Music

The three-song 1976 recording arrives in a new boxed set at what seems a perfect moment to deepen our appreciation for the saxophonist’s role in music history.In trying to capture what lay at the powerful core of the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders’s music, the British journalist Valerie Wilmer once referenced a conversation with a Nigerian composer. “In all ritual song there is that slow beat, trying to call the gods,” the (unnamed) musician had told her. “There’s no rush. It’s a slow process, as though one is praying.”“Pharoah Sanders,” Wilmer declared, achieved “precisely this mood” in the music he made in the late 1960s and ’70s, just before and then after his mentor, John Coltrane, died.Sanders generally used large ensembles to get there, with horns, mixed percussion and multiple basses cracking open the firmament over incantatory grooves. But in summer 1976, after parting ways with Impulse! Records — “the house that Trane built,” and his home for more than a decade — he dialed down. He traveled with his wife Bedria and a small band to a rustic studio in upstate New York, and recorded what would become one of his most intimate and serene works, titled simply “Pharoah.”Made in the weeks leading up to what would have been Coltrane’s 50th birthday, the album includes the highlight “Harvest Time,” 20 minutes and all of Side A, with Bedria on harmonium and a restful prayer coming from Sanders’s saxophone. Released in limited batches on LP the following year, and then in a small run of CDs in the 1990s, “Pharoah” has been passed around for decades mostly as a bootleg. For those who have experienced it, the album often becomes a touchstone. Sanders’s work can feel so grand, so tapped-in, so collectively powerful, it’s hard to isolate his expression within the fray. The saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings once wrote that he found it “difficult to regard Pharoah Sanders as an individual,” meaning this as a deep compliment. But not so on “Harvest Time.”One person who felt this record’s formative influence was Sam Shepherd, the multi-hyphenate musician who records as Floating Points. He released a collaborative album, “Promises,” with Sanders in 2021, the year before the saxophonist died at 81. If you’d heard “Harvest Time,” you could easily recognize that the expansive, high-contrast “Promises” was written in conversation with it.Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-Nyström“Promises” came out on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint, and Shepherd urged the label to think about reissuing “Pharoah” next. Then they learned about the existence of some live recordings of “Harvest Time” from a 1977 European tour. This Friday it all comes out as a remastered vinyl set, in a creatively packaged box that includes a bonus LP with two live versions of “Harvest Time.”Sanders had been at Coltrane’s right hand for the last two years of the bandleader’s career, when his music turned explosive and totally free. In 1968, the poet and critic Amiri Baraka wrote that he could envision Sanders “coming through the desert to claim what I think will be his. His birth rite, as left to him, by Trane, his own true father.” Man, expectations.Sanders handled it by making the music the focus, not his role within it. “He was very humble, quiet, liked to listen,” the guitarist Tisziji Muñoz, who recorded the indelible guitar accompaniment on “Harvest Time,” said in an interview. “But he had a strong viewpoint. If he had to tell you something, you’d have to be prepared for it.”Greg Bandy, the drummer on “Pharoah” and a longtime Sanders collaborator, said that when the saxophonist did speak, his words had magnitude. “He used to say, ‘Tell about the one that made us all!’ And that’s how it went. What can you say about that? That’s a mouthful of information,” Bandy said in an interview. “Pharoah was just naturally born with the spirit.”Born in 1940 in Little Rock, Ark., Sanders arrived in New York in the early 1960s, by way of a Bay Area blues and jazz scene that had more or less rejected him. “You should go play in New York,” he remembered people telling him. “Learn all the standard songs, get your tuxedo and learn how to work — learn how to live this kind of life.”Sanders in Frankfurt in 2013. “Pharoah” was made in the weeks leading up to what would have been his mentor John Coltrane’s 50th birthday.Manfred Roth/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesThat’s not exactly how it went. In New York, the blues came to him. Sanders lived without an address for over two years, but he developed a reputation on the avant-garde, and a lifestyle centered on wellness and music. He practiced yoga with the saxophonist Marion Brown, and carried a jar of whole wheat germ in his saxophone bag.Sanders became known for changing his saxophone reeds as often as his side musicians, forever seeking the perfect “sound.” That pursuit produced some remarkable albums in the late 1960s and ’70s, like “Karma” (featuring his