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      Rick Froberg, Singer of Artful Intensity, Is Dead at 55

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      A longtime linchpin of a 1990s underground music scene, he built a devoted and enthusiastic following and was also a prolific visual artist.Rick Froberg, the vocalist and guitarist best known for his work with the influential 1990s post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, whose urgent howl was one of rock’s most distinctive voices, died on June 30 in San Diego. He was 55.His partner, Britton Neubacher, said the cause was an undiagnosed heart condition.Mr. Froberg, a beloved linchpin of the San Diego underground music scene that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, sang in a raspy roar that segued smoothly between snarl and scream. “He always wanted to effortlessly sound kick-ass,” said John Reis, Mr. Froberg’s longtime bandmate and songwriting partner in the bands Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes.Mr. Froberg particularly loved the gnarled growls of the Australian vocalists Bon Scott of AC/DC — his favorite band — and Chris Bailey of the proto-punk Saints, and he strived to follow them, Mr. Reis said. “I would tell him, ‘Dude, you have that in spades, and you actually have another gear those people don’t have.’”Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis met as teenagers in 1986, at a picnic organized by a local anarchist publication at a San Diego park. They bonded immediately and soon joined up in Pitchfork, with Mr. Froberg on vocals. The band was inspired, Mr. Reis said, by the noisy music being issued at the time on independent labels like Dischord, Touch & Go and SST. By the time Pitchfork’s debut album was released in 1990, however, the band had broken up.Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis quickly regrouped in Drive Like Jehu, where Mr. Froberg also began playing guitar, inspired by Sonic Youth’s atonal, unorthodox guitar tunings — which “made it seem like you could just do anything you wanted to do,” Mr. Froberg said in a recent web interview.Drive Like Jehu’s two albums featured dissonant, tightly coiled compositions with off-kilter rhythms and cathartic explosions. The group built a small but fervent following, with the enthusiasm it inspired far outstripping its record sales. The band’s single “Bullet Train to Vegas”/“Hand Over Fist,” a marvel of feral intensity and relentless locomotive force released by Merge Records in 1992, was described by the author Nabil Ayers in a recent Substack post as “arguably the best 7-inch single ever to be released.” A tribute to Mr. Froberg on the Merge website called it “one of the most revered in our catalog.”Mr. Reis soon became busy touring with another of his bands, Rocket From the Crypt, and Drive Like Jehu fizzled out after its second album, “Yank Crime.” Released on Interscope, it was Mr. Froberg’s only recording for a major label.Mr. Froberg was also a prolific visual artist. His artwork gradually evolved from fliers, posters and album covers into silk-screened graphics, linocut etchings and gouache paintings. He had three solo exhibitions, most recently at Trash Lamb Gallery in San Diego in 2022, and his work was included in over a dozen group shows.He moved to Brooklyn in 1998 and pursued a career as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer; he also had a stint doing animation with the artist Gary Panter. His illustrations were published in The New Yorker and The New York Times; Matt Dorfman, a Times art director who worked with Mr. Froberg, described his style as “a hysterical pastiche of 1920s surrealism and Tex Avery cartoons.”Eric Gerald Froberg was born on Jan. 19, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Eric and Sylvia (Phillips) Froberg. His father, a business consultant and entrepreneur, legally changed the Swedish family name from Froberg to Farr in 1979; Mr. Froberg used the ancestral surname professionally, though he sometimes signed his artwork “Rick Farr” or “Rick Fork.”His parents divorced soon after his birth, and he never had a relationship with his birth mother, who died in 1992. His father married Lynne Wacker, a sales training manager for Hooked on Phonics, in 1973. The family lived in Glendale and Playa del Rey before moving to Carlsbad when Mr. Froberg was 8. He lived primarily in the North County area of San Diego until he moved to Brooklyn.He married Amelia Halverson in 2003. They divorced in 2015. In addition to Ms. Neubacher, he is survived by his father, his stepmother and three younger brothers, Christopher, Justin and Gregory.In 1999 Mr. Reis formed a new band, Hot Snakes. Dissatisfied with his own vocals, he sent a cassette to Mr. Froberg, who agreed to join even though they lived on different coasts. In contrast to Drive Like Jehu’s distortion, Hot Snakes favored a clean guitar sound and short, efficient tunes, Mr. Reis said, “letting Rick’s voice and the attack of the pick carry the power.”Mr. Froberg also sang and played guitar from 2006 to 2015 in the Brooklyn band Obits, which released three albums on Sub Pop. The name was Mr. Froberg’s idea, said Sohrab Habibion, Obits’ other guitarist, a comment on ageism in music.Painters, photographers and filmmakers can grow old, Mr. Habibion said, “and jazz musicians and classical players are allowed to get long in the tooth. But rock ’n’ roll is stuck in this youth culture rut, so we wanted to put a stake in the ground and say that middle-aged people could make rock music that was relevant, vital and worthy of being part of the cultural conversation.”Drive Like Jehu reunited in 2014 for an outdoor concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in San Diego, attracting a crowd estimated to be the biggest since Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address there in 1915. “Intoxicated by the high of that day,” Mr. Reis said, the band later reconvened to tour.After moving back to San Diego in 2021, Mr. Froberg collaborated with Ms. Neubacher, a botanical artist, on large-scale installations at the San Diego Museum of Art and at Mothership, a space-themed tiki bar. “Watching him get lost in the secret places of his imagination was a daily pleasure of mine,” Ms. Neubacher said.Mr. Froberg had recently been working on what would have been Hot Snakes’ fifth studio album. “He was really firing on all cylinders,” Mr. Reis said. “His voice gave me a lot of freedom as a songwriter, because I didn’t have to worry about where the chorus or the melody was. I could go wildly off into what I considered uncharted territory for myself, and always knew that he would make sense of it and turn it into something beautiful.“I’m just lost without him,” he added. “I don’t know what to do now.” More

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      How Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Became the ‘Scary’ Version

