by the breakup of his first marriage.In quick succession he recorded the hits “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after reading a Newsweek article about the sinking of an iron-ore carrier in Lake Superior in 1975, with the loss of all 29 crew members.For Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot was a national hero, a homegrown star who stayed home even after achieving spectacular success in the United States and who catered to his Canadian fans with cross-country tours. His ballads on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the nation’s rivers and forests, which he explored on ambitious canoe trips far into the hinterlands.His personal style, reticent and self-effacing — he avoided interviews and flinched when confronted with praise — also went down well. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot told The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”Performing in London in June 1973.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesGordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, where his father managed a dry-cleaning plant. As a boy, he sang in a church choir, performed on local radio shows and shined in singing competitions. “Man, I did the whole bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he told Time magazine in 1968.He played piano, drums and guitar as a teenager, and while still in high school wrote his first song, a topical number about the Hula Hoop craze with a catchy last line: “I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time.”After studying composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, he returned to Canada. For a time he was a member of the Singing Swinging Eight, a singing and dancing troupe on the television show “Country Hoedown,” but he soon became part of the Toronto folk scene, performing at the same coffee houses and clubs as Ian and Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.He formed a folk duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a live album in 1962, “Two Tones at the Village Corner.” The next year, while traveling in Europe, he served as the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC television.As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot had advanced beyond the Hula Hoop, but not by a great deal. His work “didn’t have any kind of identity,” he told the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” published in 1969. When the Greenwich Village folk boom brought Mr. Dylan and other dynamic songwriters to the fore, he said, “I started to get a point of view, and that’s when I started to improve.”In 1965, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and made his debut in the United States at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a rich, warm voice and a dexterous guitar technique,” Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “With a little more attention to stage personality, he should become quite popular.”A year later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the manager of Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” With performances of “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” a hit record in Canada in 1963, the album was warmly received by the critics.Real commercial success came when he switched to Warner Brothers, initially recording for the company’s Reprise label. “By the time I changed over to Warner Brothers, round about 1970, I was reinventing myself,” he told the Georgia newspaper Savannah Connect in 2010. “Let’s say I was probably just advancing away from the folk era, and trying to find some direction whereby I might have some music that people would want to listen to.”Lightfoot with his 12-string guitar at the 2018 Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for StagecoachMr. Lightfoot, accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar, in a voice that often trembled with emotion, gave spare, direct accounts of his material. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian landscape. He was, as the Canadian writer Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”His popularity as a recording artist began to wane in the 1980s, but he maintained a busy touring schedule. In 1999 Rhino Records released “Songbook,” a four-disc survey of his career.Mr. Lightfoot, who lived in Toronto, is survived by his wife, Kim Hasse, six children — Fred, Ingrid, Miles, Meredith, Eric and Galen — and several grandchildren, according to Ms. Lord, his publicist. His first two marriages ended in divorce. His older sister, Beverley Eyers, died in 2017.In 2002, just before going onstage in Orillia, Mr. Lightfoot collapsed when an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta ruptured and left him near death. After two years spent recovering, he recorded an album, “Harmony,” and in 2005 he resumed his live performances with the Better Late Than Never Tour.“I want to be like Ralph Carter, Stompin’ Tom and Willie Nelson,” Mr. Lightfoot told the CBC in 2004. “Just do it for as long as humanly possible.”Vjosa Isai More

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    Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ Was An Unlikely Hit

    Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk ballad told the true story of a shipwreck on Lake Superior. One of his old friends called it “a documentarian’s song.”Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer who died on Monday at 84, had one hit in particular that famously defied Top 40 logic.“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” his 1976 folk ballad, was unusual partly because, at more than six minutes long, it was about twice as long as most pop hits. It also retold a real-life tragedy — the 1975 sinking on Lake Superior of a freighter with 29 crewmen aboard — with meticulous attention to detail.“It’s a documentarian’s song, when you think about it,” said Eric Greenberg, a longtime friend of the singer who interviewed Mr. Lightfoot as a student journalist in the late 1970s and later co-wrote a song with him.The plotline of a typical Top 40 hit usually consists of “boy meets girl, boy breaks up with girl, or come back, or you left me, or whatever,” Mr. Greenberg said, speaking by phone from New York City. “Not a five-, six-, seven-minute story — a factual story, in Gordon’s case, painstakingly checked to make sure that all the facts are right.”Here’s the true story that inspired “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and a look at the song that kept its memory alive.A disappearing shipThe Edmund Fitzgerald was a 729-foot ore carrier and one of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes when it left Superior, Wis., on Nov. 9, 1975, carrying iron pellets bound for Detroit.The next day, the ship was caught in a storm with winds that averaged 60 to 65 miles an hour. Its captain reported 20- to 25-foot waves washing over the decks and water pouring in below deck through two broken air vents.That night, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank near the coasts of Ontario and Michigan, in water that was only about 50 degrees. A nearby ship reported seeing its lights disappear in the driving snow.The Coast Guard later found lifeboats, life rings and other debris from the ship. But the lifeboats were self-inflatable, so their discovery did not necessarily indicate that they had been used. None of the 29 crew members survived.An unlikely successThe morning after the Fitzgerald went down, the rector of Mariners’ Church of Detroit tolled its bell 29 times, once for each man lost. An Associated Press reporter knocked on the church’s door, interviewed the rector and filed an account that was published in newspapers.Mr. Lightfoot read the article. Soon afterward, he started singing a song about the wreck during a previously scheduled recording session. His band joined in, and the first version of the song that they recorded was later released, according to “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,” a 2020 documentary.There was no expectation that the song would become a hit single, because its length made it too long for airplay on the radio. But it would spend 21 weeks on the Billboard charts and peak at No. 2, one notch behind Mr. Lightfoot’s only No. 1 hit, “Sundown.” It also turned the tale of the sinking into a modern legend.Yet unlike songs that use a real-life story as the basis for embellishment, Mr. Lightfoot’s ballad hewed precisely to the real-life details. The weight of the ore, for example — “26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty” — was accurate. So was the number of times that the church bell chimed in Detroit.Decades later, Mr. Lightfoot changed the lyrics slightly after investigations into the accident revealed that waves, not crew error, had led to the shipwreck. In the new lyrics, he sang that it got dark at 7 that November night on Lake Superior — not that a main hatchway caved in.“That’s the kind of meticulous, looking-for-the-truth kind of guy that he was,” Mr. Greenberg said.An enduring legacy“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” like its creator, endured as a Canadian classic long after slipping off the Top 40 charts. The bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice (who also released an entire album of Lightfoot cover songs) and the rock bands Rheostatics and the Dandy Warhols were among those who sang covers over the years.“The melodies are so powerful and he’s such a good storyteller and such a beautiful lyricist,” the Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan said in the 2020 documentary. “And the combination of those things just really makes for a great song.”Mr. Lightfoot remained proud of it for decades, and he kept newspaper clippings and items given to him by the crew members’ surviving families in his home, Mr. Greenberg said.The song’s success had one downside: It turned the wreck, which lies in Canadian territory at a depth of about 500 feet, into a trophy for divers, upsetting the lost sailors’ families. In 2006, the government of Ontario adopted a law protecting the site. More

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    When La Scala Is Sold Out, You Can Still Get In (Online)

    The opera house’s new streaming service provides live and on-demand performances, as well as extras like backstage glimpses and educational programs.La Scala’s audience can now be anywhere.The opera house in Milan is sharing select performances online through LaScalaTv, a platform that started streaming in February. Its first live offering was a broadcast of Verdi’s opera “I Vespri siciliani,” conducted by Fabio Luisi and featuring such soloists as Marina Rebeka and Luca Micheletti.The program also includes concerts and ballets. On May 11, Alberto Malazzi conducts “Petite Messe Solennelle” by Rossini, to commemorate the anniversary of La Scala’s restoration and reopening after World War II. The ballet “Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Prokofiev takes the screen to choreography by Kenneth MacMillan on June 28.The on-demand library also includes performances for children, starting with a staged concert based on carnival celebrations called “Lalla & Skali and … the Enchanted Mask.”The platform is part of a wider effort to modernize La Scala’s infrastructure, including an extensive educational outreach program using the technology and plans for subtitles on seat backs.Mirjam Schiavello, left, and Matteo Sala in a performance of “Lalla and Skali and … the Enchanted Mask” at La Scala, part of the house’s on-demand offerings for children.