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      Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Chemistry’ Draws on Familiar Formulas

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      With a big voice and big personal changes to sing about, Clarkson ends up with arrangements that don’t match the power and rawness of the emotions fueling them.When a musician known in part for her fiery breakup anthems announces the dissolution of her marriage, fans can sometimes react with an impolite if somewhat understandable presumption: “Well, at least the divorce album will be good.”That was the response in 2019, when Adele separated from her now ex-husband Simon Konecki, though she certainly fanned the flames: In the promotional cycle for her 2021 album “30,” when a fan asked what her new record would be about, Adele replied with the instantly memed quote, “Divorce, babe, divorce.” Still, she rose to the challenge: “30” was her most radically honest and stylistically adventurous album yet.Earlier this year, when Kelly Clarkson — another beloved, recently divorced powerhouse vocalist — announced the release of “Chemistry,” expectations were high for some scorched-earth catharsis from the woman who unleashed the feel-good breakup song of the millennium, “Since U Been Gone.” After a holiday album and a covers EP, “Chemistry” is the first album of original pop material Clarkson has released in six years, following the debut of her popular, Daytime Emmy-winning talk show and her 2020 split with her husband, Brandon Blackstock. The track list — featuring song titles like “I Hate Love,” “My Mistake” and “Red Flag Collector” — practically screamed divorce, babe, divorce.But Clarkson, 41, said she wanted “Chemistry” to depict a full arc of a relationship, including its high points. “Favorite Kind of High,” an upbeat, electro-pop tune that Clarkson wrote with the producer Jesse Shatkin and Carly Rae Jepsen, attempts to capture the fizz of new infatuation. (A remix by David Guetta kicks the song into an even higher gear.) The slower, sultry “Magic” addresses a more long-term devotion: “Magic takes time, and I’ve got my sights and they’re set on you,” she sings breathily. Clarkson delivers these vocals with her signature virtuosity, but she doesn’t quite inhabit these relatively faceless songs as fully as she does when she’s singing about love gone wrong.Clarkson has always brought a sharp authenticity and feisty independence to her recording career. The popular “Kellyoke” segment on her daytime program has become a showcase for her genuine appreciation for all sorts of music and proof that she can sing expertly in just about any genre.“Chemistry” never quite lives up to her reputation for excellence, though, and it fails to find a sound that fits the rawness of much of its subject matter. The album is often a showcase for the elemental power of Clarkson’s voice and occasionally for her clever turns of phrase as a lyricist, but the arrangements too often rely on modern pop clichés rather than push for innovation or reach back to the soulful traditionalism of her 2017 LP, “Meaning of Life.”The production — helmed by Clarkson’s longtime musical director Jason Halbert and her frequent producer Shatkin, along with new collaborators Rachel Orscher and Erica Serna — often feels excessively compressed and synthetic, keeping Clarkson’s voice and emotion at an unfortunate remove. “Down to You,” with its sassy, hair-flipping energy, has a few zingers — “I tried to be your friend/I won’t make that mistake again” — but its sputtering, faceless chorus demands about 1 percent of her voice’s potential wattage.The wrenching, piano-driven torch song “Lighthouse,” on the other hand, gives her a little more breathing space and puts a spotlight on one of the album’s most impassioned vocal performances. “My Mistake” relies on a more synthetic pop sound, but its swooping melody gives her more room to vamp. It’s one of only two songs on the record Clarkson didn’t help write; she imbues the other, the booming, ’80s-inspired pop-rock standout “High Road,” with a lived-in weariness and convincing emotional maturity: “To become stronger, you have to listen/Keep it open, don’t try to hide it/And if you need love, don’t try to fight it.”Perhaps surprisingly for a record born from the heartbreak of divorce, “Chemistry” is at its most distinct when it abandons the weight of pathos and allows Clarkson to get loose. Across the final trio of songs, starting with the octave-leaping “Red Flag Collector,” she switches gears into a more conversational delivery — teasing out a sensibility shared by country, cabaret and Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together” — and lets her quirky personality lead. Steve Martin, of all people, plays banjo on the stylistically restless “I Hate Love,” while Sheila E. provides percussion on the breezy finale “That’s Right.”These three songs may still be about a breakup, but they’re not tear-jerkers: “Turns out I like things that you don’t,” Clarkson sings on the closer, before hitting the beach — which he hated, apparently — and reconnecting with herself. “Chemistry” ultimately feels like a missed opportunity for more depth and daring, but at least it sometimes sounds like a vacation.Kelly Clarkson“Chemistry”(Atlantic) More

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      Jesse McReynolds, Lead Singer in Long-Running Bluegrass Duo, Dies at 93

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      He also played mandolin in the act, Jim & Jesse, performing with his brother for 55 years.Jesse McReynolds, for 55 years the lead singer and mandolin player with Jim & Jesse, the first-generation bluegrass duo he established with his older brother, Jim McReynolds, died on Friday at his home in Gallatin, Tenn. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his wife, Joy McReynolds, on her Facebook page.Bluegrass’s longest running brother act, Jim & Jesse developed a smooth blend of harmony singing that contrasted with the more piercing, down-home vocal arrangements of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. Mr. McReynolds sang the melody line in a crystalline baritone, while his brother, who died of thyroid cancer in 2002, added honeyed tenor harmonies on top.The McReynolds’s instrumental approach likewise was more polished than that of their peers, creating a bridge between the barnyard twang of early sibling duos like the Delmore Brothers and the more streamlined sounds of mid-20th century country music.Typically backed by banjo, fiddle and bass, the duo’s music — built around Mr. McReynolds’s plaintive mandolin playing and his brother’s metronome-like rhythm guitar — was not without its experimental side. Most notable was Mr. McReynolds’s widely imitated cross-picking technique, which employed a flat pick to approximate the three-finger banjo roll of the bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs.