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      Doja Cat Goes Horror Rap on ‘Demons,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Peter Gabriel, Lauren Mayberry, Oneohtrix Point Never and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Doja Cat, ‘Demons’A brash, blown-speaker quality animates “Demons,” the latest single from Doja Cat’s upcoming album, “Scarlet.” “How my demons look now that my pockets full?” she shouts with a defiant rasp, before switching to a lighter and more viciously humorous register on the verses. (“Who are you, and what are those? You are gross!”) “Demons” also features a horror movie-inspired video, which stars Christina Ricci and features a very creepy Doja slithering around like a red-eyed monster. Other pop stars merely tune out their haters; Doja exorcises them. LINDSAY ZOLADZNicki Minaj, ‘Last Time I Saw You’Nicki Minaj doesn’t usually admit to any regrets or second thoughts. But she does in “Last Time I Saw You,” a song that seesaws between guitar-flecked ballad and rueful rapping. “I wish I remembered to say I’d do anything for you/Maybe I pushed you away because I thought that I’d bore you,” she sings, confessing that she was the one in the wrong. JON PARELESTeezo Touchdown featuring Janelle Monáe, ‘You Thought’Misjudgments pile up in “You Thought,” which transforms from percussive, triplet-driven rock to ballad with brisk hip-hop wordplay. Teezo Touchdown moves between rapping and singing; Monáe is melodic, singing, “I thought we were better.” The song details a breakup from both sides: missed opportunities, misunderstandings, unfulfilled needs, all compressed into pop. PARELESBlankfor.ms, Jason Moran and Marcus Gilmore, ‘Eighth Pose’Tyler Gilmore — the New York-based composer and musician known as Blankfor.ms — makes music using degraded tape loops, analog synthesizers and an old spinet piano. He was approached recently by the producer Sun Chung about doing an album with jazz improvisers, and his first call was to the pianist and composer Jason Moran, his former teacher at the New England Conservatory. His second was to the drummer Marcus Gilmore. Those two are among the finest improvisers alive: It is an impressive team for a first foray. On “Refract,” their new album, the trio works across medium and style, with composed elements and prepared loops by Blankfor.ms sparking improvisations from his collaborators. “Eighth Pose” turns on a twitchy, coiled synth phrase, like a keyed-up Aphex Twin track; Moran picks it up on the piano, toying with it, while Gilmore adds a nervy drumbeat, passed through compressed effects. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKenya Grace, ‘Strangers’Speedy breakbeats equate with dating jitters in “Strangers,” Kenya Grace’s whispery complaint about how 21st-century romance too often ends in ghosting. She’s the singer, songwriter and producer on the track. “One random night when everything changes/you won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers.” Synthesizers hum as the percussion races ahead, while she sings about feeling like “Everyone’s disposable.” PARELESJeff Rosenstock, ‘Will U Still U’The Long Island-born punk lifer Jeff Rosenstock tests the limits of love on “Will U Still U,” the jet-propelled opening track off his new album “Hellmode.” “Will you still love me” after I’ve messed up, he asks (with an expletive) in a catchy, incongruously cheery melody, before unleashing a rapid-fire rundown of his relationship worries. In the song’s cathartic finale he’s joined by a chorus of voices shouting that refrain at the top of their lungs and fist-pumping in anxious solidarity. ZOLADZOneohtrix Point Never, ‘A Barely Lit Path’Oneohtrix Point Never is the composer and mastermind Daniel Lopatin, who has been the Weeknd’s producer and created the nervy soundtrack for “Uncut Gems,” along with making his own albums. “A Barely Lit Path” begins as a reverent, electronics-edged dirge with processed vocals imagining “a barely lit path from your house to mine.” Then it goes through a multiverse of wordless transformations: pulsing synthesizers, a stately quasi-Baroque string orchestra, a choir accompanied by synthesizer arpeggios and a gradual, virtual decrescendo. Absolutely anything can happen as long as it’s in the same key. PARELESPeter Gabriel, ‘Love Can Heal (Bright-Side Mix)’An expansive sound design — with bell-toned ostinatos, throaty cellos and multidirectional echoes — underlines Peter Gabriel’s troubled but determined optimism in “Love Can Heal,” a new track from his gradually accruing album “I/O.” His vocal sets aside his usual grizzled hoarseness for a modest tenor; a choir joins him, yet the song stays fragile. PARELESJason Hawk Harris, ‘Jordan and the Nile’There’s an Appalachian feeling to the melody of Jason Hawk Harris’s rootsy incantation “Jordan and the Nile,” a leisurely, mystical song about rivers and generations. An organ and a string section provide droning chords as he sings about determined optimism informed by biblical imagery: “I’m feeling heavy but I see the light/A world is dark but my abyss is bright,” he promises. PARELESLauren Mayberry, ‘Are You Awake?’The debut solo single from Lauren Mayberry — the lead singer of the Scottish electro-pop group Chvrches — is a sparse, plaintive piano ballad written with Tobias Jesso Jr., chronicling nocturnal anxieties and open-ended questions. “Are you awake? I feel a sadness in my skin,” Mayberry sings, her voice melancholy but chiming with the faintest hint of hope that her message will be answered. ZOLADZMaria BC, ‘Amber’ and ‘Watcher’Glimmering electronics, tolling guitars and hovering vocal harmonies gather in “Amber” and “Watcher,” two segued songs that meditate on closeness: “Your scent is on me now/Your senses draw me out,” Maria BC sings. “There is no place to hide and no wrong.” It’s blissfully enveloping and humbly