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      A fan thought she had ordered a new vinyl pressing of the pop star’s album. But what came out of the speakers was entirely different.Rachel Hunter could not wait to play her new vinyl recording of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”After waiting weeks for its arrival, Ms. Hunter placed the orchid-colored vinyl with Ms. Swift’s face on its center on her record player, lifted the needle and let it play. But instead of Ms. Swift’s catchy choruses, acoustic guitar and banjo strums, another woman’s voice came out.“I quit seeing people, quit looking at the flakes of flesh and dancing organisms,” an echoing voice said, without music in the background.Maybe there was something wrong with the speed, Ms. Hunter thought, or maybe it was one of Ms. Swift’s notorious Easter eggs. She flipped the record to the other side, but it only got weirder.“The 70 billion people of Earth, where are they hiding?” a man’s eerie voice said repeatedly.“It was a little scary. I was by myself,” Ms. Hunter recalled. “I thought, Is this a horror film? Because it didn’t feel like real life, especially when you’re expecting Taylor Swift.”The record wasn’t haunted. It was just British electronica music.Universal Music Group, which represents Taylor Swift, and Above Board Distribution, a small British label, use the same printing plant in France. But instead of pressing Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” album, the plant accidentally pressed “Happy Land,” a compilation of British electronica from the 1990s, onto the purple vinyl and put it into the “Speak Now” jacket.The first song Ms. Hunter heard was “True Romance,” which features more than 11 minutes of electronica by Thunderhead, and the second was “Soul Vine,” a deep-house track by Cabaret Voltaire, one of the most influential groups of the genre.That revelation materialized only after Ms. Hunter posted about her experience on TikTok: “Does anyone else’s ‘Speak Now’ vinyl not have Taylor Swift on it?” she asked. The video has been viewed over four million times.Now she’s fending off offers of $250 for the record. Her video set off a lengthy discussion on Discogs, an online music database, among collectors who are hoping to find another copy. Fans of Cabaret Voltaire have reimagined the band’s vinyl sleeves with the names of Ms. Swift’s albums; one even mixed Ms. Swift’s song “All Too Well” with Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag.”

      @mischief_marauder send help I got speak now (not Taylors version) this is so funny #speaknowtaylorsversion @Taylor Swift @Taylor Nation #erastour #speaknoworchid ♬ original sound – Rachel ✨ In a statement, Universal said it was “aware that there are an extremely limited number of incorrectly pressed vinyl copies in circulation and have addressed the issue,” adding that if customers receive a misprinted vinyl, they should contact their retailer.Ms. Hunter, who purchased the album through Ms. Swift’s official store in Britain, requested a new copy but had not received it as of Friday.Dan Hill, the managing director of Above Board, said the label had printed a couple hundred records of “Happy Land,” and he assumed that the stamper had been accidentally left on the machine and used for the “Speak Now” discs.“What’s happened in the making of this record is kind of like making a cake — they mixed up the ingredients,” he said, adding that misprints had happened from time to time, including with albums by Beyoncé and the Beatles, “but maybe not with this profile.”Mr. Hill believes there might be at least one more pressing out in the world like Ms. Hunter’s. He is looking as hard as the next record collector.“This is a total Willy-Wonka-style golden ticket. If someone has one, these could be worth thousands,” he said. “But no one knows how far they are.”Joe Muggs, a British music writer who reviewed the reissue of “Happy Land” for the online magazine The Quietus earlier this spring, said the tracks came from a variety of genres, including heavy dub reggae, industrial and electronica, that come together to make a “very narcotic kind of sound” that was emblematic of the 1990s.“That’s what makes the music on this album really exciting,” he said, “its ability to startle even now when someone hears it out of the blue.”The Cabaret Voltaire song is one of the darker tracks, he said, but many of the songs had a “pop compatibility” and were “very funky; there’s a lot of melody in there.”“The fact that TikTok will fling up these random things does leave the window open to magic in terms of changing people’s tastes or sparking little fires,” Mr. Muggs said.That’s exactly what Stephen Mallinder, a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, is hoping for. Cabaret Voltaire has always appealed to new audiences, he said, but being jump-started by Ms. Swift’s audience “is a different kind of magnitude.”“It has captured everyone’s imagination because it’s a cultural clash of big proportions,” Mr. Mallinder said, adding, “If we can convert a few and get them into electronica stuff, clubby stuff, that’s all right by me.” More

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      Listening to Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ References

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      A tour through key samples, references and influences on the pop star’s 2022 album as her world tour arrives in North America.A scene from the screens at Beyoncé’s North American Renaissance World Tour opener in Toronto.The New York TimesDear listeners,Last weekend, I traveled to Toronto to catch the first North American date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour. I returned home feeling like the human incarnation of the starry-eyed emoji (so many sparkles!) and with a new appreciation for “Renaissance,” the loose and sprawling album that Beyoncé released this time last year.“Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, is a sonic odyssey through the history of dance music, with a specific focus on the genre’s Black and queer pioneers. It achieves the perfect balance of many opposing forces: “Renaissance” is studied and referential but still maintains a fun lightness. It celebrates community and a kind of artistic plurality while still centering Beyoncé’s singular star power. It contains a few of Beyoncé’s strongest stand-alone singles and yet plays like a continuous D.J. set: Sometimes I will get an urge to hear one particular song and, before I know it, I will have listened to the rest of the album in its entirety — again!Witnessing the way Beyoncé staged some of these songs live has helped me hear new elements in an album I have already played approximately four billion times. Some of that has to do with the way she contextualized the “Renaissance” songs within the evolution of her own catalog (the vampy, hard-hitting “Diva,” from 2008, sounds like a transmission from Beyoncé’s future), but she also made sure to situate “Renaissance” within a larger continuum of pop music, electronic sounds, and Black and queer culture.That’s a project I’d like to continue with today’s playlist, which is a kind of musical tour of the samples, references and influences heard on “Renaissance.” It is highly indebted to a great piece that the music journalist and electronic dance music scholar Michaelangelo Matos wrote for The Times right after the album was released, which served as a listening guide to its many sonic footnotes.Come along for the ride as Beyoncé pays homage to the Chicago house of Adonis, the postmillennial bounce of Big Freedia, the pulsating bass of Reese and much more. May this playlist help you hear “Renaissance” anew, learn a little about electronic music history or maybe just make like Beyoncé and Grace Jones and move.