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaDominique Meyer, the theater’s current artistic director and chief executive, said that technological advances in recent years had made it easier for an opera house to widen its reach.“It is a real leap,” he said, recalling the difficulties he faced in 2013 when starting a platform for the Vienna State Opera during his tenure there. “Most people have a faster internet connection, which is extremely important when viewers want to watch a stream in 4K.”The equipment available for in-house operations has also advanced rapidly. Small, robotic cameras can capture performances in the dark without necessitating changes of light, leaving on-site viewers undisturbed. And microphones can easily transmit quality sound.Performances on LaScalaTv are available in either ultra high definition or high definition. The most expensive offering, a live program at the highest resolution, costs 11.90 euros (about $13), while a children’s program at the lower resolution costs €2.90. The audio track is uniformly transmitted in AAC, a compression format of a higher grade than MP3.Mr. Meyer has prioritized a wide view of the stage. “It was important to me to respect a certain distance,” he said. “One doesn’t need close-ups that show the sweat on the face of Gilda at the end of ‘Rigoletto.’”He also wants to capture dance performances at a healthy distance. “If you come too close, it looks like the dancer’s head is about to hit the top of the screen,” he said. “A principle of the whole project was that there would not be too many cuts, and that the viewer would have the liberty to focus where he or she pleases.”Cameras at La Scala can capture performances for online audiences without disturbing viewers in the opera house itself. Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScallaIntermissions provide glimpses backstage and facts about La Scala’s history. Recent offerings have included a tour of the theater’s museum, home to such treasures as a manuscript page from Verdi’s “Nabucco” and a portrait of the soprano Maria Callas.Mr. Meyer said that the house had just scratched the surface of the possibilities and that “there was a lot to tell,” citing “the rehearsals, what happens behind the scenes, the [costume and set] workshops.”Of central importance is bringing some of these stories to younger viewers. The theater has started by creating a network of 200 schools in Italy to bring students into contact with opera.For example, a live rehearsal of Puccini’s “La Bohème” was recently followed by a livestream of the performance itself. A documentary about Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” was combined with an on-demand viewing of the opera itself. This September will bring the first ballet program, revolving around Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”The house is also teaming up with RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, to share footage from the 1970s and ’80s, including performances under the conductors Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti. The main sponsor of LaScalaTv is the bank Intesa Sanpaolo, and the Cariplo Foundation is supporting the dissemination of content to schools.A scene from “La Bohème” at La Scala. A recent stream of a rehearsal for that opera was followed by a livestream of the performance itself.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla Scalla“We brought in about €40.5 million in sponsorship revenue last season,” Mr. Meyer said. “That is huge in Europe. All these projects are being financed.”In the theater, subtitles will be installed this summer on the backs of chairs with translations in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, using the same software as the streaming platform (eventually there will be eight languages). On May 29, La Scala unveils its new website — which includes a digital magazine — coinciding with its presentation of the 2023-24 season.Italian viewers thus far make up half the streaming service’s audience. Another fourth comes from other European countries. Outside Europe, the highest numbers are currently in the United States and Russia.In-house, Mr. Meyer said, La Scala has regularly sold out this season. “We of course can’t create more seats,” he said. “This technology allows us to expand our audience, also to children.” More

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    Dvorak’s Opera ‘Rusalka’ Prepares to Debut at La Scala in Milan

    The opera by Antonin Dvorak about a water nymph’s journey into the human world, first performed in 1901, is making its debut at La Scala in June.Poor Rusalka. The title character of Antonin Dvorak’s opera is a love-struck water nymph, misunderstood and scorned. She has long been appreciated but was not exactly celebrated as an operatic heroine for decades before slowly emerging as a darling of the opera world.But now, “Rusalka” is having a moment that may charm even the most jaded of water nymphs. The opera will make its debut at La Scala in Milan next month, 122 years after it first delighted audiences in Dvorak’s native Czech homeland in 1901. Many might say it’s long overdue at one of the world’s most prestigious opera houses, but for the creative team assembled at La Scala it’s a chance to discover, or rediscover, an opera still being interpreted more than a century later.