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      Fugees’ Pras Says Lawyer Used A.I. for ‘Ineffectual’ Defense

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      Prakazrel Michel was convicted in April in an illegal foreign influence scheme. In a motion for a new trial, he said his lawyer’s closing argument was “frivolous.”A founding member of the hip-hop group the Fugees has requested a new trial for a foreign influence scheme after arguing in part that his lawyer used artificial intelligence software to craft a “frivolous and ineffectual” closing argument.In April, the rapper Prakazrel Michel was found guilty in federal court of orchestrating an illegal international conspiracy, in which he took millions of dollars from Jho Low, a Malaysian financier who was seeking political influence in the United States. Mr. Michel, known as Pras, was convicted on 10 criminal counts that included money laundering and witness tampering. He faces up to 20 years in prison.In a motion for a new trial this week, Mr. Michel’s new legal team said the lawyers who defended him during the trial in U.S. District Court in Washington had been “deficient throughout.” They singled out the lead lawyer, David E. Kenner, saying that he had misunderstood the facts of the case and ignored “critical weaknesses” in federal prosecutors’ arguments, and that he used an experimental A.I. program to create a closing argument that made “frivolous” claims.Mr. Michel’s lawyers also wrote that Mr. Kenner and another lawyer, Alon Israely, “appear to have had an undisclosed financial interest” in the program, EyeLevel.AI. The motion cited a news release from EyeLevel that mentioned a partner company, CaseFile Connect, the website of which lists the same Los Angeles address as Mr. Kenner’s law firm.Mr. Kenner did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Neither Mr. Israely nor CaseFile Connect could be reached for comment.Neil Katz, the founder and chief operating officer of EyeLevel.AI, said on Thursday that it was “categorically untrue” that the trial lawyers had had an undisclosed financial interest in the company. He added that neither CaseFile Connect nor the lawyers at Mr. Kenner’s firm had a financial stake in his company.Regarding the role his company’s software played in the case, Mr. Katz said that it merely allowed the lawyers to conduct research and analysis in real time based on trial transcripts.“The idea here is not that you would take what is outputted by a computer and walk it into a courtroom and read it into the record,” he said. “That’s not what happened here,”“Human lawyers take this as one important input that helps them get to the ideas faster,” he added. “They ultimately write the legal arguments that they present in a court.”The motion also took aim at the Justice Department and the federal court itself. It said government prosecutors had improperly used an F.B.I. agent at trial, “usurping the role of the jury and influencing the jury’s verdict.” It added that court had prejudiced the jury by ruling in front of them that Mr. Michel had conspired with others in the foreign influence scheme.The Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did not immediately responded to requests for comment.Erica Dumas, Mr. Michel’s publicist, said in a brief statement that his new legal team had identified areas of the case “where justice may not have been properly served.”“After careful examination of the facts and circumstances around Pras Michel’s previous trial, it has become evident that there were inconsistencies and errors in the case,” she said. She did not elaborate and declined to comment further.It was unclear whether the motion would be granted. More

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      The Shindellas, an R&B Girl Group With an Unlikely Story

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      The trio, brought together by a writing and production team and based just outside Nashville, are hoping for a breakout moment with their second album, “Shindo.”The home base of the pop-R&B girl group the Shindellas is a yellow two-story house that’s been standing for more than a century in a pastoral Tennessee town. Inside, the group’s vision board fills an entire wall with its goals — for radio airplay, industry awards, television appearances, movie roles, high-profile collaborations and brand deals. On a slip of paper in the middle, the words “household name” are printed in marker.