Aurelia Butler

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    Tobias Rahim Wants to Take Danish-Language Pop Global

    Tobias Rahim is a phenomenon in Denmark. Now, he wants the country’s music to be internationally renowned.Tobias Rahim, a 6-foot-7 Kurdish Danish pop singer, strode around the vast stage of Copenhagen’s Royal Arena one recent Saturday night dressed in a tasseled gold cowboy outfit.He was midway through “Stor Mand” (“Big Man”), a romantic duet sung with Andreas Odbjerg, another star in Denmark. But it seemed like Rahim barely needed to perform: He simply pointed his microphone at the 16,000-capacity crowd who manically sung every word for him.Soon, the crowd — some wearing cowboy hats just like Rahim — made their adoration even clearer, when a group started chanting, “The girls want your body.” The quirky 33-year-old, who posed nude for a previous project, quickly moved onto the next hit.In recent years, American music fans have become accustomed to listening to pop in languages other than English. K-pop groups and Spanish-language acts like Bad Bunny have had hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, and French-language singers have been appearing at major festivals in the United States.After making music in Colombia and Ghana, Rahim’s career truly took off in Denmark with his 2022 album “When the Soul Vomits.”Mathias Eis for The New York TimesDanish, an often staccato language spoken by only about six million people and whose alphabet includes the letters Æ, Ø and Å, is perhaps an unlikely choice for pop’s next lingua franca. But Rahim said in an interview the day after the show that there was no reason Danish-language pop couldn’t take off, too.Outside the country, Denmark has long been renowned for its gastronomy and noirish television dramas. Rahim said there was equal talent in its pop scene. “The energy field here is really strong,” he said. Rahim had heard criticism that Danish was an ugly language, but he said he disagreed: “Any language converted into music can be super beautiful.”A handful of Danish musicians, including the fresh-faced Lukas Graham and the arty singer MØ, have long made music in English to cultivate audiences abroad. Simon Lund, the music editor of Politiken, a major Danish newspaper, said in an interview that the country was still producing great English-language songs, but that it was also seeing a boom in Danish-language pop, with acts showcasing catchy melodies.Among those, Lund said, Rahim was the phenomenon. Last year, tracks from his second album, “Nar sjælen kaster op” (“When the Soul Vomits”), topped Denmark’s singles charts for nearly 40 weeks. “Når Mænd Græder” (“When Men Cry”), a track about how men should be able to be emotional, set off a national debate about the nature of masculinity, Lund added.In the run-up to Christmas, Rahim released a poetry collection that included a picture of him nude, clenching a rose in his mouth. The book sold out in stores and now, the singer is “impossible to ignore” in Denmark, Lund said.Growing up half-Kurdish and half-Danish in the coastal city of Aarhus, Rahim said he never felt like he fully belonged and often felt “half.” The nude photographs, he added, showed him as a proud, and whole, mixed-race “neo-Scandinavian man.”Mathias Eis for The New York TimesMathias Eis for The New York TimesThroughout his career, Rahim has tried to find success outside Denmark.In 2009, shortly after leaving school, he moved to Cali, Colombia, where he became friends with rappers and reggaeton musicians who lived in one of that city’s more impoverished neighborhoods. Rahim said he spent about two years making music there and left only after witnessing a neighbor get shot.In Denmark, he released a handful of tracks as part of the reggaeton duo Camilo & Grande, but in 2018, he got the urge to move again, this time heading to Accra, Ghana, where he performed as an Afropop artist under the name Toby Tabu. In Ghana, Rahim said he sought to act like any other local musician, hustling to get his upbeat songs played on the radio, performing support slots for big local names and sleeping on couches while he tried to break through.Despite those attention-grabbing travels, his career only truly took off in Denmark with the 2022 album “When the Soul Vomits,” written with the producer Arto Eriksen and filled with ’80s influenced pop songs and personal songwriting. Rahim said he used to be afraid of being vulnerable in his music, fearing that producers would tell him to stick to “sexy reggaeton,” but at the height of the coronavirus pandemic he forced himself to overcome such doubts. Soon, he was working on tracks about his Kurdish heritage and his father’s emotional distance.So far, becoming a pop phenomenon — even in a small country like Denmark — has been a mixed experience. Rahim said that last year he often felt like he was on a runaway train, and that he started having delusions “that someone was going to kill me.”In the fall, while rehearsing for a performance at Denmark’s main music awards, he had a panic attack. It “felt like my body was underwater,” he recalled. He pulled out of the show and public life, only returning with this spring’s arena tour. He is now feeling better, he said, and in recent weeks he released two tracks, “Toget” (“The Train”) and “Orange,” about the year’s challenges and a more hopeful future.At the concert, many fans shed tears during Rahim’s track “When Men Cry.”Mathias Eis for The New York TimesDuring a 90-minute interview, Rahim said that when it came to breaking through outside Denmark, he did not believe in having a master plan, but would simply go “wherever the river takes me.” He then pointed to a tattoo on his arm of a fish racing through a stream with the word “river” written in Danish above it to show how important the idea was to him.“I love the world, and I really feel an urge to interact with the world,” Rahim said, “but I also love making music here.”At the recent arena show, Rahim had decided that — for now at least — he was going to bring the world to Denmark. At the show’s climax, he announced that he was about to play “Kurder I København” (“Kurds in Copenhagen”), a tropical pop song about immigration that ends as a Middle Eastern party tune complete with Kurdish chants and traditional instruments.He invited several guest singers and musicians onstage, one waving the Kurdish flag, talked about how proud he was to be a Kurd, and then told the crowd he wanted them to all link their pinkie fingers and start bobbing up and down as if dancing at a Kurdish wedding.As the crowd followed his instructions, Rahim beamed from the stage. In that moment, he looked truly at home. More

