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      It’s Drake vs. Everybody … Who’s Winning?

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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, includes segments on:The tensions brewing among hip-hop’s biggest stars, beginning with Kendrick Lamar’s sideways lyrics about Drake, which have led to a full-scale recalibration of genre alliancesDrake’s leaked response to LamarHow other artists like Future, the Weeknd and Rick Ross have jumped in the fray, all lining up against DrakeHow hip-hop’s recent squabbles are a life raft for late-career artistsWhether the “Big 3” — how people once referred to the grouping of top hip-hop stars Drake, Lamar and J. Cole — was ever really as stable as advertisedSongs of the week from Peso Pluma featuring Arcángel, Sky Ferreira and NLE ChoppaSnack 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

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      Sons of Paul McCartney and John Lennon Release New Song

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      James McCartney teamed with Sean Ono Lennon for “Primrose Hill,” a ballad with echoes of the Beatles aesthetic.For six decades, the partnership summarized by the songwriting credit “Lennon-McCartney” has been pop music’s gold standard. So there was some surprise last week when fans woke up to a brand-new track from McCartney and Lennon — if not the same duo.James McCartney, the son of Linda McCartney and the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, released the song, “Primrose Hill,” last Thursday. He co-wrote it with Sean Ono Lennon, the son of Yoko Ono and the Beatles’ John Lennon.James, 46, announced the single — a dreamy ballad with echoes of the Beatles’ style — on social media the day after its release. Its B-side, “Beautiful,” came out in February.“With the release of this song it feels like we’re really getting the ball rolling and I am so excited to continue to share music with you,” he wrote.James began releasing his own music with a 2010 EP titled “Available Light,” which he recorded partly at Abbey Road. His first full album, “Me” from 2013, was produced by David Kahne, a former record executive who has worked with the Strokes, Linkin Park, Lana Del Rey and yes, Paul McCartney. (The album featured vocals, guitar and drums from his father.) Its follow-up, “The Blackberry Train,” came out in 2016. James previously contributed to albums by both of his parents, including “Flaming Pie” and “Wide Prairie.”Through a representative, McCartney and Ono Lennon declined to comment on the new track.Paul McCartney did tout his son’s fresh work on social media, adding: “lots of love to Sean Ono Lennon.”Perhaps the most poignant reaction to the track, and to the opportunity and burden of the Beatles legacy, came from yet another band scion: the drummer Zak Starkey, who is the son of the drummer Ringo Starr.One observer had ruefully commented on an Instagram post from an unofficial Paul McCartney fan account, “Sad ya can’t just walk your own road.”Starkey — an accomplished drummer who has toured with the Who and Oasis — replied, the Beatles are a “wall u cannot go thru over or under — I was 25 when I came to terms with that.” More

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      Nadia Boulanger, Music’s Greatest Teacher, Wrote an Opera

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      Nadia Boulanger’s “La Ville Morte” was repeatedly thwarted by death and World War I, then nearly lost. Finally, it is having its American premiere.In March 1912, the famous violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe visited the home of his fellow musician Raoul Pugno in Paris. At the piano, Pugno played and sang through “La Ville Morte,” an opera he was writing with Nadia Boulanger, a mentee-turned-collaborator 35 years his junior.“Of this very private performance,” Ysaÿe wrote to Boulanger later that month, “I keep the most profound and happiest impression.” The opera, he told her, was “so beautiful, so sound, so poignant.”“La Ville Morte” was the most ambitious project of Boulanger’s young composing career. And once it took shape, with a piano-vocal score completed that summer, she wrote under the final measures, “Alleluia!!!!”But one thing after another kept “La Ville Morte” from reaching the stage. In 1914, Pugno, an essential partner in selling it to the public, died. World War I broke out, delaying the planned premiere, not for the last time. Several years later, Boulanger’s dear sister, the composer Lili Boulanger, died, too, and Nadia virtually stopped writing or promoting her own music.Robin Guarino, center, the director of “La Ville Morte” for Catapult Opera, rehearses with the singers. Guarino said she was amazed by the score and the “feminism sizzling under the surface.”Ava Pellor for The New York TimesBoulanger would instead go on to become one of the greatest music teachers in history — a formative figure for titans of the 20th century, like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter, and other legends, including Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach and Philip Glass.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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      Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival to Focus on Civic Bonds

