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      Gone in a Six-Year Flash: Farewell to the New York Phil’s Maestro

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      The pandemic-derailed tenure of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was too short to give us a full sense of him, as man or maestro.Jaap, we hardly knew ye.On Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted a lean, driven rendition of Mahler’s sprawling Second Symphony. After two more performances through Saturday, he will leave his Lincoln Center podium, a mere six years after stepping onto it.No Philharmonic artistic leader has been less present in front of its players and audience since Mahler himself, who died two years into his tenure, in 1911. There was barely enough time to meet van Zweden, let alone get a full sense of him, as man or maestro.He had no signature initiatives, and his choice of works revealed little personal stamp. His interpretations of the classics only occasionally relaxed from a tense punchiness. And though I wasn’t always displeased after hearing him lead a program, I was never inspired to return and hear it again.The period of van Zweden’s tenure has been hugely consequential for the Philharmonic. There was the orchestra’s survival through the extended pandemic lockdown, the renovation of its home at Geffen Hall and a flood of music by composers beyond the usual roster of white men of the distant past.But van Zweden, 63, has seemed more a participant in all this than a leader. When he was preparing to start in New York, he expressed enthusiasm about bringing back Deborah Borda, an industry legend, as chief executive. Having such a strong, visionary administrative partner, though, ended up making this feel more like Borda’s era than van Zweden’s.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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      My Starting Five Songs From Boston and Dallas

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      Catch the N.B.A. Finals spirit with Erykah Badu, Pixies, Kelly Clarkson and more.Erykah Badu, repping for DallasErik Carter for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last night marked the start of the 2023-2024 N.B.A. Finals, a best-of-seven matchup between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks. As a long-suffering and perpetually annoying fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, I do not really have a horse in this race*, but I also have an excess of energy I would normally reserve for rooting for one of these two teams. I have decided to put that energy to productive use by making a playlist of music by artists from both Boston and Dallas.Consider these musicians my starting five from each city. Both Boston and Dallas have rich and varied musical histories, as you’ll hear in this playlist’s blend of rock, pop, country, R&B, blues and hip-hop. It features bona fide superstars (the Texan Kelly Clarkson; the Dorchesterite Donna Summer) and influential legends (Dallas’s own Stevie Ray Vaughan; the Beantown art-rockers the Pixies). Sure, there are some omissions, but these are just my personal starting fives — and given how many times the ABC broadcast played “Sweet Emotion” when throwing to commercial last night, you’ve probably already hit your Aerosmith quota for the week.Game 1 was quite anticlimactic, with Boston blowing out Dallas 107-89, so hopefully the human Golden Retriever that is Luka Dončić will be able to galvanize his Mavericks into giving us a more competitive series. And if not, well, there’s always this playlist.She knows the highest stakes,Lindsay*Beyond an inborn and semi-irrational distaste for all Boston sports teams, of course.Listen along while you read.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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      Plant and Krauss Cover a Led Zeppelin Classic, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Soccer Mommy, Tems, Floating Points 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.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘When the Levee Breaks’No one is more entitled to cover Led Zeppelin than its singer, Robert Plant. His close-harmony duo with the singer and fiddler Alison Krauss excels at making songs sound far older than they are, and even in 1971, “When the Levee Breaks” harked back to a vintage blues by Memphis Minnie. This live recording is stark, resonant and rumbling, with a fiddle solo by Stuart Duncan that looks toward both Ireland and Morocco and a cranked-up guitar stomp that builds toward — alas! — a frustrating fade-out. JON PARELESCarly Pearce, ‘Truck on Fire’The spoiler is in the title of “Truck on Fire,” a swinging country revenge song from Carly Pearce’s new album, “Hummingbird.” Her voice seethes as she recalls “the way that you laughed it off when I was catching on/Said it was in my head,” and there’s a dark glee (and a product placement) while she watches the “flames rolling off of your Goodyear tires.” PARELESSabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’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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      What’s the Best Way to Honor Sophie in Song?