“I was sort of listening to what he was doing,” Mr. McReynolds said, discussing the origins of his Scruggs-style picking, an approach that influenced mandolin virtuosos like David Grisman and Sam Bush, in a 2019 interview for the website candlewater.com.“I didn’t know how he was doing it. I knew he was using a three-finger roll on it,” he added, but “I was trying to do it with a straight pick so I could play my other style, too.”That other style, which also qualified as an innovation in bluegrass, involved a split-string technique in which Mr. McReynolds used his pinkie to hold down one string of his mandolin’s four pairs of strings while letting its counterpart reverberate, or ring open, to achieve a droning effect. Requiring great precision, this sleight-of-hand produced two distinct notes from a pair of strings which, on the mandolin, were usually played in unison.The duo’s 1963 recording of the instrumental “Stoney Creek” is often cited as the quintessential vehicle for Mr. McReynolds’s prowess as a mandolinist. His Scruggs-inspired “mandolin roll,” though, already could be heard a decade earlier on gospel recordings like “I’ll Fly Away” and “On the Jericho Road.”The McReynolds brothers sometimes incorporated electric and steel guitar into their performances in lieu of bluegrass’s customary banjo and fiddle. In 1969, Mr. McReynolds contributed mandolin to a track on “The Soft Parade,” an album released by the countercultural Los Angeles rock band the Doors.Repertoire was yet another area in which Jim & Jesse were in the bluegrass vanguard. Nowhere was this more evident than with the 1965 release of “Berry Pickin’ in the Country,” a collection of bluegrass covers of Chuck Berry songs, including a chuffing take of “Memphis.” The album proved to be one of the most popular of the brothers’ career.Jesse McReynolds, center, in Nashville in 2014. He continued to perform after his brother Jim died in 2002. Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesTheir untrammeled musical instincts notwithstanding, Jim & Jesse were among the most commercially successful bluegrass acts of the ’60s and ’70s. They placed 10 singles on the country chart, notably “Cotton Mill Man” (1964), a worker’s plaint, and “Diesel on My Tail” (1967), a truck-driving song featuring steel guitar that reached No. 18.Jesse Lester McReynolds was born on July 9, 1929, in Carfax, Va., in the mountains of southern Appalachia. His father, Claude Matthew McReynolds, was a coal miner and amateur banjo player; his mother, Savannah Prudence (Robinette) McReynolds, played guitar, banjo and harmonica and taught her sons to sing gospel harmonies. Mr. McReynolds’s grandfather, the fiddler Charles McReynolds, recorded as one-half of the Bull Mountain Moonshiners at 1927’s Bristol Sessions, the so-called big bang of country music that produced landmark recordings by the likes of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.Although raised in a musical family, young Jesse did not take up the mandolin in earnest until he turned 14 and was recovering from an automobile accident that left him with two broken legs. Four years later, he and his brother started a banjo-less string band that played country music throughout southwestern Virginia. It was not until 1952, when they began working with the producer Ken Nelson at Capitol Records, that they first described the music they were making as bluegrass.“We were hesitating over whether we’d even feature the five-string banjo,” Mr. McReynolds said in an interview for the liner notes to “Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys: In the Tradition,” a 1987 album released by Rounder Records. “But it turned out that Ken Nelson was expecting us to record as a bluegrass band, so that’s what we did.”Mr. Nelson also encouraged the brothers to change the name of their ensemble from the Virginia Trio, under which they made their first recordings in 1951, to Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys. In 1960, after more than a decade of performing on many of the radio barn dances of the era, they began hosting their own syndicated television program, sponsored by the Martha White flour company.The duo was a popular draw on the early ’60s folk circuit, appearing, among other places, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. A year later they became members of the cast of the Grand Old Opry, having gained a reputation, like Bill Monroe before them, for attracting elite talent to their band like the fiddle players Tommy Jackson and Vassar Clements.The ensuing decades found the brothers returning to a more traditional approach to bluegrass while consolidating their reputation as one of the premier ensembles in the history of the idiom. Mr. McReynolds served as the affable frontman of the group, his brother as manager of their business affairs.In the late ’80s, Mr. McReynolds toured and recorded with the Masters, a bluegrass supergroup that included the fiddler Kenny Baker, the dobroist Josh Graves and the banjo player and guitarist Eddie Adcock.In 1993, Jim & Jesse were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame. Four years later they received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.Mr. McReynolds remained active after his brother’s death. Among other projects, he released a 2010 collection of songs written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, a band upon which Jim & Jesse were a formative influence.Besides his wife of 27 years, Mr. McReynolds is survived by a daughter, Gwen; two sons, Michael and Randy; eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.Much has been made of Mr. McReynolds’s debt to the ebullient banjo phrasing of Earl Scruggs. While certainly the case, Mr. McReynolds also improvised on his forebear’s technique by reversing the order of the notes he played in his variant of the Scruggs banjo roll to create a more melancholy tonal effect.“Ultimately, I ended up playing the opposite of what he did,” Mr. McReynolds explained, talking about the differences between his technique and that of Mr. Scruggs in a 2017 interview with Bluegrass Today. “My rolls went backwards, while Earl’s rolls went forward.” More

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      Joni Mitchell Finally Returned. Her Fans Were Waiting.