awe-struck. PARELESKris Davis, ‘Dolores’ (Take 1)“Dolores” is easily one of the most infectious melodies Wayne Shorter wrote during his stint as musical director for the Miles Davis Quintet. But it’s not one of the (many) Shorter tunes you’re likely to hear called at a jam session or covered at a straight-ahead gig. Maybe there is something intimidating about the balled up, stop-and-start melody; the centerlessness of its structure; or how perfectly the quintet plays it on the classic 1966 recording. Well, none of this scares the pianist and composer Kris Davis. Strong-but-bendable rhythm, splintered melodic lines and rough-and-tumble interplay are par for the course for (this) Davis, especially with her Diatom Ribbons project. On a new album, recorded live at the Village Vanguard with a five-member version of that ensemble, the group takes its time getting to the theme: The bassist Trevor Dunn makes some references to it, the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington establishes a heavy groove, and finally Julian Lage’s guitar comes together with Davis’s piano to grapple with the melody. When Lage departs from it on his solo, he travels far — and the band comes with him. RUSSONELLO More

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      For 50 Years, Emanuel Ax Has Made Music Sound Simply Right

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      Understated and unarrogant, Ax can be taken for granted. But he has long been, and continues to be, one of the finest American pianists.“A young pianist with the hard-to-forget name of Emanuel Ax has one thing going for him before he plays a note,” the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1973. “But brand identification, as advertising men term it, helps in the long run only if the product delivers, and Mr. Ax’s recital at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night fortunately carried the stamp of quality.”The occasion was Ax’s New York debut, and it was the opening flourish of a banner few years. At the Marlboro Festival in Vermont that summer, Ax gave his first concert with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist he has spent his career playing and quipping with, the friend who calls him “the big brother I never had.” Soon, there was a date on the Young Concert Artists series, a Carnegie Hall appearance, a victory in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and, in February 1975, an eloquent first recording.That stamp of quality had become indelible, and it has since endured. Of course, Ax, 74, protests that the half-century career he has enjoyed following that inaugural hometown bow has been largely the product of good fortune. Never mind his Avery Fisher Prize or his 19 Grammy nominations (and eight wins), his long list of premieres or his generosity and ease as a chamber music partner to Ma and other eager collaborators. Even now, Ax will only reluctantly allow that he has much talent at all.“I just started, and I stuck to it; I liked it,” Ax said of playing the piano during a recent interview at Tanglewood, where he was joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a Brahms concerto as he has many, many times before. “I think the sheer enjoyment of it is a talent in itself.”From left, Leonidas Kavakos, Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, who as a trio have been working their way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Hilary ScottThat’s Manny, as everyone calls him. He has said things like this forever, sought to share the spotlight or point it wholly elsewhere. And his modesty, which he wraps in a jesting smile and a famous bonhomie, is at the heart of his pianism and personality alike.“Whatever his musical decisions are, they are never ones that would draw attention to himself,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has known Ax for four decades and will premiere a piano concerto by Anders Hillborg with him and the San Francisco Symphony in October. “So in the very, very best sense of the word, he kind of eradicates himself out of the picture.”Might that mean, though, that Ax is taken for granted? After all, how many artists have performed at his level for so long? How many have treated us so reliably to such taste and good sense as he? How many have had his ability, not unlike that of his late associate Bernard Haitink, to make music sound so simply right?Ax ranks among the very finest of American pianists. Yet he would never admit it. As Ma put it, “He doesn’t go around saying, ‘And I did this.’” In fact, Ma recalled, when Ax told him that this article was happening, he said, “I don’t know why they’re doing this.”“I told him it’s because he’s old,” Ma said, bursting into laughter.Ma, left, and Ax in 1989.PhotofestMa — who, aside from the pianist Yoko Nozaki, Ax’s wife since 1974, has probably heard him play more than anyone — has a theory about why Ax is the way he is. “One thing that I can safely say, over the 50 years I’ve known him, is that he operates by a very strict code of conduct,” he said.The code, Ma went on, means that Ax never speaks ill of other pianists, and does what he can to bolster them instead. He insists on being kind, on looking at the brighter side of things. He goes to unusual lengths to build trust with fellow performers because the music, in the end, depends on it.“Somewhere along the line, he saw some things that he didn’t like, and he decided that he was not going to be that,” Ma explained. “He’s seen the consequences, and that’s why the code of conduct exists. It’s not some arbitrary thing.”AX WAS BORN in the Soviet Union in 1949, in what is now Lviv, Ukraine — though he still calls it Lwów, the Polish name it held in the interwar years. During the Holocaust, his parents, Joachim and Hellen, survived the concentration camps but lost, he said, “everybody.” They wed after the war and left for Warsaw when Ax was 7. He didn’t return to Lviv until six years ago, when he visited at the invitation of Philippe Sands, whose book “East West Street” movingly recounts the history of that contested city.Ax as a boy.