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      Recent tracks from Charli XCX, A.G. Cook, Caroline Polachek and St. Vincent capture the producer’s philosophy and humanity, but not necessarily her signature sound.When the producer Sophie died at 34 in 2021 after an accidental fall, it felt like a singular loss, as well as the end of a nascent era in electronic music. The innovative Scottish artist, who worked with Charli XCX, Vince Staples and Madonna, was a linchpin of the U.K.’s experimental scene in the 2010s and advocated for a radical reframing of the way creators and listeners think about music. “The language of electronic music shouldn’t still be referencing obsolete instruments like kick drum or clap. No one’s kicking or clapping,” she said in 2014. “It makes more sense in my mind to discard those ideas of polyphony and traditional roles of instrumentation.”Sophie provided a new vernacular, as well as great inspiration, for a generation of acolytes, but her own body of work was relatively small and she rarely spoke to the press, making it hard to imagine where one of pop futurism’s leading lights may have gone next. While many artists, such as the avant-garde pop duo 100 gecs and the German experimental musician Lyra Pramuk, have drawn clear inspiration from Sophie, few have captured the perilous, cutting-edge newness of her work, which reinterpreted pop music codes in disorienting, physical, textural ways.On “Lemonade,” an early calling card, she seemed to craft melody out of the sounds of popping bubbles and hissing gas canisters; “Faceshopping” turns ideas of constructed digital identity into what sounds like a construction site, whirring with the sounds of tearing metal and heavy machinery. Sophie felt that music should be a tactile, unpredictable experience — she memorably said a song should feel like a roller-coaster ride, ending with the listener buying a key ring — but a lot of attempts to reference the “Sophie sound,” like Kim Petras’s 2023 track “Brrr,” reduce the producer’s philosophy to an aesthetic of bulbous bass and scraping synths while still fitting conventional pop forms.“So I,” a song from Charli XCX’s new album, “Brat,” pays tribute to her longtime collaborator Sophie, who died in 2021.Bianca De Marchi/EPA, via ShutterstockFour recent songs by Charli XCX, A.G. Cook, Caroline Polachek and St. Vincent seem to suggest that the best way to pay tribute to a modern titan is not to emulate her at all, but to reinterpret strands of her DNA in hope of alluding to a bigger picture. These tracks reckon with Sophie’s legacy in emotional, rather than technical, ways, acknowledging the humanity within a figure who is often remembered in flattening, counterintuitively rigid portraits.The most trenchant of these songs is “So I,” the wounded core of Charli’s volatile, clubby new record, “Brat.” Over shuddering laser-beam synths — a nod to her past work with Sophie on records like “Vroom Vroom” and “Number 1 Angel” — Charli sings about regretting putting distance between herself and Sophie, whose talent awed her, while she was alive. The song is nakedly vulnerable, almost power ballad-esque in the way it builds, resembling one of Sophie’s best-known tracks: “It’s OK to Cry,” the song with which she came out as transgender and revealed her face to the public for the first time. Charli makes the link explicit on the track’s chorus: “I know you always said ‘It’s OK to cry’/So I know I can cry.”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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      Jennifer Lopez and Black Keys Tour Cancellations Raise Questions for Industry

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      High-profile cancellations from Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys have armchair analysts talking. But industry insiders say live music is still thriving.For the concert business, 2023 was a champagne-popping year. The worst of the pandemic comfortably in the rearview, shows big and small were selling out, with mega-tours by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Drake and Bruce Springsteen pushing the industry to record ticket sales.This year, as with much of the economy, success on the road seems more fragile. A string of high-profile cancellations, and slow sales for some major events, have raised questions about an overcrowded market and whether ticket prices have simply gotten too expensive.Most conspicuously, Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys have canceled entire arena tours. In the case of the Black Keys — a standby of rock radio and a popular touring draw for nearly two decades — the fallout has been severe enough that the band dismissed its two managers, the industry giant Irving Azoff and Steve Moir, those men confirmed through a representative.At Coachella, usually so buzzy that it sells out well before any performers are announced, tickets for the second of the California festival’s two weekends were still available by the time it opened in April.Those issues have stoked headlines about a concert business that may be in trouble. But the reality, many insiders say, is more complex, with no simple explanation for problems on a range of tours, and a business that may be leveling out after a couple of extraordinary years when fans rushed to shows after Covid-19 shutdowns.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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      ‘The Spark’: How Irish Kids Created the Song of Summer

