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    15 Fashion Triumphs From Cannes Over the Decades

    Movies aren’t the only thing to watch. The film festival has made red carpet waves since “being seen” became mainstream.If the Met Gala is the all-star showcase of red carpet entrances, the Oscars the skills championship, and the MTV Video Music Awards the X Games, then the Cannes Film Festival is effectively the playoffs: an extended period in which celebrities show up multiple times in clothes high and low, demonstrating all their moves.And though outfits seem to be getting increasingly extreme with the proliferation of social media, a look back through the history of the festival’s runway (oops, red carpet) — which this year runs May 16-27 — reveals that it was, in fact, ever thus.The Croisette boulevard has always been a catwalk and we, the rapt audience looking on.The actress Elizabeth Taylor grasps the arm of her husband at the time, the film producer Mike Todd, at the Cannes Film Festival, wearing a Balmain gown and Cartier tiara.Malcolm McNeill/Mirrorpix, via Getty Images1957Elizabeth TaylorWhen she attended Cannes on the arm of her third husband, the producer Mike Todd (who was there to promote “Around the World in 80 Days”), Ms. Taylor was Hollywood royalty, and she dressed the part — from the tip of her diamond Cartier tiara to the hem of her white Balmain gown and the fingertips of her opera gloves. The princess dress would forever after be a festival staple (not least on Princesses Grace and Diana when they would take their own Cannes bows).Catherine Deneuve attended a screening of “Les Cendres” by Andrzej Wajda at Cannes in an Yves Saint Laurent T-shirt dress.Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images1966Catherine DeneuveMs. Deneuve attended Cannes with her then-husband, the photographer David Bailey, in a long seaside-striped sequin Yves Saint Laurent T-shirt dress. She was a de facto YSL ambassador before that term had even entered the fashion playbook (back then, the usual appellation was “muse”). She would remain one for decades, loyally wearing YSL onscreen and off. When it comes to casual glamour, however, this dress set the tone, proving the concept was not an oxymoron, but a whole potential genre unto itself.Jane Birkin toted her signature picnic basket as a handbag to Cannes.Gilbert Giribaldi/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images1974Jane BirkinMs. Birkin popped up at Cannes with her beau, Serge Gainsbourg, and a picnic basket as a handbag, toting it not just during the day, but on the red carpet with a glimmering frock. Reportedly discovered in a fishing village in Portugal, it was the Birkin bag before the Birkin bag. It became a symbol of the British star and of a certain je ne sais quoi in boho style and the freewheeling nature of Cannes.Madonna arrived for the premiere of her film “Madonna: Truth or Dare” (known internationally as “In Bed with Madonna”) in a pink Jean Paul Gaultier coat that she shed to reveal a satin undergarment set.Dave Hogan/Getty Images1991MadonnaShe came to Cannes to unveil “Madonna: Truth or Dare” — and herself. Decades before Lady Gaga stripped down to her undergarments on the Met Gala steps, Madonna walked the carpet for her premiere in a voluminous pink taffeta coat by Jean Paul Gaultier — only to drop it at the last moment to reveal a white satin cone bra, knickers and a garter belt set. She jolted the public out of their torpor and started a new era of peekaboo dressing.Sharon Stone came to the premiere of “Unzipped” unbuttoned — a satin skirt parted to uncover a bedazzled romper.Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty Images1995Sharon StoneIn 2002 Ms. Stone came to Cannes as a member of the film festival jury and revived her flagging profile by walking the red carpet in a different fashion statement every night. But years before that, she made dressing noise when she arrived at the premiere of “Unzipped” in a champagne-colored satin skirt that was, well, unbuttoned to reveal a bedazzled romper beneath. Ever since, shorts have been a festival staple.For the screening of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Johnny Depp was accompanied by his girlfriend at the time, Kate Moss.Patrick Hertzog/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images1998Kate MossMinimalism came to the Croisette courtesy of Ms. Moss, attending the premiere of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” with her then-boyfriend, Johnny Depp. Ms. Moss wore a black cocktail dress with ostrich feathers at the top and almost no makeup with merely a touch of diamonds and barely-there sandals. She made everyone else look overdone and overdressed, washing the Augean stables of Cannes clean.Tilda Swinton walked the Croisette in a metallic pantsuit.Daniele Venturelli/WireImage2007Tilda SwintonMs. Swinton strode the carpet in a metallic pantsuit, proving that a woman does not need a big dress to make a big statement.Linda Evangelista in a gold Lanvin dress.Kurt Krieger/Corbis, via Getty Images2008Linda EvangelistaMs. Evangelista posed like a gold Greek statuette in Lanvin at the premiere of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Models had become key parts of the festival’s opening evening mix, upping the fashion ante even further.Lupita Nyong’o in a chiffon Gucci dress.Venturelli/WireImage2015Lupita Nyong’oMs. Nyong’o seemed to embody springtime itself in a green pleated Gucci chiffon dress accented with crystal flowers. It was only a few months after Alessandro Michele had taken over as creative director of the Italian house, and the dress heralded the arrival of a new aesthetic and Hollywood love affair with Gucci.Amal Clooney in an Atelier Versace dress.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images2016Amal ClooneyMs. Clooney made her Cannes debut in a classic butter yellow Atelier Versace dress with a high slit on one leg, entirely overshadowing her husband, George, at the premiere of his film, “Money Monster,” and, once again, proving style and substance are not antithetical concepts.Rihanna in a Dior couture gown.Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images2017RihannaShe made her first Cannes appearance at the “Okja” premiere in an ivory Dior couture gown with a long matching coat and New Wave-style sunglasses. Two years later, Dior owner LVMH would announce a deal with the artist for her own fashion line, and though it was shut down during the pandemic, her ability to channel cool has never wavered.Kristen Stewart, in a Chanel dress, removed her Louboutins to ascend the stairs barefoot.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images2018Kristen StewartMs. Stewart’s short chain mail Chanel dress was a fighting mix of armor and crystals, but what really made news was her decision to doff her Christian Louboutin stilettos and walk up the stairs barefoot. Coming a year after the actor complained about the festival’s unspoken high heels dress code, it was an unmistakable fashion throw down and, well, a step forward for wardrobe equity.Isabelle Huppert in a Balenciaga gown.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images2021Isabelle HuppertThe French actress made the ultimate elegant refusal of Cannes convention in a high-necked, long-sleeved all-black Balenciaga gown, matching boot leggings and matching shades. It cut through the carpet froth and excess like a knife.Spike Lee in a colorful suit made by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton.Eric Gaillard/Reuters2021Spike LeeThe sole man in this trendsetting list, Mr. Lee put ye olde penguin suits to shame as jury president, eschewing the usual tuxedo or white dinner jacket for a bouquet of sunset-toned suiting, by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. He did the right thing.Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in a Gaurav Gupta gown.Stephane Mahe/Reuters2022Aishwarya Rai BachchanSometimes, it seems like the wide open skies of the Côte d’Azur encourage even wider skirts on the Cannes carpet, but Ms. Bachchan topped them all in a fantastical creation from Gaurav Gupta that made her look like some sort of alien smoke goddess materializing on Earth. Sometimes, it really does seem like the looks at Cannes are out of this world. More