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx with his parents, who left the Soviet Union and eventually settled in the United States.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx said that he only really remembered the opera house where he had first heard music, but Ma has heard him talk about a darker recollection, too: “I think he remembers a big parade in the town, and he knew the exact spot where it was. He backtracked and realized that that must have been when Stalin had died.”Warsaw led to Winnipeg, and Winnipeg to Manhattan, where the family settled into an apartment on the roof of a building across the street from Carnegie Hall. Ax was 12, and the hall, where he will play works by Beethoven and Schoenberg in April, became his playground. “I haunted the place,” he said.Great pianists crossed his path, older ones like Artur Rubinstein and younger artists such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he speaks of them with the excitement of a fan and the insight of a colleague. For Emil Gilels, he reserves telling enthusiasm.“I think he’s in a way the most sane pianist,” Ax said. “It’s so direct, absolutely self-confident, unarrogant, logical, beautiful, and just done just right. You walk out and you say, ‘That’s the way it should be.’ Of course, then you hear Richter, and you say, ‘No, that’s the way it should be.’ And then you hear Horowitz.”Ax studied at Juilliard with Mieczyslaw Munz, and endured several competitions before he triumphed in the Rubinstein. Even then, his virtues were not those typical of winners. For all his “dream technique,” as a critic described it in 1975, he immediately seemed a deeper musician than most. “His interpretations are warm, solid and straightforward,” Tim Page wrote in The Times in 1985, styling him as “a deeply satisfying pianist” — traits you can hear on his recording of the Chopin “Ballades” from the same year, or his later Haydn and Brahms.Ax performing with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2011; the two will be reunited when they premiere a new concerto with the San Francisco Symphony in October.Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesIf consistency has been Ax’s hallmark, he has never been entirely reducible to type. He dabbled with period instruments for a while, joining Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to record the Chopin concertos with brilliance and verve; his dedication to new music, which has seen him premiere scores by composers including John Adams and Missy Mazzoli, has been striking for a pianist of his stature.“I don’t think he sees it as a duty,” Salonen said of Ax’s commitment to contemporary works. “I think he thinks it’s normal. He thinks this is something that musicians do.”Chamber music, though, was with Ax from the start. He studied with the legendary tutor Felix Galimir as a teenager, then went on to form, among other groups, his duo with Ma, a piano trio with Ma and Isaac Stern, a piano quartet with the addition of Jaime Laredo, and, most recently, another trio with Ma and Leonidas Kavakos, with whom he is working his way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Ax’s fundamental approach to chamber music reflects his “devotion to where he landed, and to the aspirations of the system,” Ma said, to “the idea of republicanism, that you can be not hierarchical.” Their relationship was forged on jokes told in the Juilliard cafeteria, where they met when Ma was 15 and Ax was 21, but also on an ideal of equality in shared music, Ma said; this, at a time when pianists were still billed as accompanists to stars, or spoken of in the possessive sense.And it is chamber music, or more precisely playing with friends, that keeps Ax from retiring. He thinks about it more than he used to, he said; he missed giving concerts during the pandemic, but he also felt liberated from the deep anxiety that has always come with them.Ax in 1973.Christian Steiner/YCA“I get very nervous when I play, and I really wish I could get over it,” Ax said, confiding that the feeling can be worse now than before. “It’s not even a musical worry, it’s more about getting things right, you know — wrong notes and things like that.”Ax is modest even about these strains; Ma compared the pressure that Ax has always felt to that suffered by Martha Argerich, whose stage fright and perfectionism have led her largely to abandon solo recitals. But he suspects that Ax is not there yet.“Something in me tells me that he’s not going to stop, because performing also does something for him that is a pillar in his life,” Ma said. “It’s solidifying. I wouldn’t say that it’s like he needs it, but there’s a mutuality that’s good.”Ask Ma what makes Ax special as a pianist, and he will say that it is how he gives music the sense that everything has been thought through. He will note how revealing it is that Ax so adores Brahms, whose works are all about restraint, about reaching for things that are kept out of reach. He will marvel, with more than a hint of exasperation, that Ax still practices for four hours a day, that he is still so prone to doubt; he will grant, though, that doubt serves a purpose in Ax’s life.“He experiences that — he lets himself experience that — because he doesn’t want to say, ‘I know everything,’” Ma said.But Ma will say all this only when asked to elaborate. Otherwise, when he answers the question of what defines Ax as a pianist, he responds with just one word.“Musicianship.”Ax, left, with students from Kids 4 Harmony at Tanglewood.Hilary Scott More

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      Are We Finally Ready to Take Tammy Wynette Seriously?