“Rusalka,” playing six performances from June 6 to 22, is based on Slavic folklore (with parallels to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”). Rusalka lives in a lake with her water-goblin father and falls in love with a prince. With the help of a local witch and a potion, she decides to become a human to win her prince. Let’s just say that things don’t exactly go her way.The design for the character Rusalka, a love-struck water nymph. “This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus,” the director, Emma Dante, said.Vanessa SanninoThe opera is known mostly for its first-act aria “Song to the Moon” — championed by many high-profile sopranos over the last few decades, including Renée Fleming — which has helped cement its position at several major opera houses. And now at La Scala.“I have directed at many opera houses and in the repertoire of each of them there was at least one opera that was conspicuously absent,” Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive of La Scala, said by email. “When I was directing the Vienna [State] Opera, we realized that ‘Anna Bolena’ had never been performed there. At La Scala, something similar happened with ‘Rusalka.’”Mr. Meyer said the debut production was the ideal vehicle to bring back Emma Dante, a theater and film director known for her 2013 movie “A Street in Palermo” as well as avant-garde theater and opera productions. Mr. Meyer cited her “imagination and sensitivity.”“I’m happy to come back to La Scala with an opera whose protagonist is a woman,” Ms. Dante said in a video interview. “My first time was with ‘Carmen,’ and I felt a strong connection with this woman, just as I do now with Rusalka.”Ms. Dante said she feels Rusalka’s journey into the human world — and her desire to be accepted there — is a timeless topic and applicable today in a world of refugees and political turmoil worldwide.A drawing of one of the sets for “Rusalka” with the title character at left.Carmine Maringola“She arrives in a land that is not her land, so I’m interested in that transformation,” Ms. Dante said. “I’m also deeply interested in how the community does not accept her diversity.”She worked with the costume designer Vanessa Sannino and the set designer Carmine Maringola, both of whom she has collaborated with before, to do more than emphasize the fairy-tale aspect of the story.“This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus, which you can see in a wheelchair when she first comes onto land,” Ms. Dante explained. “Also, we won’t have a lake, but instead the church and the prince’s palace will both be flooded to represent a world adrift. This flooded world is a catastrophic cause of nonacceptance, of intolerance toward those of different origins and appearance.”Ms. Sannino also wanted to emphasize the witch and the prince in this otherworldly setting.“We wanted the witch to be like a madonna, monochromatic red and immense and made of muscle fibers,” she said. “And the lightness that we decided to give the prince can be found in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears.”The costume design for the prince. “The lightness that we decided to give the prince can be found in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears,” the costume designer said.Vanessa SanninoThis approach seems fitting for an opera based on folklore, and not, say, a romantic Italian opera based on a famous book and specific to its time and place. It’s also open to discovery from a musical perspective.“It’s genius music, but Dvorak was not known as a typical opera composer, and therefore it comes with some difficulties that might not always sell the piece,” said the Czech conductor Tomas Hanus in a phone interview from his home in Brno, Czech Republic. He is making his debut at La Scala with “Rusalka,” which he also conducted at the Vienna State Opera (in his debut there in 2017) and in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Munich. “The Czech composing schools did not always teach how to write these big romantic operatic scores. It’s very dependent on the interpretation of singers and conductors.”That is a sentiment echoed by the Ukrainian soprano Olga Bezsmertna, who will sing the title role, which she has come to adore (she sang it at the Vienna State Opera in 2014 and 2020 and last year in Bratislava, Slovakia). It becomes more layered each time she sings it, she said.“It’s a very difficult opera, but my voice feels at home because I don’t have to push,” Ms. Bezsmertna said in a phone interview from her home in Vienna. “My first time in Vienna, I jumped in five days before the first performance. I honestly didn’t have time to think about what to do. But it’s perfect for a lyric soprano voice.”Ms. Bezsmertna has grown into the character more in the past few years, she said, especially the journey Rusalka takes both emotionally and musically.“The second act is so completely different from the first act because she is destroyed,” Ms. Bezsmertna said. “It’s not a fairy tale anymore. She’s alone, and the prince loves another woman. Life has changed completely.”And it’s in that fairy-tale-versus-real-world situation where “Rusalka” seems to flourish, despite its dark corners, for those who know the opera or for first-time viewers at the debut at La Scala.“Death is very present in ‘Rusalka,’ but we have to keep this idea of lightness,” Ms. Dante said. “It’s a tragedy, but it’s still a fairy tale. And we always have to look at death as an occasion for rebirth.” More

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    How an Architect Gave La Scala a 21st-Century Update