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    Happy 100th Birthday, 16-Millimeter Film

    The format was initially a boon to amateurs. Now, with moviemaking gone digital, it’s the choice of auteurs like Darren Aronofsky and Kelly Reichardt.One hundred years ago, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a shiny new camera that promised to revolutionize moviemaking. The company had been selling filming devices for more than two decades by then, but this novel contraption — the Ciné-Kodak camera, sold with the Kodascope projector — offered a new thrill: the ability to make and screen movies at home, with no special expertise.The technical marvel, however, wasn’t just the camera but also the film inside. Until 1923, the film used most commonly in motion pictures was 35 millimeters wide. That year, Kodak produced a new format that was only 16 millimeters. The image wasn’t as sharp when you blew it up on the big screen, but it allowed for smaller, cheaper and more portable cameras.16 millimeter ushered in a new era of movies made outside the Hollywood system. Regular folks could now record their own lives, journalists and soldiers could film in the midst of war, and activists could shoot political documentaries in the street. Until digital video arrived in the late 1990s, 16-millimeter film was the mainstay of the amateur or independent filmmaker, requiring neither the investment nor the know-how of commercial cinema.Last week, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which holds thousands of 16-millimeter reels in its collection, the film archivist Elena Rossi-Snook projected some shorts for a group of undergraduates from Marymount Manhattan College. As the projector whirred, a beam of light cut through the darkened room, painting the screen with scenes from the 1946 animated “Boundary Lines,” a stirring movie by Philip Stapp about social integrity in the wake of World War II. That was followed by “The End,” an antiwar stoner comedy directed by a teenager, Alfonso Sanchez, in 1968. The third film, “Black Faces” from 1970, was an ebullient, one-minute montage of portraits of Harlem residents.These productions, precious documents of the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, have endured, Rossi-Snook explained, because their makers had relatively cheap and convenient access to film, a medium that can last hundreds of years if stored properly.Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” another Aronofsky film shot on 16 millimeter.Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight PicturesToday, 16 millimeter is no longer optimal for the amateur filmmaker. Analog film is increasingly expensive, fewer and fewer labs can process it, and the format doesn’t allow the nearly unlimited shooting and instant playback that video does. But even as it turns 100, 16 millimeter still has a unique look that neither 35-millimeter film nor video can rival.When projected on the screen, analog film has a three-dimensional, pointillist texture called “grain,” a product of its synthetic makeup. There is more grain in 16 millimeter than in 35 millimeter, resulting in a fuzzier, flickering picture. In the 20th century, that was a drawback for professional filmmakers seeking crisp, theatrical images. But today, as high-definition media saturate our lives, some directors choose 16 millimeter precisely for its rougher look. It reminds us that what we’re watching is not the world as is, but filtered and transformed, with great creativity, through a chemical process.The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has shot several movies on 16-millimeter film, including “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Mother!” (2017). But when he was making his debut feature, “Pi” (1998), 16 millimeter was a necessity, not a choice. The resolution of available digital cameras wasn’t good enough for feature filmmaking at the time, and Aronofsky couldn’t afford 35 millimeter. But he and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, soon realized that 16 millimeter — especially the high-contrast stock they used called reversal film — emphasized the hallucinatory style of “Pi,” a black-and-white psychological thriller that delves into the obsessions of a paranoid number theorist.