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      The Soft Moon and Silent Servant Die in L.A.

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      Jose (Luis) Vasquez, John (Juan) Mendez and a third person, Simone Ling, were found unresponsive last week. Authorities had not determined a cause but said “possible narcotics” were at the scene.The musician Jose (Luis) Vasquez of the post-punk band the Soft Moon, John (Juan) Mendez, the D.J. known as Silent Servant, and a third person were found unresponsive at a loft apartment in downtown Los Angeles last week and were pronounced dead, according to their representatives and the authorities in Los Angeles.Vasquez’s death was announced in a post on the band’s Facebook page on Friday. Records kept by the Los Angeles County Coroner show that Jose Vasquez, 44, died at a residence the day before, Jan. 18.Triangle Agency, which represents Mendez, confirmed his death to the electronic music platform Resident Advisor. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office lists John Mendez, 46, as also having died on Jan. 18 at a residence.The coroner’s office said a third person, Simone Ling, 43, was also found the afternoon of Jan. 18 at the private residence in the 600 block of South Main Street in Los Angeles. A spokeswoman said the Department of Medical Examiner has deferred the cause of death in all three cases, and that it could take between three and six months to make a final determination about the cause.Lt. Letisia Ruiz, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, said officers had responded to a call about a missing person, and upon arriving at Pacific Electric Lofts downtown, they entered a unit to find three adults who were unresponsive. “The officers also observed possible narcotics and narcotics paraphernalia,” she said. All three people were pronounced dead at the scene, she added.Homicide investigators were deployed to the scene and found no evidence of foul play or forced entry into the location, Lieutenant Ruiz said. The coroner’s office will handle the case and perform toxicology tests, 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?  More

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      Brittany Howard Taps Into the Ancestors on ‘What Now’

