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      Renée Fleming, Star Soprano, Tries Out the Director’s Chair

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      A young soprano was rehearsing a difficult aria from Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” when the director stopped her and made a suggestion.“I always liked to lay down for this part,” the director said, “because it lets the body relax.”It’s not every opera director who can talk about performing choices in the first person. But on that summer afternoon in Aspen, Colo., the woman staging the scene was Renée Fleming, perhaps the most famous soprano of recent decades. Fleming was passing on a career’s worth of accumulated wisdom to a cast in which the oldest singer is 32.Among her lessons was when to say no.“Just remember, you’re going to be more nervous onstage than you are now,” Fleming said as the group worked on some aerobics-style choreography for the production, set in the early 1980s. “So maybe don’t do these jumps, because even if you can sing while you’re doing them now, you’re going to be out of breath on opening night.”Fleming is making her directing debut with this “Così,” which opens on Monday at the Wheeler Opera House as part of the Aspen Music Festival and School, one of the country’s most prestigious summer programs for rising artists.The soprano Lauren Carroll (left, with Fleming) is singing Fiordiligi, Fleming’s old role.Matthew Defeo for The New York TimesShe joins a select group of divas (and divos) turned directors. This fall, the tenor Rolando Villazón’s production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” comes to the Metropolitan Opera. And the mezzo Denyce Graves is staging Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” for Washington National Opera next year.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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      Roger Norrington, Iconoclastic British Conductor, Dies at 91

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      His work, largely unknown outside Britain until late in his career, was often based on historical treatises. It was seen by many as refreshingly innovative.Roger Norrington, the English conductor who became a star of the historically informed performance movement by provocatively applying scholarly research about tempos and tone production to a broad expanse of the symphonic repertoire, from Beethoven to Mahler and even the modernist Stravinsky, died on Friday at his home outside of Exeter, England. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his friend and musical colleague Evans Mirageas, who is the artistic director of the Cincinnati Opera.Mr. Norrington was known for his brisk, lively and often audacious performances of Handel, Mozart and Haydn before he turned his attention to Beethoven and Berlioz; after that, he forged deeper into the 19th and early 20th centuries. He led both period-instrument and modern orchestras, using the same interpretive principles, and though some of his performances drew criticism for their brash iconoclasm, many listeners regarded them as insightful and refreshingly original.Lanky, bespectacled, bearded and balding, Mr. Norrington projected both affability and authority, and he loved making the case for his ideas — not only in interviews but also in seemingly off-the-cuff comments at his concerts. He often cited centuries-old treatises as well as his delight in the “pure” sound, as he put it, of strings playing without vibrato. He once famously referred to vibrato as “a modern drug.”Toward the end of his career, he preferred to conduct while seated, usually on a high swivel chair that allowed him to turn to the audience to smile conspiratorially at a light moment within the music, and even to encourage applause. He was known to tell audiences that they could applaud between the movements of a symphony or a concerto, a common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries that is frowned on today.He reveled in being provocative. In a 2021 interview with The Telegraph, he referred to his 2007 recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony as his “last hand grenade.”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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      W.N.B.A.’s All-Star Weekend Is Still Buzzing, Even Without Caitlin Clark

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      The temperature had crept past 80 degrees, but on Friday afternoon, on a basketball court in the heart of downtown Indianapolis, Ava Shampo, 5, was feeling good.“I made it!” she said, smiling, after heaving an orange-and-white basketball toward a hoop that towered over her.The line of nets on Monument Circle, the traffic roundabout at the city’s center, was one of more than a dozen public events held in connection with the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Saturday night. The game was expected to feature fan favorites like Aliyah Boston of the Indiana Fever and A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces — even if the biggest name, the Fever’s Caitlin Clark, was sidelined by a right groin injury she sustained earlier in the week.The turnout for All-Star Weekend — a fervent crowd seemingly undiminished by Ms. Clark’s injury — reflected both the explosion of interest in the W.N.B.A. and the excitement around the sport in Indianapolis.Fans descended on Indianapolis for more than a dozen public events held around the city in connection with the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game.Lee Klafczynski for The New York TimesA young fan decorated her sneakers.Lee Klafczynski for The New York TimesDonna Motley of Chicago made her own outfit for the weekend.Lee Klafczynski for The New York TimesWe 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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      Patty Griffin’s Life Fell Apart. Rebuilding Gave Her Music a Jolt.

