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      Tyshawn Sorey Wins Pulitzer for Composing an ‘Anti-Concerto’

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      The composer and instrumentalist was honored for “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” an unconventional concerto written for saxophone and orchestra.Concertos are typically works meant to showcase dazzling virtuosity. But when the composer and instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey set out to write one for saxophone and orchestra several years ago, he quickly dispensed with convention.Describing the work as an “anti-concerto,” Sorey set out to provide a “respite from the chaos and intrusiveness of modern life.” In the score, he instructed the soloist and orchestra to play very softly and at an unhurried tempo of thirty-six quarter notes per minute.“I’m not interested in having a typical experience,” Sorey, 43, said in an interview. “I just wanted to create a work that kind of gets us to let the music wash over us, and lets us take our time in listening to it.”On Monday, the work, called “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” which was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. It was a high honor for an artist who has spent his career defying labels, blurring the boundaries between jazz and classical music.Sorey wrote the roughly 20-minute work to pay tribute to Smith, the celebrated American trumpeter and composer, whom he met two decades ago and calls a mentor.“Every moment I spend with him is a learning experience,” he said, “and it’s always been something that I value and cherish.”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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      Lead in Beethoven’s Hair Offers New Clues to Mystery of His Deafness

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      Using powerful technologies, scientists found staggering amounts of lead and other toxic substances in the composer’s hair that may have come from wine, or other sources.At 7 p.m. on May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven, then 53, strode onto the stage of the magnificent Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna to help conduct the world premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the last he would ever complete.That performance, whose 200th anniversary is on Tuesday, was unforgettable in many ways. But it was marked by an incident at the start of the second movement that revealed to the audience of about 1,800 people how deaf the revered composer had become.Ted Albrecht, a professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio and author of a recent book on the Ninth Symphony, described the scene.The movement began with loud kettledrums, and the crowd cheered wildly.But Beethoven was oblivious to the applause and his music. He stood with his back to the audience, beating time. At that moment, a soloist grasped his sleeve and turned him around to see the raucous adulation he could not hear.It was one more humiliation for a composer who had been mortified by his deafness since he had begun to lose his hearing in his twenties.But why had he gone deaf? And why was he plagued by unrelenting abdominal cramps, flatulence and diarrhea?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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      Coming Soon to Little Island: An Arts Festival With Powerful Backers

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      The mogul Barry Diller, who paid for the park, will finance a summer season of music, dance, theater and more, shaped in part by the Broadway producer Scott Rudin.Little Island, the $260 million park on the Hudson River that opened in 2021, was imagined as a haven for innovation in the performing arts. But the park’s cultural offerings — mostly sporadic, one-off works — have so far fallen short of those ambitions.Now Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul who paid for the park, is setting out to deliver on the original vision, financing a robust, four-month annual performing arts festival on Little Island, the park announced on Monday. He is doing so with the guidance of Scott Rudin, the film, television and theater producer who retreated from public view in 2021 amid accusations of bullying by workers in his office.Diller said in an interview that he and his family foundation were prepared to spend more than $100 million over the next two decades on programming. The festival, one of the most ambitious artistic undertakings in New York City in recent years, will promote new work in music, dance, theater and opera. Nine premieres are planned this year for June through September, including a full-length work by the choreographer Twyla Tharp, and an adaptation of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” in which the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will sing all of the leading roles.“I want people to enjoy the originality and adventure of Little Island,” Diller said. “I want it to produce a smile.”Rudin, a friend of Diller’s and a longtime adviser to Little Island, was not mentioned in a news release on Monday announcing the creation of the festival, but Diller said he was intimately involved in its planning.“He’s engaged in almost every discussion we have about the programming,” Diller said. “It started with him. It was his project.”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’s ‘Tortured Poets’ Posts a Huge Second Week on the Chart