“We decided to really lean into 16 millimeter,” Aronofsky said in a phone interview. “I wanted the big grain and the contrast-y look. It’s funny, because we just had the 25th anniversary of the film, and we blew it up for IMAX. And the IMAX people were nervous because of how grainy it was. They wanted to know if I wanted to clear out some of the grain with computer technology. And we said, absolutely not. We loved the look of it.”Several TV shows from the late ’90s and early 2000s, including “The O.C.” and “Sex and the City,” used Super 16, a variation of 16 millimeter with a larger picture area that gave them a sense of real-time immediacy. The first 10 seasons of “The Walking Dead” were also largely shot on 16 millimeter to capture the grimy, crumbling feel of classic horror cinema.The cinematographer John Inwood, who filmed 150 episodes of the comedy “Scrubs,” recalled that 16-millimeter cameras, which are smaller and lighter than their 35-millimeter counterparts (and even many contemporary professional video cameras), were crucial in developing the series’s frenetic mockumentary style.“It was good for ‘Scrubs’ because we moved the cameras a lot, and we were sometimes in tight spaces,” he told me. “We shot in an actual hospital, the former North Hollywood hospital, and we shot in every square inch of it, even down to the morgue.”Chadwick Boseman in a flashback to the Vietnam War in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” The director wanted those scenes to look as if they were archival newsreel footage.NetflixAs digital cameras have become sharper and more versatile, many filmmakers have turned to 16 millimeter to evoke the analog past and the blurry, precarious nature of memory. In an interview with Gold Derby, Newton Thomas Sigel, who filmed Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), said the director had insisted to Netflix that they use 16-millimeter reversal film for the sequences set amid the Vietnam War, despite the costs and logistical challenges. The film had to be shipped from Vietnam to an American lab for processing, and by the time the crew members could see what they had shot, Chadwick Boseman’s acting schedule had already ended. But Lee was adamant that the scenes look authentic, like archival newsreels filmed in the field in the 1970s.The veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman used Super 16 on two of his collaborations with the director Todd Haynes, both of them period dramas: the mini-series “Mildred Pierce” (2011), and “Carol” (2015), which garnered him an Academy Award nomination.On both projects, the format was chosen to mimic photographic images from the 1940s and ’50s, and the grittiness of postwar America. But Lachman realized that the grain also brought “tension to the surface of the image,” paralleling the repressive qualities of the characters in both “Mildred Pierce” and “Carol.”For Lachman, the appeal of 16 millimeter transcends nostalgia. It comes down to cinema’s status as an art, meant to stylize rather than simply reproduce reality. He likened film to painting, and grain to brushstrokes. “The grain changes in each frame with exposure,” he said. “It’s like breathing, almost like an anthropomorphic quality.”Kelly Reichardt turned to 16 millimeter after video shots of the snow looked too flat.Sony Pictures ClassicsThe filmmaker Kelly Reichardt recalled that when she started shooting her 2016 feature, “Certain Women,” she didn’t have the budget for 16 millimeter. But when she and her cameraman, Christopher Blauvelt, did test shoots in Montana, where the film is set, Reichardt was horrified at how “flat” the snow looked on video.“With film stocks, things weren’t so real looking,” Reichardt said. “A lot of it is grain, and 16 has more grain than 35. So when you blow it up, you don’t get the hard lines that you get in HD, which is what you see in sports.”A grant ultimately allowed Reichardt to shoot “Certain Women” on 16 millimeter. It made the production more laborious, but the results — soft, textured images of wide roads, snowy mountains and grassy plains, all shimmering with light, dust and shadow — made it worth it.“I guess it’s about beauty, in a way,” Reichardt said. “I remember on ‘30 Rock’ they did a little thing where Lemon walks in front of the HD camera, and it’s like, she’s a skeleton hag. You know? You see every single thing. It’s very unforgiving. For nature, too.” More