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      The unsung godmother of so-called “sad girl” music — and one of pop’s most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain — has long been misunderstood.Earlier this month, at a concert in Arkansas, Lana Del Rey covered a song she’d never played live before: Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”The performance made headlines, even if most of the accompanying articles held “Stand by Your Man” — an exhaustively debated cultural Rorschach test about badly behaved men and the women who put up with them — and Wynette herself at arm’s length.People magazine called the original song “polarizing.” The website Stereogum referred to Wynette’s track as “controversial.” Rolling Stone noted that Del Rey “didn’t introduce the song or offer commentary on her intentions,” as if simply paying tribute to Wynette couldn’t have been enough of an intention. That article referred to Wynette’s 1968 hit as “a tune many considered an affront to the feminist movement of the late ’60s,” then linked to the publication’s recently revised list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, on which “Stand by Your Man” ranked No. 473.It was just another Rorschach test: Even 25 years after her death, nobody knows quite what to make of Tammy Wynette.Born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942, Wynette had a resonantly sad voice and a life story to match. Married at 17; divorced with three children by 23; in and out of disappointing and sometimes abusive relationships (most famously with her frequent duet partner, George Jones); a sufferer of chronic health problems and bizarre, unexplained acts of violence; gone too soon when she died in her sleep in 1998, at age 55.She was also, perhaps because of these experiences, one of the most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain that popular music has ever known.Wynette and George Jones onstage in 1980 in Chicago. The couple’s tumultuous relationship was chronicled in the recent series “George & Tammy.”Kirk West/Getty ImagesIn recent years, Dolly Parton has been canonized into an untouchable pop-cultural saint, and Loretta Lynn, rightly remembered as a feisty country pioneer when she died last year at 90, enjoyed a late-career renaissance collaborating with younger rock and alt-country artists. But Wynette’s legacy has become more complicated, perhaps because her tumultuous life and storied career have too often been conflated with the flattest and most literal reading of her signature song.Notoriously, when rumors of Bill Clinton’s infidelity surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton told a reporter, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” But was that ever what Wynette was actually advocating? (For one thing, Wynette was also known for singing one of the most famous songs about divorce.) A recent prestige-TV series and an incisive new book of music criticism offer their own answers, and varied ways to think about Wynette in a modern context.Late last year, Showtime aired the long-gestating “George & Tammy,” in which Jessica Chastain gives a steely, fearless performance as Wynette. (Her work earned an Emmy nomination, and she’s currently the betting favorite to win.) With Michael Shannon playing a convincingly unhinged, charismatic and ultimately contrite Jones, the series encompasses the six years of the couple’s troubled marriage and decades of their closely entwined careers.Jessica Chastain as Wynette and Michael Shannon as Jones in “George & Tammy.”Dana Hawley/Showtime, via Associated PressAs strong as the lead performances are, the series suffers from small anachronisms and fictitious dramatizations — no, Wynette was not in the studio when Jones finally nailed the vocal take of his heartbreaking late-career weepie “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” at least not physically — and it too often scripts Wynette reciting retrofitted platitudes that overexplain the era’s obvious sexism. (“If a girl singer got drunk like you boys do, they would toss her out of Nashville so fast,” she says to Jones, who is eating a raw potato in an attempt to alleviate a hangover.) But “George & Tammy” is most obviously marred by its answer to the classic music biopic conundrum: to lip-sync (and risk looking unserious) or to sing (and inevitably fall short of the source material)?Chastain tackles the songs herself, and though her pipes are decent, her performances never quite transcend honky-tonk bar karaoke. Watching the series, you miss the specific and elusive magic of Wynette’s own voice, making clear how easy it is to take for granted. As with the many lackluster and overly literal covers of “Stand by Your Man” that have been recorded over the years, the power of Wynette’s vocals and the emotional intelligence of her interpretations are somehow easier to appreciate in absentia.And what a voice it was: emotionally weighty but swooping and nimble, downright kaleidoscopic in its melancholy. “The thing about Wynette’s voice,” writes the critic Steacy Easton in a slim but thoughtful new book, “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” “is that, often, how it catches and breaks, even how it twangs, are marks of domestic melodrama in her performance.”In prose that occasionally veers toward the academic but mostly stays succinctly readable, Easton effectively makes the case that Wynette is underappreciated and worthy of a serious critical reappraisal. The musician has long had a few strikes working against her. As Clinton’s curt 1992 dismissal attests, the women Wynette sang about and embodied in her songs often seemed at odds with second-wave feminism. She often sang about the sorts of people and situations that aren’t usually championed in a culture that devalues women’s work and doesn’t treat their perspectives seriously. Easton notes, astutely, that Wynette’s songs often depicted “failures of the domestic,” and that “Wynette’s best work is about when the most private failures become public scandals.”That intuitive toggling between the private and the public gets at why Wynette’s is one of the saddest voices ever put to tape. Its sadness comes not from rawness or feral inhibition, but from the constant, self-conscious mediation between how the singer is feeling and how she must present herself to the world.It’s that brimming-but-never-spilling-over quality that so many women, mothers and queer people have learned to use as a survival strategy. (Easton, who is trans and nonbinary, provides a refreshing perspective on Wynette and gender: “The idea of putting on your womanhood has a tender resonance,” they write.) It’s knowing exactly how to fold a napkin to dab your mascara so no one knows you’ve been crying. Or, as Reba McEntire sings in an affecting 2019 ballad called “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain,” it’s when “you don’t want him to see you crying, so you’re crying in the rain.” It’s also, in some cases, about the sacrifice of swallowing that pain to protect a child’s feelings — about spelling out “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” rather