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    Ruben Ostlund Doesn’t Want You to Get Too Comfortable

    The Swedish director, this year’s jury president for the Cannes Film Festival, talks about his approach to making films.For a filmmaker whose most recent movie was nominated for three Academy Awards and who has twice won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, it might sound strange to hear Ruben Ostlund say he doesn’t focus on success.“I’m much more interested in when we fail as human beings than when we succeed,” said the Swedish director, who will lead the jury at this year’s festival, which runs from Tuesday to May 27.Mr. Ostlund, 49, won the Palme d’Or, last year for “Triangle of Sadness,” a class satire set aboard a doomed luxury yacht, and for his previous feature, “The Square,” an unsparing sendup of the art world, in 2017. Mr. Ostlund is one of only nine filmmakers who have multiple Palmes d’Or to his credit — and one of three to win the award for consecutive films.After its success at Cannes, “Triangle of Sadness,” which was Mr. Ostlund’s first film entirely in English, went on to become an art-house hit in both Europe and America, and was nominated for three Oscars — for best picture, best director and best original screenplay — but didn’t win any.In his three most recent features, starting with 2014’s “Force Majeure,” Mr. Ostlund has consciously tried to get away from a certain type of European art-house film that is often cerebral, challenging and severe.“I wanted to create a wild, entertaining ride at the same time that I was trying to talk about the content that I thought was important or that I was curious about, and not making a contradiction between those things,” he said in late April during a video interview, speaking from his house in Campos, Majorca.He pointed to the political comedies of Lina Wertmüller, the Italian director whose 1974 film “Swept Away” was a clear touchstone for “Triangle of Sadness,” and the surreal provocations of the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel as examples of serious-minded films that are also great fun to watch.Arvin Kananian, left, and Woody Harrelson in a scene from “Triangle of Sadness,” which Mr. Ostlund won the Palme d’Or for last year.Neon, via Associated PressIn a statement announcing Mr. Ostlund as jury president in February, festival organizers called the decision a “tribute to films that are uncompromising and forthright and which constantly demand that viewers challenge themselves and that art continue to invent itself.”“Contrary to popular belief, thought-provoking cinema can also be popular,” Philippe Bober, one of the producers on “Triangle of Sadness,” wrote in an email.“We want to make uncompromising auteur films but also to embrace the audience,” Mr. Bober continued. He has worked with Mr. Ostlund since 2005.“The bad news for producers,” Mr. Bober added, referring to himself and the film’s other Oscar-nominated producer, Erik Hemmendorff, “is that if you want to make good films, you have to support your directors’ radicalism when they are experimenting with form and content for a long period of time before you make money.”The critical and popular acclaim for “Triangle of Sadness” seems a vindication of Mr. Bober’s faith in Mr. Ostlund.The humor, often acid-laced, that makes the Swedish director’s films so entertaining is often deeply discomfiting — and sometimes downright squirmworthy. This has proved divisive, with some viewers regarding his work as manipulative or downright cruel (“Triangle of Sadness” includes an audaciously long vomiting scene), and others hailing him as an uncommonly perceptive social commentator.“I think all my approaches in my films are looking at human behavior, creating dilemmas,” Mr. Ostlund said, “in order to try to tell something about us human beings.” He added that he tried to create “scenes where I believe that, yeah, this is an accurate and a true picture of our behavior” without pointing fingers.“I’m happy,” he added, “if I can reach the level of a really good sociological experiment.”According to Owen Gleiberman, chief film critic for Variety magazine, “Triangle of Sadness” is “very much a movie of its moment.”“It’s about the 1 percent, and it’s about the 1 percent getting their comeuppance. And that’s a good theme and it’s a gratifying theme,” said Mr. Gleiberman, who attended his first Cannes Film Festival in 1996. At the same time, he said he felt that the film was “too in love with its own satirical excess.” While he was delighted by the unexpected Palme d’Or win for “The Square,” he felt “Triangle of Sadness” was less deserving of the prize.“There’s no rule that says that a director shouldn’t take the Palme d’Or twice in five years,” Mr. Gleiberman said. “But when that happens, it’s usually an indication not that he has made two masterpieces, but that he’s become a Cannes darling.” As such, the fact that Mr. Ostlund was tapped to head the Cannes jury, Mr. Gleiberman added, “makes perfect sense.”“I think all my approaches in my films are looking at human behavior, creating dilemmas,” Mr. Ostlund said, “in order to try to tell something about us human beings.”Ana Cuba for The New York Times“I hesitated a little bit because of the burden of the position actually,” Mr. Ostlund said about being asked to chair the jury. His eight co-jurors include the American actors Paul Dano and Brie Larson, the Argentine director Damián Szifron, and the French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d’Or in 2021 for “Titane,” a controversial body-horror film.Even though no one person gets to decide the winners, the awards at Cannes often become identified with that year’s jury president. Historically speaking, the films that have taken the Palme d’Or, Mr. Gleiberman suggested, are “not some list of masterpieces.”“It’s more like the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said.Mr. Ostlund seemed all too aware of this when he suggested that the Palme d’Or awarded by a jury president is “something that can follow you then through your career,” for good or for ill.But Mr. Ostlund said it was important, above all, for him to endorse what Cannes stands for. “For me, it is the festival in the world that is on the barricades fighting for cinema” and a “provocative approach to cinema as an art form,” he said.“The last year when I had been traveling around with ‘Triangle of Sadness,’ I have tried to really promote cinema, talked about the advantage of cinema, talked about what are the qualities of watching things together instead of sitting in front of an individual screen,” he added.The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo, another Cannes favorite, said that the festival connected him to an “ethical, fundamental state of what does that mean to be a filmmaker and a true believer in film as the seventh art.”Films by Mr. Mundruczo, 48, and Mr. Ostlund have shared lineups at Cannes several times. In 2014, they both headlined the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar: Mr. Mundruczo’s “White God” won top prize and Mr. Ostlund’s “Force Majeure” took the jury prize. Three of Mr. Mundruczo’s other films have screened in the main competition at Cannes; he was invited to be a juror at Cannes twice but declined because of prior commitments.While expressing reservations about running films like horses in a race, Mr. Mundruczo, who has chaired juries at other festivals, said he enjoyed the experience — and not only because it forced him to take in multiple films a day.“As a jury member, you feel like you can give your taste, your honesty and your vision of the future of cinema and all your love of cinema,” Mr. Mundruczo said in an interview in Berlin, where he lives.Mr. Ostlund, who has also served on film festival juries before, said it was important to take care of the group dynamics and make sure everyone “feels that they are seen.”“I think I will have a very Swedish approach when it comes to running the jury,” he said.“It will be a democracy.” More

