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      Taylor Swift Breaks Her Own Record With a 12th Week at No. 1

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      Facing a tight battle with Zach Bryan, the pop superstar benefited from the release of three new versions of “The Tortured Poets Department” and shipments of CDs.This week Taylor Swift sets a personal chart record with her album “The Tortured Poets Department” after fending off the latest challenger: the singer-songwriter Zach Bryan.With 12 weeks at No. 1, “Tortured Poets” is now the longest-running chart-topper of Swift’s career, exceeding the 11-week totals she had for “Fearless” (2008) and “1989” (2014). It is the first album to rack up a dozen consecutive times at the top since Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” which did so last year, and Swift joins rare company in the 68-year history of the Billboard 200 chart.In the elite group of albums that not only had long consecutive runs at No. 1, but did so from the very first week they came out, “Tortured Poets” now surpasses Whitney Houston’s 1987 LP “Whitney” — featuring enduring hits like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “So Emotional” — which spent its first 11 weeks at No. 1, and is just shy of Stevie Wonder’s 13 for “Songs in the Key of Life” in 1976 and 1977.In its most recent week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 163,000 sales in the United States, including 95 million streams and 90,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release in April, the full 31-track album has logged three billion streams and had the equivalent of just under five million sales in the United States.“The Great American Bar Scene,” the new album by Bryan, whose style has been described as Americana, folk, rock and country, was Swift’s latest competitor for the top spot. And the race seemed close, with both artists unleashing some chart-goosing weapons in the closing hours of the tracking period last week. Bryan offered his album at a discounted price, while Swift released another three variants of “Tortured Poets” as digital downloads.But Swift triumphed, while “The Great American Bar Scene” lands at No. 2 with the equivalent of 137,000 sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Should Slim Shady Be Canceled? Eminem’s Young Fans Say No.

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      The rapper unleashes more provocative lyrics on his 12th album, and new generations are defending him — rather than rushing to criticize him — online.Twenty-two years separated “Without Me,” Eminem’s cocky, impish and defiantly tasteless 2002 smash, from “Houdini,” the lead single from the rapper’s latest studio album, “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce).” But the new track, with its sneering tone and catalog of quips that make punchlines out of both Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 shooting and contemporary identity politics, transmits a resounding message: In the world of Eminem, nothing much has changed.Since the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, reckonings around sexual harassment, toxic workplaces, body positivity and gender identity have changed cultural expectations for language and behavior. Young people, surprised at what the generations that preceded them endured and accepted, have largely led the charge, helping “cancel” offending figures in campaigns that ignite on social media.Yet Eminem — an artist who has made a career of thumbing his nose at social mores, rapping lyrics that can be seen as glorifying violence against women, mocking the infirm and normalizing homophobic slurs — has persisted. All nine of his albums released this century so far, including three since 2017, have debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. “Houdini,” which came out in June, opened at No. 2 on the Hot 100 singles chart, his best solo showing since 2010.Eminem accepting a Grammy in 2003. His 12th album arrived on Friday.Vincent Laforet/The New York Times“The Death of Slim Shady,” Eminem’s 12th album, arrived on Friday, and what’s striking is how wide his support base remains — and specifically how much loyalty he has engendered among younger listeners who might be expected to find his wordplay offensive, if not abhorrent.For several years, a handful of online voices, amplified by the media, have helped stoke the notion that members of Gen Z would like to see Eminem retroactively canceled. (Eminem plays with the idea himself on the new album’s “Antichrist.”) Upon the release of “Houdini,” one TikTok user called out a lyric about a Siamese “transgender cat” that “identifies as Black” that seemed designed for maximum antagonism. In a widely viewed video, the poster scoffed at listeners who still engage with Eminem, 51, a figure he referred to as a “grandpa.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are Games Like the Euro 2024 Final the Riskiest Gig in Music?