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      The third edition of Summer for the City will feature hip-hop, comedy, classical music and more, under the motto “life, liberty and happiness.”Lincoln Center said on Wednesday that it would devote its summer festival to themes of community and civic participation, with a mix of hip-hop, comedy, dance, classical music and more under the motto “life, liberty and happiness.”The festival, Summer for the City, will feature premieres of anthems about contemporary hopes and struggles. Classical music concerts will be more participatory than in the past; at one event, audience members will be asked to vote on the program. And civil rights will be prominent, with the New York premiere of an opera about Eric Garner, who died in 2014 at the hands of police officers on Staten Island.“We know the performing arts have a role in strengthening our community and strengthening our civic bonds,” Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “This is a time where we can really be together and celebrate the ideas and ideals that we all share.”The third edition of the festival, which will run from June 12 to Aug. 10, is part of the center’s efforts to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd, in part by promoting a broader array of genres, including pop music and social dance.Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the center has shifted its focus from classical music and international theater, prompting some criticism that it is not doing enough to promote traditional offerings. (Timms will depart his post in August; a search for his successor is in progress.)After eliminating the Mostly Mozart Festival, a summer fixture since the 1970s, Lincoln Center renamed the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, saying that it was time to reimagine the ensemble for a modern and more inclusive age. This season, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, as the ensemble is now called, will convene for the first time under the rising conductor Jonathon Heyward.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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      Taylor Swift Sells a Rainbow of Vinyl Albums. Fans Keep Buying Them.

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      Artists across pop genres are finding success with colored vinyl and different variants of their releases. For Swifties, the urge to collect them all is strong.When Taylor Swift released nine vinyl editions of her album “Folklore” in 2020, Tylor Hammers, a fan in Florida, took notice. But it wasn’t until “Midnights” two years later that he became a true collector, scouring the internet and retail shops for every variation of her albums he could find — spending about $1,000 in the process — and cataloging the technicolor expanse of Swift’s LP output in an online discography.“I get enjoyment out of being a completionist,” Hammers, 24, said in a recent interview.He’s not the only one.Although streaming remains the dominant music format, physical media has been a growing niche where the industry can cater to so-called superfans, who express their dedication to artists by shelling out big bucks for collectible versions of new releases, sometimes in multiple quantities. K-pop acts like BTS pioneered this strategy by putting out an array of elaborate CD packages, often featuring goodies like postcards and photo booklets, which helped the boy band repeatedly go to No. 1.But nobody does it quite like Swift, or at least at the same scale. Last year she sold 3.5 million LPs in the United States, thanks in part to five pastel-hued variants of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, and the popularity of Swift’s entire catalog during her record-breaking Eras Tour.When Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out on Friday, it will be available in a portfolio of different versions — on vinyl, CD and even cassette — with bonus tracks and, on certain “deluxe” editions sold through Swift’s website, trinkets like magnets, photo cards and engraved bookmarks. Some items, like a standard CD, go for as little as $13. But last weekend, Swift’s site offered a limited run of autographed LPs for $50, which, according to fans on social media, vanished in 20 minutes.“The Tortured Poets Department” comes out on Friday in a number of different versions and formats including CD, left, and cassette. 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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      FKA twigs Dances Martha Graham: ‘This Is Art in Its Truest Form’