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    Matthias Pintscher to Lead Kansas City Symphony

    He will take the podium in 2024, with a mandate to help draw new audiences to classical music.The German-born composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher didn’t know what to expect when he traveled to Missouri in March to lead a series of performances with the Kansas City Symphony. He had never been to the city, nor had he worked with its orchestra.But after a few days of rehearsing and performing works by Ravel, Ligeti and Scriabin, Pintscher felt a deep connection with the ensemble. “There was magic,” he said in an interview. “A willingness to really give the best.”The orchestra was impressed, too: On Tuesday, it announced that Pintscher, 52, had agreed to serve as its next music director, beginning with a five-year term in 2024. He will succeed Michael Stern, who has been the orchestra’s leader since 2005, and lead the orchestra for 10 weeks each season.Danny Beckley, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, offered Pintscher the job only a couple of days after his March visit. He described Pintscher’s relationship with the orchestra as “electric” and said he hoped Pintscher could help to get more people into the concert hall.“We are committed to making orchestral music more appealing to a far wider audience, and I think Matthias can really help make that happen,” Beckley said in a statement.Pintscher, who lives in New York City, rose to prominence as a composer, writing a range of music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, as well as solo pieces for piano and voice. His compositions are often evocative and mysterious, showcasing the ability of instruments like the clarinet and the double bass to whisper.He has also won accolades as a conductor, serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, a new music group, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra in Switzerland. (His tenure at the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which he has led for a decade, ends this season.) He is a member of the composition faculty at Juilliard.In Kansas City, he said, he felt a sense of belonging. He recalled chatting with a stranger at a supermarket; after he introduced himself, she immediately bought tickets to a concert.“It was such a warm welcome, by the city, the locals, the public, the musicians,” he said. “It was a happy arrival.” More

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    Morgan Wallen Postpones Six Weeks of Shows After Vocal Cord Injury

    The country superstar, who has held No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for nine straight weeks, said the pause was recommended by his doctors.Morgan Wallen, the chart-dominating country star, is postponing six weeks of shows on his current tour, saying in a statement on Tuesday that he had injured his vocal cords and that the pause was recommended by his doctors.“I performed three shows last weekend in Florida and by the third one I felt terrible,” Wallen said in a video posted on social media. “So I went in and got scoped yesterday, and they told me that I reinjured my vocal cords and that I have vocal fold trauma. Their advice is that I go on vocal rest for six weeks, so that’s what I’m going to do.”He also announced that he would not perform as scheduled at the Academy of Country Music Awards show this Thursday, where he is up for entertainer of the year.A spokeswoman for Wallen said that 14 shows would be postponed, starting with a planned date in Hershey, Penn., on May 18, and including two shows at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. The tour is set to resume on June 22 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.Rescheduled dates will be announced.Last month, Wallen canceled a stadium show at the University of Mississippi shortly before he was to take the stage, saying that he had lost his voice. Even so, angry fans took to social media to complain.Wallen has held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart for the last nine weeks with his 36-track new album, “One Thing at a Time,” which has now been streamed about 2.3 billion times in the United States alone. His last LP, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” was No. 1 for 10 weeks two years ago, even amid an industry rebuke — including his temporary removal from country radio playlists — after he was caught on video using a racist slur.In his statement on Tuesday, Wallen said: “They told me that if I do this the right way, I’ll get back to 100 percent, and they also said that if I don’t listen and I keep singing, then I’ll permanently damage my voice.”“So for the longevity of my career,” he added, “this is just a choice I had to make.” More