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      When Brittany Howard was 17, she lived alone, in a haunted house in Athens, Ala., that had belonged to her great-grandmother.At first, she was thrilled. Alabama Shakes, the band she’d started with her high school classmate Zac Cockrell, practiced there. Then doors started to open on their own. Cabinets slammed shut. One day, Howard was outside the back door when she heard the lock slide closed on the inside. Thinking someone had broken in, she crept into the kitchen and grabbed a weapon she kept behind her fridge.“I had this machete, and I’m clearing rooms in the house like I’m Bruce Willis in ‘Pulp Fiction,’” she said on an afternoon in early January. “There’s nobody in the house.”After seven years, Howard abandoned the old, run-down duplex, but she has long maintained a connection to the ghosts of her past, and her music has often felt haunted. The Shakes were imbued with the essence of artists who preceded them by a few generations — Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Curtis Mayfield — and shaped by an American South that sometimes struggled to look forward instead of back. In 2019, after two albums, and just as the band appeared poised for superstardom, Howard walked away, releasing “Jaime,” a solo debut named after her late sister.On Feb. 9, she returns with “What Now,” an album filled with wailing soul, jittery funk and buzzing grooves born of frustration, pain, love and intense questioning. Its roots can be traced to the pandemic, and another house Howard believed might be haunted: a big 100-year-old yellow rental filled with antique furniture in East Nashville.“I came by this album pretty honest,” Howard, 35, said while sitting at a desk at the Sound Emporium in Nashville, the studio where she recorded it. She wore a gray button-down, white sneakers and rings on most of her fingers. She has spent nearly all her life in the South but in 2019 was living in New Mexico with her wife, the singer-songwriter Jesse Lafser. As Howard was getting ready to release “Jaime,” their marriage was coming apart.On Feb. 9, Brittany Howard returns with her second solo album, “What Now,” an LP filled with wailing soul, jittery funk and buzzing grooves.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“I got divorced and drove back to Nashville,” Howard said. “I was like, ‘Man, I thought I was through with this place.’” In March 2020, she was preparing for a European tour when the pandemic scotched those plans. It was just as well. After nearly a decade of writing, recording and touring, Howard was burned out.“I was in the house, excited not to have to be a musician and just be a human washing groceries,” she said. “I was hiking, fishing, outside every day. I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ to keep my mood up. I finished all of ‘Tiger King.’ Then I ran out of stuff to do. I got to a point where I was like, ‘What am I for?’”She set up a bare-bones studio in a small spare bedroom. “I’d just go in there and make whatever I was feeling that day,” Howard said. She didn’t think the songs would ever see the light of day.It wasn’t until she revisited them a couple of years later that she realized what she had. “This album, for me, was just a series of journal entries,” she said. “Because it was the pandemic, my heart was going through so many things. There was all this sorrow about seeing the world on fire, seeing people the same color as you getting beaten in the streets. On the other hand, I was falling in love.”The joy of this new relationship was shaded not only by the darkness of the world around her, but also by the specter of past romantic failures. “There was a lot of fear,” Howard said. “What if this happens again? What if they don’t like me like that? Why can’t I enjoy this? All that had to go somewhere.”The songs aren’t really about Lafser or any other former partners. They aren’t even about Howard’s new relationship at the time, which ended before the album was finished. The songs are about Howard, herself. “I’m the common denominator,” she said.“There are so many interesting things about music,” Howard said. “Why just do one of them?”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesAFTER THE STUDIO visit, Howard walked into the living room of her latest house — a well-appointed but unassuming midsize home in East Nashville — and was besieged by her small, feisty dogs, Wilma and Wanda. The room felt like a display case for Howard’s enthusiasms. A wooden chess board sat atop a baby grand piano. “Sister Outsider,” a collection of essays by the queer Black feminist poet Audre Lorde, was on the coffee table. Tucked into a corner was a photo of Howard with the Obamas. A sitar case leaned against the credenza housing her record player. A giant portrait of the Supremes dominated one wall.“It’s from the first gay club in Nashville,” Howard said. “I’m just borrowing it because the person who owns it doesn’t have tall enough ceilings.”Howard bought the home from the singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton and her husband, John McCauley, of the band Deer Tick. Behind the house, between an old fishing boat Howard rebuilt and an archery target shaped like a deer head — “I have strange hobbies,” she noted, walking through the backyard — was a garage that had been converted into a home studio. Howard finished recording the “What Now” demos in this comfortably disheveled space with guitars adorning the walls, a movie screen hanging from the ceiling and a sauna beside the door.