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    11 Songs That Will Make You Want to Move

    The key to a great exercise playlist, our critic writes, is a mix of novelty and familiarity.Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,I have heard some truly horrific music at the gym.I am loathe to even tell you about it, but if I must: I have been subjected to an EDM remix of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” and a clubby re-imagination of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” I have heard Iggy Azalea songs that are not “Fancy.” I have experienced things I have had to purge from my memory in order to carry on.The pandemic forced me, like so many of us, to find ways to work out at home. This was sometimes difficult, and once involved lugging a 20-pound kettlebell nearly a mile home from Target — do not recommend — but it also meant I had much more freedom to determine what I listened to while swinging my new gear around. I started seeking out YouTube workouts without background music, or ones I could do with the sound off. And, naturally, I started making playlists. A bunch of them, actually.For me, a successful exercise playlist combines novelty and familiarity. It mostly functions to distract my brain from the fact that I am exerting myself and sweating profusely and would much rather not be doing those things, so ideally I want to switch things up to help the time pass. But I also appreciate when a song I know and love comes on when I need some extra motivation. Whether dancing or working out, sometimes moving your body to a song you already know can make you appreciate it in new ways.I’ve been fine-tuning this playlist for a while, rotating songs out when I get tired of them, or tinkering with the sequencing. I like the way it combines some more recent artists with their influences and forebears (a dynamic explicitly captured by Daft Punk’s great, shouted-out homage to its heroes, “Teachers,” from what itself is now a dance music landmark, “Homework,” from 1997). This is not the playlist I go to for my most high-intensity workouts or runs, though I’ll definitely share one of those in a future Amplifier. This is instead something slightly more sustained and intermittently low-key — a playlist I’d listen to when doing a strength-training routine, a jog or a very brisk walk.Rest assured, you are not required to move a muscle while listening to it. Maybe you just need an energetic, gradually crescendoing pick-me-up in the middle of a long workday. But be forewarned: There’s always a chance these songs will inspire a spontaneous dance party.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Caroline Polachek: “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings (A.G. Cook Remix)”A.G. Cook, one of the wily masterminds behind the PC Music collective, reworked this dreamy version of a fun, flirty Caroline Polachek single from her 2019 album, “Pang.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Jessie Ware: “Free Yourself”The British pop musician Jessie Ware — my personal favorite instigator of a recent disco revival — found a new groove with her great 2020 album, “What’s Your Pleasure?” She released this thumping, house-inflected jam last year as what seemed like a one-off single, but it will also appear on her next album, “That! Feels Good!,” which comes out later this month. (Listen on YouTube)3. Anita Ward: “Ring My Bell”Speaking of disco, why not go straight to the source with this blissful, weightless 1979 hit? I’m a fan of the eight-minute extended mix myself, but in the interest of keeping things moving, I opted for the three-and-a-half-minute single edit here. (Listen on YouTube)4. Giorgio Moroder: “From Here to Eternity”The ascending synthesizer arpeggios make this title track from Giorgio Moroder’s landmark 1977 album feel truly heavenly. (The opening vocoder line is a little callback to that A.G. Cook remix earlier in the playlist, too.) (Listen on YouTube)5. Yaeji: “Raingurl”The New York-born songwriter and D.J. Yaeji strays from her dance-music roots a bit on “With a Hammer,” the eclectic debut album she put out earlier this month. But for the purposes of this playlist, I prefer this playful and pulsating cult favorite from 2017. (Listen on YouTube)6. Daft Punk: “Teachers”The iconic French duo nods to the artists who inspire them on this fluid and funky cut from the group’s 1997 breakout album, “Homework.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique featuring Maluca: “Love Is Free”The euphoric 2015 EP “Love Is Free” marked the final collaboration between Swedish pop star Robyn and her longtime friend, the late producer and D.J. Christian Falk. This kinetic, house-inspired title track is the project’s undeniable highlight. (Listen on YouTube)8. Alicia Keys: “In Common (Xpect Remix)”A minor Alicia Keys hit that should have been a massive one, “In Common” inspired its own remix EP featuring re-workings by four different producers. I like this one by Xpect, which dials up the original’s Afrobeats sound. (Listen on YouTube)9. Todd Edwards: “Shall Go”The garage pioneer Todd Edwards got a shout-out from Daft Punk on the aforementioned “Teachers” — and then he started working with the group on later albums “Discovery” and “Random Access Memories.” I love this transcendent title track from his 2012 EP “Shall Go.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Daphni: “Yes, I Know”Also from 2012, here’s a soulful and transfixing track from the dance project of Dan Snaith (who also records as Caribou), centered around a memorable sample from Buddy Miles’s 1971 song “The Segment.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Britney Spears: “Stronger”Oops! I just couldn’t resist. (Listen on YouTube)Pump it up,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“11 Songs That Will Make You Want to Move” track listTrack 1: Caroline Polachek, “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings (A.G. Cook Remix)”Track 2: Jessie Ware, “Free Yourself”Track 3: Anita Ward, “Ring My Bell”Track 4: Giorgio Moroder, “From Here to Eternity”Track 5: Yaeji, “Raingurl”Track 6: Daft Punk, “Teachers”Track 7: Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique featuring Maluca, “Love Is Free”Track 8: Alicia Keys, “In Common (Xpect Remix)”Track 9: Todd Edwards, “Shall Go”Track 10: Daphni, “Yes, I Know”Track 11: Britney Spears, “Stronger”Your workout mixI’m always looking for new additions to my workout playlist, and would love to know the songs that help you forget the pain of a squat or push you through an extra mile.So tell me: What’s a song that never fails to pump you up? And what is it about the song that motivates you?Let me know by filling out this form here. We may use your response in an upcoming newsletter. More