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      The crowd at the singer-songwriter’s first announced concert in more than two decades was intergenerational and grateful.The Joni Jam, featuring a cast of collaborators, was part of Brandi Carlile’s Echoes Through the Canyon festival.On the night of June 10 at the majestic Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wash., on the lip of the Columbia River, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell played her first headlining show in 23 years. Her appearance had the air of a comet’s return: rare, breathlessly awaited and well worth camping out all night. That many concertgoers had traveled long distances made the experience feel all the more like a Mitchell song — perhaps one of the poetic highway travelogues recorded on her 1976 album “Hejira,” or even one of the romantic, intercontinental voyages she sang about on her 1971 landmark “Blue.” It was a crowd dotted with tie-dye and graying braids, yes, but also one full of lifelong friends reunited, mothers and children bonding over intergenerational musical tastes and enough homemade Mitchell T-shirts to rival Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. As Mitchell said to the adoring crowd as it held glowing cellphone lights aloft, paraphrasing one of her most memorable songs, “You’re stardust, and golden.”Loretta Pervier Grant, 64, a lifelong Mitchell fan, had never seen her play live. So she and her husband, Larry Grant, 65, drove from Arizona for the show.From left: Rose Paisley, Julie Chinnock, Vivian Pedegana, Lola Pedegana and Greg Pedegana. Rose Paisley’s daughters wore their grandmother’s clothes to the show, including her cowboy boots and jewelry.Dan Waldron and Elizabeth Ford drove from Canada to see Mitchell’s show.Suzanne Park, 64, said she grew up listening to Mitchell’s music in the ’60s and ’70s, and would play her songs on her guitar in high school. More

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      The Majesty of the Cure’s Live Show

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      Robert Smith’s band cast a spell on New York this week. Listen to a playlist that showcases the long-running group’s onstage power.Robert Smith onstage at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, during what’s become one of the year’s buzziest tours.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesDear listeners,Earlier this week, I was listening to “Pictures of You,” one of the many great singles by the British band the Cure, on the subway. It’s a song I’ve heard approximately one million times, and yet when I put it on, time still seems to slow down and everything around me becomes suspended in a romantic haze. I am almost positive the strangers sitting across from me were engaged in a simple conversation about directions. But as Robert Smith yelped dreamily — “Remembering you standing quiet in the rain, as I ran to your heart to be near” — I convinced myself that one of them was actually expressing their unrequited love.Such was the perspective-altering spell the Cure cast Thursday, on the closing night of a sold-out, three-show run at Madison Square Garden. Given its longevity, stylistic variety and staggering quantity of singles, the Cure is almost too easy to take for granted. But the buzz surrounding this current U.S. tour — “The Cure Are This Summer’s Hottest Rock Tour. Yes, Really,” declared a recent headline in Rolling Stone — suggests we have finally decided to appreciate, en masse, these unlikely, 60-something rock gods in all their glory and enduring weirdness.And we’re going to do the same today here at The Amplifier, with a playlist culled entirely from the Cure’s live albums. (Listen along on Spotify as you read.)Earlier this year, Smith became something of an internet folk hero when he publicly took on Ticketmaster for adding its usual litany of mysterious fees to tickets his fans had purchased; he also tried to limit scalpers’ resales to keep prices affordable. (In a rare concession, Ticketmaster agreed to partially refund some Cure fans.)Thursday night, I got the sense that this was not something Smith was just doing for show: This is a band that noticeably, palpably cares about its fans.The merch prices were the lowest I’ve seen at a venue like the Garden in many years — at $25, T-shirts were going for about half what most arena-filling acts charge these days. And onstage, Smith emitted a sincere sense of gratitude that I found transfixing. He spent the first five minutes of the set walking to every single corner of the stage and gazing out intensely, as though he were trying and very nearly succeeding in the impossible task of making meaningful eye contact with every one of the thousands of people in the arena.Yes, Smith still styles himself like a kinder, gentler version of the Joker. But that is about the only concession to spectacle the band makes onstage. The Cure held the audience in a trance without any of the special effects, pyrotechnics or state-of-the-art visuals that most other artists use at a venue that size. Here were six guys just playing their instruments, occasionally striking exaggerated rock poses, but mostly just letting this majestic music speak for itself.At 64, Smith’s voice has held up almost eerily well. There it was, filling the venue to the rafters in the present tense: that same distinct, keening howl heard on beloved records like “Three Imaginary Boys,” “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” and “Disintegration.” But perhaps the most striking revelation of the live show is Simon Gallup — one of the most appropriately named bassists in rock history — who plays his instrument slung low and constantly reminds the audience how integral his playing is to the Cure’s overall sound. Down in the murky depths of a Cure