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      Think you can stop what they do? I doubt it.It started with the beat, Heidi White said.On a March day at The Kabin Studio, an arts nonprofit in Cork, Ireland, Heidi, 11, and a group of other children were trying to write a rap with the help of Garry McCarthy, who is a music producer and Kabin Studio’s creative director. It was part of a weekly songwriting program.“It’s a safe space for young people in the community to come create music, hang out and just to make bangers,” Mr. McCarthy said.On this day, the group was trying to write an anthem for Cruinniú na nÓg, a government-sponsored day in Ireland devoted to children’s creativity, scheduled for June 15. Everyone was feeling a little shy and the ideas weren’t exactly flowing, Heidi said.“Then Garry had put on a drum-and-bass beat, and suddenly it was like a switch flipped and everyone started getting involved,” she said. “It was like magic.”That infectious beat has also captivated viewers around the world. The group’s song, “The Spark,” has become a sensation on social media, hailed by some on TikTok as an early contender for song of the summer. (This isn’t the first time a tune made for social media has been praised as such. See here: A 2023 earworm about margaritas.)What could have easily sounded grating to adult ears — think Kidz Bop — is instead unrelentingly catchy. The song’s accompanying music video, which culminates in all of the kids rapping, loudly, in unison on the top deck of a bus, is utterly charming.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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      Wiener Festwochen Says ‘No Excuses Anymore’ for Inequality

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      In Vienna, a series of concerts and summits will highlight women and nonbinary composers, as well as the dominance of the dead, white, male canon.In the world of classical music, progress toward gender parity can seem incredibly slow.Recent big wins have included women of the New York Philharmonic being allowed to perform in pants, and the appointment of the second woman — ever — to a music director role at one of the 25 largest orchestras in the United States. The Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s great ensembles, hired its first female concertmaster last year.Frustrated by the stubborn gender imbalances in classical music, the directors of the Wiener Festwochen, a prestigious arts festival in Vienna, have this year formed the “Academy Second Modernism,” an initiative that will showcase works by 50 female and nonbinary composers over five years.This season, less than 8 percent of approximately 16,000 works staged by 111 orchestras worldwide were composed by women, according to a report from Donne, Women in Music, an organization working for equity in the classical music industry. Of those works, the vast majority were composed by white women.According to the report, three of the 10 orchestras that performed the highest proportion of works composed by women were in the United States: the American Composers Orchestra in New York, the Chicago Sinfonietta and National Philharmonic in North Bethesda, Md. But at the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, two of America’s top orchestras, only about 10 percent of the music programmed was composed by women.“There are so many of us,” said Bushra El-Turk, a British-Lebanese composer who often merges Western and Eastern musical traditions in her work. “Whether we’re given opportunities is the problem.”Rehearsing El-Turk’s opera “Woman at Point Zero,” in Vienna last month.David Payr for The New York TimesWe 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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      Julia Fox: The Popcast (Deluxe) Interview

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, features an interview with the actress and downtown New York icon Julia Fox, speaking on a range of topics, including:Her appearance in the recent Charli XCX music video, “360,” with a slew of other “It Girls”Being the anti-“It Girl”Making decisions after starring in the movie “Uncut Gems,” along Adam Sandler, to right-size her fameHow motherhood has changed her relationship to adventureUpcoming acting projectsHow being transparent about her wild teen years shapes how she presents nowWhat she learned, good and bad, from her relationship with Kanye WestHer new song, “Down the Drain”Pop songs made by It Girl icons Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Addison Rae, Kim Kardashian, Farrah Abraham and Naomi CampbellTrying on different creative costumes, from acting to TV hosting to musicHer favorite magazines and online mediaWhat she learned from her infamous viral apartment tour videoSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More