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      A Death-Driven ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Bayreuth Festival

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      Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany is an excellently conducted puzzle of grim symbols.Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is not a love story. It’s a death story.It’s an opera in which the central duet is an ecstatic, philosophical declaration of love through a pledge of mutual death. Tristan, his name itself rooted in sadness, welcomes his end as a release; the greatest act of devotion, for Isolde, would be to join him in a state of love transfigured.OK, maybe “Tristan” is both a love story and a death story.Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s new production, at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, emphasizes the death part more. (People in the country can stream it on BR Klassik.) He sets the opera in a purgatorial space and, instead of spiritual transformation, portrays a scarcely transcendent suicide, an act of self-destruction in service of love.It’s a bleak but still Romantic outlook, conveyed with stubborn opacity and a loose grip of the dramaturgy. A director’s vision, though, is just one reason to visit Bayreuth, the pilgrimage-like festival that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago.This “Tristan” belongs, above all, to the conductor Semyon Bychkov. He previously led “Parsifal” at Bayreuth with shocking speed, but he did something like the opposite here: not necessarily stretching the score, but relishing key moments to guide the audience’s emotions as commandingly as Wagner intended. At times, the passion was tidal; at others, teeming with anticipation.(Bychkov is in good company. The festival has had its share of conductor missteps in recent years, but the evening before I saw “Tristan,” Simone Young led a masterly “Götterdämmerung”; elsewhere at Bayreuth, Pablo Heras-Casado is returning for “Parsifal”; Nathalie Stutzmann is picking up a “Tannhäuser” once botched by Valery Gergiev; and Oksana Lyniv continues her fiery “Der Fliegende Holländer.” With three female conductors out of five total, Bayreuth’s gender distribution is applaudably better than many in classical music and opera.)Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s production abstracts parts of a ruined ship that, by the third act, is broken up and scattered around the stage.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleWe 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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      Why the Runaways’ Jackie Fox Made a Rock ’n’ Roll Board Game

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      The teenage bassist of the Runaways cut her music career short in 1977. Rather than retell her story, she’s reimagined it as a board game, Rock Hard: 1977.Jackie Fox grew up with a guitar in her hand. In 1975, when she was 15 years old, she was pulled off the dance floor at a Hollywood nightclub and recruited to join an all-girl teen rock band. The Runaways became a sensation and tossed Fox and her young bandmates into a turbulent industry that was also violent and sexist. In 1977, Fox quit the band. She never played music professionally again.Now, almost 50 years later, Fox has recast her experience in the form of a board game. In Rock Hard: 1977, Fox has shrunk the chaotic ’70s club scene to the size of a card table. She has written her own rules, anointed new kinds of rock stars and assumed control. Now she can play on her own terms — and win.“As soon as I decided I was going to design a game, I knew it was going to be about becoming a rock star,” Fox, 64, said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home earlier this week. “People have been asking me to ‘tell my story,’ and there are a lot of reasons why I don’t want to sit down and write a book.” After all the years she has spent living and reliving that experience, she wanted to reimagine it — to create a situation where she could have fun.From left: Joan Jett, Fox, Cherie Currie, Sandy West and Lita Ford of the Runaways onstage in 1976 at CBGBs.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn the game, you play one of 10 characters who are, much like Fox was, musicians on the verge of stardom in 1977. (They each have excellent hair.) As you roll the dice and pull cards, your rock hopeful hops around a board from day job to rehearsal studio, vying to achieve personal goals while growing your reputation and writing songs. Points are tallied on a board styled like an amp that turns up to 11.As your avatar works her way up from bar mitzvahs to arena stages, you navigate managers, journalists, D.J.s and fans. The game’s protagonists are largely not the white men who dominated the rock scene in the 1970s, but characters representing the diverse musicians who played in clubs and toiled in studios, angling for their shot. You can play as Yolanda Delacroix, an Afro-Cuban studio musician, or “Doc” Sapphire, the androgynous child of Indian immigrants, and the game play is tuned slightly to reflect their experiences.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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      How a ‘Dirty Gospel’ Minister Spends His Sundays