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    Boston’s Mayor, Michelle Wu, Trades City Hall for Symphony Hall

    Michelle Wu, a lifelong pianist, has played to prepare for mayoral debates. Last weekend, she joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra onstage.BOSTON — There are things that a big-city mayor just has to do. Cut a ribbon here. Plant a tree there. Throw out the first pitch. Play Mozart with the local symphony orchestra.Hang on a second.Plenty of politicians might say that they support the arts, but Michelle Wu, a Democrat who became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected mayor of Boston, in November 2021, is one of the few who will court embarrassment to prove it.At the free “Concert for the City” on Sunday afternoon, put on by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its sister ensemble, the Boston Pops, Wu took the stage before a nearly full house at Symphony Hall here to perform as the soloist in the dreamy slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. She may not quite be ready for a world tour, but with the Symphony and its music director, Andris Nelsons, in support, she captured more of the composer’s characteristic elegance than an amateur might. And she barely missed a note.“I think Michelle did it so wonderfully,” Nelsons said during a news conference after the performance.While political figures, including Edward M. Kennedy, the former Massachusetts senator, and Thomas M. Menino, the former Boston mayor, have from time to time stood on the podium while the Pops has played such staples as “Sleigh Ride” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the Symphony’s archivist said that Wu, 38, was almost certainly the first officeholder in the orchestra’s more than 140-year history to take the far greater risk of stepping into the spotlight as a soloist.Some players in the ensemble — which had rehearsed with her on Saturday, before giving a ferociously intense reading that night of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 to end its subscription season — stayed onstage to watch, even though they had no music to play.Wu played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with the orchestra as part of Boston’s “Concert for the City.”Robert Torres“I have been playing piano since long, long before I ever thought about politics, and my parents are probably more than skeptical still about the politics thing,” Wu said at the news conference, adding with a laugh, “This is probably the proudest that they’ve ever been of me, and it took getting elected to mayor to be able to do this.”For the Boston Symphony, the performance was a chance to showcase its quickly strengthening commitment to community engagement. For Wu, it was a platform to promote her policies as the city’s arts institutions steadily right themselves after the pandemic, including her insistence that every child in a Boston public school should have access to an instrument. But it was also an occasion to reflect on the deeper connections that she — as a pianist who trained from age 4 and, as The Boston Globe reported, keeps an upright in her City Hall office — sees between music and politics broadly.Classical artists often talk in platitudes about music being a universal language that can transcend borders, but for Wu, who grew up in Chicago as the first child of immigrants from Taiwan and who also learned the violin, the commonplaces were a reality.“I remember very vaguely when I was young, we would go drive really far so my mom would sing in a community chorus concert,” Wu said in an interview. “My mom has a gorgeous voice, so much of my function learning piano growing up was to be her accompanist.”Music offered Wu’s parents continuity amid change, as they learned English and adapted to a new culture. She remembered seeing that her mother had transliterated the words in her score for Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” into Chinese, so that she could pronounce them correctly.“My parents were in a very modest situation,” Wu said. “We were initially receiving benefits and as my dad’s career moved up, kind of moved more firmly into the middle class. But piano lessons were, I’m sure, at that time just a luxury splurge for them. But it was important because my parents were both musical, and again, it was their way to feel like the barriers maybe weren’t so high in this country.”As a high schooler, Wu played the solo part in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and she became a subscriber to the Boston Symphony while she was studying at Harvard University. Although she practiced hard for Sunday’s performance, she said, she had made a tradition of playing for herself the night before mayoral debates.“My go-to to really calm myself is Liszt’s ‘Un Sospiro,’” Wu said. “With the flowing of it, you can really lose yourself quickly. And then if it was that kind of day, it’d be a little Rachmaninoff.”Wu’s Boston Symphony appearance came about after she and her children attended a family and youth concert last year, and she played a few bars of Liszt backstage for that program’s conductor, Thomas Wilkins. The orchestra approached her about Sunday’s concert of short, mostly Boston-related works about a month and a half ago, offering her three Mozart pieces to choose from. She took a few weeks to think about it, she admitted.“Just as I try to be honest about the challenges that can come with being a working parent,” Wu said at the news conference, “in the hopes that that means we change our systems faster and encourage other people to believe that it’s possible to live their lives and give their fullest in every way, I hope that people will see that we can come to our positions — if you might be so fortunate to have a position of leadership or whatever platform you have — to bring your whole self to that.”Wu talks about the role that the arts can play in society with a conviction that many musical institutions are still working to acquire, describing them as, among other things, “a vehicle to talk about and address our biggest challenges in new and interesting ways,” such as climate change and race. These are beliefs that, she said, she might not hold with the same intensity if she had not played the piano.“I would imagine that even as someone who would not necessarily play but be a passionate audience member, there’s something about the feeling and the connection that you can’t put words to when all of it comes together,” Wu said in the interview. “The power of how people felt connected in Symphony Hall today, hanging on every note, delighted at each individual piece and the surprises and twists of every composition — that’s a model for how we want our community to be, day in and day out, in this city.” More