    Mario Botta, who just finished leading a second round of updates to the 18th-century opera house in Milan, discussed his work and his inspiration.Over the past two decades, La Scala, completed by the architect Giuseppe Piermarini in 1778, has experienced its most profound changes since after World War II, when it suffered severe damage from Allied bombing raids.The recent updates to the opera house in Milan have been led by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, renowned for designing luminous, formidable spaces worldwide, including the Church of Santo Volto in Turin, Italy, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Mr. Botta’s first phase of work at La Scala was carried out from 2002 to 2004, and the second, begun in 2019, has just wrapped up. He discussed his work in a video interview. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.What is the scope of your work at La Scala? And what have your goals been?The work has been about creating a dialogue between the 18th century and modernity. This theater was born as a space to create dreams, illusions, adventures. It’s still a place of collective imagination. But to effectively make it work today, it needed to be much more flexible and capable than what existed in the 1700s. It had run out of space to perform effectively. We’ve created a series of elements designed to make the theater function for the 2000s.The work completed in 2004 included conserving the opera’s interiors [including restoring original elements that had been abandoned or hidden over the years], a much taller fly tower for stage sets and an elliptical building. For the most recent work, we’ve added a 17-story structure [six floors are underground] parallel to La Scala on the Via Verdi. At the base of this tower is an orchestra practice room, and on top is an airy dance studio. In between is needed functional space like offices, storage and rehearsal space.Mario Botta. “I work in the realm of modernity, but within a culture that traces back to the total history of architecture,” he said.Matteo Fieni, via Mario Botta ArchitettiThe new forms you’ve created feel modern but also timeless. Your work seems especially inspired by the tension between history and modernity. How has that informed your design process here?We’re working with the materials and techniques of today. But at the same time, this is a space that was created in a different lifetime. We want to merge the two. It’s an effort that goes on all the time in the city. The city is constantly transforming; it is a discussion between centuries. Piermarini had an image; now I need to listen to what the opera needs.When I was younger, I looked for a language inspired by futurists like Antonio Sant’Elia. They wanted to create a completely futuristic city. Over the years, my design has evolved to be about the confrontation between times. A collage of different languages. It’s about the functions, needs and realities of today merging with the continuation of historical representation.The facade of the extension of La Scala.Theatre La ScalaWhat does your creative process look like?In my work, the pencil is the protagonist. I don’t work with computers. I work with models. With solid pieces, like an artisan. As all the issues come to the table, I find a synthesis. History is the mother; the pencil is the father. History stays history, but it provides endless inspiration. Without history, we don’t exist. I work in the realm of modernity, but within a culture that traces back to the total history of architecture. We have so many examples of images of the past. Without history, there is no inspiration.For this project, you’ve created substantial new buildings clad in Botticino marble. This diverges from the work of many modern architects, who tend to highlight lighter materials like glass and steel.Glass as a material is less inspiring, less honest. Stone is honest. With glass, you can see it’s transparent, but you can’t really understand what’s inside. I look for forms and materials that speak to the function of a building: a church, a library, a museum. Something with a familiar presence. A gravity. If a building has no gravity, it doesn’t exist. I look for the truth of a material, and of a building. Buildings today all look the same. You can’t read their function. This is the homogeneity that’s been created by globalization. It’s destroyed the symbolic power of buildings; the value of architecture. Now, a McDonald’s can resemble a theater. We’ve lost the capacity to express the true value of architecture.You’ve got a long history with Milan — you studied there when you were young. How has it played a role in your design?Milan has very specific characteristics. Its history is very much about strength and gravity, and there are so many buildings that express themselves through verticality and honesty.This is because Milan is a city of work. More than other cities in Italy, it’s a city of industry, of promotion, of entrepreneurship. It needs buildings like that.You’re well known for your weighty but uplifting sacred architecture. The work here seems to have a sacred component to it. Can you talk about that?I find that architecture is always a sacred act, because it transforms nature and it represents our entire world. The architecture of sacred spaces is very close to the architecture of theaters or museums. You’re trying to create a type of value and strength. You’re attempting to embody a certain message. To try to understand our world. I only do work that I consider sacred. I’m trying to interpret and build a kind of spirit. I leave McDonald’s to America. More

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    Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen Dominate Billboard’s Album Chart