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      The Reverend Vince Anderson, a mainstay of the Brooklyn music scene, fills his day with worship in two languages, the Mets and a full hour of watering his 92 houseplants.When most people picture a minister, Vince Anderson is not who comes to mind.He curses. He wears caftans. He has played a “dirty gospel” residency with his six-member band, The Love Choir, on Monday nights for the past 26 years, a majority of them at the Union Pool bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His signature song is “Get Out of My Way,” a growling, percussive call-and-response anthem he wrote in 2000. (He used to get naked by the end of every show; he stopped in the mid-2000s.)Mr. Anderson, 53, who left seminary after three months in 1994 to pursue music, is the minister of music and community arts at Bushwick Abbey, an Episcopal church in Brooklyn, and plays the piano for Sunday services at Iglesia de la Santa Cruz, a Spanish-speaking congregation in the same building.Known as Reverend Vince, Mr. Anderson said he was ordained in 2003. He has played with all of his band members since at least about that time, and he said they’ve never had a rehearsal. “Once in a while I send the band a crude recording, but most of the time I just play a new song once onstage for the first time on piano, and they kind of get it, and then we go into it,” he said.He was the subject of a 2022 documentary, “The Reverend,” which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the Criterion Channel. He lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens — about a 15-minute walk from his Bushwick congregations — with his wife of five years, Millicent Souris, 50, a cook and a writer, and their 3-month-old rescue kittens, Ace and Sonny.DAILY DEVOTIONS I wake up around 7 a.m. — lately I’ve been trying to keep my phone out of my bedroom, so I just use my Apple Watch for an alarm — and read a book or some psalms. I’m currently reading “Wandering Stars,” Tommy Orange’s new novel. I let the kittens come in and cuddle with me for a minute. Rather than doomscrolling, I’m trying to just be thankful and count my blessings; it’s important to me to be present in the moment to start my day.GETTING CENTERED I started drawing mandalas during my recovery from spinal surgery in January (I had five herniated discs in my spine, all from me playing piano) and I’ve kept it up. I’ll paint or draw something in a circle, which gives me focus. It opens up the spiritual side of me and gets the creative side of me flowing in a different way than music does.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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      Aerosmith Retires From Touring, Citing Steven Tyler’s Vocal Injury

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      Last year, the band’s frontman, Steven Tyler, suffered a vocal injury during a show, and the farewell tour was postponed. The band announced its retirement on Friday, saying a full recovery was not possible.Aerosmith, the venerated American hard rock band whose hit records like “Dream On” have reverberated across the airwaves and in sweaty sold-out venues around the world for more than half a century, announced Friday that it was retiring from the tour stage, citing a permanent vocal injury to its star frontman, Steven Tyler.“He has spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before his injury,” the band said in a statement on its website. “We’ve seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear, that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible. We have made a heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision — as a band of brothers — to retire from the touring stage.”An email message sent to a representative for the band on Friday night was not immediately returned.The announcement came ahead of the band’s “Peace Out” farewell tour, which had been set to begin in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20 and run through February at stops in the United States and in Canada, including a performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Feb. 23, 2025. The band’s final tour stop was scheduled for Buffalo on Feb 26.The tour had been postponed to later this year after Tyler, 76, hurt his vocal cords during the band’s Sept. 9, 2023, show at UBS Arena on Long Island. The band said that it had decided to postpone the tour until this year because the injury turned out to be more serious than initially thought and involved a fractured larynx in addition to the vocal cord damage.Fans who purchased tickets through Ticketmaster will receive automatic refunds, the band said. People who bought tickets via third-party sites were asked to contact those vendors. More

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      Benjamin Luxon, British Baritone Thwarted by Hearing Loss, Dies at 87

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      A favorite of Benjamin Britten, he won acclaim in roles like Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin and Falstaff until his affliction forced him to largely give up singing.Benjamin Luxon, a warm-voiced British baritone who was admired for his singing of German and British song and his robust opera performances, but whose flourishing career was cut short by encroaching deafness, died on July 25 at his home in Sandisfield, Mass. He was 87.His son Daniel said the cause was colon cancer.At the height of his career, in the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Luxon was one of the most sought-after singers on British, American and continental operatic stages, in roles like Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin and Falstaff, as well as in the operas of Benjamin Britten.Mr. Britten created the title role of the 1971 television opera “Owen Wingrave,” based on a Henry James short story, specifically for Mr. Luxon. Mr. Luxon’s thoughtful singing of Schubert, Hugo Wolf and English song was praised by critics in England and the U.S. for its subtlety.Mr. Luxon in the English National Opera’s production of “Falstaff” in 1994, around the time he was forced to largely give up singing. “The problem is that most of my high-frequency hearing has gone,” he said at the time.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty ImagesHe moved with ease among folk song, art song and even English music hall favorites, explaining to interviewers that he had grown up singing in church and school choirs in his native Cornwall in England. “It was like breathing, it was like second nature to me,” he said.But his singing days were curtailed when, in the late 1980s, he developed a hearing affliction that led to partial deafness and some disastrous misfires on the recital stage. He bore the condition stoically, but by the mid-1990s he was forced to largely give up singing despite using a hearing aid.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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      After Olympic Show, ‘Love Activist’ D.J. Barbara Butch Deals With Hate