“That’s probably the biggest one,” said Tamara Chauniece, one of its three members. “Because with that comes all of this.”The Shindellas, which also include Stacy Johnson and Kasi Jones, stand out in the 2023 pop landscape: a vocal trio of women over 30, brought together by a writing-production team, trying to reach the masses with songs that recall the glory of powerhouse girl groups — 20 miles south of Nashville, in the shadow of the country music industry.The group came to town in January 2017 to become part of Weirdo Workshop, a small music company started by the writing and production team Claude Kelly and Chuck Harmony, whose credits include Mary J. Blige, Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus. The Shindellas each hailed from very different performing backgrounds, but were drawn by Kelly and Harmony’s vision for the trio — a concept dating back to a session in the late 2000s, where they found themselves reminiscing about the Supremes and wondering, “‘Where are the girl groups right now?’” Kelly recalled.Their 2019 “Genesis” EP and 2021 debut, “Hits That Stick Like Grits,” remained below the radar, but the elaborately staged shows they did alongside Harmony and Kelly’s duo Louis York helped establish their poised, polished reputation in Tennessee. Their new album, “Shindo,” out Friday, has the potential to bring them to larger stages: It is their first release to receive an outside push from a label partner, the Nashville indie Thirty Tigers, and first to generate a radio hit: “Last Night Was Good for My Soul,” a day-after-the-party jam with a disco groove, reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart.The Shindellas onstage in May. In their rehearsal room, they practice projecting stadium-scale energy and their original choreography.Paras Griffin/Getty ImagesThe group has been preparing for a breakout moment. Coordinated stage costumes pack a walk-in closet. (The aesthetic they request from stylists is “Afrofuturist and just classy, elegant,” Johnson said.) In their rehearsal room, the Shindellas often perform before a mirror, scrutinizing themselves while they practice projecting stadium-scale energy and their original, crisply synchronized choreography.Though Harmony and Kelly assembled the Shindellas, they and the group all agreed on a crucial point early: that the women should be in control of their destiny, well aware of the erasure that minimized contributions from generations of female pop and R&B acts, especially those featuring Black women. “To act as if a group of women who have a powerful sense of style and artistry and songwriting and ideas should just be puppets for you doesn’t work,” Kelly said in an interview. “It didn’t work then,” he added, “and it definitely doesn’t work now.”Before they came together, all of the trio’s members had developed skepticism of the Faustian bargains of the music industry. Johnson, 36, spent her youth in Chicago working with a family-run music company, singing jingles, then graduated to dance tracks. She briefly joined a girl group, but quit when she became uncomfortable with how she was asked to present herself. When Harmony, who previously had hired her to sing demos, pitched her on the concept of a trio built on demanding respect, she was intrigued.“My little sister could listen to this. My grandma could listen to this. I could sing this and turn it up,” she recalled thinking of the idea. She dove into helping find the group’s other voices.Jones, 40, stood out. She had done musical theater and theme park work and booked her own overseas tours as a neo-soul singer-songwriter. But she said she had experienced predatory behavior from some producers in Los Angeles: “People being sexually aggressive, going into a situation with someone you think you know well, and it turns into another thing,” she said. Warily, Jones flew out to visit Weirdo Workshop, where she found the safe space she’d been looking for.Chauniece, 33, spent her childhood on the Texas gospel circuit, managed by her mother. Appearing on Season 5 of “The Voice” boosted her profile, but afterward she felt lost, posting videos of herself singing online that sometimes went viral before resolving to work with a small label. “I don’t want to be on a major label roster, get lost in the sauce,” she said of her mind-set at the time.Initially, the Shindellas would tell Kelly and Harmony what they wanted to sing about and sound like, and gathered around the piano to weigh in on song ideas. Then, Chauniece said, the three women would contemplate how to interpret their parts: “Anytime you hear me, it’s me,” she said of that work. “People don’t consider that authorship, or they don’t consider that your creative property. But it is.”On “Genesis,” they tried out vintage sensibilities, recalling the swinging effervescence of the Motown era and the Pointer Sisters’ knowing invocations of World War II-era vocal jazz. “Hits That Stick Like Grits” covered more stylistic territory and featured an interlude with writing credits for all three Shindellas. But on “Shindo,” named for a made-up word they use in the studio describing “that overwhelming feeling of chills,” Jones said — the group puts its charisma, attitude and personality up front.The Shindellas sing about taking the lead in lust and lasting romance: announcing what they are looking for from a partner in the sleek, funky “Up 2 You,” demanding a lover’s discretion in regard to a hook up in the slow-burning “Kiss N Tell,” and playfully instructing a man how to give pleasure in the bass-driven “Juicy.” (They helped write the latter two.) The video for “Juicy” is all moisturized lips and ripe fruit — except for shots of Jones reading Angela Davis’s book “Women, Race & Class,” a reminder that the Shindellas are always paying attention to power dynamics.