than explaining what it means.Despite her cultural association with standing by her man, Wynette actually divorced four times. In Ken Burns’s 2019 documentary “Country Music,” the singer-songwriter Jeannie Seely notes the irony that while Lynn’s songs often embodied the persona of the feisty woman ready to kick her man to the curb, she was the one who stood by her man for his entire life. Seely mused, of Wynette and Lynn, “I always kind of thought they wrote each other’s songs.”Wynette on her tour bus in 1971. Al Clayton/Getty ImagesOnstage in Arkansas, a state abutting Wynette’s own Mississippi birthplace, Del Rey put her into yet another modern context — perhaps one that made the most sense yet. I’ve often considered Wynette to be an unrecognized godmother of so-called “sad girl” music, that somewhat nebulous aesthetic that initially flourished on the microblogging website Tumblr, and of which Del Rey has become an unofficial icon. While there’s something explicitly womanly about Wynette’s sadness — “this ain’t no little girl heartache,” McEntire sings in her definition of “Tammy Wynette pain” — Del Rey’s cover brings Wynette’s music to a generation and a type of listener less inclined to dismiss the expression of feminine pain as weakness. As the critic and artist Audrey Wollen once said of her playfully defined “Sad Girl Theory,” “there is an entire lineage of women who consciously disrupted the status quo through enacting their own sorrow.” Which sounds like yet another way of talking about that Tammy Wynette kind of pain.That type of subversion pervades Wynette’s exquisite and deeply felt performance of “Stand by Your Man,” too — a performance that no one has come close to topping. The Chicks play it too perky; Lyle Lovett’s version is winkingly smarmy; Carla Bruni’s cover … well … exists. Del Rey, though, seems to understand something about the song’s tension and dynamism, its paradoxical earnest irony. But even an eerie A.I. recording speculating what it might sound like if “Del Rey” recorded a “studio version” of “Stand by Your Man” can’t quite fathom the song’s murky depths as well as Wynette could. Again, the voice you miss is distinctly hers.Maybe I am able to come to it with less baggage than I may have had I lived through the particular culture war it spawned in 1968, but I do not listen to this song — or, for that matter, Wynette’s devastating 1967 breakout hit “I Don’t Want to Play House” — and hear a ringing endorsement of heterosexual monogamy, female submission and male supremacy. I hear a quavering teardrop of a voice acknowledge and sing like she means it, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” And then I hear her issuing one of the most zinging backhanded compliments in the history of patriarchy: “If you love him, oh be proud of him/’cause after all, he’s just a man.” More

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      John Eliot Gardiner Withdraws From Performances After Accusations He Struck Singer

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      John Eliot Gardiner said he would take time off until next year to “get the specialist help I recognize that I have needed for some time.”The renowned conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who drew criticism this month when he was accused of hitting a singer in the face after a performance in France, said on Thursday that he would withdraw from performances for the rest of the year as he sought counseling.“I am taking a step back in order to get the specialist help I recognize that I have needed for some time,” Gardiner said in a statement. “I want to apologize to colleagues who have felt badly treated and anyone who may feel let down by my decision to take time out to address my issues. I am heartbroken to have caused so much distress and I am determined to learn from my mistakes.”Intermusica, the agency that represents Gardiner, said he would withdraw from all concerts until next year to focus “on his mental health while engaging in a course of counseling.” He had at least 10 more planned engagements this year, including a planned six-concert tour in the United States and Canada in October with two of his ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists.“Over the next few months he will be undergoing an extensive, tailored course of treatment and he asks for space and privacy while the program is ongoing,” a spokesman for Intermusica, Nicholas Boyd-Vaughan, said in a statement.Gardiner, 80, apologized last week after he was accused of striking the singer, William Thomas, 28, after a performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” with two of his ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André. Gardiner abruptly returned to London to see his doctor and withdrew from the rest of a planned European tour with the ensembles.Gardiner was upset that Thomas had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, according to a person who was granted anonymity to describe the incident because the person was not authorized to discuss it publicly.Gardiner expressed regret last week, saying that he had lost his temper and that he had apologized to Thomas, a rising bass from England.“I know that physical violence is never acceptable and that musicians should always feel safe,” he said at the time. “I ask for your patience and understanding as I take time to reflect on my actions.”Thomas was not seriously injured and has continued to perform on the tour. He has not commented on the encounter.Gardiner, who conducted at the coronation of King Charles III of Britain in May, is a crucial figure in the period-instrument movement and the founder of some of its most treasured ensembles. He has made numerous recordings, many of which are considered classics, and wrote 2013’s “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” about the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach.In October, he was to appear with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists in the United States, including at Carnegie Hall, where he was to lead Bach’s Mass in B Minor and a rare performance of Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.”The Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, a nonprofit that oversees Gardiner’s ensembles, said in a statement on Thursday that the tour would proceed without Gardiner, and that a replacement would be announced at a later date.“The well-being of all our performers and employees is important to us and we respect his decision,” the statement said. More

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      36 Hours in Amsterdam: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Find your perfect street food
