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      Review: Two Electric Debuts at the New York Philharmonic

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      An exciting program featured the conductor Elim Chan and the cellist Sol Gabetta in a pairing of music by Martinu and Rimsky-Korsakov.At a time when many orchestras are relying on entrenched repertoire and beloved artists to shore up their dwindling audiences, the New York Philharmonic on Thursday night offered three thrilling new perspectives — two from younger, female performers making their Philharmonic debuts, the third a world premiere.One of the debuting artists was the dynamic conductor Elim Chan. Born in Hong Kong, trained in the United States and already a sensation in Europe, Chan walked to the podium with confidence. Her physical ease was justified: She showed up to her first gig with the Philharmonic fully ready to harness its forces.She opened the program with the string orchestra version of “Pisachi,” commissioned by the Philharmonic from the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Originally written for the string quartet Ethel, “Pisachi” (pronounced “pih-SAH-chee”) pays homage to the desert landscape of the Southwest and the music of the Hopi and Pueblo peoples.“Pisachi” alternates between hushed, singing harmonics and piquant rhythms painted in impassioned tremolos and spiky pizzicatos. Tate’s gifts for texture and color are intensely rendered in Ethel’s feisty 2015 recording; the Philharmonic’s version was plusher. Still, Chan drew out all of Tate’s biting phrases; conducting with just her hands, her fingers fluttered in the air.The Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta made her Philharmonic debut, in Bohuslav Martinu’s First Cello Concerto.Chris LeeChan was then joined by the Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta, also making her Philharmonic debut, in Bohuslav Martinu’s First Cello Concerto — enough of a rarity that it might as well be another piece of new music. (The Philharmonic last performed it in 1976.)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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      Kamasi Washington’s Ecstatic Return, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by 4batz featuring Drake, Salt Cathedral, Swamp Dogg 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.Kamasi Washington, ‘Prologue’“Prologue” is actually the final track on Kamasi Washington’s coming album, “Fearless Movement,” and it’s dense and bustling. Double time drumming, frenetic percussion and hyperactive keyboard counterpoint roil around a melody that rises resolutely over descending chords, while breakneck solos from Dontae Winslow on trumpet and Washington on saxophone exult in sheer agility and emotional peaks. JON PARELESShabazz Palaces and Lavarr the Starr, ‘Take Me to Your Leader’Shabazz Palaces — Ishmael Butler from Digable Planets — sets up a sci-fi scenario in “Take Me to Your Leader” from his album due March 29, “Exotic Birds of Prey.” He and a guest rapper, Lavarr the Starr, have to convince a powerful, mysterious queen that “our race deserves to survive.” Amid blipping electronics and slow-pulsing bass, with voices warped by echoes and effects, they set out a strategy of gifts, philosophizing, seduction and “a steady-bumping beat she can freak with.” PARELESSalt Cathedral, ‘Off the Walls’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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      Review: Igor Levit Wields Orchestral Power With Just a Piano

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      For his latest Carnegie Hall appearance, Levit played solo piano transcriptions of symphonic works by Mahler and Beethoven.Igor Levit, a pianist of awe-inspiring insight and redoubtable technique, decided to conduct himself during his solo recital at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.He was playing the Nocturne from Hindemith’s “Suite 1922,” a collection of five genre pieces like marches and rags, and there are a few moments in which the pianist only needs to use one hand. Gesturing with his left one in a downward pressing motion, he seemed to tell himself, “Gentle, gentle,” as he plucked starlight off the page and dispersed it through the air.When Levit is onstage, he seems to be in his own world. He scratches his nose, nods approvingly as a piece closes and shakes out the strain in his hands from a particularly grueling program. He doesn’t make a show of inviting the audience along; rather, he leaves the door cracked open for anyone who wants to join.Such physical quirks are of a piece with the prodigious concentration and individuality of Levit’s performances. He makes music his own and illuminates it for others. His confidence and decisiveness allow a listener to hear a piece’s architecture, the way individual figures become phrases and then entire sections.At Carnegie, Levit tested his focus and stamina with piano transcriptions of well-known symphonic works. The program opened with the relatively brief Hindemith suite before diving headlong into Ronald Stevenson’s adaptation of the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony and a nearly hourlong rendition of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, in a solo version by Liszt.It was a display of earth-rattling strength. Octaves in contrary motion smoked with ferocity in the Hindemith, and sforzandos in the Beethoven reintroduced audiences to the elemental wildness of a composer of repertory standards. Levit’s New York appearances last season, in music by Shostakovich and Morton Feldman, deployed his concentration in service of witty élan and meditative stillness. But Thursday’s recital was pure might.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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      Ariana Grande’s Album ‘Eternal Sunshine’ Spins Heartbreak Into Gold