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    ‘Teeth’ Adaptation and ‘Stereophonic’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

    The company’s 2023-24 lineup includes works by Michael R. Jackson, Anna K. Jacobs, David Adjmi and Will Butler of Arcade Fire.Playwrights Horizons will present three large-scale productions and three solo works as part of its eclectic lineup for its 2023-24 season, with a range of genres and price points, the company announced on Tuesday.“These last few years are still asking us to pivot and be creative in ways we didn’t know we’d be asked to be,” said Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, who added that the company has had to scale back on producing new and commissioned works because of budgetary constraints.“Our job is to put as much new writing as possible in front of people,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to do more with less.”“Teeth,” based on the horror comedy film about an evangelical teenage girl with toothed genitalia — which the critic Stephen Holden called a “twisted sex-education film,” “quasi-feminist fable” and an “outrageous stunt” — will make its stage premiere in February.The musical production, which has been in the works since before the pandemic, and which Greenfield called “an examination of ancient misogyny,” is written by Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”) and Anna K. Jacobs, and will be choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and directed by Sarah Benson, who will soon be leaving her leadership role at Soho Rep.“It’s bigger than any room that can try to contain it,” Greenfield said. “It’s incredibly fun and incredibly irreverent and brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant.”The season will kick off in October with the world premiere of David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” with original music by the Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, about a band whose members keep clashing while creating a new album. Set over two recording sessions, with fragments of the in-progress songs teased throughout, the show is “a valentine and a cautionary tale to the act of creation itself,” Greenfield said.The 2023-24 season will also feature three solo works written and performed by the playwrights. Milo Cramer’s “School Pictures,” which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in November, is a musical journal of song-poems that present a portrait of the New York City education system. Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which recently ran at the Abrons Art Center, is a clown cabaret about a young woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu will perform his stand-up act, “Amusements,” a mix of storytelling, music and multimedia, which will also make an appearance at Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer.Presented in repertory, the solo performances will begin previews in November; tickets will be offered at a discounted rate.Rounding out the season is Abe Koogler’s “Staff Meal,” a comedic play, directed by Morgan Green, about a wait staff working to keep service running smoothly at a mysterious New York City restaurant while the world falls apart. Previews begin next April.Playwrights Horizons will also present a slate of programming with the Movement Theater Company, a troupe dedicated to developing and producing new work by artists of color. The residency begins in May 2024.“I think people are craving variety,” Greenfield said. “This new season speaks to that cultural shift.” More

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    6 New Songs You Should Hear Now