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    What’s in Your Workout Playlist?

    Tell us the songs that help you break a sweat.For Lindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic, a successful exercise playlist combines novelty and familiarity.“It mostly functions to distract my brain from the fact that I am exerting myself and sweating profusely and would much rather not be doing those things,” she wrote in this week’s Amplifier newsletter. “So ideally I want to switch things up to help the time pass.”Lindsay is always looking for new additions to her workout playlist, and would love to know the songs that help you forget the pain of a squat or push you through an extra mile.So tell us: What’s a song that never fails to pump you up?Let us know by filling out this form below. We may use your response in an upcoming newsletter.Your workout songs More

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    Tribeca Festival Unveils 2023 Lineup With Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and More

    Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and Randall Park, among others, are making their directorial debuts at the annual New York event, set for June.Films directed by performers like Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and Randall Park will be a focus of the 2023 Tribeca Festival, organizers said Tuesday as they announced the event lineup. Also on the schedule will be the premiere of a Marvel documentary about the iconic comic book writer Stan Lee.This year’s festival, which will run in Lower Manhattan from June 7 to 18, will include 109 feature films from 127 filmmakers across 36 countries. Among those filmmakers will be 43 first-timers.“The Tribeca Festival is a celebratory event that honors artists and uplifts attendees, and this year is no exception,” the festival’s co-founder, Jane Rosenthal, said in a statement, adding that the event will offer “storytelling as a powerful tool of democracy, activism and social awareness.”Peretti, an actor perhaps best known for her work on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” will bring to Tribeca the world premiere of “First Time Female Director,” a comedy she also wrote about a woman filmmaker struggling to fill the shoes of her male predecessor.Shannon went behind the camera for “Eric LaRue,” a world-premiere drama in which parents grappling with the fallout of their son’s shocking crime seek solace in rival religious congregations.And Park, whose acting career took off after he landed a starring role in the television sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” will take “Shortcomings” to Tribeca after it screened earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.Also in the lineup will be the world premieres of “Maggie Moore(s)” by John Slattery; “Fresh Kills” by Jennifer Esposito; and the North American premiere of “The Listener” by Steve Buscemi.The Marvel documentary “Stan Lee,” from the director David Gelb, will be among the 53 nonfiction features at the festival.The festival is known for its live events and several are scheduled for the 2023 edition. Sara Bareilles will perform after the world premiere of “Waitress, the Musical — Live on Broadway!,” which features her music and lyrics. Gloria Gaynor will perform following the world premiere of the documentary “Gloria Gaynor: “I Will Survive.” And a conversation with Dan Rather and the director Frank Marshall will take place after the world premiere of the film “Rather.” More