      Between the Lindengracht Markt and the neighboring Noordermarkt, a pricier, organic market that also has antiques, handmade jewelry, artisanal pickles, soaps and honey to browse, there are plenty of street-food stalls to choose from. (Walking while eating is frowned upon in Dutch culture, so grab a picnic table). On the Lindengracht side, try a sabich (€7.50), a stuffed vegetarian pita at Abu Salie, or for a classic Dutch lunch, go for the speciaal beenham and braadworst (a sandwich piled high with sausage, ham and sauerkraut, €6) at Fluks & Sons. Stalls throughout the markets also sell raw herring, sometimes covered in onions. Join locals at the Noordermarkt for fresh oysters (from €3.50 each; find them beside the entrance, next to the church tower). Dutch sweets also abound, including the ever-popular poffertjes (mini pancakes in powdered sugar or syrup) or warm and gooey stroopwafels. More

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      Ray Hildebrand, the ‘Paul’ of Hitmakers Paul and Paula, Dies at 82

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      He wrote a romantic song for his friend’s girlfriend, Paula, and recorded it as a duet with Jill Jackson. It became a No. 1 hit.Ray Hildebrand, whose recording with a friend, Jill Jackson, of a love song he wrote in college, “Hey Paula,” became a No. 1 hit in 1963 and brought them instant fame as Paul and Paula, died on Aug. 18 at his home in Overland Park, Kan. He was 82.His son-in-law, Larry Sterling, said the cause was dementia.“Hey Paula” was a sweet, romantic ballad about a couple close to marrying. Mr. Hildebrand had written it at the request of a friend whose girlfriend was named Paula, but the emotion behind it was for Judy Hendricks, a former girlfriend with whom Mr. Hildebrand wanted to reunite.The song is a musical conversation started by Mr. Hildebrand, who sings in, part:Hey, hey, Paula.I want to marry you.Hey, hey, Paula.No one else could ever do.When Ms. Jackson answers, she sings:Hey, Paul.I’ve been waiting for you.Hey, hey, hey Paul.I want to marry you too.The popularity of “Hey Paula” evolved slowly and then exploded. It began as a song that Mr. Hildebrand and Ms. Jackson sang on a 15-minute radio show she had in Brownwood, Texas, where they were both attending Howard Payne College (now University). The show’s disc jockey told them that listeners loved the song, and suggested they record it.At a studio in Fort Worth, they cut a 45-r.p.m. record, and the song, released on the small Le Cam label, became a regional hit. Recognizing the song’s potential, Mercury Records soon bought their contract and the recording and reissued it on its Philips label.“They changed our names,” Mr. Hildebrand told Link, the Howard Payne magazine, in 2012. “We called the song ‘Paul and Paula’ by Jill and Ray, and they called it ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul and Paula, which is better marketing.”Released in late 1962, “Hey Paula” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the second week of February 1963, displacing “Walk Right In” by the Rooftop Singers. It stayed in the No. 1 spot for three weeks. Paul and Paula’s next single, “Young Lovers,” peaked at No. 6 at the end of that April.They were on tour in England in the spring, when “Hey Paula” rose to No. 8 on the Melody Maker chart and they met the Beatles in a BBC television studio.In June they sang “First Quarrel” on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” and they later joined Mr. Clark’s three-week musical caravan as part of a roster that also included Gene Pitney, Lou Christie, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans, the Crystals and Ruby and the Romantics.But when the Clark tour reached Cincinnati at the end of July, Mr. Hildebrand realized that he had had enough of the road. At the end of a show, he told Ms. Jackson that he was quitting the tour. He felt he was no longer in control of his life.“So at 5 o’clock in the morning in Cincinnati, I wrote Dick Clark a note and slipped it under his door,” he said at an event held two years ago by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a sports ministry, to which he devoted much of his life. “I said, ‘I’m so sorry.’”For the rest of the tour, Mr. Hildebrand said in an interview with the website Classic Bands, Mr. Clark filled in for him on “Hey Paula.”Once he was off the tour, Mr. Hildebrand started dating Miss Hendricks again. They married in early 1964 and stayed together until her death in 1999.Jill Jackson, who is now Jill Landon, said she supported Mr. Hildebrand’s decision to leave the Clark caravan. “It was the right thing for him to do,” she said by phone.She and Mr. Hildebrand released three albums in 1963. They continued to perform together occasionally for a while and, until recently, reunited at oldies shows and other events.Mr. Hildebrand and Ms. Jackson in 1985. Though their days as hitmakers ended in 1963, they continued to reunite for oldies shows and other events. Ron Wolfson/MediaPunch , via AlamyRaymond Glenn Hildebrand was born on Nov. 21, 1940, in Joshua, Texas. His father, Walter, was a school principal; his mother, Alma (Wood) Hildebrand, was a teacher. After attending Navarro Junior College in Corsicana, Texas, he transferred to Howard Payne College on a basketball scholarship.In the summer of 1962, he got a job at the college’s swimming pool and, to save money on housing, lived in the gymnasium. In the quiet of the gym, he started writing songs.He was asked by a teammate to write a song about his girlfriend, Paula. Another teammate listened to an early version of the song, which was told entirely by Paul, and suggested a change.“He said, ‘You ought to let the girl sing back to the guy,’” Mr. Hildebrand recalled in the Link magazine interview. At first, he said, he thought the suggestion was ridiculous, but then he agreed to do it, turning the song into a conversation.After receiving his bachelor’s degree in English in 1964, Mr. Hildebrand started a new career as a contemporary Christian singer and songwriter. He recorded albums under his own name and, starting in the 1980s, with a partner, Paul Land, in an act that mixed music with comedy.From 1967 to 1981, he was program director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at the organization’s national office in Kansas City, Mo. It was mostly a musical job, writing songs with pop melodies and performing them at conferences and summer camps for young athletes. He continued to perform at Fellowship events for many years.“He brought a great deal of fun and laughter to the stage,” Wayne Atcheson, a former assistant director of the organization, said in a phone interview. “You never knew what he would say to get a belly laugh.”Mr. Hildebrand was inducted into the Fellowship’s Hall of Champions in 2003.He also worked as a television producer and a real estate appraiser.He is survived by his daughter, Heidi Sterling; his son, Michael; seven grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and a brother, Steve.Looking back at “Hey Paula” many years later, Mr. Hildebrand said he understood its appeal.“I think one of the things ‘Hey Paula’ had was, it was like a couple dating over the air,” he said in the Classic Bands interview. “They were singing back and forth to each other. You had your Steve and Eydies, but it was not in the teenage pizza-and-peanut-butter songs.”He added: “It was marketable. It was cute.” More

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      Popcast (Deluxe) Mailbag: Selena Gomez, BTS and Doja Cat!