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      Once a young bunhead, the acclaimed musical artist is taking the stage with the Martha Graham Dance Company. For her, it’s holy grail territory.The rebellious spirit of Martha Graham has found a rebellious soul mate in another creative powerhouse. A classically trained dancer, she’s known in the world as an acclaimed recording artist. She moves like water. Her pole dancing is pretty astounding, too. This is FKA twigs.On Thursday, she will make her debut as a dancer with the Graham company in the solo “Satyric Festival Song” (1932). “To me, this is, honestly, like winning a Grammy,” she said. “I feel like I’m winning a Grammy.”At the company’s gala performance, FKA twigs will slip into her costume, a bold and graphic striped dress designed by Graham. She will pop into the air as if the floor were on fire. She will twist and bend her body into jagged edges. And she will tease the audience with tilts of the head and dancing, expressive eyes. This is a solo inspired by rituals that Graham observed in the pueblos of the American Southwest, specifically, the kachina figures that served as comic relief at religious ceremonies. Graham was also poking fun at her serious, dramatic self.“To me, this is, honestly, like winning a Grammy,” FKA twigs said of dancing with the Graham company.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesAn artist of vast imagination whose music defies genre, FKA twigs is adventurous in all of her pursuits. Her shimmering, fluent physicality, displayed over the years in videos and performances, is equally fearless and lissome. “My values of success and achievement are maybe slightly different to other people’s,” FKA twigs said in an interview from London. Many of her colleagues will be at Coachella over the next two weeks, “which is obviously such an honor,” she said. “But I’ve spent the whole of my life in the dance studio. I studied Martha Graham’s technique at dance school. I took the class many times when I was a younger dancer.”The Graham company, though, didn’t know she had studied the technique. So how did this solo happen? Through that unofficial dance network known as Instagram.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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      Anthony Davis Puts His Operatic Spin on Edith Wharton

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      Anthony Davis has written operas based on recent history. But now he is adapting, and dramatically changing, Wharton’s 1912 novel “The Reef.”The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.“The Reef,” Davis’s latest music drama to arrive onstage and his follow-up to “The Central Park Five,” seems more fitting in that literary cohort. That is, once it’s finished. Still in progress, the piece dipped its toes into the world by way of a recent workshop performance at Merkin Hall, presented by the Berkshire Opera Festival.Adapted from Edith Wharton’s 1912 novel of the same name, “The Reef,” with a libretto by Joan Ross Sorkin, has been in development, in fits and starts, since 2014. (Since then, Davis premiered “The Central Park Five” and revised the score of “X,” ahead of its traveling revival.)At the Merkin performance, the work departed significantly from Wharton’s text. For one thing, it’s set in Martinique rather than in Paris or the French countryside. The novel’s love-triangle treatment of romance, late Victorian propriety and social class has also been altered by a change of one character’s racial identity: The demimonde-adjacent Sophy is, in Davis and Sorkin’s version, the nursemaid Sonya, a biracial member of the sugar-cane estate’s domestic staff. A quartet of other Black workers on the estate, named the Invisibles, has also been added to the mix. The opera’s creators are toying with the idea of setting their story in 1928 to make more of the Jazz Age’s emergence.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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      La Scala Opera Taps Fortunato Ortombina to Succeed Dominique Meyer

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      Fortunato Ortombina, the general director of Teatro La Fenice, Venice’s opera house, will succeed Dominique Meyer, a respected French impresario.The Teatro alla Scala in Milan, one of the world’s most prestigious and storied opera houses, announced Tuesday that its next leader would be Fortunato Ortombina, who is currently general director of Venice’s opera house, Teatro La Fenice.Ortombina will succeed Dominique Meyer, a respected French impresario who has run La Scala since 2020 and who previously led the Vienna State Opera. The appointment of Ortombina comes as Italy’s current national government has made it clear that it favors homegrown talent over foreigners at major cultural posts.“A decision has finally been reached,” Mayor Giuseppe Sala of Milan, who is the chairman of the foundation that runs the opera house, said Tuesday after a board meeting. The appointment of Ortombina ended months of speculation and whispers in the opera world.Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, enthusiastically welcomed the appointment on Tuesday. “After three foreign general directors, Stéphane Lissner, Alexander Pereira and Dominique Meyer, an Italian returns to La Scala,” he said in a statement, which noted that the practice of Italian opera singing had recently been added to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list.Ortombina’s appointment was unanimous, Sala said Tuesday. It was widely expected, and followed months of rejected candidates, crossed vetoes pitting board members against lawmakers at the local and national levels, and even a new law instituting age limits for theater leaders that critics said was intended to oust the foreigners who hold such posts.The haggling had risked putting politics and vested interests ahead of the theater’s artistic legacy, said Alberto Mattioli, an opera critic who recently published a book about Italy’s opera houses and their history. “It’s all been a power game” over appointments, while omitting discussion of cultural policy or a vision for the theater and its “core business, opera,” he 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