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    Review: A Tenor Arrives at the Met Opera in ‘Elisir’

    The 27-year-old Xabier Anduaga debuted in the role of Nemorino in a revival of Donizetti’s romantic comedy.There are some arias that are so beloved, so virtually indestructible, that they more or less sing themselves. Think of “La donna è mobile” or “Vissi d’arte.” A good performance gets audiences applauding; a great one transports them.“Una furtiva lagrima,” with its teary sighs and bursts of joy, is one of those arias, and when the 27-year-old Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga sang it on Sunday in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s frolicsome comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore,” time seemed to stop. Cutting a lonely figure in a field against a midnight-blue sky, he sang with enchanting beauty. He took the second verse in a beguilingly soft tone and rounded out the cadenza with a convincing messa di voce — one more polished than the rendition captured on video last week.Anduaga’s soigné style, and vibrant yet plangent timbre, made him an uncommonly sensitive Nemorino — more of a melancholy-prone Werther scribbling poeticisms in a notebook than a sunny country bumpkin mooning over his beloved. His gracefully produced sound nevertheless carried wonderfully throughout the Met’s vast auditorium, and his acting, subtly charming instead of cloyingly eager, was of a piece with his voice.Still, Anduaga missed opportunities that seemed tailor-made for him — the descending lines of “Adina, credimi” lost their legato — but once he figures out how to bring his ravishing vocalism to the less showy parts of this role, it will no doubt become a signature one.Nemorino has his eye on a woman who is worldlier than he — he admires her studiousness in his first aria — and Aleksandra Kurzak’s confident, intuitive way with Adina’s music, reflecting a long familiarity with coloratura roles, implicitly conveyed that quality. Some breathiness perforated her tone, and her vibrato widened at high volume, but she did tap into the magic of her early coloratura days with a silvery, delicately vulnerable “Prendi.”The baritone Joshua Hopkins, who sang Papageno in Julie Taymor’s production of “The Magic Flute” earlier this season, turned in another fantastic performance. With a velvety tone, cocked eyebrow and dash of swagger, his Belcore was as much a macho sensualist as a cartoonish military sergeant. Even though “Come Paride” is something of a gag — nodding as it does to Dandini’s supercilious “Come un’ape” from Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” — Hopkins’s evenly textured, firmly woven sound elevated it to a thing of beauty. Elsewhere, his patter percolated, creating a smooth yet lively murmur.Bartlett Sher’s production has Dulcamara arrive in a gilded carriage bearing his snake oils, and as opera’s favorite charlatan, Alex Esposito traded basso buffoonery for the tradition of slippery salesmen like Pirelli and Harold Hill.The conductor Michele Gamba painted in dusky pastels, finding unanimity of color in swelling strings and pearly woodwinds. There were occasional ensemble issues, but once the opera entered its final stretch — with “Una furtiva lagrima” flowing into “Prendi” and on to the all’s-well finale — Donizetti’s sturdily constructed masterwork seemed to take care of itself.L’Elisir d’AmoreThrough April 29 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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    Lincoln Center Revives Summer for the City, Hoping to Draw New Fans