anthem, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” with Leon Thomas on yodeling vocals), “Thembi” and “Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun).” But he turned off more critics than he appealed to, especially his split-tone saxophone playing, which was both an expression of catharsis and a callback to West African techniques of “vocal chording.”On “Pharoah,” Sanders embraced the less incendiary elements of his style. As he said candidly in an interview after the album’s release, he’d hoped that isolating his tender side might produce “something that would sell well.”The session had come about when Bob Cummins, a self-taught audio engineer who had recently started a small label called India Navigation, approached Sanders, his musical hero, with an offer to record at the humble Nyack, N.Y., studio that he’d built with his wife, Nancy. He insisted that Sanders bring a lean setup, suggesting a spartan bass-and-sax recording, but when the saxophonist arrived, he had Bedria and five other musicians with him. (For Sanders, this was a small group.)It all became a bit of a disaster — except the record itself. Somehow, Cummins’s spare setup proved just sufficient, and the three tracks on “Pharoah” stand out from everything Sanders had been playing in that period: They resist peaking, staying quieter and more direct.“Harvest Time” centers on a finger-plucked guitar, with an underwater tremolo effect, alternating — in classic Sanders style — between just two chords. (In the recovered live recordings included with this release, Sanders plays Muñoz’s part on the saxophone; those chords are the song’s melody.) In come Steve Neil’s steady bass, Sanders’s searching lines and then Bedria’s gusts of harmonium, filling the air.In some ways this was in the spirit of Trane, but it was also outside his shadow, casting toward ambient music. On another track, “Love Will Find a Way,” Sanders reaches for a jazz-rock sound more related to Santana or the Grateful Dead, letting Muñoz’s distorted guitar lines tear ahead.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSanders would rerecord that song in 1977, in a distant-cousin version, for Arista, committing to a more commercial route with a backing of CTI Records-esque strings. The LPs that followed often felt like negotiations between his id and his audience, often to rewarding result, like on “Journey to the One” and “Beyond a Dream.”In his 2020 tribute to Sanders, Hutchings mentioned that the elder’s music represented “the cyclical view which sees the prominence of individual players as transient but the group contribution as reaching for eternity.” That is, he was just a vessel — an awesome one. By that view, maybe it shouldn’t be hard to defend the decision to present a concert next week at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring Sanders and Floating Points’s “Promises,” with Hutchings filling in on the tenor saxophone parts. By another perspective, it’s a bit off-putting to see a younger musician dropped in to fill the shoes of such a purposeful figure.There is something more appealing about the “Harvest Time Project,” a traveling performance scenario that will put Muñoz together with an intergenerational mix of musicians in an active upholding of Sanders’s pursuit. A workshop performance — potentially the best kind, for this group — will be held on Oct. 14 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn (featuring the bassist Joshua Abrams, the guitarist Jeff Parker, the drummer Chad Taylor, the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis), before it heads to Europe.Bedria Sanders said music was a verb, not a noun, for Sanders, a constant lifeline. “Music was something to elevate you above all this other stuff that was going on, to a more spiritual realm,” she said in an interview, remembering their six years together. “To put you back on focus, to get back to yourself and what you really are here for. To get back to the natural state of the universe, which is peace.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:“Guts,” the new album by Olivia Rodrigo, who two years ago catapulted from midlevel Disney teen star to pop supernova with her single “Drivers License.” Rodrigo has become part of pop’s elite, and her new album reckons with what that means, for her and for everyone watching her.Zach Bryan, whose new self-titled album is currently the No. 1 album in the country, and who has carved out an idiosyncratic path through country, bar rock and roots music. He was also arrested last week for interfering with a police investigation in connection with a traffic stop.The rapper Cam’ron’s rebirth as a risqué sports podcaster on his show with Mase, “It Is What It Is”New songs from Emilia, and Lil Peep & iLoveMakonnenSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