song, Gallup plays so insistently that his bass riffs are usually as hummable as whatever Smith and Reeves Gabrels (speaking of great rock names) are playing on guitar.Today’s playlist is an appreciation for the Cure’s reign as a top-notch live act. Save for a few tracks from the excellent 1993 live album “Show” — recorded in Auburn Hills, Mich., in the afterglow of the band’s 1992 album “Wish” — it is mostly filled with recordings from the last decade or so.You’ll hear songs from the band’s headlining sets at festivals like the British event Bestival and the artist-curated Meltdown festival, which Smith hosted in 2018. Many songs come from the most immaculately recorded of the Cure’s later live albums, “Anniversary 1978-2018,” which documented a triumphant, career-spanning set at London’s Hyde Park. In those recordings, you’ll hear the engulfing majesty of “Plainsong,” the springy bounce of the perpetual singalong “Just Like Heaven” and the slightly slower tempo at which they have been playing “Boys Don’t Cry,” which teases out some of the sumptuous atmospherics of what was once a spikily arranged post-punk song.May the whole playlist put you in one of those dreamy, rose-colored hazes that brings out the drama and romanticism in everything.Let’s cut the conversation and get out for a bit,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Majesty of the Cure Live” track listTrack 1: “Pictures of You (Live in Hyde Park)”Track 2: “Lovesong (Live in Hyde Park)”Track 3: “In Between Days (Live in Auburn Hills, Mich.)”Track 4: “Just Like Heaven (Live in Hyde Park)”Track 5: “The Last Day of Summer (Live in London)”Track 6: “Plainsong (Live in Hyde Park)”Track 7: “Friday I’m in Love (Live in Auburn Hills, Mich.)”Track 8: “Boys Don’t Cry (Live in Hyde Park)”Track 9: “Jumping Someone Else’s Train (Live at Bestival 2011)”Bonus tracksAs we do each Friday, we’ve selected a Playlist’s worth of new releases for you to enjoy this weekend. This time around, you’ll hear collaborations between Beck and Phoenix, Amanda Shires and Bobbie Nelson, and a brand-new track from Aphex Twin, among other gems. More

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      Review: A Composer’s ‘Lear’ Freshens a Shakespeare Evening

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      The Met Orchestra’s season-ending concert at Carnegie Hall featured the premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches).”The Metropolitan Opera orchestra’s uneven, season-ending concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday had a sleepily evergreen theme: Shakespeare.Two standards inspired by the classic pair of star-crossed lovers — Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy Overture and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” — dominated the program, alongside a brisk account of the final act from Verdi’s “Otello.”But the freshest part of the evening was the shortest: the new, 11-minute “Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches),” by Matthew Aucoin.Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice,” presented at the Met in 2021, musically overwhelmed a fragile text. With this bit of “Lear,” on the other hand, he has found a subject grand enough to match his sensibility.Yet Aucoin’s restraint in handling these huge forces is one of the most notable things about “Heath,” whose four sections, played without pause, exude a confident, brooding reserve. With tolling bells, grim chords and an uneasy melody, the opening immediately brings to mind Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” another tale of a king gone mad.This first section, “The Divided Kingdom,” shows Aucoin’s talent for creating orchestral textures that are simultaneously granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Sharp snaps of snare drum punctuate a gradual increase in forcefulness to a bleak, expansive landscape of solemn brasses and a droning in the strings, which melts into an almost Tchaikovskian Romantic sweep.A slightly faster second section, named after Lear’s Fool, is pierced by the hard, maniacal playfulness of flutes — hinting at the scores for Kurosawa’s filmed Shakespeare adaptations — before a brief, spare interlude inspired by the blinded Gloucester’s raw regret. The fourth part, “With a Dead March” (the play’s indication for the final mass exit), builds in dense, steady waves before suddenly receding to a subtle, discomfiting yet elegant ending of rustling percussion.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit for consistently leading this richly gifted composer’s works with both organizations over the past few years. (Aucoin is currently working on an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” planned for the Met.)Despite being clear and energetic on the podium, Nézet-Séguin couldn’t quite whip up the crisp brilliance needed to make the over-familiar Bernstein and Tchaikovsky pieces on the program newly memorable. Neither was slow, exactly, but they nevertheless felt a bit tired and hectically blurred, with hiccups in the horns and trumpets at the end of a long season. The Tchaikovsky lacked the passionate opulence that is this score’s reason for being.The “Otello” finale was originally intended as a vehicle for the veteran soprano Renée Fleming, a superb Desdemona in her day who delivered a tender performance of the opera’s “Ave Maria” during the Met’s livestreamed “At-Home Gala” in April 2020.When she withdrew a few months ago, Fleming was replaced by Angel Blue, a rising star who sang a warm “La Traviata” in March and will be featured by the company in three major roles next season. Blue’s voice and presence are sweet, sincere and straightforward; on Thursday, her upper register was particularly shining (other than an ascent to a slightly off soft A flat at the end of the “Ave Maria”).But there