“You’ve got to have a sauna in your studio,” she said. “To sweat it out.”A small control room was dominated by a large vintage mixing board once used to record Prince’s debut album. Howard is a huge fan, and apparently the feeling was mutual. In 2015, he invited her and the Shakes to play at Paisley Park, and joined them on guitar for “Gimme All Your Love.” One of the new songs, the dynamic, tempo-shifting “Power to Undo,” feels animated by his spirit.“When I was making it, I was like, ‘Prince would’ve liked this,’” Howard said. The song, she explained, is about trying to leave someone who keeps coming back. “There’s a part of you that’s like, ‘I kind of do want to go back,’ and then the older, wiser part that’s like, ‘Don’t you dare.’”“What Now” feels like a breakup album, albeit one tinged less with bitterness for her exes and more with a harsh lens turned on herself. “Out there, there’s a love waiting for me,” Howard sings on the opener, “Earth Sign,” her voice floating over spare, ethereal piano chords. “I can feel, I can’t see/But will I know when I feel it?”Howard produced the album alongside Shawn Everett, who engineered “Jaime” and the second Shakes album, “Sound & Color.” He recalled that “Earth Sign” was a spare 30-second demo when Howard brought it into the studio.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“One day, she was like, ‘Just give me the drums,’” Everett said. “Then without any chords even being there, she put this insanely complex harmony over the whole thing.”Everett, who has worked with Adele, the Killers and John Legend, was taken aback. “The amount of singers able to build a complex ocean of harmonies without any chord progression is almost zero,” he said. “Then she sat there composing this beautiful piano arrangement. Some studied musician could maybe figure that out, but she just does it by feeling.” The resulting vibe is simultaneously hopeful and despairing, setting a tone for the album.From song to song, the album approximates the emotional whiplash of falling in and out of love. “The best time that I ever had/That’s when the worst times started,” Howard sings on the humid, stuttering “Red Flags,” a track about careening into new relationships. “I wanted to talk about how I just let my heart rule everything,” she said. “When I feel love, I’m going in that direction. It’s like, ‘Honey, that’s not a parade! That’s danger!’”For “Samson,” a hypnotic meditation on a dying union, she came into the studio with 16 bars of a drumbeat, some keyboard chords and a few lyrics. Working with Everett, she began to color in the rest, cutting, chopping and mixing in elements including a winding muted trumpet melody by the Nashville-based jazz artist Rod McGaha. As the deadline loomed, the lyrics remained unfinished. “I just made them up in real time,” she said. “The vocals on it are live. The way I sung it, it’s like you’ve been wrung out.”The effect is devastating. The singer-songwriter Becca Mancari, one of Howard’s closest friends, recalled when Howard first played her a rough mix, in her car one night in Nashville. “I started tearing up,” she said. “I have chills thinking about it now. I remember being like, ‘This is my friend tapping into the ancestors.’”Mancari introduced Howard to her current partner, Anna-Maria Babcock, when Howard was selling merch at one of Mancari’s shows. “When they saw each other, I felt this energetic wash,” Mancari remembered.Amid all the tumult and heartache, “What Now” offers moments to dance through the tears. “It feels like this liberated, queer Black music,” Mancari said. “You could hear these songs in a queer club, which I’d never thought about a Brittany song.”“What Now” doesn’t sound too much like what Howard has done before. As Cockrell, who played bass on both of Howard’s solo albums, put it: “The songs are all very different, but I can hear elements of Brittany in all of it.”“I wanted to talk about how I just let my heart rule everything,” Howard said of her new music. “When I feel love, I’m going in that direction. It’s like, ‘Honey, that’s not a parade! That’s danger!’”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesConsidering her previous successes — five Grammys, a Billboard No. 1 album, multiple performances at the White House — Howard’s refusal to repeat herself is refreshingly risky. Although she has never closed the door on another Alabama Shakes album, she is committed to her own restlessness. “There are so many interesting things about music,” she said. “Why just do one of them?”Howard credits therapy for helping her navigate her emotional life, understand her ghosts and channel it all into art. “Therapy has made my life bearable,” she said. It has also clarified her goals. She has a remarkably detailed vision of a not-too-distant future when she would like to be effectively retired, playing music only when and how she wants.“I want a farm with animals somewhere in the South, an orchard to grow plums, a five-acre pond, a golden retriever and maybe some kids,” she said. “I want to grow food in my backyard, and have this big barn with three doors, where my studio equipment is, a place for my hobbies. I can woodwork and do whatever weird projects I’m into. And I want one of them four-by-four vehicles.”As to whether she can imagine growing old with someone else in that picture, notwithstanding her current happiness, those old ghosts breed skepticism.“I’ve got to see it to believe it.” More