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      The pop star sets the end of a romance and the start of a new one to a soundtrack awash in lavish atmosphere and adventurous melodies, with help from Max Martin.In 2019, the altitudinous-voiced pop star Ariana Grande released an exquisitely unbothered breakup song titled “Thank U, Next” — a light, chiming smash that mentioned several of her famous exes by name and then blithely banished them from her heart forever with a wink and a smile.But the heartache that fuels her seventh album, “Eternal Sunshine,” is of a considerably deeper variety; it even takes its name from Michel Gondry’s 2004 movie about the impossible fantasy of purging a past relationship from memory. “I try to wipe my mind, just so I feel less insane,” Grande, 30, sings on its skittering, mid-tempo title track. The potent melancholy that suffuses the song, and much of the album, tells you about how well that went.“Eternal Sunshine” is Grande’s first album in over three years, which is a considerable pause after a prolific stretch where she put out a hit LP nearly annually. She followed the poised, polished “Sweetener” in 2018 with two quickly produced albums that felt more off-the-cuff and conversational: the intimate and revelatory “Thank U, Next” and the love-struck but less consistent “Positions.”Since then, she got divorced from her husband of two years, Dalton Gomez, and started a romance with Ethan Slater, her co-star in the upcoming movie version of the hit musical “Wicked.” An overall narrative arc of heartbreak and new love unfolds on “Eternal Sunshine.” But, in a departure from her last several albums — one of which featured a song named for Pete Davidson, the comedian to whom she was then engaged — Grande stops short of explicit nods to autobiography and lets sweeping, wholehearted emotion tell the story.“Eternal Sunshine” is Grande’s most sustained collaboration with pop’s own Wizard of Oz, the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, with whom she wrote or produced 11 of its 13 tracks. (Ilya Salmanzadeh, a longtime collaborator of both Grande and Martin, also helped write and produce much of the album.) Unsurprisingly, this is one of Grande’s most meticulously crafted and texturally consistent releases — it sounds as expensive as the gleaming treasures she sang about on “7 Rings” — though it lacks the whispered asides, rough edges and irreverent humor that made those last two albums so fun. Still, “Eternal Sunshine” is awash in lavish atmosphere, adventurous melodies and an emotional weight that brings a new sophistication to Grande’s songcraft.On a brief introduction subtitled “End of the World,” Grande expresses doubts about a relationship and pops a burning question in the glowing lower depths of her register: “If it all ended tomorrow, would I be the one on your mind?” The answer lies in the title of the following song: “Bye.”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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      Steve Lawrence, Who Sang His Listeners Down Memory Lane, Dies at 88

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      With his wife, Eydie Gorme, and sometimes on his own, he kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime. He also acted on television and on Broadway.Steve Lawrence, the mellow baritone nightclub, television and recording star who with his wife and partner, the soprano Eydie Gorme, kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime and took America on musical walks down memory lane for a half-century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Susan DuBow, a spokeswoman for the family. He had been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s in 2019.Billed as “Steve and Eydie” at Carnegie Hall concerts, on television and at glitzy hotels in Las Vegas, the remarkably durable couple remained steadfast to their pop style as rock ’n’ roll took America by storm in the 1950s and ’60s. Long after the millennium, they were still rendering songs like “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” “Just in Time” and “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” for audiences that seemed to grow old with them.Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme recording in the 1960s. As Steve and Eydie, they performed at Carnegie Hall, on television and in Las Vegas.via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Lawrence, a cantor’s son from Brooklyn, and Ms. Gorme, a Bronx-born daughter of Sephardic Jewish immigrants, met professionally in 1953 as regular singers on “The Steve Allen Show” a late-night show on NBC’s New York station that would go national the next year as “Tonight.” Their romance might have been the plot of an MGM musical of the ’40s, with spats, breakups, reconciliations and plenty of songs.When they finally decided to get married, Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme faced a roadblock, as they recalled in a dressing-room interview with The New York Times at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas in 1992.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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      Met Opera’s Orchestra Will Tour Asia for the First Time