wasn’t the fullness to her tone that would have made her lower music really penetrate. The tenor Russell Thomas was smoothly stentorian if bland as Otello; perhaps, without the journey of the first three acts, this half-hour excerpt is fated to come across as anticlimactic. These are talented singers, but the programming did them no favors.Met OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Beck and Phoenix’s Bouncy Synth-Pop Team-up, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Palehound, Jaimie Branch, Aphex Twin 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.Beck and Phoenix, ‘Odyssey’Double bill challenge: write a song with the act sharing the tour to prove compatibility. Beck and the French electro-pop band Phoenix, who will hit the road together this summer, have done just that. Their collaboration, “Odyssey,” finds common ground in synthesizer-centered 1980s pop, specifically Talking Heads’ 1980 “Once in a Lifetime” plus a lot of marimba or xylophone overdubs. Homer’s “Odyssey” was a long, brutal journey home. This “Odyssey” is much more comfortable. JON PARELESMaisie Peters, ‘Run’“If the man says that he wants you in his life forever — run!” That’s what the English songwriter Maisie Peters advises after a relationship with someone who was “too good to be true.” It’s a brisk, beat-driven battle-of-the-sexes song that could be a slogan. PARELESAphex Twin, ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 21f’Brooding synthesizer chords and dependable but ever-shifting drumbeats run through Aphex Twin’s first official release in five years, the inscrutably titled (as usual) “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f,” from an EP due July 28. Melodically, the track is a dirge, but until the rhythm drops away at the end, the percussion is there to party no matter how grim the surroundings. PARELESJaimie Branch, ‘Take Over the World’The trumpeter and bandleader Jaimie Branch, who was 39 when she died last year, left behind raucous, defiant recordings that will be released in August as a posthumous album, “Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)).” Branch determinedly fused jazz, electronics and punk spirit, and in “Take Over the World” she starts out chanting “Gonna gonna take over the world/and give it back-back-back-back to the l-l-land,” whooping up high as she’s joined by pummeling, New Orleans-flavored drums and rhythmically droning cello and bass. She plays a taunting, growling trumpet solo; she puts her vocals through an electronic warp. Her fury gathers a fierce, joyful momentum. PARELESPalehound, ‘Independence Day’“We broke up on Independence Day, crying while the next door neighbors raged,” El Kempner begins on this single from indie-rockers Palehound’s forthcoming album “Eye on the Bat,” atop a chord progression that chugs wearily, like Wilco’s “Kamera.” That memorable line sets the scene for this bleary, blurred snapshot of a relationship’s end, full of wry humor and hard-won wisdom. “Even if I could, it would kill me to look back,” Kempner sings, musing on the sadness of the road not taken. “No, I don’t wanna see the other path.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAmanda Shires and Bobbie Nelson, ‘Waltz Across Texas’The country artists Amanda Shires and Bobbie Nelson recorded the generation-bridging album “Loving You” shortly before Nelson’s 2022 death at age 91, and the result is a testament to the collaborative spirit and light, intuitive touch as a pianist that she retained up until the very end of her life. The album’s opening number “Waltz Across Texas,” the Western swing classic made famous by Ernest Tubb, showcases their easy musical chemistry: Shires’s fluttery voice is playful but reverent to the source material, and Nelson’s notes are as elegantly spaced and glimmering as stars in a night sky. ZOLADZFaye Webster, ‘But Not Kiss’Faye Webster trades in deceptive nonchalance. She brings her sly, sleepy voice to “But Not Kiss,” singing about the wary, ambivalent beginnings of a relationship: “I want to see you in my dreams but then forget,” she sings, “We’re meant to be — but not yet.” Each quiet, folky declaration is answered by a rich burst of instruments: physical responses outpacing rational decisions. PARELESThe Smile, ‘Bending Hectic’What would it feel like to drive off a Mediterranean mountainside? Leave it to the Smile — Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead with the jazz drummer Tom Skinner — to consider that possibility in this nerve-racking eight-minute track. “Bending Hectic” moves from contemplating the view to getting suicidal on curvy Italian mountain roads, from quiet guitar picking and contemplation to disaster scored by Greenwood’s dissonant string arrangements. Takeaway: Choose that van driver carefully. PARELESAmbrose Akinmusire, ‘Cora Campbell’Ambrose Akinmusire recorded his newest album, “Beauty Is Enough,” at Paris’s towering Saint-Eustache cathedral, without an audience or a band — just his trumpet and the natural reverb of the hall. He approached the album, which is entirely improvised, as something of a rite of passage: So many of his horn-playing heroes had done solo albums at crucial career junctures, he’d known he would at some point too. Akinmusire has a huge knowledge of jazz history, but he pushes himself to avoid relaxing within it; you’ll never hear him falling back on references. Instead he’s built one of the most ineffable styles in jazz, full of smoldering feeling, but with a startling quietness at its core. (The LP’s cover art approximates this well: a faint, almost bodily shape, barely emerging from an all-black background.) On “Cora Campbell,” the last of the LP’s 16 tracks, you’ll hear him squeeze his notes tightly, letting them tremor and wriggle a bit. Seventy seconds in, he turns the notes he’s been toying with into a steady pattern, then challenges himself to splice higher pitches and glissandos into its gaps. It’s not overloaded, but he’s never at rest. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      Sonic Sphere, a Concert Hall That Hangs Like a Disco Ball