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      The Cleveland Orchestra Says a Lot, but Only Through Music

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      With neither encores nor speeches, this ensemble presented a subtly clever, cogent and complete pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall.The conductor Franz Welser-Möst is a man of few words. Or, judging by his two concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last weekend, no words.Dressed in his usual performance costume of white tie and tails, Welser-Möst strode to the podium, turned his back to the audience and, with the finesse that characterizes this orchestra’s performances, let the music speak for itself.If he did want to speak, he’d have a lot to talk about. Welser-Möst recently announced that he was stepping down from the Cleveland Orchestra in 2027, after 25 years as its music director. He is one of Carnegie’s Perspectives artists this season, and with these concerts was opening the hall’s festival Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice.The Clevelanders, with their evenly balanced tone and precise articulation, reflect the understated poise of their maestro. Their sound has a lovely finish: softly molded winds, round-toned brasses, strings that never turn strident. The unflashy solos captivate in the way they refuse to draw attention. When a tempo takes off, there’s no sense that the players are flustered or swept away in it. Transitions are handled with care, even perhaps too much so.Perspectives artists open their musical world, the loves and preoccupations that animate it, by organizing their own series. In March, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in three programs, and for his two last weekend, he surveyed some sounds of the Weimar era — jazz, serialism, lurid down-at-heel drama, machine music — with a rigor and cohesion that were his own.The ensemble’s meticulous and methodical approach found an inspired match on Sunday in two challenging symphonies by Prokofiev — one written during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), and one during the wartime years that followed. At first, the players’ resistance to the garishness of the Second Symphony’s blaring machine music, Prokofiev’s nod to the fashion for compositions that imitate the sounds of industry, seemed to miss the point. But it was as though Welser-Möst took apart this rusted apparatus, polished every screw and gear, and put it back together again. It whirred with magnificent efficiency; the strings, locked into repetitive patterns, threw off bright, clean sparks. The sequence of variations on a theme was kinetic, and lyrical moments wore their beauty lightly.Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, grandly classical in conception, with dashes of the composer’s wily idiosyncrasies, was played with lush strings and enveloping brasses. Motifs were given expansive statements, then were cut up and brought back with edge and suavity. The fourth movement had a mahogany tone of divided cellos and a finale of mechanical energy and busy tinkering before a thrilling final flourish.Felicities abounded in the programming. The first concert paired Ernst Krenek’s “Little Symphony,” a Neo-Classical mishmash of Mozart and jazz, with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, whose score Krenek completed at the request of Mahler’s widow, Alma. The second concert juxtaposed two symphonies that utilize a theme-and-variations form, Prokofiev’s Second and Webern’s Op. 21. Both concerts ended with some drama, with the suite from Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and Prokofiev’s Fifth, which incorporates music from his stage works.The concerts gestured at the historical context on either side of the Weimar era. Prokofiev’s Fifth represented a time when the composer was writing under Stalin’s totalitarian regime; the Mahler, the work of a turn-of-the-century composer whose legacy the Nazis tried to tarnish. As programming it felt subtly clever, cogent and complete, despite the tight focus.The flip side of the Clevelanders’ general unflappability, which served them so well in Prokofiev’s ardent, piquant musical language, was a tendency to smooth out a work’s individuality. In the Mahler, Welser-Möst charted an unbroken, long-breathed line from the violas’ mysterious sadness and the violins’ soaring romanticism to the dissonant climax, in which the piece seems to implode with its own emotional cataclysm. But Mahler’s music is too multifaceted, too spiked with peculiar about-faces, for lyrical sameness.A similar problem bedeviled the Bartok. Welser-Möst sanitized the sordid street scene that brings the curtain up, and the piece’s strong episodic structure, its constant lurching between sexuality and violence, weakened as vignettes blurred together. Trombone glissandos and trumpet blares were downright polite. As in the Mahler, the playing was tasteful to a fault.The clarinetist Afendi Yusuf beautifully rendered the solos that represent a woman who lures men off the street to be robbed; Yusuf’s playing was reluctantly beckoning at first and then more fluid, confident and complicit.An arrangement of Bartok’s Third String Quartet by Stanley Konopka, the orchestra’s assistant principal viola, worked better as a vehicle for theatrical expression. Konopka divided the ensemble into a double string orchestra and had them seated antiphonally on the stage. Some balance issues aside, it worked brilliantly well, teasing out the piece’s delicacy and aggression with an exciting, fruitful tension.At both performances, there were no encores. Perhaps Welser-Möst and the Cleveland musicians had already said everything they wanted to say. More

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      Ewa Podles, a Rare Contralto With Sweeping Range, Dies at 71