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      Patty Griffin did not intend to embarrass her mother on her debut album.In the early ’90s, Griffin recorded a series of simple demos to get gigs within Boston’s songwriter circuit. She had written “Sweet Lorraine” — a biographical snapshot of her mother’s rough-and-tumble upbringing — in a flash. But as hubbub grew about the diminutive redhead with the enormous voice, every label interested in Griffin demanded that “Sweet Lorraine” appear on her 1996 debut, “Living With Ghosts.” She’d never thought Lorraine would hear it.“She was so angry, and now that I’m older, I don’t blame her,” Griffin said recently during a video interview from her home in Austin, as her dog, Buster, nuzzled her. “That was stepping across a line.”On her 10 albums since that debut, Griffin has pinballed between post-grunge rock and graceful folk, between Spanish balladry and sizzling blues, even duetting with Mavis Staples before cutting a country-gospel wonder in Nashville. As she wrote about civil rights and bigotry, adventure and lust, she continued to examine her difficult childhood and relationship with Lorraine in many of her most tender but tough songs.Those family tunes culminate on her new album, “Crown of Roses,” out July 25, with the arresting “Way Up to the Sky.” On “Sweet Lorraine,” she blamed her mother’s problems on her past. But on “Way Up to the Sky,” Griffin shoulders some of the blame, singing about being the youngest of seven children who rarely made their mother feel valued amid a collapsing marriage in a cash-strapped household held together by Catholicism and convenience. Lorraine never heard “Way Up to the Sky.” She died in February at 93.“I wanted to know all the secret stuff in her heart, what those days were like when she was sad and lost and broke and unappreciated,” Griffin, 61, said with a rueful chuckle. “It was hard to get that close to it, because she had been so angry with us for so long — especially me.”On the 10 albums since her debut, Patty Griffin has pinballed between post-grunge rock and graceful folk, between Spanish balladry and sizzling blues, even duetting with Mavis Staples before cutting a country-gospel wonder in Nashville.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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      ‘Swag’ Album Review: Justin Bieber Finds His Old Soul