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Adonis: “No Way Back”One of the formative early classics of Chicago house — a localized subgenre of dance music that spread through the Windy City’s underground club scene in the mid-80s — Adonis’s 1986 track “No Way Back” has a menacing intensity and a grimy low-end that would prove enormously influential … (Listen on YouTube)2. Beyoncé: “Cozy”… and “Cozy,” the second song off “Renaissance,” certainly bears that influence. Production and a writing credit from the Chicago-born D.J. and musician Honey Dijon also add some house-music credibility to this hypnotic track. (Listen on YouTube)3. Chic: “Good Times”Sumptuous, timeless, transcendent — Chic’s glittering “Good Times,” from 1979, remains one of the best-known and most frequently referenced tunes in the history of dance music. Bernard Edwards’s bass line is a thing of beauty, rightly given its own extended solo. (Listen on YouTube)4. Beyoncé: “Cuff It”If you’re going to pay homage to Chic, as Beyoncé does on this groovy disco throwback, you might as well get Nile Rodgers on the track. “When I got called to play on this song, it was the most organic thing that ever happened to me,” Rodgers said, accepting a Grammy when “Cuff It” won best R&B song. (Beyoncé was fashionably late.) “I heard the song and I just said, ‘I wanna play on that. Right now.’ And it was one take, I promise.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Robin S.: “Show Me Love”Driven by the unmistakable sound of the Korg M1 Organ 2, this 1992 hit — technically a remix, by the Swedish producer StoneBridge, of a little-heard 1990 track by Robin Stone — brought house music to the mainstream in the early ’90s, and its much-sampled keyboard riff is still ubiquitous today. (Listen on YouTube)6. Big Freedia: “Explode”Beyoncé first sampled Big Freedia, a.k.a. the Queen of Bounce, on her 2016 hit “Formation.” She once again drew upon the New Orleans musician’s highly flammable energy on “Break My Soul,” which samples her 2014 single “Explode.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Beyoncé: “Break My Soul”A house homage updated with some fresh zaps of New Orleans bounce, the “Renaissance” leadoff single “Break My Soul” was a worthy introduction to the album’s kinetic, highly referential sound. (Though, as the reporter Rich Juzwiak found when speaking to StoneBridge and Robin S., exactly how directly “Break My Soul” references “Show Me Love” is up for debate.) (Listen on YouTube)8. Reese/Kevin Saunderson: “Just Want Another Chance”The term “Reese bass” refers to the dark, warbling low-end that rumbles through the foundation of “Just Want Another Chance,” a pivotal Detroit techno track released by Kevin Saunderson — under the moniker Reese — in 1988. The Reese has become so popular that there are innumerable patches and presets that now replicate Saunderson’s groundbreaking bass sound. (Listen on YouTube)9. Beyoncé: “America Has a Problem”The most bonkers staging on the Renaissance World Tour comes when Beyoncé plays this one live — donning a custom Mugler bee costume and performing from behind a desk like she’s a newscaster attempting to brainwash the world. The Reese-indebted tones give this song, and its live performance, an ominous edge. (Listen on YouTube)10. A.G. Cook: “Beautiful”In the mid-to-late 2010s, the experimental production collective PC Music pushed pop to its most frenetic, gloriously synthetic extremes, reveling in surface sheen and outré ideas. The English producer A.G. Cook was at the forefront of this wave (sometimes called hyperpop), and his zanily infectious “Beautiful,” from the 2015 compilation “PC Music Volume 1,” is emblematic of his distinct sound. (Listen on YouTube)11. Beyoncé: “All Up in Your Mind”Beyoncé goes hyperpop — sort of — on this distorted earworm co-produced by Cook himself. The instrumentation sounds like a malfunctioning computer program, but there’s a growly physicality to Beyoncé’s vocal that gives the song an intriguing textural friction and keeps things in the realm of flesh and blood. (Listen on YouTube)12. Donna Summer: “I Feel Love”Arguably the most innovative and influential dance record of all time, “I Feel Love” is Giorgio Moroder’s wholehearted embrace of electronic music’s nascent, seemingly boundless possibilities. Donna Summer plays the ghost in the machine, unfurling an ecstatic vocal and achieving a kind of cyborgian bliss. (Listen on YouTube)13. Beyoncé: “Summer Renaissance”It’s risky business, referencing the iconic “I Feel Love” as blatantly as Beyoncé does here. But over the course of four-and-a-half minutes of airy falsetto and giddy sass, she effectively makes the argument that quoting Summer is the only way to end an album like “Renaissance.” It’s the ultimate, inevitable conclusion — a fireworks-display finale to this dazzling tour through dance music past, present and future. (Listen on YouTube)Release your wiggle,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ References” track listTrack 1: Adonis, “No Way Back”Track 2: Beyoncé, “Cozy”Track 3: Chic, “Good Times”Track 4: Beyoncé, “Cuff It”Track 5: Robin S., “Show Me Love”Track 6: Big Freedia: “Explode”Track 7: Beyoncé, “Break My Soul”Track 8: Reese/Kevin Saunderson, “Just Want Another Chance”Track 9: Beyoncé, “America Has a Problem”Track 10: A.G. Cook, “Beautiful”Track 11: Beyoncé, “All Up in Your Mind”Track 12: Donna Summer, “I Feel Love”Track 13: Beyoncé: “Summer Renaissance”Bonus tracksSpeaking of dance floor anthems that pull knowingly from house music history: I am very much digging Troye Sivan’s new single “Rush.” I don’t know if the Song of the Summer is a thing anymore, or if it ever really was, but I nonetheless appreciate him making a run for it.“Rush” is just one of the 11 new songs we recommend in this week’s Playlist. Check out the full selection, featuring tracks by Billie Eilish, Jamila Woods and Jlin, here. More