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      Performing before a major match like the Euro 2024 final offers priceless visibility, and the nonzero chance that you’ll be booed.Even to some of the most glittering names in music, the pitch is compelling.There is a gig. It is a very short gig: a tight six minutes or so. It is also unpaid. In exchange, though, the offer promises exposure that borders on priceless: a live crowd numbering somewhere around 70,000, and a captive television audience in the hundreds of millions.The appeal of serving as the pregame entertainment at one of European soccer’s twin showpieces — the finals of the Champions League and the European Championship — is so obvious, and the benefits of that brief performance so extravagant, that the likes of Camila Cabello, Alicia Keys and the Black Eyed Peas (albeit without Fergie) have signed up to do it.There is, however, a catch. For most, what is likely to be one of the most high-profile gigs of their career might also be the riskiest booking in music, one that comes with a nonzero chance of being loudly, unapologetically, unremittingly booed.Regret is not a guarantee, of course. There are acts that look back on their brush with soccer fondly, artists who serve as beacons of hope for the (somewhat unwieldy) trio that is scheduled to play just before the final of Euro 2024 on Sunday in Berlin. That lineup — the Italian dance act Meduza, the German singer Leony and the American rock band OneRepublic — have presumably chosen to focus on the more positive precedents.Dua Lipa was such a hit at the 2018 Champions League final that she has subsequently suggested she now considers herself an honorary Liverpool fan. Oceana, a German singer who performed at the final of the 2012 European Championship, remembers it as one of the highlights of her career. “The whole stadium was singing,” she said in an interview last week.Dua Lipa’s performance at the 2018 Champions League final forged a lasting connection with Liverpool and its fans. Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Revivals Take Center Stage

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      The festival’s chief loves inviting productions back, giving attendees another shot at seeing a beloved show, and allowing directors a chance to nail it on the second try.Lydia Steier’s directorial debut at the Salzburg Festival did not quite go as planned. Her 2018 production of “Die Zauberflöte” was savaged by many critics.“Not magical at all,” hissed the Austrian newspaper Kurier, in the headline of its review. Steier, a native of Hartford, Conn., feared she would never work in Mozart’s hometown again.“I’ve never been so stung as by the first reactions to the 2018 ‘Magic Flute,’” the 45-year-old director said in a recent phone interview from her home in Dresden, Germany. “I felt like the concept was fantastic and we didn’t nail it,” she said, adding that the production was bedeviled by many challenges, from problematic casting to the choice of venue.Steier was not alone in thinking that her production had not reached its full potential. Several months after the festival, she heard from Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director. He wondered, would she be interested in giving the opera another spin for the summer 2020 festival?A rehearsal for Steier’s 2018 production of “Die Zauberflöte.” “I felt like the concept was fantastic and we didn’t nail it,” she said.Andreas Schaad/EPA, via ShutterstockSteier was stunned. “He gave us this insane, like, once in a lifetime shot to rejigger the ‘Zauberflöte,’” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Salzburg Festival, a Polarizing Composer Brings Artists Together