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, is comprised completely of viewer and listener questions, and includes segments on:The sub rosa pop superstardom of Selena Gomez, who has been proximate to many of the biggest ideas in pop over the past decade, but never quite at their centerThe phases of BTS’s American success, both before and after it began anticipating how its music would be received in this countryThe sudden rise of Renee Rapp, actress turned TikTok pot-stirrer turned would-be pop starThe persistence of Doja Cat, an unconventional pop star who seems immune to the frailties of ordinary pop stars, who aren’t allowed to deviate from their carefully crafted imagesThe idiosyncratic career choices of Earl Sweatshirt, who has rejected the conventions of rap stardom at every turn and instead continued to make advanced-placement hip-hop on his own termsSongs of the week, including “Making Noise for the Ones You Love,” a new song from the Chicago band Ratboys, and “Ticking,” a track from the new self-titled album by the country-folk singer Zach BryanSnacks 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

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      Henry Timms Wants to Tear Down Walls at Lincoln Center

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      For evidence that all is not business as usual at Lincoln Center these days, look no further than its stately travertine campus, which, for much of the summer, was dominated by a giant glittering disco ball, pink and purple flowers painted on the sidewalk and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.“There are some who will reasonably eye-roll at this,” said Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, standing on the plaza recently. “I get it. But it sends a message that we are here to have some fun.”“We can afford,” he said, “to loosen up a little.”Since taking the helm in 2019, Timms has been on a mission to remake Lincoln Center. Having helped finally push through the long-delayed $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, he is working to forge closer ties with the city and to bring more diversity to the center’s staff, board and audiences.Now he wants to tear down the barriers that literally wall the campus off from Amsterdam Avenue, with its neighboring housing projects, schools and new developments. But as Lincoln Center rethinks its programming — this summer’s festival included hip-hop, K-pop and an LGBTQ mariachi group — it has drawn some criticism for presenting less classical music and international theater.For the summer, Lincoln Center hung up a disco ball on the plaza.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThis summer’s festival — which included more popular programming than in the past and choose-what-you-pay tickets for some events — attracted more than 380,000 people, officials said, many of whom were new to the campus. Among them was Sandy Mendez, a saleswoman who lives in Washington Heights, and saw her first Lincoln Center performance, a comedy show, after coming across an advertisement at a community center. She took photos in front of the disco ball with her husband and two children.“It feels like a dance club here,” said Mendez, 42, “not a performing arts center.”It is the kind of observation that both Timms’s admirers and his detractors might make.Running Lincoln Center is not easy. The center acts as landlord to the independent arts organizations on its campus, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, but has little power over them, since each has its own leadership, board and budget.Linc. Inc., as it’s known, also presents its own work, which has sometimes led to tensions with constituents. Reynold Levy, its president for more than a decade, called his memoir “They Told Me Not to Take That Job.” After he left, in 2013, Lincoln Center cycled through four leadership teams in five years before appointing Timms in 2019.The British-born Timms, 46, who previously led the 92nd Street Y, helped create #GivingTuesday and co-wrote “New Power,” a book exploring bottom-up leadership, including movements like #MeToo and social networks like Facebook. Now he is trying to apply some of those participatory principles at Lincoln Center. He said his efforts were not “some new trendy idea” but a response to the fact that the center has for too long been disconnected from the community.“We very much came with an agenda, which was we were going to tell a different kind of story about Lincoln Center,” Timms said, “to fundamentally shift the institution in terms of who leads it, who represents it, who’s on our staff, who’s on our stages, who’s in our audiences.”Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall, has been a hit with critics and is drawing crowds.Nico Schinco for The New York Times“We have a long way to go as an organization — nobody at Lincoln Center is taking a bow,” he added in an interview at Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall that critics have named one of the best in the city. “But relative to where we were, I feel like we’ve made good progress.”Nevertheless, the reduction in programming, and the shift away from classical music and theater to other genres, has raised questions. Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of the Juilliard School who has written a history of Lincoln Center, said that Timms’s vision was a “sea change” for the center that could come at a cost.“It leaves a gap in music programming in New York City that is not being filled — it can’t be filled,” he said. “All the artistic leaders I know are fully in support of more program diversity at Lincoln Center. Now the question is, how far does the pendulum swing?”The critic Alex Ross recently wrote in The New Yorker that the new approach seemed “fundamentally out of step with Lincoln Center and its public, both extant and potential.”The conductor Jonathon Heyward will lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterBut Timms pushes back on such criticism, partly by pointing out that “we have just spent four years through a pandemic, and half a billion dollars, creating a concert hall to house the New York Philharmonic” and noting that the center had hired Jonathon Heyward, who recently became the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, to lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.