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      Billie Eilish’s ‘Barbie’ Ballad, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Troye Sivan, Jamila Woods, C. Tangana 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.Billie Eilish, ‘What Was I Made For?’Billie Eilish draws a connection between the public’s consumption of pop stars and plastic dolls on “What Was I Made For?,” a sparse, forlorn piano ballad from the “Barbie” soundtrack: “Looked so alive, turns out I’m not real,” she sings in a quivering whisper. “Just something you paid for.” The song hews closer to the more traditional, crooner-inspired fare on Eilish’s album “Happier Than Ever” than to the rest of “Barbie the Album,” which features upbeat tunes from Dua Lipa and Charli XCX. Still, Eilish knows how to tease out the pathos and a subtle sense of macabre from a particular kind of feminine malaise. “I’m used to float, now I just fall down,” she sings, making life in plastic sound less than fantastic. LINDSAY ZOLADZMargaret Glaspy, ‘Memories’Margaret Glaspy sings as if every word is a struggle in “Memories,” a song of sheer grief and loss: “I’m lonesome without you/but I’m a wreck thinking about you.” Her voice arrives behind the beat and then leaps onto the note; the vocal quivers, cracks and sometimes breaks, conjuring emotions that are still raw. JON PARELESJamila Woods featuring duendita, ‘Tiny Garden’Jamila Woods sings about incremental, ordinary but genuine feelings of love in “Tiny Garden”: “It’s not gonna be a big production/It’s not butterflies and fireworks,” she sings. “It’s gonna be a tiny garden/But I feed it every day.” As she describes a real but undemonstrative connection and the testing phase of a romance — “You want to be sure that I want you/Not just someone fun to do” — the track pulses with keyboard chords and rises with gospelly backup vocals, promising that there’s a true spiritual link. The artist duendita joins her near the end, more than willing to “watch all the purpose we place multiply slowly over time.” PARELESTroye Sivan, ‘Rush’Troye Sivan — the Australian pop musician, ex-YouTuber and rare musician who actually proved to be a watchable screen presence on “The Idol” (ahem!) — returns triumphantly with “Rush,” a sweaty, kinetic, gloriously hedonistic summer dance-floor anthem with a lightly NSFW video to match. Sivan’s breathy vocals dance atop an insistent beat and house-inspired piano riff, while a chorus of deep male voices chant the song’s infectious hook: “I feel the rush, addicted to your touch.” At last, Xander is free! ZOLADZSid Sriram, ‘The Hard Way’Born in India, Sid Sriham grew up in California, studying Carnatic (South Indian) music with his parents while soaking up American R&B and jazz. He built a career in India, singing Bollywood hits along with Carnatic ragas. For his American debut album, “Sidharth,” due Aug. 25, Sriham veered toward the experimental, working with the producer Ryan Olson (from Poliça) and musicians including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). “The Hard Way” is a lovelorn ballad — “I would do anything, anything, anything to make you smile,” he insists — that’s chopped up and placed within a jittery electronic exoskeleton: racing double-time beats, pitch-shifted vocals, bursts of multitracked harmony. It’s bold; he could easily have chosen a more commercial, less thorny approach. PARELESYard Act, ‘The Trench Coat Museum’It is a law of nature that there is never too much cowbell. Yard Act, the post-punk band that could almost be LCD Soundsystem with a British accent and a social-media update, has re-emerged after its debut album. That means post-punk nostalgia folded in on itself like origami. “The Trench Coat Museum” imagines that there might be such an institution — celebrating a garment that’s assertive, concealing, protective, too long and too evocative — in a spoke-sung eight-minute track that easily gives way to its early 1980s groove: beat, bass riff, turntable scratching, clawing rhythm guitar, synthesizers and Latin percussion that definitely includes cowbell. The open secret of post-punk is that no matter how cynical the vocal gets, the song is always about the groove. PARELESC. Tangana, ‘Oliveira Dos Cen Anos’C. Tangana, the Spanish songwriter who started as a rapper and has delved ever deeper into the musical past, stays out of the foreground of his latest project, a hundredth-anniversary song for a soccer team from Galicia, Real Club Celta de Vigo; his father is from the town of Vigo. “Oliveira Dos Cen Anos” (“Hundred-Year-Old Olive Tree”) is rooted in Galician folk tradition but underpinned by electronics. C. Tangana is one of the songwriters and co-producers and the director of a sweeping, scenic video; Galician musicians sing lead vocals. An ardent choral anthem, with folk-song lyrics vowing love and loyalty, gives way to a traditionalist six-beat stomp, with a fierce cameo from the drumming, singing women of As Lagharteiras, along with a glimmering harp interlude and a stadium-sized singalong. “I will always be here,” men shout. “Celta forever! PARELESLoraine James featuring RiTchie, ‘Déjà Vu’“Not everything is quite audible,” the rapper and singer RiTchie calmly observes in “Déjà Vu.” The producer Loraine James constructed a perpetually disorienting mix of jolting electronic glitches, soothing piano and furtive snippets of percussion and synthesizer. RiTchie, from the group Injury Reserve, layers on multiple vocals, sung and spoken, and sounds completely unfazed by his surroundings: “You just gotta soak it all in,” he advises. PARELESOxlade featuring Dave, ‘Intoxycated’Oxlade, a singer and songwriter from Nigeria, and Dave, a rapper from England with Nigerian roots, commiserate about straying lovers and social media in “Intoxycated.” Oxlade decides “love is overrated” after seeing his girlfriend with another guy on Instagram; Dave reflects, “Love’s easy to find, harder to hold/Most stories end and start with a phone.” A minor-key Afrobeats groove with little guitar curlicues sums up the mood: sleek and resigned. PARELESJlin, ‘Fourth Perspective’The composer and producer Jlin — Jerrilynn Patton — built head-spinning electronic music out of percussive sounds, so it made perfect sense for her to write music for live acoustic performance by the ensemble Third Coast Percussion, which appeared on the group’s 2022 album, “Perspectives.” Now, Jlin has reworked those compositions for her own mini-album “Perspective,” due in September. Her new version of “Fourth Perspective” brings back electronic sounds, moving a ghostly, plinking, minimalistic waltz toward the ratchety, foreboding terrain of trap. PARELESmaJa, ‘A Vivir en Desacuerdo’MaJa — the Dominican songwriter Maria-José Gonell — sings about contentedly being a fish out of water in “A Vivir en Desacuerdo” (“To Live in Disagreement”). Her airy voice makes her seem tentative at first, but the production — by her songwriting collaborator Gian Rojas — radiates growing confidence, as a beat slips in and electronics sparkle ever more brightly. She’s not diffident; she’s above it all. PARELES More

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      “The Greek Passion” Takes Center Stage at the Salzburg Festival