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      A concert series at the Salzburg Festival, along with other events, will celebrate Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday and bring his music to new audiences.The composer Arnold Schönberg revolutionized the course of Western classical music. By dismantling the tonal system of major and minor keys as he self-consciously placed himself in the German tradition, he is also one of the 20th century’s most polarizing figures.The 150th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated this year with exhibits, concerts and workshops. The official birthday concert is scheduled for Sept. 13 at the Musikverein in Vienna, with the monumental “Gurre-Lieder” (“Songs of Gurre”) performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and conducted by its music director, Petr Popelka. Also in September, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York will unveil an exhibit to commemorate the anniversary.And from July 27 to Aug. 24, the Salzburg Festival will present the concert series “Time With Schönberg,” juxtaposing the composer with everyone from his contemporary Maurice Ravel to his disciple Alban Berg.Schönberg’s theories emerged from a forward-looking intellectual climate in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century that included Sigmund Freud and painters such as Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt. The composer would write some of his most important works in Berlin, however, which he also established as a home base starting in 1912. After Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, Schönberg emigrated to Los Angeles, where he spent the last two decades of his life.In Salzburg, the soprano Anna Prohaska, 42, will sing in the expressionist String Quartet No. 2, a work that she has been performing since 2007 and considers a “cornerstone of her career.” Georg Nigl, 52, a bass-baritone, will take on the song cycle “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” a score that has been sitting on his shelf for three decades, and will return to the satirical, late-period work “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte.” The pianist Tamara Stefanovich, 51, will (together with Nenad Lecic) perform the Second Chamber Symphony in a version for two pianos written by the composer after he left Germany.The following conversations have been edited and condensed. Prohaska and Stefanovich were interviewed by phone from Aix-en-Provence, France, and Berlin; Nigl was interviewed in person in Vienna.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Katy Perry’s ‘World’ of Mixed Signals, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bright Eyes, Johnny Blue Skies (a.k.a. Sturgill Simpson), Magdalena Bay and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Katy Perry, ‘Woman’s World’“It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be living in it,” Katy Perry insists in “Woman’s World,” a song with six writers (among them Lukas Gottwald, a.k.a. Dr. Luke, who was behind her blockbuster album “Teenage Dream” before his extended legal battle with Kesha). “Sexy, confident, so intelligent, she is heaven-sent,” Perry sings. “So soft, so strong.” With echoes of Madonna’s 1990s electro-pop, the praise continues throughout this synthesizer-pumped, positive-vibes affirmation of the obvious. It’s too bad the overblown video clip — including a postapocalyptic sequence dotted with social media influencers — doesn’t live up to the euphoric sound.Nelly Furtado and Bomba Estéreo, ‘Corazón’Bomba Estéreo, from Colombia, supplies the beat, flute, chant and Spanish-language bridge behind a cheerfully assertive Nelly Furtado in “Corazon,” from her album “7,” due in September. Floating a blithe, catchy chorus over the Afro-Colombian rhythm, Furtado summons a perpetual, be-here-now party spirit, insisting, “My heart can’t stop.”Bright Eyes, ‘Bells and Whistles’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      France’s Army Is Singing for Ukraine

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      The Choir of the French Army will join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in Paris to show support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.When President Emmanuel Macron of France refused in February to rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine, he shattered a taboo and spooked his NATO allies. But five months later, his statement looks more like a provocation than a promise, and the idea of French boots on the ground seems a distant prospect.There are other ways, however, that France’s military can aid the Ukrainian cause.In a Paris church on Friday, 30 members of the Choir of the French Army will lend their voices to a free concert to honor Ukraine’s fighting spirit.“We are here on a mission,” said the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson during a recent rehearsal for the concert, “a mission to support Ukraine, on the artistic and cultural front.”Then she led the singers of the all-male military choir, joined by 30 female members of a Ukrainian vocal ensemble, through a rendition of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the famous “Ode to Joy.” The massed voices soared in the echoing space.At Friday’s concert, Wilson, a Canadian with Ukrainian roots, will conduct the singers alongside the 74-musician Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in Saint-Eustache church. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the orchestra — some of whose members still live in the country at war — have been coming together each summer to perform across Europe, with Wilson conducting.The concert in Paris is the first stop on the orchestra’s third tour. The ensemble will perform with local choirs when it plays concerts in London, Poland and the United States, where it will perform in Washington and, on Aug. 1, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Soprano Sings ‘the Sound of the Soul’

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      “Un bel dì,” the title character’s great aria in “Madama Butterfly,” begins with the soprano singing a hovering G flat. Puccini writes in the score that the note is to emerge not just pianissimo, or very soft, but also “come da lontano”: as if coming from far away.The opera is about a young Japanese woman convinced that the American naval officer who abandoned her will return, and “Un bel dì” narrates her fantasy of seeing his ship sailing back into the harbor at Nagasaki.At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, Ermonela Jaho condenses that desperate illusion into a haunting filament of tone. What’s more, she sings the note while lying on her back on the floor in this bracingly intimate new production of the beloved work.“The attack on the G flat, it’s like hope is being suspended in midair, it’s a sound like the ship appearing on the horizon,” Daniele Rustioni, who conducts the Lyon Opera Orchestra in the production, said in an interview. “And Ermonela does it. You wait for that moment and she delivers.”Jaho, left, and the tenor Adam Smith, as Pinkteron.Ruth WalzJaho, who turns 50 on July 18, delivers these time-stopping threads of sound again and again at moments like Butterfly’s ethereal entrance, marked even softer than pianissimo; during her love duet with Pinkerton, the callous American officer, when she says that the stars are like eyes, gazing at them; and later, when she insists that when Pinkerton returns, their son’s name will change from Sorrow to Joy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More