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      “Swag,” a new album of dreamy beats and unexpected collaborations, eschews formulaic pop to lean into the singer’s R&B instincts.In 2007, back when YouTube was in its infancy and Justin Bieber was not far beyond his, he and his mother posted to the platform a series of videos of him singing covers. Mostly, he gave preternaturally tender versions of R&B hits — Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” Brian McKnight’s “Back at One,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (!) and more. (There is also 40 seconds of “Justin Bieber playing the djembe” for the curious.)All of these videos remain on Bieber’s YouTube channel and the spirit captured in them has remained in his music, even if at times it has appeared to be shoved into the back seat and told to remain quiet while the adults were talking.By the dawn of the 2010s, he was a pop phenom, and a couple of years after that, he was the most successful male pop star of his generation. The more successful he became, though, the more his connection to R&B was pared back. “Journals,” his 2013 EP of lo-fi soul, became a connoisseur’s favorite, but didn’t reorient his trip to the pop stratosphere. On his biggest hits — especially the 2015 pair “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean?” — his voice, and how it was filtered, was more eau de toilette than eau de parfum.A decade has passed since then, and Bieber has spent long stretches of that time in a kind of public retreat. He’s had big hits, and he’s toured big rooms, and he’s been an object of tabloid scrutiny and public speculation about his mental health; largely, he’s been a superstar seeking a shadow.“Swag,” Bieber’s seventh studio album, which was released with almost no advance notice last week, is a winning example of an older artist — though, at just 31, it feels lightly ludicrous to refer to Bieber this way — being willing to toss much of the old playbook away, or at least obscure it really well. It is an album of spacey, sometimes slithery soul music — some of it highly digitally manipulated, some of it refreshingly acoustic — that feels like a reversion to Bieber’s core passions refracted through the lens of a performer who has seen too much.The low-pressure environment of this album is tactile — Bieber sings in a variety of modes, he collaborates with unexpected peers, he has standard-length songs and also snippets and skits.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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      Nine Inch Nails Revisits the ’80s, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Robert Plant, Amanda Shires, Blood Orange and more.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.Nine Inch Nails: ‘As Alive as You Need Me to Be’“As Alive as You Need to Be” explains why Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross reclaimed the Nine Inch Nails name for their latest film score, “Tron: Ares.” It’s a complete song and a return to the buzz-bomb synthesizers, stomping march beat, stereo ricochets and gut-wrenching vocals of the band’s heyday — quite suitable, in its late-1980s impact, for the latest sequel to “Tron,” the 1982 movie based on the videogame. The refrain might be a breakthrough for an artificial intelligence: “I can finally feel.”FKA twigs: ‘Perfectly’FKA twigs is still in dance-club mode for this track from “Deluxua,” the expanded version of her “Eusexua” album released in January. She chases euphoria — “Inside my head I have the best time” — over a transparent but insistent house beat topped with ghostly keyboards. Singing delicately but not hesitantly, she’s melting into the moment.Olivia Dean: ‘Lady Lady’On “Lady Lady,” the English pop-soul songwriter Olivia Dean faces change with a little nostalgia and a little hope. “She’s always changing me without a word,” Dean sings, adding, “I was just getting used to her.” Sumptuous keyboards and gently encouraging backup vocals tip the balance toward optimism: “Now we know that dream ain’t coming true / There’s room for something new.”Hermanos Gutiérrez featuring Leon Bridges: ‘Elegantly Wasted’It’s just a guess, but perhaps Leon Bridges was listening to the lilt of a minor-key bolero when he came up with the phrase “elegantly wasted” and built a bolero-meets-soul song around it. The rhythm of that refrain meshes with the guitars and rhythm section of Hermanos Gutiérrez — usually an instrumental band — while Bridges steers the song toward physical longing: “Show me how to taste it,” he pleads.Amanda Shires: ‘A Way It Goes’Retro sounds conjure bitter memories on Amanda Shires’s “A Way It Goes.” A hollow version of a girl-group beat, a distant surf-guitar twang and hovering strings are the backdrop as Shires recalls a shattering heartbreak: She was divorced from the songwriter Jason Isbell in March after a 10-year marriage. “I could tell you I felt like I was dying / Hugged my knees to my chest crying, I couldn’t stop,” she sings. But while the pain is still vivid, so is her determination to leave it behind — to find herself, a year later, “flying happily ever after the aftermath.”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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      Alan Bergman, Half of a Prolific Lyric-Writing Team, Dies at 99

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      With his wife, Marilyn, he wrote the words to memorable TV theme songs and the Oscar-winning “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind.”Alan Bergman, who teamed with his wife, Marilyn, to write lyrics for the Academy Award-winning songs “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind” and for some of television’s most memorable theme songs, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.His death was announced by a family spokesman, Ken Sunshine.The Bergmans regularly collaborated with prominent composers like Marvin Hamlisch, with whom they wrote “The Way We Were,” from the 1973 Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford romance of the same name (“Memories/Light the corners of my mind/Misty watercolor memories/Of the way we were”), and Michel Legrand, with whom they wrote “The Windmills of Your Mind,” from the 1968 crime movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway (“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel/Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel”).Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in the 1973 film “The Way We Were.” The Bergmans won an Academy Award for the title song, a collaboration with Marvin Hamlisch.Columbia PicturesThey also wrote the lyrics to Mr. Legrand’s score for Ms. Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl,” for which they won their third Academy Award.The Bergmans were among the favored lyricists of stars like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and especially Ms. Streisand, who in 2011 released the album “What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.” The album’s 10 tracks included “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Nice ’n’ Easy,” “That Face” and the title song, none of which were among the numerous Bergman lyrics Ms. Streisand had recorded before. Promoting the album, she described the Bergmans as having “a remarkable gift for expressing affairs of the heart.”Between 1970 and 1996, the Bergmans received a total of 16 Oscar nominations. One year, 1983, they claimed three of the five best-song nominations, for “It Might Be You” from “Tootsie,” “If We Were in Love” from “Yes, Giorgio” and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from “Best Friends.” (They lost to “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman.”)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