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      The lights inside the cavernous McCourt space at the Shed had been dimmed, and a mystical soundtrack was playing. “Your journey begins in five minutes,” a recorded voice announced to the roughly 200 people gathered there on a recent evening.A curtain opened, revealing a 50-ton spherical, suspended concert hall that glowed red and orange.There were whispers among audience members that the hall, called the Sonic Sphere, resembled a spaceship, Epcot, a disco ball or the Death Star. Some people, snapping photos, joked that it might take flight during the nearly 70-minute program, a listening session of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” Others were expecting a more spiritual experience.“I want to lose myself in the sound,” Stephen Ross, an architect, said as he made his way up a flight of stairs to the main entrance. “I want to be transported.”The Sonic Sphere, a realization of a modernist dream by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, aims for a new kind of listening experience: surrounding the audience with 124 meticulously arranged speakers and an array of lights that change color with the music.The 66-foot-diameter Sonic Sphere suspended and under construction at the Shed.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe Sonic Sphere was overseen by a team that includes Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, Nicholas Christie, Chester Chipperfield and Jessica Lair.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe infrastructure includes 1,178 steel struts, 3,500 yards of cloth and 12 structural cables supporting the sphere from the roof.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThis summer, the Sonic Sphere will host listening sessions of music remixed for its spatial sound design, including the xx’s debut album, from 2009. The lineup also includes playlists by the D.J.s Yaeji and Carl Craig, and live performances by the pianist Igor Levit, who will play Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari” with a visual accompaniment by Rirkrit Tiravanija.The Shed’s iteration of the Sonic Sphere — overseen by a team that includes Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, Nicholas Christie, Chester Chipperfield and Jessica Lair — is the 11th and the largest, with a diameter of about 66 feet and a capacity of roughly 250 people, who sit or lie in netted areas.“It’s about a change in consciousness that leaves a memory,” Cooke said of the project. “Can people have an experience where they touch some new territory of consciousness, not in a way that is like an altered state, but one that actually leaves a trace?”George Etheredge for The New York TimesStockhausen conceived of a spherical concert hall known as the Kugelauditorium, a form of which was erected at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan. There, Germany’s pavilion presented works written for the dome, including music by Stockhausen himself. Crowds of music fans visited, but the idea never caught on.Since 2021, Cooke and his team have revived the concept, building Sonic Spheres in France, the United Kingdom, Mexico and the United States, including at Burning Man. Each time, the hall has grown bigger; the first one, at the Féy commune in northeastern France, was 10 feet in diameter and cost about $1,000.Events at the Sonic Sphere include listening parties of albums remixed for its 124 meticulously arranged speakers, as well as live performances by the pianist Igor Levit.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe version in New York has 1,178 steel struts, 3,500 yards of cloth and 12 structural cables supporting the sphere from the roof. The hall’s opening was pushed back a week because of delays receiving supplies, including trusses and floor plates. The result is the first Sonic Sphere to be suspended in air, at a cost of more than $2 million, with much of the financing from technology investors and entrepreneurs.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, who in his early career worked with Stockhausen, said that the Sonic Sphere’s aim was to bring the focus back to sound.Christopher Lee for The New York Times“These days, we talk about going to see a concert, which is kind of nuts,” he said. “We’re so dominated by the visual. Here we’re bringing music back to the center of the experience, and that’s really beautiful and important.”At the “Music for 18 Musicians” listening session last week, audience members had a range of opinions about the hall.Ryan Mannion, a software engineer in New York, said he was able to lose himself in the music: “I found myself just sort of sitting back and closing my eyes and enjoying it.” Some, though found the experience too noisy, and too long. “There were a few moments when it was sublime,” said Sarah Watson, an executive coach, “but not all the time.”The Sonic Sphere’s main entrance is reached by a staircase of about 50 steps.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesOne audience member, Ryan Mannion, said, “I found myself just sort of sitting back and closing my eyes and enjoying it.”Christopher Lee for The New York TimesWatson’s 9-year-old daughter, Matilda Morton, said that she enjoyed the session but found some parts excessive. “It felt like we were secret agents in an alien mother ship,” she said. “It was pretty overwhelming with the red lights and the loud, vibrating noises.”The Shed’s Sonic Sphere will close on July 30, but is expected to return next year. Before then, it will move to another location, possibly on the West Coast or in Europe.Cooke said that he hoped the agility and accessibility of the spheres, which can be built and taken down relatively quickly, would allow them to become more common.“People are more and more desperate to come together and experience rich, transformational things,” Cooke said. “We want to give them something magical.” More