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      Bohuslav Martinu’s “Greek Passion” poses a timeless question: when a group of refugees seek protection in a new community, what will the locals do?Bohuslav Martinu’s final opera, “The Greek Passion,” explores a story that was as explosive in the mid-twentieth century as it is today. When a group of refugees seeks protection in the village of Lycovrissi, the community is thrown into upheaval: Will the villagers reaffirm their Christian virtues or indulge in acts of selfishness?This Aug. 13-27, the opera will be performed for the first time at the Salzburg Festival in a production directed by Simon Stone. Maxime Pascal, the 2014 winner of the summertime event’s annual Young Conductors Award, leads — his first fully staged opera here — in the Felsenreitschule.The festival has performed Martinu’s work occasionally since 1950, presenting the world premiere of his orchestral piece “Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca” in 1956. Recent editions have seen mostly chamber music.“The Greek Passion” had personal resonance for Martinu, who was perpetually homesick in his last years. Born in 1890 in Policka — a town in Bohemia just over the Moravian border (in the modern-day Czech Republic) — he came into maturity as a composer in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1941, as a member of the French Resistance, he fled the Nazis for the United States. Martinu would die in Switzerland, in 1959, unable to return to his native country for political reasons.Bohuslav Martinu in 1948.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesAfter a long search for a tragic subject matter that he could personally adapt into a libretto, he discovered the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis and won approval to adapt his book “Christ Recrucified.”“I now feel ready for another step,” the composer wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1956, “which is most difficult and entails the greatest responsibility, and that is a musical tragedy.”Martinu collaborated closely with Kazantzakis as he worked through the novel, in an English translation by Jonathan Griffin. The original conflict, involving Turkish rule, was tightened, so that the standoff in Lycovrissi (a town north of Athens) involved only Greeks.Ales Brezina, director of the Bohuslav Martinu Institute, explained that the story line, as such, had particular import to the composer in the context of Cold War politics that pitted people of the same nation against each other. Having taken up American citizenship, Martinu was considered a traitor in his home country. In the United States, he had to face the repercussions of being a Czech native during the anti-communist McCarthy era.“In the context of a bipolar world where everything was suspect,” Mr. Brezina said, “Martinu was moved by the topic of what people were capable of doing to their fellow countrymen.”Mr. Pascal, the conductor, also emphasized the centrality of this dynamic to the work. “A group of Greeks arrives in a Greek village, and they start to chase them away,” he said. “This reveals the viciousness of an angry mob toward another human being and humanity itself.”The score features two choruses — one representing the people of Lycovrissi, another, the refugees — a structure that follows a long tradition of musical settings of the Passion, or the story of the Crucifixion, as told in the Gospels of the Bible. In “The Greek Passion,” art becomes life as the villagers re-enact a Passion play. The shepherd Manolios, who portrays Christ, is ultimately murdered after he challenges his fellow villagers about the authenticity of their values.Mr. Pascal pointed out that Kazantzakis was considered a heretic for reinterpreting the doctrines of faith as they had been handed down by the church. “He saw a revolutionary figure in the figure of Christ but most of all saw in the mystery of Christianity something along the lines of a legend or myth,” he said.Simon Stone is directing the production.Jan Friese/SFMartinu left behind two very different versions of “The Greek Passion” because of an unusual twist of events. He chose the Royal Opera in London as the location for the premiere, although there was also interest from the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival and La Scala in Milan.Yet the opera was ultimately rejected by external advisers to the theater’s board. The musicologist and conductor Anthony Lewis argued that certain works by the Czech natives Smetana and Janacek had yet to be heard in London, and that the house needed to champion contemporary English composers.Despite the relentless support of the Royal Opera’s music director, the Czech-born Rafael Kubelik, the board would not reverse its decision. Martinu, for his part, believed that the war for independence in Cyprus — which was affecting diplomatic relations between Britain and Greece — might have tainted the subject matter.He revised and tightened the score for the Zurich Opera, where the show premiered in June 1961, after Martinu’s death, under the baton of his friend and patron, Paul Sacher. The original version, intended to premiere in London, did not hit the stage until 1999 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.Mr. Brezina, who reconstructed the score for that production, compared the original version to a “dramatic fresco” or a “mosaic in which individual scenes and appearances blaze against each other.” The Zurich version, which will be performed in Salzburg, by contrast resembles “a kind of oratorio with wonderful melodies and choral scenes,” he said.Martinu’s mature works achieve an unprecedented synthesis of Czech and French elements, combining Bohemian rhythms and Moravian cadences with the influences of such composers as Stravinsky and Debussy. His “Greek Passion,” however, is distinct in that he carefully absorbed Greek Orthodox music, only occasionally alluding to his Czech roots. In 1955, Martinu traveled to New York to meet with friends of Kazantzakis and learn about Greek folk music and liturgy.Mr. Brezina explained that Martinu was keen to portray simple people while keeping his distance from the “farmer’s music” that can be found in the works of Janacek, who was the first composer to adapt Moravian speech patterns and melodies to the operatic stage. “He found in Kazantzakis exceptional intelligence, but also a down-to-earth person,” he said. “All the characters in the ‘Greek Passion’ have almost no education. They behave instinctively.”Mr. Pascal noted that the displacement of peoples in Greece echoed developments in Martinu’s native Czechoslovakia. “The oral songs and dances that migrated from region to region must have spoken enormously to him,” he said.The conductor also pointed to the score’s strongly Impressionist character. “There is incredible violence, but at the same time everything seems to be bathed in sunlight,” he said.Mr. Pascal further reflected on the superimposition of time periods that can be typical for a composer’s ultimate statement: “The after-war period, the period of Christ, Greece: There is a continuity between the past and present that is vertiginous.This is also found in Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ — in which 8th-century Chinese texts bifurcate with a text that the composer wrote himself — or Gérard Grisey’s ‘Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.’”Although it is rarely performed, “The Greek Passion” is considered Martinu’s greatest operatic achievement, alongside his 1938 surrealist masterpiece “Juliette.” “It is the self-proclaimed pinnacle of his work for the stage,” Mr. Brezina said. 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      The Baritone Andrè Schuen Performs at the Salzburg Festival