“Lincoln Center was founded as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; it was not founded as Lincoln Center for the Classical Arts,” Timms said. “You go back to the beginning and there’s a reason Mahalia Jackson was playing here. And it’s not because we’re only supposed to be about the opera and the ballet.”Summers at Lincoln Center look different now. The old Lincoln Center Festival was scrapped a few years before Timms arrived, and with it the large-scale, ambitious productions it brought each summer from around the world, including Noh theater and Kabuki theater from Japan, Indonesian dance and Chinese opera. Lincoln Center’s programming is now overseen by Shanta Thake, its chief artistic officer, who was formerly an associate artistic director at the Public Theater. She and Timms have replaced the Mostly Mozart Festival, which had focused on classical music and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, with the more eclectic Summer for the City festival.Portia and the American Composers Orchestra at “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which Lincoln Center staged in Damrosch Park as part of its Summer for the City festival.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center“How do we build on this promise of being a performing arts center for all New Yorkers?” Thake asked. “How do we not rest on our laurels but push for what a performing arts center needs to be right now? Everybody’s willing to have hard conversations.”The coming fall and winter season will feature an array of classical offerings, including a new production of Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” and a performance of Philip Glass’s piano études. There will also be more experimental fare in line with the center’s new vision, including a reimagining of “The Sound of Music” through a “utopian, Afrofuturistic lens,” featuring gospel, funk, soul and Afrobeat music.Timms has also prioritized diversity backstage: of the 109 current members of the executive and senior management teams, about 60 percent are women and nearly 40 percent are people of color. In addition, the center recently started a two-year fellowship program to develop a diverse pipeline of potential board members for the resident organizations; three have been placed as trustees and three more have elections pending.Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who serves on Lincoln Center’s board, praised Timms as a “once-in-a-generation leader” who “genuinely understands that diversity correlates with excellence.”A summer dance party on the Lincoln Center plaza.Mohamed Sadek for The New York TimesThe ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who joined Lincoln Center’s board under Timms, commended his spearheading of the Amsterdam Avenue project, a long-neglected plan to make right Lincoln Center’s initial razing of the low-income San Juan Hill neighborhood where the performing arts complex was built.“He does not shy away from a history that may not look clean and sparkly,” Copeland said. “I don’t think I could imagine 10 years ago that this is where Lincoln Center would be.”Timms, whose mother was an illustrator from the United States and whose father was a British archaeologist, grew up in Exeter, England, where his family often attended regional theaters.“Our childhood was full of ideas and the arts,” he said. “We had access and experience and ownership. You felt like you were a part of something.”He graduated from Durham University in England and landed a job overseeing programming at the 92nd Street Y in 2008, where he helped start #GivingTuesday, a day of philanthropy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday that became a global success. In 2014, he was named the Y’s executive director.Steven R. Swartz, the new chairman of Lincoln Center, said Timms had won over the center’s board with his energy and ideas, quickly recognizing the organization’s main problems, including tensions with the constituents. “He just so quickly diagnosed what needed to be done,” Swartz said.And after years of false starts and bitter feuds, Timms built a good working relationship with the leaders of the Philharmonic — he and Deborah Borda, who was the orchestra’s president and chief executive, sometimes resolved disputes over coffee or martinis — and finally renovated Geffen Hall. By accelerating construction during the pandemic shutdown, they were able to open the reimagined hall ahead of schedule.“He was intent on moving past the history of animosity that existed between Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic,” said Borda, who stepped down at the end of June. “He put a premium on working together. He was essentially the right man at the right time at the right place.”Katherine G. Farley, who stepped down as Lincoln Center’s chairwoman in June, said Timms “has led the transformation of a traditional institution” and that he is “quick and eager to experiment.””Not everything works out,” she added. “When it doesn’t work, he’s quick to shut it down and try something else.”Like other arts institutions, Lincoln Center is still trying to recover from the pandemic shutdown, when the performing arts came to a halt for more than 18 months. The organization is spending less on programming than it did when Timms began his tenure: about $14 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, down from $23 million in 2019, a decrease of about 40 percent that officials attributed in part to the fact that Geffen Hall remained closed for construction through the fiscal year of 2022.But fund-raising remains relatively strong, and the endowment has risen to about $268 million, compared to $258 million in 2019. Moody’s recently affirmed its A3 rating on the center’s $356 million of debt but revised its outlook to stable from negative, noting the completion of Geffen Hall and the center’s efforts to cut expenses and attract new audiences.And relations have eased with the constituent organizations — who historically competed with Lincoln Center for audiences, donors and attention.David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened last year after a long-delayed renovation.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“He’s been very clear that it’s the job of Lincoln Center to honor and pay attention to and try to help all the constituents that make up Lincoln Center,” said Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said Timms had signaled to the constituents early in his tenure that the days of infighting were over. “Here was somebody who understood and really seemed to be listening,” he said. And Damian Woetzel, the president of Juilliard, said Timms had proven “tradition is not at war with innovation.”On a recent day, a team of Lincoln Center staff members inside Geffen Hall was conducting research to prepare for the Amsterdam Avenue project, asking visitors where they spent time on campus and what they would like to do more of: attend cultural events? meet friends? play games? exercise? A poster explained the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and said: “Help us make our campus more welcoming!”In a few hours, Timms would join a salsa band on the outdoor dance floor in a pair of coral-colored Nike Air Max sneakers.“Changing with the world isn’t just the right thing to do morally,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do strategically. And if leaders in a position like ours don’t lead this change, what on earth are you doing?” More