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      The Conductor Claudio Abbado Saw Orchestras as Collectives

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      A collection of 257 CDs and eight DVDs released by Deutsche Grammophon offers the breadth of Abbado’s approach, and its legacy.Claudio Abbado lit a cigar and looked uneasy, as he often did.The Italian conductor, who died in 2014 but would have turned 90 on June 26, was at a meal with the actor Maximilian Schell, in a scene captured in a 1996 documentary. Schell, who was typecast playing Nazis for much of his Academy Award-winning career but worked with Abbado on Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw,” among other things, was telling everyone at the table that conducting must naturally give a musician a sense of power.Abbado smiled, quizzical. Power has nothing to do with music, insisted the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra on which Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan had once imposed their interpretive will. “For me,” Abbado added, “power is always linked with dictatorship.”But not all power is political, Schell said; for instance, what might Abbado call the power of music over people? “Love, or respect, or understanding, or tolerance,” the conductor replied. “Remember that, for thinking people, music is one of the most important things in life. It’s part of life itself. That has nothing to do with power.”The pianist Martha Argerich, left, with Abbado in 1968.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIf Abbado’s life had a theme, it was this question of power: of what power means in music, where it comes from, and to what ends. Few of his peers enjoyed such a vita — before Berlin, he held posts at the Teatro Alla Scala, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera — yet were so ambivalent about authority and attention. Shy, quiet, stubborn, he took bows timidly, avoided publicity and denied that he had anything so ignoble as a career. “For me, conducting is not a game,” he told The New York Times in 1973.Berg: ‘Wozzeck,’ Act III interludeVienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1987Politically a man of the left, Abbado as a musician was most comfortable among equals, if even that; he was a sublime accompanist to the pianists Martha Argerich and Maurizio Pollini, as well as to any number of singers. The film in which he spoke with Schell, “The Silence That Follows the Music,” portrayed him as an embodiment of democracy, an exemplary figure to lead the Berlin Philharmonic after the fall of the Wall and the death of Karajan in 1989, symbols of tyranny and ego alike. If Karajan, as critics described him, saw orchestras as single entities and denied their members any individuality that might impinge on his own, Abbado increasingly saw them, over the course of his life, as more of a collective, in which the players might freely share the spirit of chamber music.Achieving that ideal was no simple task with orchestras of long traditions and routines, though Abbado remade the Philharmonic in his image, and lastingly so. Striving to fulfill that promise led him not only to embrace the energy of youth orchestras, but also to support and found ensembles of like mind: the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra Mozart. The most extravagant was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, a coterie of colleagues and admirers with whom he gave critically sanctified summer performances from 2003 until just before his death. “All the musicians in the orchestra,” he said in 2007, offering his highest praise to a group that included several noted soloists and sometimes entire string quartets, “they are listening to each other.”But what kinds of interpretations did Abbado’s approach engender? And how will they endure?Many certainly will last, on the evidence of a comprehensive collection of his recordings for the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips labels that the Universal Music Group released earlier this year. Complete with a hardback hagiography and a price tag that, at some retailers, has drifted into four figures despite the easy prior availability of its contents, it compiles 257 CDs and eight DVDs. The breadth is extraordinary — what other conductor was as adept as Abbado in Rossini as well as in Webern and Ligeti? — yet it still excludes records he made for EMI, RCA and Sony, as well as most of his vaunted Mahler from Lucerne.Schubert: Symphony No. 3, finaleChamber Orchestra of Europe, 1987Slide a sleeve out of the box, and chances are that you will select a confirmed classic — the joyful distinction of his Schubert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, or the formidable La Scala “Simon Boccanegra” and “Macbeth” that are the best of his Verdi. You might happen upon a less celebrated gem, like his early Stravinsky or his late Pergolesi, his “Fierrabras” or his “Khovanshchina.” Far from every disc is faultless, though the worst to be said about all but the weakest of them — his Haydn is dismayingly fussy, some of his Mozart wan — is that they are anonymous, refined but bland. But that was the risk that Abbado took in the name of beauty.BORN INTO A richly musical and bravely antifascist Milanese family in 1933, Abbado spent his youth watching the leading conductors of the day as they passed through La Scala. He trained as a pianist, making a couple of recordings, but his fascination was always