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      Andrè Schuen stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”Andrè Schuen, a fast-rising young Italian baritone, brings innate musicality to his performances. Born in La Val, a small village in Südtirol, the mountainous region at the border with Austria, Schuen grew up speaking three languages: Ladin, Italian and German.This summer, Schuen, 38, stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” running from July 27 to Aug. 28. With rehearsals underway in late June, he spoke in a video call about his background and upcoming performance. The following conversation, translated from German, has been edited and condensed.You hail from a remote region and are part of a cultural-linguistic minority, the Ladin people. How did this background influence your musical formation?From childhood onward, music was always the most important thing. That was also the case with my father, who got his love of music from his father.You need to remember that 100 years ago people were very poor where I come from. Before tourism, they were all farmers who lived off their fields and cows.My grandfather acquired a small collection of instruments, which my father passed on to us. That means that we grew up with music, including many folk songs, with my father playing accordion and clarinet, my two sisters on violin, and me on cello.We also made music together as a family and put together a program connected to our Ladin national saga, about the legend of the Kingdom of Fanes. Later, I was in a band and did covers of everything, including punk songs.You weren’t listening to Schubert alone in your room.Not at all! Quite the opposite. For instance, when I was 13, soccer meant everything to me. I was on a team. It’s not like my parents forced me in a musical direction. If I had said I wanted to be a carpenter, then I would have become a carpenter.When did you start playing cello?When I was about 7. I studied cello for 12 years. I knew that I liked to sing, but singing classically would have never occurred to me. One of my sisters told me, “You sing well. Why don’t you give it a shot?”So I auditioned for voice at the Mozarteum [University] in Salzburg. And that’s how it happened. Without ever thinking about it too much, everything pretty much came together harmoniously.What does singing give you that playing the cello doesn’t?I think it has a bit to do with the fact that you are the instrument yourself, that you don’t have to take something in your hand and practice on it. And of course, there’s the added element of text. I think being an opera singer has more parameters. It’s not just about singing.This summer you’ll be appearing as the Count in “Figaro.” You’ve also sung the title character many times. What’s it like being both upstairs and downstairs in this opera?Personally, I prefer singing the Count. He’s not exactly a positive character, but that’s exactly what makes him interesting. He has more layers than Figaro. He has a soft, seductive side, but he’s also aggressive or irascible and you need to switch quickly between emotions.Most recently, you sang the Count in Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed, comically astute Vienna production of “Figaro.” Is Martin Kusej, the director in Salzburg, going to show us a different side of “Figaro”?Definitely. [Kusej] doesn’t want to reproduce the piece the way it was intended in [Mozart’s] time. He’s trying to bring out something relevant that still touches or concerns us nowadays. But I don’t think he’s looking for that through the comedy.You recently sang your first Wolfram in “Tannhäuser.” How was it singing such a meaty Wagner role?I was emotionally transported. As for other Wagner roles, we’ll see where else my voice leads me. But Mozart will probably remain a key part of my repertoire until the end. The Count is not a part I want to retire, because it’s a role you can still sing when you’re 60. More

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      How a Jay-Z Exhibit Took Over the Brooklyn Public Library

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      “The Book of Hov,” an elaborate summer exhibition at the borough’s main branch, was quietly conceived by his team as a surprise tribute that opens Friday.Earlier this week, when passages of Jay-Z lyrics from songs like “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” and “Justify My Thug” appeared on the Art Deco-style, curved limestone facade of the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch, fans and passers-by could only speculate on the occasion for the building’s sudden makeover. A surprise concert for the rapper’s home borough? A tribute to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop this summer?The answer, it turned out, was neither — and also a secret even from the man himself.On Thursday evening, when Jay-Z entered the library for a private event surrounded by an inner circle of family, friends and business associates, he was greeted by his live band playing instrumental versions of his hits out front, and a career-spanning archival exhibition that he never asked for inside.Jay-Z learned about the exhibition at a private event held at the library on Thursday night.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times“I know he wouldn’t let us do this,” said Desiree Perez, the chief executive of Jay-Z’s entertainment empire Roc Nation, about keeping such elaborate plans from the boss. “This could never happen if he was involved.”Featuring artwork, music, memorabilia, ephemera and large-scale recreations of touchstones from a sprawling career, “The Book of Hov,” which will run through the summer, might seem more at home at the Brooklyn Museum down the block. But by installing the showcase across eight zones of a functioning library, its architects are aiming to bring aspirational celebrity extravagance to a free public haven just a few miles from the Marcy Houses where Jay-Z grew up.“Jay belongs to the people,” Perez said. “It’s a place that feels comfortable. It’s not intimidating. A lot of people go to the museum, but a lot of people don’t.”Nicola Yeoman and Dan Tobin Smith’s mash-up of instruments that was photographed for the “Blueprint 3” cover.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA Gucci jacket tied to the release of Jay-Z’s 2010 memoir, “Decoded.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA mural by Jazz Grant made of hand-cut and scanned imagery from Jay-Z’s archives.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesOnly the debut on Thursday was meant to be exclusive. Following a private tour through his own memories, Jay-Z made himself scarce when the tightly controlled doors opened, content to leave the V.I.P. guests among representations of his many likenesses, from Mafioso M.C. to boardroom mogul to social justice string-puller.Even his elusive wife, Beyoncé, mingled more, at least momentarily, as crowds gathered outside to catch glimpses of the Jay-Z extended universe — athletes like Jayson Tatum and Robinson Cano; the musicians Lil Uzi Vert, DJ Khaled and Questlove; the director Josh Safdie and the businessman Michael Rubin.By Friday, when the exhibit opens to the masses, the hors d’oeuvres and passed drinks — Jay-Z’s brands, naturally — would be gone. But remaining among the stacks are statues, sneakers, paintings, platinum plaques, trophies and news clippings tied to Jay-Z’s 13 albums and the companies he founded, including Rocawear and Tidal.The library had initially pitched Jay-Z as an honoree for its annual fund-raising gala. But when its chief executive, Linda E. Johnson — the wife of another Jay-Z ally, the developer Bruce Ratner — floated the idea to Perez of Roc Nation, the pair pivoted.One area of the library features playable turntables and vinyl representing the samples used across Jay-Z’s catalog.