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      With her molten chest voice and commanding presence, Ms. Podles, a galvanizing Polish opera singer, developed a cult following.Ewa Podles, the Polish contralto whose darkly molten, three-octave-plus voice and commanding presence made her a favorite of opera connoisseurs, died on Friday in Warsaw. She was 71.Her death, in a hospice center, was confirmed by her stepdaughter, Ania Marchwinska, who said the cause was lung cancer.Aficionados embraced Ms. Podles (whose full name was pronounced AE-vuh PODE-lesh) not just for her exciting performances, but also for how unusual she was: True contraltos — the lowest-lying female voice type, deeper than a mezzo-soprano — are hardly common.Developing the low chest register as much as the rest of the voice, a contralto is “like an alto in the lower range, like a soprano on top,” Ms. Podles told The New York Times in 1998. And she fit that bill: Though her tone was melancholically hooded and brooding, with a cavernous chest register, she also had the high notes and agility to excel at Handel and Rossini’s most demandingly florid roles.“It’s a very rare voice,” Ms. Podles said of her instrument.And she wielded it with utter authority. “Never, for even one moment of one recitative in any opera, was she anything but riveting in her conviction,” the conductor Will Crutchfield, who collaborated with her several times, said in a phone interview. “She had something to say.”Ewa Maria Podles was born on April 26, 1952, in Warsaw to Walery and Teresa (Sawicka) Podles, a member of the chorus of the Polish National Opera.“My mother was an extraordinary singer,” Ms. Podles told The Times. “She had a very, very deep voice, like a man. She recorded a bit on the radio, but everyone who heard her asked: ‘Is it really a woman singing?’”Ms. Podles didn’t have to fight for her low notes, either. “It’s the most natural register in my voice,” she said. “I was born with this chest voice. Some people hate the chest voice, and some people say: ‘Oh, it’s magnificent. I adore you.’”She studied in Warsaw at the conservatory that is now the Chopin University of Music, and she was a prizewinner at the 1978 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1984, taking over for the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, another singer with both earthy power and dazzling coloratura, in the title role of Handel’s “Rinaldo.” (That part, like many of Ms. Podles’s Baroque specialties, was originally written for a male castrato and is typically sung today by a lower-register female singer or a male countertenor.)While Ms. Podles was hardly unknown in American opera circles, the repertoire in which she specialized wasn’t standard fare at U.S. opera houses, and her only Met appearance after “Rinaldo” was a 2008 run in the small but crucial role of La Cieca in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.” Ms. Podles became something of a cult figure, one of the singers that fans make a point of traveling to hear.And, like many cult artists, she was not to all tastes. Her acting was unabashedly old-fashioned — a sometimes wide-eyed, arms-outstretched embodiment of opera’s stylized, semi-mythic side.Ms. Podles, left, with the soprano Deborah Voigt in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWell-groomed modern singers aim for a smooth, unobtrusive flow between the different parts of their voices; Ms. Podles reveled in the breaks between them. As she told The Times, gutsily relishing the chest register, as she did, is off-putting to some listeners. She said that while the top and bottom extremes of her voice came easily, the rest needed to be diligently built, and her middle register could be a bit breathy.But for many, she was unforgettable. “The sheer, round, sensuous beauty of her voice was staggering,” the eminent pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who toured and recorded with her, said in an interview. “I don’t want to make comparisons, but when I worked with Jessye Norman” — the American soprano who died in 2019 — “you had the same sense of this huge, engulfing but not piercing sound, a wide sound.”And when elemental intensity was called for, as in Mussorgsky’s cycle “Songs and Dances of Death,” Ms. Podles was ideal.“She had this mournful quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said. “She could draw you into states of sadness and lament and pain that were overwhelming in their sincerity and beauty, so you liked feeling bad with her.”Ms. Podles’s husband, Jerzy Marchwinski, a prominent pianist who curtailed his performing career because of back problems and who was a close adviser to his wife, died in November. In addition to her stepdaughter, Ms. Marchwinska, she is survived by her and her husband’s daughter, Maria Madej, and four grandchildren.Among a wide-ranging repertoire, Ms. Podles sang songs by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and works with orchestra by Mahler, Brahms, Prokofiev and Penderecki. Her operatic characters extended to Verdi’s Azucena and Eboli, Adalgisa in Bellini’s “Norma,” Erda in Wagner’s “Ring” and Klytämnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra.” (She even played the bearded lady Baba the Turk in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”)Ms. Podles appeared onstage for the last time in Barcelona in 2017, as the comically highhanded Marquise de Berkenfield in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.”“She had that unmistakable great-singer quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said, “of holding the audience absolutely in the palm of her hand.” More

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      Mary Weiss, Who Sang ‘Leader of the Pack,’ Is Dead at 75

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      As the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, she conveyed passion, pathos and toughness — and reached the Top 40 six times while still in her teens.Mary Weiss, who in 1964 was the lead singer of the Shangri-Las’ No. 1 hit, “Leader of the Pack,” extracting every ounce of passion and pathos available in a three-minute adolescent soap opera, died on Friday at her home in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 75.Her death was announced by the author and television writer David Stenn, who had been collaborating with Ms. Weiss on a stage musical about the Shangri-Las. He said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.“Leader of the Pack,” the Shangri-Las’ second and biggest hit, was narrated by a young woman who falls in love with a motorcycle-riding tough guy without her parents’ approval — “They told me he was bad/But I knew he was sad” — and is then left bereft when he dies in a road accident on a rainy night.Produced and co-written by Shadow Morton, the single featured call-and-response vocals, full-tilt teenage angst and motorcycle sound effects. It was excessive and melodramatic, requiring acting as much as singing, but Ms. Weiss sold it with her yearning performance. She was just 15 when it topped the charts.From left, Mary Ann Ganser, Betty Weiss and Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las in 1965.David Dalton“I’m kind of a shy person, but I felt that the recording studio was the place that you could really release what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you,” Ms. Weiss was quoted as saying in “Always Magic in the Air,” Ken Emerson’s 2005 book about notable songwriting teams of early rock ’n’ roll. “I had enough pain in me at the time to pull off anything and get into it and sound believable.”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?  More