    The festival will include hip-hop, Korean arts, Mostly Mozart and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.Lincoln Center will bring back its Summer for the City festival this year, the organization announced on Monday, continuing its efforts to attract new audiences by embracing a wide variety of genres, including pop and classical music, social dance and comedy.There will be a weeklong celebration of hip-hop, performances by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and a Korean cultural festival. A flock of 200 neon-pink flamingo lawn ornaments will adorn a pool near David Geffen Hall, part of a reimagining of the center’s outdoor spaces by the Broadway costume and set designer Clint Ramos.“The hope is to transform the campus — to upend people’s expectations of what Lincoln Center is,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “To allow people to just come and play and understand that this isn’t a precious palace on a hill, but a place to inspire joy.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked in recent years to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some grumbling among fans of more traditional genres, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music. Some elements of the Mostly Mozart rubric have been reduced in recent years, including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and performances of new music that flows out of the classical tradition.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform 13 concerts over three weeks, beginning with a program on July 22 that features Mozart’s Concerto No. 2 for Flute, with the soloist Jasmine Choi, as well as the Korean folk song “Arirang” and Soo Yeon Lyuh’s “Dudurim.” The performance is also part of Korean Arts Week, which includes K-pop bands, DJs and a film festival.It will be Mostly Mozart’s last season with Louis Langrée, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2002. His contract expires this year.Thake said that Mostly Mozart would maintain a presence after Langrée’s exit. She said that the center was in talks with the orchestra about future seasons, and that they were discussing how Mostly Mozart “fits within the values of Lincoln Center,” including efforts to reach new audiences and promote inclusivity.“There’s no doubt that the orchestra will maintain a central place in our programming going forward,” she said.Hip-hop will be front and center as part of a celebration of its 50th anniversary, with performances by J.Period, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane.An opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower,” by the folk and blues musician Toshi Reagon and the composer Bernice Johnson Reagon, will get its New York City premiere at Geffen Hall on July 14.Social dance returns on June 14 with a performance of Cuban music by the singer Lucrecia and the salsa band 8 Y Más. The giant disco ball that hung over the main plaza last year, also designed by Ramos, will be back too.More than 300,000 people attended last year’s festival, which aimed at helping New York City heal after the upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. More than three-quarters of them had never before bought a ticket to a Lincoln Center offering, according to the center.Thake said she was not overly concerned about skeptics who worry that the center’s identity has changed too much.“To those people I say, It’s wonderful that you have found a home at Lincoln Center and what a gift it has been that Lincoln Center has been a home for so many for so long,” she said. “All that we are doing right now is opening up that invitation. And really having many, many more New Yorkers be able to say the exact same thing. That’s a real gift, and something that not only we can do, but something that we really have to do.” More

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    The Buggles’ Song Launched MTV. After 45 Years, They’re Going on Tour.

