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      Daniel Barenboim Announces He Has Parkinson’s Disease

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      “I am planning to maintain as many of my professional commitments as possible,” the conductor said.Daniel Barenboim, the eminent conductor and pianist who stepped back from engagements in recent years citing health concerns, said Thursday that he has Parkinson’s disease.Announcing the diagnosis in a short news release, Barenboim, 82, said that he still planned to fulfill “as many of my professional commitments as possible,” including concerts with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble he founded in 1999 to bring Israeli and Arab musicians together.“If I am unable to perform, it is because my health does not allow me to,” Barenboim said, adding that he was adjusting to “navigating this new reality” and that his focus “is on receiving the best available care.”Three years ago, Barenboim announced that he was suffering from a “serious neurological condition” that was affecting his work. In January 2023, he resigned as general music director of the Berlin State Opera because of poor health.A spokeswoman for the Daniel Barenboim Foundation said that the conductor was unavailable for interview. His next scheduled performance is in August as part of a West-Eastern Divan Orchestra summer tour, the spokeswoman said, adding that Barenboim was continuing to teach at the Barenboim-Said Academy, a music school he established in Berlin that brings together students from across the Middle East.Born to Jewish parents in Argentina, Barenboim has been a titan of classical music for almost seven decades, first as a piano prodigy and later as a conductor and music director. He took over the leadership of the Berlin State Opera in 1992 and transformed into one of the world’s leading houses, and he also held music director positions at the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Teatro alla Scala, in Milan.Since the 1980s, Barenboim has also been an outspoken political figure, as much as a revered musical one — a rarity for a conductor. In 1989, just days after the Berlin Wall fell, Barenboim led the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert for East Germans. A decade later, along with the Palestinian scholar and writer Edward Said, he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the belief that music could lead Israelis and Arabs to mutual understanding.In his statement on Thursday, Barenboim said he considered the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra his “most important responsibility.”“It is essential for me to ensure the orchestra’s long-term stability and development,” he said. More

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      A Tribute to Marianne Faithfull

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      Hear 10 tracks from a long, winding career.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesDear listeners,We lost one of the true greats last week when Marianne Faithfull died at age 78. A pop star turned punk rocker turned cabaret chanteuse, Faithfull was also a style icon, an actress with remarkable screen presence and a wonderfully unfiltered memoirist, among many other things. She will be greatly missed — but what a life she lived!Today’s playlist is a celebration of Faithfull’s long and varied musical career, which began at 17 — when she was signed on sight by the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham — and stretched until her late 70s. I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Faithfull in 2021, around the release of what is now the final album she released in her lifetime, “She Walks in Beauty,” which found her reciting Romantic poetry atop compositions produced by her friend and collaborator Warren Ellis. She was then recovering from a nasty bout of Covid-19 that had put her in a coma, but her resilience was something to behold.That toughness and durability was a through line of her career, as she sprung back from multiple near-death experiences and returned with music that seemed supercharged by those struggles. She was a bold, intuitive and one-of-a-kind artist, as you’ll hear on the following 10 tracks.Also, apologies for this newsletter going out a day late. My personal advice: Steer clear of that norovirus! Thankfully I’m now on the mend and The Amplifier will return to its regular schedule on Friday. Til then!It is the evening of the day,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Composer Turns Down the Tempo, and Turns Up the Complexity

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      Lisa Streich, an artist on the rise who has found success in Europe, is having a rare American showcase this week in New York.In the golden vastness of St. Mark’s Basilica after night had fallen, the voices seemed to hover in an endless haze. It was the closing concert of the Venice Music Biennale in October, and Lisa Streich’s “Stabat,” written for 32 singers divided into four choirs, blurred over half an hour into a soft yet never quite settled dream.Streich, 39, was represented in Venice not just by “Stabat,” but also by the premiere of “Orchestra of Black Butterflies,” a rigorous yet playful, pleasurable work for four musicians that unfolds like an off-kilter machine. That piece is now coming to New York, where it will be performed at the Miller Theater on Thursday by the piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire in a Composer Portrait devoted to Streich, a rare American showcase for an important rising artist.Born in Sweden and raised in a small town in northern Germany, Streich already has a formidable career in Europe. She was a composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival last summer. She has been commissioned by major institutions like the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which asked her to write a final scene to append to Hans Werner Henze’s one-act “Das Wundertheater.” Conductors as eminent as Alan Gilbert and Matthias Pintscher have led her scores. After hearing her work in Venice, I’m hooked.Streich’s music is often quiet and deliberate. The program note at Miller says that when she was a young composer, her goal was “to find the slowest tempo where a performer could still keep a solid pulse.” Her favorite? Thirty-seven beats per minute. Her pieces tend to fade into oblivion as they end; “Ishjarta,” her Berlin Philharmonic commission, ends with almost the entire orchestra playing an extremely soft pianissississimo.Even when her work skirts inaudibility, it’s complex. Streich has taken to using software to analyze recordings of choirs she finds on the internet. She focuses on gnarly harmonic moments and has compiled some of the results — divided into 14 categories, like “Gloria” and “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” — in “Book of Chords,” alongside her photographs and poetry.