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“I just asked her, ‘How big is the library?’” Perez recalled. “And when she said 350,000 square feet, I couldn’t believe it.”Throughout the pandemic, Perez and Roc Nation had been plotting to display artifacts that conveyed Jay-Z’s influence across music, business and broader culture, including the pallets’ worth of master recordings he had regained ownership of over the years.“That archive belongs in Brooklyn,” said Johnson, who oversaw the merger of the Brooklyn Public Library and Brooklyn Historical Society.Together, the teams began planning “The Book of Hov” in January, tapping the production designers Bruce and Shelley Rodgers, Emmy-winning veterans of the Super Bowl halftime show, as well as the creative agency General Idea to conceive and execute the elaborate project.It wasn’t just displaying memorabilia. Beyond the library’s main atrium, beneath an enormous Jay-Z collage, now sits a full-scale replica of the main room from Baseline Recording Studios, where Jay-Z created some of his best-known songs. Every detail had to be correct, down to the TV size and the tub of Dum Dums on the counter.A full-scale recreation of the main room from Baseline Recording Studios, where Jay-Z created some of his most famous songs.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA reel-to-reel machine in the replica of Baseline Studios.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA Betacam master tape of the song “99 Problems.”Amir Hamja/The New York Times“They had the wrong couch, the wrong soundboard,” said Juan Perez, a Roc Nation executive and longtime friend of Jay-Z’s, who designed the original studio and gave plenty of notes for the recreation.Another area of the library features playable turntables and vinyl representing the samples used across Jay-Z’s catalog, surrounded by the encased tape reels, floppy disks and CDs containing his original music.Bruce Rodgers, the production designer now working on his 18th Super Bowl halftime show, called the project “probably the most intense installation I’ve ever been involved in,” adding: “We didn’t want to interrupt the normal workings of the library, but we wanted to make a statement.” That included flying in “ninjas” from the West Coast who could rappel up and down the building to install the lyrical facade in time.An area of the exhibition designed for children to make paper planes.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe paper plane is a Roc Nation logo attached to an inspirational motto.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesPart of the exhibition is dedicated to Jay-Z’s philanthropy and social justice work, as well as his various businesses.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“People thought I was a little out of my mind,” Johnson, the library executive, said. “I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb to say that this is the biggest exhibition we’ve ever done.”While the valuables will require additional security, Brooklyn Public Library was not paying for any of the production for the show, she added. “Roc Nation is doing a lot for us financially,” Johnson said, including a substantial donation tied to the gala in October, when Jay-Z and his mother, Gloria Carter, will be honored.In the meantime, Jay-Z will also be helping, perhaps unwittingly, with sign-ups. In addition to the draw of the exhibition itself, the library is producing 13 limited-edition library card variations featuring its homegrown star — one for each album.“I’m concerned about crowds,” Johnson said, conveying equal parts trepidation and excitement. “We’ll run out, I suspect.” More

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      Louis Langrée Wraps Up a Quietly Transformative Era of Conducting

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      Rehearsals led by the conductor Louis Langrée tend to follow a trajectory. Early on, he speaks poetically and tells stories; during preparations for a May concert with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he is the music director, he explained Saint-Saëns with references to the Kyrie of a Mass and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. But then his language becomes technical and specific; that day, broad explanations of mood gave way to meticulous balance and bowing as the playing took shape like an increasingly detailed, fine sculpture.Langrée wasn’t afraid, at that point, to repeat a phrase until it was right. Musicians are capable of understanding a direction when it’s given to them, he said in an interview later, “but they need to feel it, physically.”The result is often an interpretation rich in specificity and color, to a degree that can impress even seasoned musicians. On that program in Cincinnati, Vikingur Olafsson joined the orchestra as the soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and although he had toured the piece all season, he felt that rehearsing it with Langrée, a Frenchman, was like “talking about Chopin with someone in Warsaw.” And, Olafsson added, “there were things that I hadn’t heard before, and that’s a big compliment.”And yet, at 62, Langrée has never been one of the world’s most famous or sought-after conductors. His career has been a steady climb of prestige and quality, quietly remarkable but undersung even as he has transformed ensembles: in Cincinnati, where he has been at the podium for a decade, and in New York, where he has been the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra since 2003.Langrée conducting in Cincinnati. “He’d rather leave five years too early,” Jonathan Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, said, “than stay five minutes too late.”Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesHis time at both posts, though, is coming to an end. Lincoln Center has dropped the Mostly Mozart Festival, keeping its orchestra but changing its music director and name, so Langrée is set to depart this summer at the end of his contract; and his tenure in Cincinnati concludes next season. All this, as he settles into his new job as the leader — not the conductor — of the Opéra Comique in Paris.Cincinnati, which is still searching for his successor, will have a mourning period, said Jonathan Martin, that orchestra’s chief executive. But Langrée is returning to France on a high note.