    Wallen spends an eighth week at No. 1 with “One Thing at a Time,” and Swift lands three albums in the Top 10, including the new vinyl set “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.”Half of the Billboard album chart’s Top 10 this week belongs to Morgan Wallen and Taylor Swift, with Wallen holding two slots, including No. 1, and Swift taking three.Wallen’s 36-track “One Thing at a Time” remains at the top for an eighth time, with the equivalent of 149,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. His previous release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 7.Agust D — better known as Suga of the K-pop titans BTS — debuts at No. 2 with his first solo studio album, “D-Day.” It had the equivalent of 140,000 sales, including 18 million streams and 122,000 copies sold as a complete album.Swift opens at No. 3 with “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,” a two-LP vinyl set released on April 22 as part of Record Store Day, an annual promotion in which artists and labels issue one-day special releases. It was limited to 75,000 copies in the United States, and every one of them was sold, according to Luminate. That is the biggest week for any album on vinyl so far this year, Billboard said.Swift, who is still playing stadiums on her Eras Tour, also occupies No. 4 this week, with her latest studio album, “Midnights,” and No. 10, with “Lover,” from 2019.Also this week, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the prolific Louisiana rapper, arrives at No. 5 with his new “Don’t Try This at Home,” which features guest appearances by Nicki Minaj, Mariah the Scientist, Post Malone and others. The 33-track album, his 14th to reach the Top 10, had the equivalent of 60,000 sales, including 88 million streams. More

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    ‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

    The emphasis Encores! puts on words and music rather than spectacle allows the cruel realities of Dickensian London to stand out amid the bouncy tunes.It was 10 a.m. on a recent morning in a rehearsal room at New York City Center, and nine boys scurried around the space, clutching parasols of red and white lace, tin cups and jaunty pocket squares.“OK, everyone!” said Lorin Latarro, the choreographer of the show, a new staging of “Oliver!,” the Lionel Bart musical opening at City Center on Wednesday for a two-week run as part of the Encores! series. “Today we’re going to work on ‘I’d Do Anything.’”The boys gathered around Raúl Esparza, who is playing Fagin, the lovable London crime lord, in a battered brown hat with a buckle, tan overcoat and black fingerless gloves.“Would you risk the ‘drop’?” he sang, his eyes bugging as he grabbed his scarf and mimed a noose tightening around his neck. (Translation: Are you willing to go out and commit robbery and possibly face the gallows if you’re caught?) All nine pickpockets in training nodded enthusiastically.“Oliver!,” based on the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist,” is the story of an orphan’s search for belonging in that band of young pickpockets in 1830s London. It mixes fun, candy-coated musical theater crowd-pleasers like “Food, Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself” with darker Dickensian themes including poverty and domestic violence.“The show has these really harrowing lyrics even in songs that are upbeat,” said the production’s director, Lear deBessonet. “And I think that in some productions, you may just be bobbing along with the rhythm of the song, and you might not really hear those words.”But that’s generally not the case in the concert-like stagings that Encores! is known for. Although there is an orchestra onstage, props and sets are minimal.“Because you strip away some of those other production elements, it really puts a new focus on the lyric,” deBessonet said. “It’s meaty work for me as a director to figure out how to tell the story with so few elements.”When deBessonet, now in her third year as the artistic director of Encores!, was setting the season lineup in late 2021, just before the Omicron surge of Covid-19, she was struck by the parallels between the uncertain present and the perilous world of Dickens’s day.“It’s interesting that ‘Oliver!’ is generally thought of as a family musical,” she said in a recent conversation in her office at City Center. “It certainly has these very winsome tunes, and the cast of children is delightful beyond measure, but there are dark edges of the story that we’re very much leaning into and exploring in this production.”Lilli Cooper, left, as Nancy, and Angelica Beliard, right, dancing with Benjamin Pajak, who plays Oliver in the musical.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMANY OF THE SONGS FROM ‘OLIVER!’ have become well known, thanks to the popular 1968 film adaptation, which starred Ron Moody as Fagin. This crowd-pleasing musical is a staple of school stages across Britain, where it debuted in London’s West End in 1960, and the United States, where it opened on Broadway in 1963 and won three Tony Awards, including one for the score. But “Oliver!,” like many of the shows staged by Encores!, whose mission is to offer revivals of seldom-seen work, is rarely produced in full.It hasn’t been professionally staged in its entirety on a New York City stage in nearly 40 years, since the short-lived 1984 Broadway revival that starred Patti LuPone as Nancy. In fact, neither deBessonet, nor any of the five main cast members except for Benjamin Pajak (“The Music Man”), who plays Oliver, had ever seen a live performance of the show.David Jones as the Artful Dodger (in top hat) and Georgia Brown, beside him, in a number from the musical “Oliver!” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIn addition to Esparza (“Company”), the show also stars Lilli Cooper as Nancy, the romantic partner of the brutal Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu, recently of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”), and Julian Lerner, who plays the Artful Dodger, the leader of the gang that takes Oliver in.Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet said, like the fear and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Without elaborate sets or showstopping production numbers there are fewer elements competing to divert the audience’s attention from the words of the actors.But neither did the production need to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she said — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s text, and in Bart’s book, score and lyrics.“We’re trying to have those words be heard with the belief that the complexity is in the lyric itself,” she said.One example, she said, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a song familiar to many, even those who haven’t seen the show, for its high-spirited chorus.“It’s this really bouncy song,” deBessonet said, “but the actual lyrics are:There’s a dark, thin, winding stairwayWithout any banisterWhich we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroachesServed in a canister.The show does preserve many of the musical’s more lighthearted elements. Every song from the original Broadway production remains, including bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Anything” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Food, Glorious Food,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 additional performers, all New York City public school students, will join the company onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the first true family he has known.“The show is incredibly challenging — the domestic violence, the treatment of children at that time in general is truly harrowing,” deBessonet said. “And yet there’s this buoyant joy about these numbers.”And the emotional core is still the camaraderie that springs up between the striving, working-class characters.“The whole narrative question of the show is ‘Where is the love?’ and Fagin is one answer,” deBessonet said. “But it’s complicated.”Even though the Fagin of the Bart musical is more of a lovable curmudgeon than the child-exploiting criminal in the Dickens novel, deBessonet and Esparza said that they wanted the audience to remain cognizant of the less-savory context of his mentorship.“I fully believe Fagin loves those children, and he is exploiting them,” deBessonet said. “He’s sending them out to rob for him, to keep him alive, and he knows that every time he sends them out, there’s a possibility that they could get caught or killed.”Less complex is Bill Sikes, who is objectively the show’s most loathsome character.“Bill Sikes is a sociopath, and there is no end to his cruelty,” deBessonet said of Nancy’s abusive boyfriend. “The show ends with him murdering her brutally in front of us and in front of a kid.”A model of the stage set of “Oliver!”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut Mutu knew he didn’t want to play a one-note villain. Instead he searched for the humanity within the character, to add nuances to his portrayal without offering redemption.“People aren’t black and white,” he said. “There are levels to each of us. Yes, I am playing a sociopath who has violent tendencies —”“— but he has redeeming qualities,” Esparza interjected. “Which are?”They both laughed.“The love between Nancy and Bill is genuine,” Mutu said, referring to their codependency as fascinating. “I’m trying to find the sense of the complexity of our relationship, which I think gets brushed under the carpet.”Normally, deBessonet said, she would have no interest in doing a production that includes violence toward a woman — “I’ve already seen enough of that for a lifetime” — but she was impressed by Nancy’s bravery, how she risked everything to save the life of Oliver.And Cooper and deBessonet said they wanted to make sure Nancy’s murder was not the final word on her story. “Her life is about her heroism and choosing to lay down her life to save this child who not too long ago was a stranger to her,” deBessonet said.Though Nancy allows others to see her as a passive player in her own life, Cooper wanted her performance to underscore the power Nancy wields in moments like the “Oom-Pah-Pah” number, in which her lively and somewhat risqué dance is actually a means of distracting Bill Sikes and Fagin so she can help Oliver escape.“She has this innate maternal nature to her,” Cooper said, “especially with all the boys in Fagin’s den and wanting to protect them. Even with Bill, the man that she loves, she feels needed by those who are wounded and fragile and need help.”“She herself was a child thief, and she’s managed to grab hold of life with this force,” deBessonet said. “In the face of all that difficulty, she’s been able to say, ‘I’m still going to love life.”BACK IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, the boys continued their run-through of “I’d Do Anything.” Two stood on either side at the front, wielding red parasols, while two with white ones flanked them from behind. As the boys spun the parasols to imitate wheels, Nancy and the Artful Dodger walked to center.“Would you climb a hill?” she sang, as the human “carriage” began to roll.“Anything!” he responded.“Wear a daffodil?”He nodded. “Anything!”“Leave me all your will?”He nodded more vigorously. “Anything!”“Even fight my Bill?” she asked pointedly.He recoiled slightly.“Stop!” Latarro called. She walked over to Lerner. “Bill Sikes is really tall and really scary — he’s like a boxer,” she said. “So you all jump back like ‘No way!’”They tried again.This time when Nancy asked, all nine pickpockets sprung back as though they had just realized they were standing on the third rail. Their eyes hardened.“Anything!” More