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      The Paris Olympics opening ceremony made the French D.J. Barbara Butch famous and infamous around the world. Already known in France as an outspoken lesbian and activist for fat people, Butch — her stage name, of course — appeared with a crown and her mixing board in one of the last scenes, called “Festivity.”For 45 minutes, dancers, including drag queens, showcased their talent along a raised catwalk that stretched down the stage before, at the very end, the French singer Philippe Katerine emerged from under a giant silver dome, painted entirely in blue and wearing little clothing, to sing part of “Nude,” one of his songs.The scene incited an almost instant public fury, particularly among those who interpreted it as parodying Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and, by extension, mocking Christianity. Even after the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, explained the inspiration was a grand pagan festival connected to the gods of Olympus, the fury continued, with Donald J. Trump calling the scene “a disgrace” on social media.On Monday, Butch filed a complaint for cyber-harassment, and the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation for discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation. The next day, Jolly followed suit, and an investigation was opened into his case, too.Delegations arrive at the Trocadero during the Olympics opening ceremony as spectators watch the French singer Philippe Katerine performing on a giant screen.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesButch has become accustomed to hate, though not at this level. She is a Jew from a working-class family who grew up in a small apartment above her parents’ restaurant in Paris, and antisemitism had provoked her grandmother to leave France for Israel years ago, 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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      Who’s Afraid of Being Black? Not Kamala, Beyoncé or Kendrick.

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      With her response to Donald Trump’s comments about her background, Kamala Harris showed that Blackness doesn’t need to be explained or defended — an idea underscored by her campaign theme song.Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t take the race bait.A few hours after Donald J. Trump falsely claimed that she suddenly decided to become “a Black person,” Ms. Harris reminded the crowd at a Black sorority convention in Houston that Mr. Trump was resorting to a familiar script. It was the “same old show,” she said, of “divisiveness and disrespect.”She chose not to deflect attention away from her multicultural heritage or to double down on it. That tactic nullified an implication that being Black is something that needs to be authenticated, explained, disavowed or defended. It underscored that Blackness isn’t something that can be turned on or off.Like Ms. Harris, my father is the child of an Indian mother and a Black father. Both he and his parents were born in and emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago. Because of him, I saw up close what Ms. Harris is conveying: that it’s possible to refuse to pit one heritage against the other even as you embrace Blackness as your primary political identity.“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Ms. Harris wrote in “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” her 2019 memoir. “She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”Ms. Harris, like my dad, considers her Blackness something to be celebrated and, at times, protected.Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar perform her song “Freedom,” now used by the Kamala Harris campaign, at the BET Awards in 2016.Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated PressWe 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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      Untitled (The Playlist)

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      Hear songs with no firm names from the Cure, D’Angelo, Kate Bollinger and more.Robert Smith of the Cure.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,Today, Jack White released a new solo album named “No Name,” joining the ranks of the many artists throughout history who have finished a piece of music and, confronted with the challenge of giving it an all-encompassing title, simply shrugged and said, “I’d rather not.” Elliott Smith, for example, had a whole numbered series of “No Name” songs, while the Breeders called their 2002 album “Title TK,” publishing shorthand for “to come later.” The rapper Noname has confused things further, cheekily titling a recent song “Namesake.” The mind boggles.But when it comes to music without a name, one particular title has been used more often than any other: “Untitled.” And so we have arrived at the theme of today’s playlist, filled entirely with untitled tracks.“Untitled,” that neutrally toned cop-out of a name, has been used by all kinds of artists past and present, Interpol, R.E.M. and Mk.gee among them. To call a song “Untitled” can be either pretentious or practical, depending on the ear of the beholder. Sometimes, as on Kendrick Lamar’s demo collection “Untitled Unmastered,” it’s used to suggest that there is a certain rough, unpolished quality to the material. Other times, as illustrated here in songs by Kate Bollinger and the Cure, a lack of a title echoes a narrator’s struggle to communicate the right sentiment. Every so often, it’s all a bit of a lark. Consider the playful wink that D’Angelo gave this whole phenomenon when he titled what is perhaps his most famous song, “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”What’s in a name? These nine songs just might make you wonder. For all their differences, though, they share an understanding that an untitled song lets the music speak for itself.Never quite said what I wanted to say to you,LindsayListen 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