“Last Night Was Good for My Soul” showcases Jones’s near-rapping and theatrical warmth, and she and Johnson also take their turns in the spotlight; however, the Shindellas have no lead singer. They combine their voices with pinpoint precision, often singing in softened yet self-possessed unison, then spreading into radiant, jazzy intervals.Their recordings typically begin with piano, and Harmony later wraps exuberant dance floor rhythms or silken slow jam textures around their voices, using a combo of hand-played instruments, ’80s synthesizers and drum machines, and digital sharpening.“Musically, I think to create the future, you need a healthy balance of the past and the present,” he said. “And I feel like live instrumentation mixed with technology is the dance in my head that I’m always doing with the Shindellas. And it’s intricate, because I want them to be formidable. I want them to be a legacy act.”Right now, the Shindellas are focused on expanding their reach. “We know that we’re doing music that’s for everybody,” Chauniece said. “But when you actually see the faces of what that everybody is, it’s still like …”Johnson finished her thought: “Literally everybody.” More

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      Takeaways from Britney Spears’s Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’

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      The pop star’s new book, “The Woman in Me,” recounts her rise to fame, struggles that became tabloid fodder and her efforts to escape a conservatorship that long governed her life.There came a point during the 13 years that a conservatorship strictly governed Britney Spears’s life and career that she gave up fighting it, the singer recalls in her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which is being released on Tuesday.Her father, James P. Spears, had been put in charge of her affairs in 2008 after she was twice hospitalized for involuntary psychological assessments. At times over the years that followed, she pushed back privately, but ultimately her exhaustion and fear of losing access to her two young sons won out, she recalls in the book.“After being held down on a gurney,” the memoir reads, “I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. And so I went along with it.” Spears adds, “My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”In the much-awaited 275-page memoir, which The New York Times obtained from a retail store in advance of its authorized release, Spears writes about her career as a teen idol, her struggles that became tabloid fodder, her time under the conservatorship and her eventual push for its termination in 2021, when she regained the right to make her own decisions.Throughout, she describes the feeling of being too much in the public eye, too scrutinized, whether by her parents or the paparazzi, or even by the doctors who she says “took me away from my kids and my dogs and my house.” But the story is, by nature, incomplete, referring cheerily to Spears’s post-conservatorship marriage to Hesam Asghari, known as Sam, who filed for divorce in August after a little more than a year.Below are other notable moments from the book.Rise to fameFrom performing her first solo — the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” — at her mother’s local day care to auditioning with Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” in rooms full of record executives, Spears tracks her rapid ascent to fame as a child and teenager.When she was 10 years old, she recalls, she was on the show “Star Search,” where the host, Ed McMahon, asked her if she had a boyfriend. After she replied that she didn’t, because they were “mean,” McMahon responded, “I’m not mean! How about me?” She “kept it together” until she left the stage, Spears writes, “But then I burst into tears.”After appearing on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Spears writes, she decided that she wanted to live a “normal life” back in Kentwood, La., until Larry Rudolph, a lawyer whom her mother met on the audition circuit, suggested that she record a demo. She won a record deal at 15, and Rudolph became her longtime manager.Spears performing in 1999 during her … Baby One More Time Tour.Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMounting fame, and attentionSpears quickly rose from a teenager performing at malls to a 16-year-old pop princess with a hit single: “ … Baby One More Time.” She went on tour with the boy band ’N Sync, and had a high-profile romance with Justin Timberlake.She writes that she “couldn’t help but notice” that talk show hosts asked Timberlake different kinds of questions from the ones that she was asked: “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts,” the book says, “wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.” The pressure only grew as she became a fixture on MTV, and the public criticism ultimately led her to start taking Prozac, she recalls.Spears describes a loving relationship with Justin Timberlake but says she was pained by what she describes as his unwillingness to have a child together when she became pregnant. She had an abortion, she writes.