    Listen to recent highlights from Foo Fighters, Avalon Emerson, Q and more.On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins,Leo Correa/Associated PressDear listeners,Avid Amplifier readers know that each Friday, the Times pop critics put together a selection of our favorite new songs in a feature called the Playlist, and now I am delivering a digest version right to your inbox. No more excuses that you don’t have time to keep up with new music anymore; I’ve got you covered.This mix is probably a combination of some names you know — Jessie Ware, Foo Fighters — and, ideally, a few that you don’t. It gets off to an upbeat start, drifts into some luminous ambience with a wordless, eight-minute Four Tet song, and then ends up somewhere right between those two extremes, with some soothing, synth-driven melodies from Avalon Emerson and Christine and the Queens.I field-tested this playlist while doing chores in my apartment and found it to run the exact length of time it took me to fold a load of wash and put on a fresh duvet cover. Its final moments were an adequate soundtrack for that blissful moment of relief and deep-seated pride when I turned the duvet cover inside out and realized that I had, indeed, put it on correctly. I am unstoppable.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Q: “SOW”I must tip my hat (that I am not wearing) to Jon Pareles for introducing me to this moody number from the profoundly difficult-to-Google R&B artist Q. The son of the Jamaican dance hall producer Stephen (Lenky) Marsden (who is responsible for the Diwali Riddim that was ubiquitous in the early-to-mid aughts), Q Marsden makes music that, in Pareles’s words, echoes “the introspective-verging-on-depressive sides of Phil Collins, Prince and Michael Jackson.” Similarly, on “SOW,” I hear the faintest tinge of Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (certified banger) updated for the age of the Weeknd. (Listen on YouTube)2. Jessie Ware: “Freak Me Now”It takes a special musician to suddenly kick things into a higher gear about a decade into her recording career, but on her 2020 neo-disco breakthrough “What’s Your Pleasure?” the British pop singer Jessie Ware proved to be one of those rare gems. That release was going to be a tough one to follow, let alone top — and then came “That! Feels Good!,” a record of such effervescent joy that even its punctuation makes me grin. This new album continues her streak of lovingly detailed, sumptuously atmospheric dance music, but it’s not just “What’s Your Pleasure? II.” Ware’s fifth album has a vampy sonic ’tude all its own (cut through with a hint of new-wave sass) as you can hear on the electric and immaculately titled dance floor anthem “Freak Me Now.” (Listen on YouTube)3. Foo Fighters: “Rescued”A good Foo Fighters song makes me want to give Dave Grohl a lozenge. Or maybe I shouldn’t, because there’s something distinctly powerful (… Grohlian?) about the way he can sound like he’s shredding his vocal cords beyond repair while still staying effortlessly in tune. I do not know how he does it, but it sounds very cool. On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins, and if the first single “Rescued” is any indication, some of these songs are going to be about processing that tragedy, and at least one of them is going to make me cry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Four Tet: “Three Drums”Kieran Hebden, the British electronic musician who records as Four Tet, has been a known quantity in the relatively niche world of underground dance music for the past two decades, but he’s recently been getting some mainstream attention thanks to his appearances D.J.ing with the somewhat strange bedfellows Fred again.. and Skrillex. (The Three Caballeros of EDM? The Haim of EDM? I’m still workshopping a nickname.) The meditative “Three Drums” is proof that he’s not going pop just yet, though: The song contrasts live-sounding percussion with glowing gradients of synth sounds that unfurl like a sunrise. It’s bliss. (Listen on YouTube)5. Avalon Emerson: “Entombed in Ice”Avalon Emerson is known primarily as a techno D.J., but you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the serene and glacial “Entombed in Ice,” from her new album “& the Charm.” In some sense, she’s reinventing herself as a dream-pop singer-songwriter, but even her D.J. mixes had a kind of smeary intimacy that carries over into this latest release. I like the way she layers her murmured vocals, giving off the impression that the listener is eavesdropping on a conversation she’s having with herself. (Listen on YouTube)6. Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake: “True Love”“True Love,” from the French singer-songwriter Christine and the Queens, is a skeletally arranged low-burner, but it suddenly bursts forth with melodramatic pathos as Chris shifts into a sublime hook. “Angel of light, take me higher,” he sings in a trembling voice. “You’re making me forget my mother.” Not to leave you with a cliffhanger, but that’s a decently foreshadowing hint about the theme of Friday’s playlist. Till then! (Listen on YouTube)I always feel like somebody’s watching me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“6 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Q, “SOW”Track 2: Jessie Ware, “Freak Me Now”Track 3: Foo Fighters, “Rescued”Track 4: Four Tet, “Three Drums”Track 5: Avalon Emerson, “Entombed in Ice”Track 6: Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, “True Love” More

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    A 19-Year-Old Pianist Electrifies Audiences. But He’s Unimpressed.