      SPUN by Sarah SavietWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Super Bowl Finally Embraced Rap. Is There Also Room for Country?

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      Since Roc Nation’s partnership with the N.F.L., hip-hop stars like Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar have been center stage at halftime.The Super Bowl halftime show was at a low point in 2019. Despite an unrivaled television audience, Rihanna turned down the National Football League’s invitation to perform, keeping solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, the exiled quarterback who had repeatedly knelt during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.The pop band Maroon 5 headlined instead, underwhelming nearly 100 million television viewers. Jon Caramanica, a music critic for The New York Times, called it “an inessential performance” that was “dynamically flat” and “mushy at the edges.”The N.F.L. was quick to respond, courting Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by the billionaire rapper Jay-Z, in an attempt to strengthen its music and social justice initiatives. Over the past six years, Roc Nation has prioritized hip-hop and R&B, bringing rap to the Super Bowl spectacle for the first time with a celebratory 2022 performance by Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and 50 Cent. Sunday’s show will feature Lamar and the guest star SZA.“The N.F.L. needed to do something to bring life to what is supposed to be their signature event, and that was accomplished,” said Jemele Hill, a writer for The Atlantic who is producing an ESPN documentary on Kaepernick with the director Spike Lee.An overdue emphasis on hip-hop and R&B — Usher and the Weeknd have also headlined under Roc Nation — means that other genres have been sidelined. Country music is ascendant culturally but has rarely been part of the Super Bowl; halftime shows by Coldplay and Lady Gaga feel long in the past.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Blue Note Records

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      This month, we look at the legacy of Blue Note Records, perhaps the best-known label in jazz, with its instantly recognizable blue-and-white vinyl center labels and decades-long run of landmark albums, some of which have become cornerstones in the genre.Founded in 1939 by the German American record executive Alfred Lion and the writer Max Margulis, Blue Note began as a passion project for Lion, who visited the recently opened Café Society club to talk about recording music with the pianists Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. Soon after, Lion paid the artists to play in a Manhattan studio, later pressing up the music from the session and releasing it as the first album ever on Blue Note Records.Over the next decade, Blue Note would become the most prolific label in jazz, releasing albums from future legends like Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Bud Powell. Then the label hit its stride in the ’50s: Records from Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins and Lou Donaldson came in rapid succession, helping solidify Blue Note as the go-to label of the moment. Now, 86 years into its run, as a label still releasing straight-ahead jazz but also jazz-meets-hip-hop-and-funk, Blue Note truly needs no introduction.Below, we asked 14 musicians and writers to name a favorite song to introduce someone to the Blue Note catalog. Listen to the playlists below the article, and don’t forget to leave your own picks in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Wayne Shorter, “Speak No Evil”Don Was, president of Blue Note RecordsWayne ShorterAndrew Putler/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn February 1971, temperatures dropped below zero in Ann Arbor, Mich. I was a 19-year-old college dropout — draftable and without a car or job. My life was veering off track but there was one ritual that always provided comfort, direction and hope: turning down the lights and listening to Wayne Shorter’s Blue Note masterpiece, “Speak No Evil.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ Too Controversial for the Super Bowl?