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressBreaking up with TimberlakeSpears recounts her connection with Timberlake as magnetic and describes their breakup — which she said he initiated over text message — as leaving her “devastated” and fantasizing about quitting show business.She recalls her reaction to the release of Timberlake’s music video “Cry Me a River,” in which, as she describes it, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.” She viewed the media as portraying her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she writes, when in reality: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”As first revealed in excerpts released by People magazine earlier this week, Spears recounts in detail the decision to get an abortion after she became pregnant while in the relationship with Timberlake. She said she didn’t view the pregnancy as “a tragedy,” but that he thought they were too young, leading her to agree “not to have the baby.”After the breakup, Spears says, she felt forced by her father and her management team to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer, during which Sawyer pressed her on what she did to Timberlake that caused him “so much pain.” (In the book, Spears confirms a longtime rumor when she says she kissed the choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she suggests that her behavior was related to rumors of Timberlake’s unfaithfulness.) Spears recalls that interview as a “breaking point” for her. “I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “set up in front of the whole world.”Relationship to drugs and alcoholTackling the peak years of her notorious stint as a paparazzi and tabloid fixture, Spears writes about her early adulthood forays into partying and nightlife with a sense of disbelief about how they were portrayed in the media.Of her time being photographed alongside celebrity peers like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Spears writes, “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be,” saying that she had no interest in hard drugs and “never had a drinking problem.” Instead, Spears describes her “drug of choice” as the ADHD medication Adderall, which “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”Spears writes that during some of her most widely known public episodes — shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car — she was “out of my mind with grief” following the death of her aunt and a custody fight with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. “With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom,” she writes. “Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”Spears adds: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”Spears with her parents. She says in her book that her father, Jamie, became so controlling of her career while running her conservatorship that at one point he declared, “I’m Britney Spears now.”Denise Truscello/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe conservatorshipIn early 2008, amid her public struggles, the singer’s father, known as Jamie, was appointed conservator of her finances and personal life by the state of California, an arrangement that lasted in various forms until 2021. Even as she returned to work as an entertainer, Spears writes that her every action was monitored, including who she could date or spend time with.“I know I had been acting wild, but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Nothing that justified upending my entire life.” She describes the decision as being made by her father along with support from her mother and a business manager, Louise Taylor, known as Lou, who has denied being an architect of the conservatorship. (Jamie Spears has long defended his involvement as an effort to protect his daughter from financial exploitation.)“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears writes, adding of her father: “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.” Elsewhere, Spears recalls her father saying, “I’m Britney Spears now.”“I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears writes. “Security guards handed me prepackaged envelopes of meds and watched me take them. They put parental controls on my iPhone. Everything was scrutinized and controlled. Everything.”Any pushback by Spears was frowned upon, ignored or minimized, she writes: “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”Fans in the #FreeBritney movement often showed up outside court proceedings where they urged that she be released from the conservatorship. Spears writes of how much that lifted her spirits. Chloe Pang for The New York TimesFighting back and #FreeBritneyWhile Spears had intermittently pushed back against the conservatorship behind closed doors to no avail, she traces the beginning of the end of the arrangement to disputes with her father near the end of 2018, when she was made to undergo further mental health evaluations and then spend more than three months in rehab.“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears writes, adding that he threatened to make her look like an “idiot.”In addition to being prescribed lithium at the facility, Spears says, she was allowed only an hour of television before a 9 p.m. bedtime. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she writes. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”It was there, in a $60,000-per-month Beverly Hills rehab, that Spears says a nurse showed her clips of fans representing the viral #FreeBritney movement that was questioning the need for the singer’s conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”She writes that “it felt like every day there was another documentary about me on yet another streaming service” (including one, “Framing Britney Spears,” by The New York Times). “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough,” she writes. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first.” She adds, “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”When her father was removed as her conservator, not long before the arrangement was ended entirely, “I felt relief sweep over me,” Spears writes. “The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life.” When she received the call from her new lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, that the conservatorship was officially over, Spears writes, she was at a resort in Tahiti.But Spears remains raw about the aftermath of the conservatorship, writing of her continued estrangement from much of her family. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship,” she writes. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage that they did.”The memoir is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA return to music?While some say the conservatorship saved Spears’s life, she writes, “No, not really. My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul.”Throughout her time performing a revue in Las Vegas, Spears writes, she was not allowed to update the show. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs, like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she writes. “It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than let me give my fans the best possible performance.”Now that she has the opportunity to create freely again, the singer writes, she does not feel motivated to do so, although she mentions a one-off collaboration with one of her musical heroes, Elton John, released last year. “Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears says. “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”Sarah Maslin Nir and Chris Kuo contributed reporting. More

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      After 47 Years, the Emerson Quartet Has One More Weekend

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      The group, famed for its rich vitality, easy power and a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly, is saying farewell.Five years ago, Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, got a call from a financial adviser. To sketch out a plan for Drucker, the adviser needed his target retirement age.“When he asked me, it seemed like a fairly academic question,” Drucker, now 71, recalled recently. “The quartet had not at all discussed an endgame.”He told the group the anecdote as something of a joke. (This is a foursome that laughs — a lot.) To his surprise, it spurred a more serious discussion about the future of the Emerson Quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles in classical music for almost half a century.The conversation eventually led to a decision, and on Saturday and Sunday at Alice Tully Hall — next to the Juilliard School, where the quartet formed — the quartet will play its final concerts. With three members near or over 70, and little desire to keep the name alive without its founders, it’s quitting while it’s ahead.Setzer and Drucker, the violinists at left, were original members of the quartet, which was founded in 1976 when they were students at Juilliard.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“There’s a feeling I think we all had: We were afraid of going on too long,” said Philip Setzer, the other violinist. “People have memories of what it was like to go to an Emerson Quartet concert, and we didn’t want to start having them hear a lesser version of that. I’m a big sports fan, and you see people play past when they should stop.”Lawrence Dutton, the group’s violist, added: “We saw it with teachers and mentors and players we had incredible respect for. It’s not pretty when it happens.”And from its formation in 1976, the Emerson Quartet sounded pretty. It became famous for its rich vitality and easy power in a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly.“Particularly in the U.S., the Emerson was maybe the only reference a lot of people had for a string quartet,” said the violinist Ryan Meehan of the Calidore Quartet, one of many younger groups the Emerson has mentored. “It speaks to their incredible artistry and their recording and performing: how far their reach was, even for people who weren’t really classical concertgoers.”Setzer and Drucker met as students of Oscar Shumsky at Juilliard and were original members. In the country’s bicentennial year, it seemed right to name the group after the great idealist American writer.Signing CDs at Watkins’s home. The group recorded profusely for Deutsche Grammophon.