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      After a blockbuster opening, the singer’s new album earned the biggest second-week totals since 2015, nearly doubling the rest of the Top 5 combined.In its second week of release, Taylor Swift’s latest blockbuster album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” holds at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, nearly doubling the rest of the Top 5 combined.One week after tallying the largest opening week since Adele in 2015 — selling the equivalent of 2.6 million albums in the United States — “The Tortured Poets Department” sold another 439,000 album units, down 83 percent, according to Billboard, but still the highest second-week total since Adele’s “25” almost a decade ago. Last month, Beyoncé’s latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” opened with 407,000 sales in its debut, then the biggest sales week for any release so far this year.Whereas Swift’s total last week included 1.9 million copies in traditional album sales — 859,000 for vinyl alone — and factored in advance orders, that number dipped 94 percent in week two, to 107,000. Instead, “The Tortured Poets Department” was consumed largely via digital streaming this time, with about 429 million plays of the album’s 31 tracks, down from a record 891 million the week prior.Also on this week’s chart, the country singer Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” released in March 2023, jumps two spots to No. 2, with 69,000 units. Future and Metro Boomin’s “We Don’t Trust You,” the first of the pair’s two recent albums (and the one featuring Kendrick Lamar dissing Drake on the hit single “Like That”), is No. 3 with 61,000 units. Rounding out the Top 5 is “Cowboy Carter” at No. 4 with 52,000 units and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” at No. 5 with 41,000 units. More

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      Review: ‘The Hours’ Returns to the Met Opera With Its Stars

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      Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato reprised their roles in Kevin Puts’s adaptation of the award-winning novel and film.Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera last season and returned for its first revival on Sunday, is even prettier than I remember.In the often exquisite score, the strings throb and the woodwinds flutter. When Puts reaches for percussion instruments, he chooses the sweeter ones — glockenspiel, crotales, chimes, vibraphone — and combines them luxuriously. Woodwinds at the top of Act II are practically Wagnerian in their extravagant stateliness. Tender piano chords toll lonesomely. Musical surges are thick with nostalgia. The luscious vocal lines revel in love, and understanding, of the human voice.But it’s easy to miss the score’s manifold beauties when the stage is full of distractions. Extraneous dancers and supernumeraries flood Phelim McDermott’s production at the Met. In one moment, the choreographer Annie-B Parson has them twirl around holding pillows while a character considers killing herself in a hotel room. Adding to the busyness, Puts heavily features the chorus as a collective, omniscient narrator and the characters’ inner voices. As a device, it doesn’t work; while the story intimately intertwines the emotional lives of three women, the chorus infringes upon their connection with the audience.It’s almost as though Puts and McDermott are afraid to take a sustained look at their heroines, or that they don’t trust the audience’s attention span. This is especially perplexing considering they have three leads on the order of Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato, who reprised their roles on Sunday. When the stage was free of clutter, their star wattage was dazzling.As Virginia Woolf, DiDonato was a haunted, magisterial presence. Her voice, dark, fulsome and cutting, communicated Woolf’s intellectual depth and her personal demons; there was the insight and occlusion of a novelist at the height of her powers hiding her suicidal ideations from others. As Laura, O’Hara sang with a voice of fine crystal, and while her timbre was a little cloudier than it used to be, she embodied Laura’s fragile nerves and anxious self-loathing. The overall shape of Fleming’s voice remained improbably youthful in its creamy roundness. Her Clarissa was patrician yet superficial, though partial blame rests with the libretto, in which every other word of hers is “flowers” or “party.”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 Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef, Explained