    Yunchan Lim’s victory at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year made him a sensation. He says the attention makes him uneasy.After six hours of sleep and a breakfast of milk and curry rice, Yunchan Lim, the South Korean pianist, was in a rehearsal studio at Lincoln Center on Tuesday morning working through a treacherous passage of Rachmaninoff.“A little bit faster,” Lim, in a black sweatshirt and sneakers, said casually to the conductor, James Gaffigan, as they prepared for Lim’s New York Philharmonic debut this week. Gaffigan laughed.“Usually pianists want the opposite!” the conductor said.Lim — shy, soft-spoken and bookish — stunned the music world last year when, at 18, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. His victory made him an immediate sensation; a video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the finals has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube. (He will play that piece with the Philharmonic this week, under Gaffigan’s baton.)Still a college sophomore, Lim has inspired a devout following in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has become a symbol of pride in South Korea, where he has been described as classical music’s answer to K-pop. Like a pop star, his face has been printed on T-shirts.Lim at the Van Cliburn competition, playing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.Richard Rodriguez/The Cliburn, via Associated Press“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. It’s really quite something.”But Lim is uneasy with the attention. He does not believe he has any musical talent, he says, and would be content to spend his life alone in the mountains playing piano all day. (He limits his use of social media, he says, because he believes it is corrosive to creativity and because he wants to live as much as possible as his favorite composers did.)“A famous performer and an earnest performer — a true artist — are two different things,” he said in an interview this week at the Steinway factory in Queens, where he was shopping for a piano.Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy. He was drawn to the piano, he said, because he had grown up hearing Chopin and Liszt on recordings that his mother had purchased when she was pregnant. He was also taken by the majesty of the instrument.Lim was taken by the majesty of the instrument when he was young. “The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“Technically, he’s phenomenal,” Alsop said of Lim, “and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal.”Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.At 13, he enrolled in a prep school at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. His teacher, the pianist Minsoo Sohn, was impressed by the sensitivity of his interpretations.“At first he was a little bit cautious, but I immediately noticed that he was a huge talent,” he said. “He’s very humble, a student of the score and he isn’t over expressive.”Sohn initially steered his student away from competitions, worried about the pressure. But when the pandemic delayed the Cliburn competition, which is held every four years, making it possible for Lim to qualify, Sohn suggested he give it a try, telling him to treat it as a performance, not a competition.“I thought the world needed to listen to what Yunchan could play in his teenage years,” Sohn said.When Lim arrived in Fort Worth for the competition, which took place over 17 days, he said he felt the spirit of Van Cliburn, the eminent pianist for whom the contest is named.Lim sometimes practiced as much as 20 hours a day, he said, sending recordings to Sohn, who was in South Korea, for guidance. He existed on a diet of Korean noodles and stews prepared by his mother, who had accompanied him, as well as midnight snacks of toasted English muffins with butter and strawberry jam made by his host family.“I knew it was like Russian roulette,” he said of the competition. “It could turn out well, or you could end up shooting yourself in the head. It was a lot of stress.”As he prepared to walk onstage to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, he said he thought of Carl Sagan’s idea of Earth as just a “pale blue dot” in the universe.“When the stage doors open and the audience applauds, when I nervously sit down at the piano and press the first key, that moment is like the Big Bang for me,” he said. “I’m nervous, but the image of the pale blue dot gives me courage. I just think of the moment as something occurring in that small little speck.”His Rachmaninoff won ovations, but he was dissatisfied with the performance, believing that he achieved only about 30 percent of what he had hoped to accomplish. Since the competition, he said he had been able to watch just the first three minutes of the YouTube video before growing dispirited.When he returned to South Korea after the Cliburn, he said he was unchanged. “I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” he said at a news conference with his teacher.“I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” Lim said at a news conference with his teacher.Ayesha Malik for The New York TimesLim, who is still enrolled at Korean National University of Arts, plans to transfer this fall to the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where Sohn now teaches.As a student, his international career has taken off, with a recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January and an appearance with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in February. This summer, he will reunite with Alsop to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next year, he will make his Carnegie Hall debut with an all-Chopin program.The New York Philharmonic booked him soon after Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, saw YouTube videos of his performances at the Cliburn — a Beethoven concerto as well as the Rachmaninoff.“I was blown away by how fluent he was in both styles,” Borda said. “He was just brilliant.”Ahead of his debut in New York, Lim has been fine-tuning his interpretation of the Rachmaninoff. In preparing the concerto’s somber opening notes, he said, he imagines the “angel of death” or cloaked figures singing a Gregorian chant, following his teacher’s advice.This performance is especially meaningful, he said. On his commute to and from middle school, he often played a 1978 recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the Philharmonic. He said he had listened to the recording at least 1,000 times.Lim said he felt nervous to follow in the footsteps of Horowitz, one of his idols, and that he would always consider himself a student, no matter how successful his career might be. He said artists should not be judged by the number of YouTube views they received, but by the authenticity of their work.“It’s a bit hard to define myself as an artist,” he said. “I’m like the universe before the Big Bang. I’m still in the learning phase.”“I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he added, “just like the universe.”Jin Yu Young contributed research from Seoul. More