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really. I’ve never seen any tension between them. I’ve seen discussion and critical thinking, but there’s no ‘this side’ and ‘that side.’”From the Juilliard Quartet, long illustrious by the 1970s, the group learned the lessons of raw vigor and commitment to a broad repertory, including new commissions. Listening to the Guarneri Quartet, younger but already august, the Emerson took on a polished, burnished, sheerly beautiful tone. (For certain listeners, on certain nights, that beauty could tip into blandness.)“There wasn’t really a long-term plan, because we were young,” Drucker said. “But there was the greatness of the repertoire for string quartet. And as a proto-Emerson student group, we had elicited a fairly strong positive reaction, which made an impression on us that this was something to pour energy and time and resources into.”By the end of the ’70s, Dutton and the cellist David Finckel had joined, and the roster was set for more than three decades. It didn’t change until 2013, when Finckel stepped aside to focus on other endeavors, including the leadership of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which is presenting the finale. He was replaced by Paul Watkins, the baby of the group at 53.Watkins said he prepared for his first session with the others, a kind of audition, by listening to Emerson recordings.The group’s final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“But I didn’t want to imitate what David had done,” he added. “I wanted to show that I could be sympathetic to them, and bring my own personality and sound into it as well. It needed to happen instinctively, and quickly: love at first sound. And thank god, it did.”A quartet is an intimate, intense unit — “a benevolent four-headed monster,” Hannigan said. Peter Mennin, then the president of Juilliard, went to an early Emerson concert and told its members that if they could survive five years, they might be able to go the distance.Five years later, in 1981, came a milestone: a marathon performance of Bartok’s six string quartets at Tully Hall for the composer’s centennial, two and a half hours of demanding, opulently bristling music. Many groups were playing the works that year, but not like that.“At first people said, ‘That’s ridiculous; you’re just doing it for show,’” Setzer said. But the concert was an unlikely sensation, establishing the Emerson as an ensemble to be reckoned with.The group was also notable (and, initially, somewhat polarizing) for having Drucker and Setzer switch between the first and second violin parts for different pieces. This is common in student ensembles, but professional quartets usually have set first and second violinists.At Alice Tully Hall, the musicians will play Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which David Finckel, a former member, will join them.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“It’s close to 300 pieces we’ve done, which is a lot,” Setzer said. “And part of that was because of the switching. I can’t imagine doing that amount if I’d had to do first violin in all of it.”With a smooth, vigorous, cleanly modern sound that also nodded to the golden glow of an earlier era, the Emerson was, Dutton said, “at the right place at the right time, blossoming just as the CD boom was happening.” The ensemble scored a contract with the eminent label Deutsche Grammophon, which wanted new digital versions of as much music as the group could set down.The explosion of albums made the Emerson omnipresent, and included benchmark recordings of the complete Beethoven, Shostakovich and Bartok quartets. And there is also — among some three days’ worth of recorded sound — warmly lucid Bach, Haydn and Mozart; nostalgic yet energetic Dvorak and Tchaikovsky; and contemporary music by composers as different as Gunther Schuller and Ned Rorem.All this was toured indefatigably, with over 140 concerts one year. “The sheer volume, playing this incredible repertory, it takes its toll,” Dutton said. (“If you do it right,” Setzer added.) The group tapered its schedule, but was still regularly playing almost 100 performances a year until the pandemic.“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe end of the Emerson Quartet doesn’t mean full retirement for its members, who will maintain a variety of solo performing, arts administration and teaching duties. For more than 20 years the group has been in residence at Stony Brook University, where last Saturday they gave a preview of their magisterial Tully program: Beethoven’s Opus 130, rendingly fragile and vulnerable, and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which Finckel poignantly joined.Their final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with bracing yet seductive works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month, featuring Hannigan.“We were rehearsing onstage,” she said, recalling her farewell appearance with the group on Oct. 10 in Milan, in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. “And they were still playing it over slowly, tuning every note, discussing, ‘Is this really the right tempo?’ It was the last rehearsal before a piece they will never play again, and they were still saying: ‘What do you think he meant here?’”“We’re lucky because our very different personalities fit together,” Dutton said. “We respected each other. We knew we were different, but we had one purpose: to make great music. And we achieved that.” More