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      Kendrick Lamar’s smash “Not Like Us” has been a lot of things since its release less than a year ago: a Drake-slaying diss track, a No. 1 single, a West Coast unity anthem, a Kamala Harris rally singalong, a World Series fight song, a bar mitzvah dance floor party-starter.At the Grammys over the weekend, it swept all five of its nominations, including song and record of the year, becoming only the second rap track ever to win in each category, while also taking home trophies for best rap song, best rap performance and best music video.A week after those victories, “Not Like Us” — with its one billion plays on Spotify and at least hundreds of millions more across radio, YouTube and social media — may reach its ultimate peak: a performance on Sunday for some 100 million people, live from the Super Bowl halftime stage in New Orleans.A casual listener — or Super Bowl viewer — may hear an easily digestible crowd-pleaser. A popular rapper, known for knotty introspection, going playful over a spacious, bouncy beat by the producer Mustard, punctuated with sped-up stabs of strings and an all-purpose, easily co-opted chant of a chorus: “They not like us.”In many senses an inescapable, old-fashioned hit, “Not Like Us” was immediately absorbed into the cultural bloodstream, where it has remained ever since, holding strong in the Billboard Top 40 in its 38th week since release. But while the song’s mega-success can by now be taken for granted, it also happens to be incredibly bizarre.The song’s specifics, and its omnipresence, represent a significant swerve for Lamar, 37, who until recently was known primarily as one of the most revered M.C.s of all time: a Pulitzer Prize winner with a sterling career whose 2015 track “Alright” was adopted as an anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jay-Z Will Seek Dismissal of Assault Lawsuit His Lawyer Calls a ‘Sham’

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      The woman who accused him of raping her in 2000, when she was a minor, acknowledged to NBC that there were inconsistencies in her account, but stood by her claim.Lawyers for Jay-Z plan to ask a judge to toss a lawsuit accusing the rapper of raping a 13-year-old in 2000, pointing to what they described as “glaring inconsistencies” that emerged in an NBC interview of the accuser, who was not named in the suit.In the lawsuit, which was filed last week, the unnamed accuser said that she had been raped by Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) and Sean Combs at a party at a private residence after the MTV Video Music Awards in Manhattan in 2000. Mr. Carter strongly denied the allegation.NBC News published an interview with the accuser on Friday evening in which she acknowledged inconsistencies in her account, but maintained that her allegation of assault was true.The woman’s lawsuit claimed that after the encounter she was picked up by her father, whom she called from a gas station. But NBC reported that her father, who would have had to drive hours from his home in upstate New York to pick up his daughter following the after-party, did not recall having done so. The father was also unnamed in the report.The plaintiff, who now lives in Alabama, also told NBC that she had spoken to the musician Benji Madden, a member of the band Good Charlotte, at the party after the awards that night. But Mr. Madden, who was not accused of any wrongdoing in her suit, was on tour in the Midwest at the time.Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Mr. Carter, wrote a letter Friday night to U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres saying that Mr. Carter intends to file a motion to strike the complaint, citing the NBC report. “The interview outs plaintiff’s allegations for what they are: a sham,” he wrote in the letter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Eliot Gardiner’s Once and Future Orchestras Duel

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      Banished from his ensembles after striking a singer, John Eliot Gardiner has assembled a new group, with the same programming at the same venue.Marten Root, a flutist specializing in historical instruments, has played under the conductor John Eliot Gardiner for over 35 years, and considers him a profoundly intelligent and honest musician.Root, 68, has also had severe enough verbal disagreements with Gardiner, 81, that he twice temporarily quit working with him. The reasons were “incidents which happen if you’re a flute player in an orchestra,” Root said in a video interview. “You’re the top of the score. You’re always in the line of fire.”Both times, he returned. Playing under Gardiner, an eminent performer of Baroque music who has recorded every single Bach cantata, was “no easy job to do,” Root said, “but basically, I decided to go back to the orchestra twice, because it’s musically more than worth it.”In August last year, Gardiner struck the singer William Thomas following a performance of the opera “Les Troyens” in France. Gardiner apologized and announced that he was temporarily withdrawing from all conducting.Now, Gardiner has returned — but not with his old organization, Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, which didn’t want him back. Instead, Gardiner has just completed a tour with a new ensemble he founded, the Constellation Choir & Orchestra.The two groups almost collided recently, playing nearly identical concerts at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, on Dec. 7 and 14. Heard so closely together, the performances offered an unusual glimpse of what’s ahead for Gardiner’s once and future ensembles. Although the concerts looked similar on paper, they sounded strikingly different.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More