with the magic men of the podium. Denied entry to observe rehearsals at the Musikverein in Vienna when he was a student there, from 1956 to ’58, he sang his way into them instead, joining the basses of a choir that performed Bach with Hermann Scherchen, and Mahler with Josef Krips.In 1958, Abbado triumphed at Tanglewood in the United States, then, after three years spent teaching chamber music in Parma, won a year as an assistant at the New York Philharmonic. “He is a talented conductor and one of temperament,” the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote after his Lincoln Center debut in 1964. If his basic approach was evident from the start — “he seems to allow his players a freedom to enjoy themselves and yet provides an unobtrusive discipline,” one reviewer noted in 1967 — it was surely made possible by the quality of the ensembles he was quickly blessed to work with. “Now I can choose only the best orchestras,” Abbado said while still not yet 40.And how he used them. The earliest sessions in the Universal box date from February 1966, when Abbado and the London Symphony excerpted Prokofiev ballets with enjoyable flair. There are moments, in the decade or so of recordings that followed, in which his awareness of the past seems to weigh a touch too heavily — a stolid Beethoven Seven from Vienna, a morose Brahms Three from Dresden — but the impression on the whole is of a young conductor of rare intelligence.Scriabin: ‘The Poem of Ecstasy’Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1971All the Abbado hallmarks grace the ear, such as the immaculate balances of his crushing Tchaikovsky “Pathétique” and the poetic elegance of his first Brahms Second in Berlin, although it is striking how the incision that marks his fledgling readings of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” and “Italian” Symphonies and Berg’s “Three Pieces for Orchestra” would be sanded down in equally successful later accounts. At his best, Abbado was already considerable: His Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, from 1970 to ’71, are not just some of the finest recordings he made, festivals of color composed with the eye of a master, but count among the choicest in the history of that orchestra.Abbado remained acutely conscious of conducting history, symbolically wearing a watch given to him by Erich Kleiber, a fellow champion of Berg. When he appeared on the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs” in 1980, he selected favorite recordings by Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and his one idol, Furtwängler, whose rare ability to generate tension he admired. But Abbado came to sound little like any of these predecessors, and took from none of them an aesthetic agenda to promote as his own. He barely spoke in detail about his artistic principles at all; “he tells you about a piece by conducting it,” one of his producers said in 1994.Given that Abbado was a slightly elusive interpreter, any generalities to be offered about him are necessarily weak. But even after he started trialing new sonorities and scales of ensemble with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the early 1980s — developing an immediacy of communication that encouraged a taste for details in him that could become a little much — there were clear traits that ran through his recordings: a warm lucidity, a smooth, long line and an ability to bring out the lyricism in a work, however dense, that critics reductively called Italianate.Debussy: ‘La Damoiselle Élue’London Symphony Orchestra, 1986With the London Symphony, there is tender, precisely shaded Ravel, a survey of cultivated Mendelssohn, exquisite Debussy, fiery Prokofiev and touching Strauss. The Chicago Symphony, too, often gave him its best, including some of his more persuasive Mahler, in whose music he was not as reliable, or at least not as distinctive, as his lifelong fidelity to the composer might suggest.Abbado leading the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001.Riccardo Musacchio/EPA, via ShutterstockThe recordings from Vienna and Berlin are more variable. Typically, the more distant a piece is from the most commonplace repertoire, the more impressive the results, though there are exceptions: chiefly, a magnificent Brahms cycle from around the start of his tenure in Berlin, audibly in the lineage of his predecessors, if gentler.There is a gorgeous “Pelléas et Mélisande” and a sweeping “Gurrelieder” from Vienna, but there are also unusual choral works by Schubert and Schumann, endearingly done, plus unmissable Berg and Boulez. Both orchestras supply Beethoven cycles. The Vienna is patchy, the Berlin livelier but finicky, the shrunken ensemble blanched of tone. Abbado’s Berlin era is better approached through other routes: a ravishing Hindemith disc; charming Mozart and Strauss with Christine Schäfer; a moving, if dimly recorded, Mahler Third along with a profoundly humane Sixth, taken from his first return to the Philharmonie since his departure in 2002, after treatment for cancer.Mahler: Symphony No. 6, finaleBerlin Philharmonic, 2004Illness left Abbado unable to conduct more than sporadically, mostly at Lucerne and with the Orchestra Mozart, which he founded in Bologna in 2004; experimentation decorates his late recordings with that ensemble, including with period-instrument practice, though more affectingly in his concerto collaborations with friends such as the flutist Jacques Zoon and the hornist Alessio Allegrini than in his Mozart, Schubert and Schumann symphonies.“You never arrive in a lifetime,” Abbado had told The Times in 1973. Perhaps it was apt that his last recording was of an unfinished symphony, Bruckner’s Ninth, in a farewell Lucerne account that, in its final bars, seems almost to glow with compassion. He died five months later. More