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      36 Hours in Glasgow: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Browse Scandi home goods and woolly Scottish knitwear
      Glaswegians have an appetite for sustainable shopping and for secondhand goods of all stripes. Hoos, next to the Botanic Gardens, stocks chic Scandi home goods, while the Glasgow Vintage Co., farther along Great Western Road from Papercup, has a thoughtful selection of second-hand Scottish knitwear alongside show-stopping coats and dresses from the 1970s. Up the hill on Otago Street, above Perch & Rest Coffee, Kelvin Apothecary sells a nice range of gifts including handmade Scottish soaps and wooden laundry and cleaning tools. In the cobbled Otago Lane is the chaotic Voltaire and Rousseau secondhand bookshop, with teetering, vertical book piles. Unlike many Glasgow shops, this store isn’t the most dog-friendly, because of the resident cat, BB, who supervises from his perch at the till. More

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      Review: Laurie Anderson Gets Back to Having a Good Time

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      With the jazz combo Sexmob, this enduring avant-gardist revisited vintage and recent songs with a grooving spirit.Laurie Anderson sounds like she’s ready to have fun again.That much was clear after the first minute or so of her thrilling multimedia show on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This one-night-only, 100-minute set, titled “Let X = X,” featured new arrangements of several 1980s-era Anderson songs. It also featured a fun backing band in the jazz combo Sexmob, reliable purveyors of a good time.Hasn’t Anderson earned a romping concert? So far in this century, she has kept her eye on grave matters. She mourned a changing, vulnerable New York City after Hurricane Sandy in “Landfall,” with the Kronos Quartet. She has likewise mourned the death of her longtime partner, Lou Reed, across multiple projects — including in her graceful, meditative film “Heart of a Dog.” And she detailed human rights violations in “Habeas Corpus,” a 2015 collaboration with a former Guantánamo prisoner, Mohammed el-Gharani, at the Park Avenue Armory.I attended and admired all those. But I have never witnessed her really enjoying a groove — at least not in the same way that I’ve enjoyed on some of her first recordings, such as “Home of the Brave” or “United States Live.” On Tuesday, though, at the tail end of one spoken interlude that detailed a variety of her heroes — such as Gandhi and Philip Glass — she concluded by mentioning James Brown. When Anderson named the tune “Get on the Good Foot,” the Sexmob slide-trumpeter Steven Bernstein and the drummer Kenny Wollesen indulged her with a musical quotation. Then Anderson whooped a funk-accurate exultation and danced a bit in front of her array of electronics.It wasn’t the only time she behaved like that. From the moment she strode onstage and triggered the synth samples of “From the Air,” she seemed to be enjoying herself, and reveled in the droll lyrics of that number: “Good evening. This is your captain. We are about to attempt a crash landing.”Tuesday’s concert wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums. With musicians who can double on electric guitar and bass clarinet, its members offered a rich range of textural variation throughout the evening. “Walk the Dog” was no longer spare, but galvanic. This new backing-band energy seemed to make Anderson’s high, digitally pitch-shifted vocals avoid rote, greatest-hits-show style. Similarly, a medley of “Born, Never Asked” and “It Tango” had fresh, more syncopated force.Recitations of childhood memories that appeared in “Heart of a Dog” were also part of the set, along with some basso profundo observations from Fenway Bergamot, Anderson’s male alter-ego (as heard on the 2010 album “Homeland”).And when Anderson and Sexmob played “Only an Expert” — perhaps her only banger from this century — she also took the opportunity to address the gravity of breaking news from the current Israel-Hamas war. (She avoided assigning blame for a hospital bombing in Gaza that day, while acknowledging the undeniable fact that it happened.) Originally, the song’s litany of state-sponsored crimes was a gloss on America’s invasion of Iraq, ironically noting:Even though a country can invade another countryAnd flatten it and ruin it and create havoc and civil war in that other countryIf the experts say it’s not a problem and everyone agrees they’re expertsAnd good at seeing problems then invading those countriesIs simply not a problem.But on Tuesday, she slipped in a new travesty: “and bomb hospitals.” (At another point, she invited the audience to scream — cathartically, Yoko Ono-style — against “genocides happing everywhere” and the holding of “hostages in Gaza.”)In a concert that otherwise offered breezy, rocking, swinging fun, such invocations of unsettling current events rode a fine line. But to my eyes and ears, Anderson pulled off that tricky task. In this moment, all sophisticated, adult-coded entertainment