“He’d rather leave five years too early,” Martin said, “than stay five minutes too late.”BORN IN MULHOUSE, France, Langrée is a proud Alsatian, who studied in the region at the Strasbourg Conservatory. From there, his work was primarily as a vocal coach and assistant conductor, at institutions including the Orchestre de Paris, where he encountered eminences like Pierre Boulez, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim.Solti passed down a bit of wisdom for conductors he had heard from Richard Strauss: Go into the hall to listen. Langrée doesn’t always need to do that, though, because he leans on the ears of his assistants, like Samuel Lee in Cincinnati. Langrée said that Lee “knows what I like,” and turned back to check in with him often during the May rehearsals, asking about articulation and whether specific textures were coming through.Starting in the early 1990s, Langrée began to pick up podium appointments in Europe, including at the Opéra National de Lyon and Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He said that his children practically grew up at Glyndebourne, in England; his daughter, Céleste, is now studying scenic design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, he added, because she was brought up by stage hands instead of nannies.Langrée first conducted the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in 1998, in a program that included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. He still remembers details of those rehearsals — working with the ensemble to perfect the style of a minuet by way of connecting the piece to “West Side Story” — and of quickly developing a relationship with the players, who were assembled from a variety of sources, like Lincoln Center institutions and Broadway.In 2002, he was appointed music director after the departure of the orchestra’s longtime conductor, Gerard Schwarz, and a strike that left the players’ morale battered. The ensemble was no critic’s favorite, but once Langrée took over, “he put his heart and soul into every aspect” of it, said Jane Moss, who shepherded Lincoln Center’s artistic programming from 1992 until 2020.Langrée rehearsing Saint-Saëns at Music Hall in Cincinnati.Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesThe orchestra, and the Mostly Mozart Festival, flourished under the leadership of Moss and Langrée. He hired most of the ensemble in its current form — he is particularly proud of Ryan Roberts, “this genius” from the New York Philharmonic, who recently joined as principal oboe — and steadily turned it into a powerhouse of Classical style.At the same time, the festival’s repertoire broadened, the programming including contemporary music; idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary performance; and international hits like George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” and Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Magic Flute.” The ambition, Moss said, flowed from her and Langrée’s relationship as “muses to each other.”“She needed me, and I needed her,” Langrée said. Moss agreed, adding: “We fed each other a very special energy. And that came through to the audience. It was about communicating how much he loved music. It was a golden age, and he was really its star.”When Langrée took over in Cincinnati in 2013, he moved his family there based on advice he had heard from Simon Rattle about his time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, he recalled, told him: “If you want to have a deep experience as a music director, you should live in the city. It’s more than conducting many concerts or programs. You have to understand the power and weakness of the city, and think about how the orchestra can be part of the solutions.”Choosing to live in Cincinnati, said Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, “inevitably led to roots growing out into the community.” Langrée was even an active parent at Walnut Hills High School — where Céleste was involved in theater and his son, Antoine, played in the band; and where he conducted the school orchestra several times. He was tickled by the fact that he worked in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of the city, given that he was born “over the Rhine” in Alsace.Living there also meant that Langrée was present to see the Cincinnati Symphony through the darkest days of the pandemic shutdown; he devised ways, almost immediately, to commission new music and stream concerts for free online. “The thing that was important to Louis was to keep things going,” Martin said.The Cincinnati Symphony today, as with the Mostly Mozart orchestra, is largely a product of Langrée’s efforts. He was actively involved in the renovation of its home theater, Music Hall, and has hired, Martin said, “somewhere between a third and half” of the players. The ensemble has built a reputation on nurturing new works on the scale of concertos and symphonies; 65 of those were led by Langrée during his directorship. And, crucially, the group is performing at a level of excellence that reflects his taste for color and nuance.“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said of Langrée in Cincinnati. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesLangrée told the Cincinnati Symphony in 2021 that he wouldn’t renew his contract there beyond the 2023-24 season. That year, he was hired by President Emmanuel Macron of France to run the Opéra Comique; it was, Langrée said, the first job he had ever applied for.His departure from Mostly Mozart, though, was blurrier. His contract there was set to conclude this summer, but there was no formal announcement about whether he would renew. The festival had gone dark in 2020, and by the time it would have come back, last year, Lincoln Center had a new artistic leader, Shanta Thake, who rolled out a summer series that included no festival proper and fewer performances than before by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. The 2019 edition was unceremoniously the festival’s last. How, Langrée said, could he renew for something that doesn’t exist?Langrée didn’t want to say more about the end of his Mostly Mozart tenure — by any measure a triumph of ensemble-building and musical curiosity. He wanted to protect the players, and for the orchestra to continue. Recently, Jonathon Heyward was made its music director, an appointment that came with the news that the group’s name would change.Thake said that, as a New Yorker who knows the Mostly Mozart orchestra as a beloved New York institution, she can see that going into Langrée’s final season, “they’re stronger than ever.” And there are still echt Langrée performances to come, like a pairing of Mozart’s C-minor Mass and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar, beginning July 25.Langrée moved to Paris once he started at the Opéra Comique, and when he is working in the United States, his day begins early, with about three hours of meetings before rehearsal starts. It’s a challenge, but in the future, he will conduct less: Beyond his concerts in Cincinnati next season, he has only a couple of guest appearances.In lieu of score study, he is now getting acquainted with the nonartistic side of his field, stressed now not about orchestral concerts, but about, say, the effect of inflation on the cost of running a theater.“It’s the last major project of my life,” he said of his job with the Opéra Comique. He will conduct one production there each season. And, as a guest, he will lead a “much-reduced repertoire” that he wants to explore more deeply than he could as a music director. Those moments, which he referred to as a “luxury,” will almost be the easy part of his career’s new phase.“I come from a musical background,” Langrée said. “When you have to read these Excel things and have to balance budgets and work with subsidies from the government — now, I feel like I’ve been plunged into real life. And that’s hard.” More