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      21 Savage Returns to No. 1 With ‘American Dream’

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      Kali Uchis’s “Orquídeas” opens at No. 2, giving the Colombian American songwriter her highest chart position yet on the Billboard 200.21 Savage, the London-born mainstay of Atlanta rap, has the first new No. 1 album of 2024 with “American Dream,” following holdovers by Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen.“American Dream” is 21 Savage’s fourth chart-topper overall, and the first time he has led the Billboard 200 as a solo artist since “I Am > I Was” five years ago; since then, he has gone to No. 1 twice via collaborative projects with Drake (“Her Loss,” 2022) and the producer Metro Boomin (“Savage Mode II,” 2020).The album is 21 Savage’s latest since the apparent resolution of his long-running problems with his immigration status. The week before the Grammy Awards in 2019, where he had been set to perform, the 31-year-old rapper, whose real name is Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for being in the United States illegally. After delays in his case, 21 Savage said in October that he had become a permanent U.S. resident.In its debut week, “American Dream,” which was announced just a few days before its release on Jan. 12 — and features guest appearances by Doja Cat, Travis Scott, Lil Durk, Young Thug and others, as well as spoken segments by the rapper’s mother, Heather Carmillia Joseph — had the equivalent of 133,000 sales in the United States. Most of that was from streaming, with nearly 170 million clicks, according to the tracking service Luminate. The 15-track LP had 4,000 sales as a complete package.Ariana Grande’s first solo song in more than three years, “Yes, And?,” opens at No. 1 on the Hot 100, her eighth track to top Billboard’s flagship pop singles chart. “Eternal Sunshine,” her next studio album, is due March 8.Also this week, “Orquídeas,” the fourth studio album by the singer Kali Uchis, which is performed primarily in Spanish, opens in second place, Uchis’s highest chart position ever. The album, whose title translates as “Orchids,” and features guest spots by Latin stars like Peso Pluma, Karol G and Rauw Alejandro, had the equivalent of 69,000 sales, including 51 million streams and 31,000 copies sold as a complete package.Wallen’s nearly year-old “One Thing at a Time,” which logged a 17th time at No. 1 last week, falls to third place this week, while Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 4 and Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” is No. 5. More

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      Green Day Gets Loud Again on ‘Saviors’