is obligated to compete with our awareness of sobering topics, the ones that Anderson has focused on in recent years, like increasingly dangerous waves of water and lethal tides of government-sponsored dehumanization.There was a great deal else in the show: her electronically modified solo violin playing; a performance of her Massenet-inspired pop hit, “O Superman”; aperçus from her friend Sharon Olds, the pathbreaking confessional poet; video art of Anderson’s design that embraced concepts of artificial intelligence. But it was her willingness to keep tragic contemporary material in view — even when enjoying the breadth of a half-century’s catalog — that amounted to its own form of spiritual advice or moral instruction.When Anderson appeared for an encore, she led the audience in tai chi movements. This risked objections of blasé appropriation, but her creative practice has always made space for genuine gestures of cultural synthesis. And on Tuesday, it was good to see these aspects of her art operating in counterpoint once again.Laurie Anderson and SexmobPerformed on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More

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      Review: Kate Lindsey Brings Women’s Tales to the Armory

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      Kate Lindsey, accompanied by the pianist Justina Lee, programmed cycles of life, love and creation by Schumann and Fauré.At her recital at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday night, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey told the stories of two women, each in her own way an originator.There was Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben,” one of the first song cycles written from a woman’s point of view, a worthwhile artifact of a time when the genre was only a few decades old, and one that persists on concert programs despite its hidebound social mores. And there was “La Chanson d’Ève,” a spare, late-career work from Fauré that excises the first man from the Creation story and wraps its heroine in music of sensual mysticism.For an artist with a daring, theatrical sensibility, it was a retrograde pairing, as though Lindsey were achieving an element of surprise by playing against expectations. Her inventive portrayals at the Metropolitan Opera have included a slick, untrustworthy Nicklausse in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and a wired Nerone bursting with nervous energy in Handel’s “Agrippina.”In the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, though, Lindsey was serene, her voice sheathed in obsidian, as she enlivened women created as companions for men who were nowhere to be found. “I don’t know where Adam is; he’s never mentioned,” she said of the Fauré, to much audience laughter.“Frauenliebe und -leben” is the opposite. The lover is mentioned constantly, everywhere, shaping practically every utterance. The piece sees a woman through the milestones she creates with a man: falling in love, getting married, having a baby, mourning his death. Lindsey tinged the narrator’s first blush of love with russet colors and a penetrating glint. A luscious line wove through “Du Ring an meinem Finger,” an almost sacred intimacy through “Süsser Freund, du blickest.” But the gushiness of “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben” felt forced.The intimate Board of Officers Room can make some vocal instruments sound big and overwhelming, but in Lindsey’s case, it allowed the audience a luxurious communion with her voice that isn’t possible in the Met’s cavernous auditorium. Her timbre, dark and occluded, is at once compelling and withholding; in vulnerable moments, she uses a threadlike straight tone.In the 10 Fauré songs, Lindsey was often enchanting: the profound whispers of “Paradis,” the conversational warmth of “Prima verba,” the gorgeous exaltations of “Comme Dieu rayonne.” The poetry’s endless talk of sighs, sun, flowers and fruits, though, took on a certain sameness; in Lindsey’s interpretation, Eve is more demigod than human. Justina Lee’s piano, at times plodding, made Eden feel earthbound rather than exquisite, the hardiness that made her Schumann comfortingly solid rendered the Fauré stolid.The concert ended with a brief set of Stephen Sondheim songs that introduced an imbalance to the evening. But only a pill could argue against hearing these wonderful pieces. Lindsey’s gentle, honest vibrato was disarming in the most poignant lines of “Losing My Mind,” but she struggled a bit with fitting her operatic technique to “Take Me to the World” and performed an abbreviated, less powerful version of “Being Alive.”The Schumann and Fauré cycles both end with meditations on death, which is where Lindsey summoned her stagecraft. In the long postlude for piano that closes “Frauenliebe,” a motif from the first song emerges as a sad, mournful echo, a memory of happier times. Lindsey’s protagonist, with no words left to sing and no man left to love, seemed to age a lifetime in a moment. There was a sense that now her life, and the person she was to be, would begin.Kate Lindsey and Justina LeePerformed on Monday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan. More