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      The two rappers had circled one another for more than a decade, but their attacks turned relentless and very personal in a slew of tracks released over the weekend.The long-building and increasingly testy rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake exploded into full-bore acrimony and unverifiable accusations over the weekend with the rapid-fire release of multiple songs littered with attacks regarding race, appropriation, sexual and physical abuse, body image, misogyny, hypocrisy, generational trauma and more.Most relentless was Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner from Compton who tends toward the isolated and considered but has now released four verbose and conceptual diss tracks — totaling more than 20 minutes of new music — targeting Drake in the last week, including three since Friday.Each racked up millions of streams and the three that were made available commercially — “Euphoria,” “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” — are expected to land near the top of next week’s Billboard singles chart, while seeming to, at least momentarily, shift the public perception of Drake, long a maestro of the online public arena and meme ecosystem.In between, on Friday night, Drake released his own broadside against Lamar — plus a smattering of other recent challengers — in a teasing Instagram interlude plus a three-part track and elaborate music video titled “Family Matters,” in which he referred to his rival as a fake activist and attempted to expose friction and alleged abuse in Lamar’s romantic relationship.But that song was followed within half an hour by Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams,” an ominous extended address to the parents and young son of Drake, born Aubrey Graham, in which Lamar refers to his rival rapper as a liar and “pervert” who “should die” in order to make the world safer for women.Lamar also seemed to assert that Drake had more than a decade ago fathered a secret daughter — echoing the big reveal of his son from Drake’s last headline rap beef — a claim Drake quickly denied on Instagram before hitting back in another song on Sunday. (Neither man has addressed the full array of rapped allegations directly.)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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      Conchita Wurst, a Eurovision Star, on the Past 10 Years

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      Since winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014, the bearded drag queen has been celebrated and condemned. For her creator, Tom Neuwirth, it has been a journey.Looking back at the last decade, Tom Neuwirth is amazed by how far his 2014 Eurovision win as the drag queen Conchita Wurst has reverberated.“I think this moment, the win, happened to all of us,” Neuwirth said in a recent interview at his team’s offices in Vienna. Dressed in pink corduroys, a black hoodie and white sneakers, he was charming and sweet, jokey one second and quietly reflective the next. “People will tell me where they were and how their life took a turn from then on,” he said. “There are always big stories and emotions.”That May, 10 years ago, 195 million people watched Conchita Wurst belt out the power ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix,” representing Austria in the finale of the Eurovision Song Contest. The annual show is Europe’s longest-running talent competition, in which singers representing their countries perform for a huge TV audience that votes for its favorite act.This year’s Eurovision final takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday. The event, which has been referred to “the queer Olympics” or “gay Christmas,” has long been popular with L.G.B.T.Q. people. By 2014, the competition had already seen a number of gay, lesbian and bisexual participants, as well as several drag acts, and a trans winner as early as 1998.Yet none of those performers received as explosive a reception as Conchita Wurst, whose victory arrived amid widespread advancements in L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Western Europe that included a wave of legalization for same-sex marriage. The singer became a worldwide symbol of the divisions between liberals and conservatives, with some calling her performance a high-profile victory for queer representation, and others seeing it as a sign of the degradation of traditional Western values.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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      Can Marin Alsop Shatter Another Glass Ceiling?

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      Alsop has had enviable success, and was the first female conductor to lead a top American orchestra. She wants to take another step up.Marin Alsop’s conducting students were taking turns on the podium recently in a rehearsal room at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore. They waved their batons in front of an imaginary orchestra, practicing Stravinsky’s notoriously complex “The Rite of Spring.”Some conductors teach in poetry: what a piece means, how a certain sound should feel. Alsop, who spent untold hours at Meyerhoff Hall during her 14 years as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a tenure that ended in 2021, teaches in technical, tangible details.In a measure with 11 beats, she suggested using the last as a pickup to the following bar, to give the players an extra bit of clarity. She flagged trouble spots: a transition that was “usually too loud, too fast, too soon,” and a moment when the winds tend to come in just after the strings, rather than in unison.“You’re not accompanying,” she told a rising maestro who seemed to be giving an invisible musician too much leeway. “You’re in charge.”At 67, Alsop is, in many ways, in charge. Last month, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting a new production of John Adams’s “El Niño.” Next season, she will lead the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the world’s pre-eminent orchestra, for the first time.She recently recorded Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with her ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra at the storied Musikverein, an experience that brought Leonard Bernstein, one of her mentors, to mind.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