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      On “Saviors,” its 14th studio album, the pop-punk trio returns to stadium-sized rock.Praising a return to form is a barbed compliment at best. It implies recent missteps, a decline, the waning of youthful inspiration, the toll of a long career — perhaps all of them at once. It suggests that the sensible way forward is to double back. Still, “Saviors,” Green Day’s new album, is a decisive, even overdetermined return to form.Ever since its beginnings in the late 1980s, Green Day has stayed contentious. Billie Joe Armstrong has sung about personal grievances — including struggles with himself — as well as the ways they intersect with larger political currents, most ambitiously on the band’s 2004 concept album, “American Idiot,” which went on to be adapted into a Broadway musical.The band can still cause a stir. In recent years, Armstrong has been performing the song “American Idiot” by changing the line “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to end with “the MAGA agenda” instead. But when he sang that phrase on broadcast TV this past New Year’s Eve, right-wing media seized on the line to raise a fuss.“Saviors” finds contemporary targets. It opens with “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” which goes barreling ahead as Armstrong derides conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant attitudes, touches on homelessness and real-estate exploitation and declares that as a nation, “We are not well.”In “Living in the ’20s,” Armstrong confronts a decade that’s brought supermarket shootings and murder hornets, while in the quick-strummed “Strange Days Are Here to Stay,” he sings about bleak expectations: “I can’t see this ending well/Now that it’s too late.”While Green Day has pushed against power structures, it has honored musical ones. With Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Tré Cool on drums and Mike Dirnt on bass, there has always been a virtuosic neatness behind Green Day’s blare.Green Day arrived as a proud heir to the fast, blunt, tuneful, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes candid punk that the Ramones had formulated in the 1970s. As Green Day’s catalog grew, it became clearer that the band was well aware of generations of guitar bands, from its grunge contemporaries back through Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Boston and Aerosmith to the Who and the Beatles.Green Day invariably delivers precisely arranged songs with clear-cut verses, choruses and bridges. Its 1994 album, “Dookie” — with hits including “Basket Case” and “Welcome to Paradise” — heralded the commercial breakthrough of punk-pop that was simultaneously raucous and high-gloss.“Saviors” trumpets its connections to Green Day’s past. For its international tour this year — to be joined along the way by bands including Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Hives — Green Day has announced it will play all the way through both “Dookie” and “American Idiot,” coinciding with their 30th and 20th anniversaries. Green Day made “Saviors” with Rob Cavallo, the co-producer of both albums, who last worked on Green Day’s three stripped-down 2012 albums “¡Uno!,” “¡Dos!” and “¡Tré!”Green Day’s more recent albums had strained to be different: noisier, murkier and often using all its resources to simulate lo-fi recording. “Saviors,” by contrast, is forthrightly lavish. Guitars and vocals are multi-layered, and the drum sound is gigantic; orchestral arrangements appear out of nowhere. The band proudly blasts again in songs like the standout track, “Dilemma,” in which Armstrong — who entered rehab after an onstage tirade in 2012 — grapples with trying to stay sober. “I don’t want to be a dead man walking,” he proclaims over stadium-shaking guitar chords.“Saviors” revisits the production approach of the so-called “loudness war” of the 1990s and 2000s, when it seemed studios sought to make, as Meat Loaf sang, “everything louder than everything else.” The waveforms of nearly every song on “Saviors” measure as what recording engineers call “brickwalled” — pushed to a constant, flattened peak. On a playlist alongside tracks that include more ups and downs, that loudness is supposed to feel exciting. But on an entire unrelenting, 15-track album, it grows wearing.Perhaps it’s inevitable that on Green Day’s 14th studio album, some of the songs have beats and chord progressions that can feel like retreads. On “Saviors,” the production often strives to offset familiarity with impact. Yet “Father to a Son” — in which an uncertain parent vows to try his best — unmistakably echoes “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” even with an orchestra now supplementing the power chords.For sonic variety, Green Day flaunts its rock scholarship. “Bobby Sox” — with Armstrong singing about the homey comforts he’d offer a girlfriend, a boyfriend or a best friend — is an outright homage to Pixies, exploding from a quiet verse to a crashing chorus. And the depressive but stubborn “Goodnight Adeline” could almost have been an arena march from Oasis.“Saviors” doesn’t hide its craftsmanship or self-consciousness, but they are a means to an end. Green Day is still angry, disgusted, worried and no longer so amused about the state of the world. This time, the band has decided to shout about it.Green Day“Saviors”(Reprise/Warner) More

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      6 Highlights of Maria Callas’s Opera Career at La Scala