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      After the pandemic forced the cancellation of a tour planned for 2022, the ensemble will visit Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in June.The coronavirus pandemic forced the Metropolitan Opera to shut its doors for more than a year and a half. It also upended plans that had been in the works for the Met Orchestra’s first Asian tour.Now, that idea is being revived. The Met announced on Thursday that the orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, would visit South Korea, Japan and Taiwan in June, performing the music of Bartok, Wagner, Debussy and others alongside star soloists.The Met musicians have toured overseas just twice since 2000. Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said that, beyond showcasing them, the tour was meant to help the Met expand its network of fans abroad.“It’s important that we serve our global constituency with live performances in person when we can,” he said. “It’s very good for the morale of the orchestra to be able to perform in major cities of the world.”The tour, which includes stops in Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo and Hyogo, Japan, will feature more than 110 orchestra players, as well as the mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, the soprano Lisette Oropesa and the bass-baritone Christian Van Horn. The program includes concert performances of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and excerpts from various operas, including Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” as well as Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone.”Last year Nézet-Séguin, who became the Met’s music director in 2018, led a company tour, the first since 2002, in Europe. (A 2021 tour there had also been canceled by the pandemic.) “Bringing live music and performances to audiences around the world is my passion,” he said in a statement.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 Black Crowes Are Back, and Bygones Are Bygones

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      If there’s one thing the fractious Black Crowes co-founders agree on, it’s that they’ve never fit in.When the Atlanta-based band, led by the brothers Chris and Rich Robinson, broke through with its neo-classic-rock 1990 debut, “Shake Your Money Maker,” “We weren’t cool,” Chris, 57, the band’s singer, lyricist and mouthpiece, said recently. “We weren’t indie, and we weren’t from Seattle.”Rich, 54, a decidedly stolid type who composes their music and plays guitar, recalled, “Hair metal was big.”“Everyone looked like Guns N’ Roses,” Chris added. “To me, walking out in bell bottoms and my Mick-Jagger-in-‘Performance’ vibe, that was punk. No one looked like us.”“We’ve always been unto ourselves,” Rich concluded.Thirty-plus years after their five-times platinum debut spawned the soulful rock-radio stalwarts “She Talks to Angels,” “Jealous Again” and their boogie-rock cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle,” the Robinsons have defied expectations — their own as well as their fans’ — by coming together again. Their first album of new songs in 15 years, the back-to-basics “Happiness Bastards,” is due March 15 on the band’s own Silver Arrow label.For brothers who fought like Battlebots when they were on top of the rock world, and who didn’t even speak to each other during a large swath of the 2010s, this reconciliation has helped heal many of the wounds, personal and professional, left by decades of personality crises, ego clashes, substance abuse, lineup changes, passive-aggressive solo projects (like the caustically named Chris Robinson Brotherhood) and, above it all, Old-Testament-level sibling rivalry.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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      girl in red: 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 Norwegian indie-pop star girl in red (Marie Ulven) — whose second album, “I’m Doing It Again Baby!,” is out April 12 — in conversation about:Her early self-released songs that went viral in the late 2010sThe invention of the girl in red “character”Why she’s pursuing music in 2024 in a more powerful way than during earlier phases of her careerOpening for Taylor Swift last year on The Eras TourCollaborating with Sabrina CarpenterDeveloping a taste for fashion and watchesBuilding relationships with fans through social mediaTumblrHer teenage fingerboarding careerWriting about her current romantic relationship on her new albumHow the climate for queer pop performers has changed in the past five yearsEmbracing ambition and joy in her new musicMeeting the TikTok stars Pookie & JettBuying a car (and contending with capitalism)The difference between Norwegian success and American successSnack 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