    Trevor Horn, half of the group behind “Video Killed the Radio Star” and a producer who helped engineer the sound of the ’80s, will be the opening act for Seal.In the late 1970s, when Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes were trying to get a record deal as the Buggles, a lot of people in the music business were confused. What kind of band has only a singing bassist and a keyboard player?“We were like, ‘We don’t want a guitar player, and we use a drum machine,’” Horn recalled recently during a video interview from his Los Angeles home. “There was a lot of suspicion about that. We were a bit ahead of our time.”Horn, 73, was being a bit modest; he’s routinely described as “the man who invented the ’80s.” The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was a global hit and ushered in a new era of opulent electronic pop. The video was the first ever played on MTV when it launched in 1981, and featured Horn and Downes in outrageous silver suits and deadpan looks.By then, they’d already moved on from the Buggles by joining Yes, briefly. Downes went on to play with the pomp-rock group Asia, and Horn entombed himself in a recording studio, waging war on boring music.As a producer and head of his own record label, ZTT, Horn worked on some of the most audacious albums of an over-excited decade: ABC’s “The Lexicon of Love,” Malcolm McLaren’s “Duck Rock,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome.” If you hate the ’80s, he’s your villain.A Trevor Horn production has clever lyrics, fortified hooks, an episodic structure and a dramatic fire-walling of frequencies that makes the music pop out of speakers. He also worked with Spandau Ballet, Grace Jones (“Slave to the Rhythm”), Seal (“Crazy”), the Pet Shop Boys, t.A.T.u., John Legend, Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart.The Buggles never toured, apart from a 2010 reunion gig for charity, but they’re the opening act on the British singer Seal’s upcoming tour, which starts April 25 in Phoenix. Horn will be playing without Downes, whose obligations to Yes got in the way.“My daughter, who is a music business lawyer, keeps saying, ‘You’ve got to change the name, because there’s only one of you. It should be called the Buggle,’” Horn explained with a laugh. His daughter also insisted Horn wear a certain iconic garment. “She said, ‘If I was a paying customer and the Buggle didn’t have his silver jacket on, I’d want my money back.’”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Geoff Downes, left, and Horn. “Video Killed the Radio Star” was a global hit and ushered in a new era of opulent electronic pop. Fin Costello/Redferns, via Getty ImagesYou worked as a producer for five years before you had your first hit, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” After such a long wait, why did you walk away from pop stardom?My first experience of being a pop star was pretty grim. I was miming to “Video Killed the Radio Star” on every TV show known to man. When you’ve made a living as a musician, miming is the most boring thing you could possibly do. I knew that in order to come from nowhere and have a hit record, we’d need to have a pretty catchy track. But that doesn’t necessarily make for a career.“Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t just catchy, it’s annoyingly, almost obnoxiously catchy. Was that part of the plan?[Laughs] I know what you’re referring to. Bruce Woolley [who helped write the song] and Tina Charles, a well-known singer in England, were singing the chorus, and it sounded bland. I said, “Why don’t you sing it in American and exaggerate it?” That was effective. I was aware that it might be a bit annoying, but I thought it was the kind of thing you wouldn’t forget.One of your early jobs was a progress chaser in a plastic bag factory. What does a progress chaser do?People would call and say, “This is the British Sugar Corporation. We ordered 20,000 plastic bags that were meant to arrive last week. Could you tell us where they are?” I’d go down to the factory to see the head of production, and ask where the bags were. And he would say, “[Expletive] off!” Then I’d go back to the British Sugar Corporation and say, “I’m assured the bags will be there on Wednesday.”Did that job influence your idea that we were living in “The Age of Plastic,” which is the name of the Buggles’ 1980 album?To some degree, but that was mostly me being irritated by people saying, “Eh, your music sounds a bit plastic.” After a while, I thought, “[Expletive] them! It’s the plastic age!”When a couple of my friends heard “Video Killed the Radio Star,” they said, “It’s got absolutely no integrity.” I suppose I was thumbing my nose a bit at the ’70s idea of integrity.Aside from the musical and technical aspects of being a producer, how important is the psychological aspect — knowing when to cajole or when to flatter?All of that is very important. Even though you think you can say whatever you want, because you’re in charge, you can’t. The only way that works is patience and kindness. Most people that are successful have well-developed instincts for what suits them, and if you’re going to take them out of their comfort zone, you’ve got to be careful.Paul McCartney certainly has well-developed instincts. Did you find him amenable to your suggestions when you worked with him on “Figure of Eight” in 1989?Paul is very charming. The first time I met him, I was playing Space Invaders and he came up behind me and said, “Do you want me to show you how to cheat the machine, Trev?” You think, “Jeez, Paul McCartney knows my name!” Even I got a bit excited by that. But when it comes down to it, he’s still only a songwriter and a bass player. It’s not like he’s the dictator of a country and he can get you locked up.When you started working with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, they said they wanted to sound like a cross between Kiss and Donna Summer. How important is it to get direction from the artist?Oh, it’s vital. ABC wanted to be like Chic, a big dance act, but with better lyrics. With Frankie Goes to Hollywood, I was intrigued by the idea of a rock-dance record. I was playing bass for a living in 1977 when Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” came out, so I heard it every night. It was the first mechanical record that I heard, and I was fascinated by it.And when I heard Kraftwerk’s “Man-Machine,” it was a revelation — the idea that you could make a record without having a group there, with all their problems. I felt like that was the way forward. You could make music all by yourself, because of the new technology.Downes (left) and Horn (at microphone) performing with Yes in 1980. Michael Putland/Getty Images“Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Yes’s big hit off “90125,” was its first No. 1 pop hit. How did you get the band to record a song it hated?I had to go down on my knees and beg. I said, “I’m a really hot producer at the moment, probably the hottest producer in the world, and if you don’t do this song, you’ll make me a failure. You promised me you’d do this song, so you’ve got to do it.” I was being funny, but not funny, if you know what I mean. I was desperate.Some people who’ve worked with you describe you as “obsessive.” Was it obsessive to spend three months working on Seal’s hit “Crazy”?It was obsessive. I’d never heard a song quite like “Crazy” before, so it took a while to figure out how to do it properly. I’m not trying to get a record perfect, I just want it to have an emotional impact. That’s what takes time.You didn’t have a hit until you were 30 years old, which is unusual. Were you thinking for years that any day now, you’d be a star?People would tell me, “You think that’s going to happen? Look at you! You’re not even that great-looking!” My parents kept trying to get me to go to teacher’s training college. It didn’t look very promising, put it that way.I remember a girl saying to me, “You’re 28. You’re driving around in a beaten-up old car, living hand-to-mouth. What are you doing with your life?” And I said, “I’m pulling the handle of a big slot machine, and I’m going to keep pulling it, because it’s going to pay the jackpot out soon. That’s why I’ve got a rubbish car.” More