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      The soprano appeared in more than two dozen productions at the house in Milan as she rose to become opera’s leading lady. Here are six highlights.No opera house has been more instrumental to the enduring myth of Maria Callas than the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Her more than two dozen productions at La Scala mirrored the peaks and troughs of her life and marked her finest years as an opera singer.It was near the start of her La Scala years that Callas underwent a physical transformation, losing some 80 pounds and becoming a global celebrity; and it was toward the end of that period that she left her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini for the wealthy magnate Aristotle Onassis, who then married someone else (Jacqueline Kennedy).Callas’s many performances at La Scala “have passed into legend,” said Neil Fisher, executive culture and books editor, The Times and Sunday Times in London. “If La Scala is a temple to opera, then Maria Callas is one of the goddesses.”Callas during a rehearsal for Cherubini’s “Medea” with the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers at La Scala in 1961. “Medea” was her final show at La Scala.Associated PressLa Scala’s reputation, in turn, is “almost inseparable” from her, Mr. Fisher added: “Postwar, the glamour of opera, and also its mystique, swirls around this character of Maria Callas.”Why does a soprano who died in 1977 remain the single most celebrated opera singer of all time?Because she made opera “about the story and the drama and the narrative,” said the American soprano Lisette Oropesa. “It wasn’t just about the beauty of the voice: She used her voice to tell a story.”Crucially, Ms. Oropesa noted, Callas became the story herself — a “hot-topic, controversial figure” — after her life became mixed up with those of Onassis and Kennedy. As a result, “people to this day cannot stop talking about her,” Ms. Oropesa added. She’s “a legend.”Callas appearing as Violetta in “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, in a 1955 production at La Scala. The character is widely considered one of her three finest roles.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesFollowing is an overview of some of Callas’s career highlights at La Scala.“Aida” (Verdi): April 12, 1950Callas’s very first performance onstage at La Scala was as a substitute for the much-adored Renata Tebaldi, who was unwell. It was, by all accounts, a tepid debut. A skin condition had given the 26-year-old soprano facial blemishes that she awkwardly covered with veils. In “Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography,” by Anne Edwards, the director Franco Zeffirelli (who would go on to work with Callas) recalled “this overweight Greek lady, peeping out from behind her trailing chiffon,” with an “unevenness” in her voice. Her two remaining performances of “Aida” went much better, but this inaugural “Aida” was a blow to the young prodigy’s self-confidence.“I Vespri Siciliani” (Verdi):Dec. 7, 1951This was the first time that Callas was headlining a La Scala production — kicking off the opera house’s season, in fact — and it was a triumph. She was understandably nervous at the start. “The miraculous throat of Maria Meneghini Callas did not have to fear the demand of the opera,” the music reviewer Franco Abbiati wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera (according to the biography “Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb,” by David Bret). Mr. Abbiati lauded the “phosphorescent beauty” of her tones, and “her technical agility, which is more than rare — it is unique.”“Lucia di Lammermoor” (Donizetti): Jan. 18, 1954This was Callas’s first time with the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan at the baton, and she didn’t disappoint. In the famous “mad scene” — where Lucia stabs her new husband on her wedding night — Callas appeared barehanded, in a nightgown and messy hair, on a dimly lit staircase; she had turned down the dagger and fake blood that are usually used to portray the murder. Yet her performance was so realistic that mesmerized audience members jumped up mid-performance, clapping and cheering, and tossed red carnations onstage that Callas touched as if they were gobs of blood. In Opera News, the critic Cynthia Jolly hailed “Callas’s supremacy amongst present-day sopranos,” and “a heart-rending poignancy of timbre which is quite unforgettable,” according to the Bret biography.“La Traviata” (Verdi): May 28, 1955The character of Violetta in “La Traviata” is widely considered one of Callas’s three finest roles — along with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma.” And the May 1955 staging by the director Luchino Visconti is, in turn, considered her finest “Traviata.” It was “a revolutionary production” that was “renowned for its realism, the intimacy and the gorgeousness of the setting, the painterly qualities,” said Mr. Fisher of The Times. It also “encapsulated so much” of the Maria Callas that audiences have come to know and revere. Set in La Belle Epoque, with ornate décor and costumes, the show triggered another audience frenzy on opening night. People cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which a tearful Callas picked up as she took a solo bow. The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini later confessed that he, too, had wept in the pit. Yet Callas’s monopolizing of attention in her solo bow was too much for the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who quit the show that night.“Anna Bolena” (Donizetti):April 14, 1957This was another Visconti spectacular, and another triumph. Callas played Anne Boleyn, a doomed wife of Henry VIII, in a somewhat lesser-known Donizetti opera. Queenlike, she appeared in a dark blue gown and enormous jewels at the top of a grand staircase, surrounded by royal portraits. Musically, she gave it her all, triggering 24 minutes of applause (according to the Edwards biography), a La Scala record.Yet offstage, in Milan, her star was starting to fade, after she had refused to perform a fifth time with the La Scala opera company on a tour in Edinburgh (she was only contractually obligated to four performances, and was feeling unwell). Protesters awaited her as she headed to the “Anna Bolena” premiere, the Edwards biography reported, and she was accompanied inside by armed police officers. When she got home on the last night of the show, there were obscenities scribbled with animal excrement on her front door and windows.“Medea” (Cherubini): May 29, 1962By the time of her final performances at La Scala, Callas was divorced and in a relationship with Onassis. Her voice was still dazzling audiences worldwide. Just 10 days before this performance of “Medea,” she had sung two arias from the opera “Carmen” at a celebration of President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday (where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday”).Yet as she was performing “Medea” that night, a sinus infection led Callas’s voice to waver in parts, though she sang all the way to the end, and still managed to draw some press acclaim.Long after her passing, Lord Harewood, a Callas supporter and onetime director of the Royal Opera House, recalled in an Evening Standard article that was excerpted in the Bret biography that it was “evident that her voice had deteriorated markedly,” and attributed it to her “being at sea with Onassis in his boat” and attending “too many parties.”“You felt that this wonderful career was coming to an end,” he was quoted as saying in the Bret biography. “But I thought that she still had great power, a tremendous grandeur about everything she did. In spite of everything, she never lost that.” More