A singer who performed alongside Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, he was known for his topical songs, some of which he wrote in minutes.Len Chandler, who was an early fixture of the folk music revival that swept through Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s and who sang alongside Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other higher-profile stars at civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, died on Aug. 28 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.Lew Irwin, a longtime friend who in the late 1960s brought Mr. Chandler to Los Angeles to provide music for an unusual new radio show he was creating, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Chandler had recently had several strokes.Mr. Chandler was a classically trained oboist when he arrived in New York from Ohio, where he had graduated from the University of Akron in 1957, and met the singer Dave Van Ronk at the Folklore Center, a Greenwich Village shop that sold records, books and sheet music and was a gathering point for folk musicians.Mr. Van Ronk “introduced me to the Washington Square Park folk scene,” Mr. Chandler said in an essay included in the book “Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival,” by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen (2015). “Every Sunday it was filled with folk singers. I remember learning to play on borrowed guitars in the park until someone said, ‘Buy your own damn guitar.’ I said, ‘OK’ and bought his for 40 bucks.”Mr. Chandler with Bob Dylan at Newport in 1964. Mr. Dylan recalled playing poker with Mr. Chandler in the back room of the Gaslight Cafe in New York. “Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” he said.Jim Marshall Photography LLCSoon he was playing regularly at the Gaslight Cafe, which opened in 1958 and was later famous as a proving ground for Mr. Dylan and others.“It was mainly a scene for poets,” Mr. Chandler said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song,” by Kristin Baggelaar and Donald Milton (1976), “and there wasn’t much happening for singers, except for me.”An executive from the Detroit television station WXYZ saw him there and in 1959 hired him to be the featured musician on “The After Hours Club,” a late-night variety show. By the time Mr. Chandler returned to New York about six months later, the folk music scene was in full swing at the Gaslight, Folk City and other clubs.That scene that included, among others, Mr. Dylan, Mr. Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens and Noel Paul Stookey, later of Peter, Paul and Mary. In “Chronicles: Volume One,” his 2004 memoir, Mr. Dylan wrote of the back-room poker game at the Gaslight where musicians would pass the time waiting their turn to perform.“Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” Mr. Dylan wrote. “‘You’ll never make it in this game if you don’t. Sometimes you even have to get caught bluffing.’”Mr. Chandler performing in New York City in an undated photo.PL Gould/Images Press, via Getty ImagesMr. Chandler, as John Christy of The Atlanta Journal once put it, “possesses a sharply honed guitar-vocal arsenal of ‘message’ songs, blues songs, jazz songs, country songs, and just songs.” But he was especially known for songs he wrote inspired by the news of the day. The first, Mr. Chandler said, was written in 1962 about a disastrous school bus accident the year before in Greeley, Colo.“Then I started writing many songs about the Freedom Riders and sit-ins,” he was quoted as saying in the “Folk Music” book. At the March on Washington in 1963, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, Mr. Chandler sang the traditional song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (Hold On)” with some updated lyrics. Ms. Baez and Mr. Dylan were among the backing singers.The next year he toured with Dick Gregory, the comedian known for sharp-edged material involving race. In the summer of 1969 Mr. Chandler was on the maiden voyage of the Clearwater, the sloop Mr. Seeger used to raise awareness of Hudson River pollution and other environmental causes, sailing from Maine to New York and staging concerts at stops along the way.In 1970 and 1971 he was part of a troupe led by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland that brought an antiwar revue known as “F.T.A.” (which stood for Free Theater Associates, or Free the Army, or something else involving the Army that is unprintable) to military towns and bases at the height of the Vietnam War.If Mr. Chandler never achieved the name recognition of some of those with whom he shared stages and causes, he did write at least one song with lasting appeal: “Beans in My Ears,” which the Serendipity Singers turned into a Top 30 hit in 1964. Aimed at adults but simple and repetitive like a children’s song, it was about people’s tendency not to listen to others. “I think that all grown-ups have beans in their ears,” the final verse went, with “beans in their ears” repeated again and again.Perhaps the song would have climbed higher on the charts had medical professionals in some cities not denounced it. “‘Beans in Ears’ Alarms Doctors Who Fear Children Will Try It,” a 1964 headline in The Indianapolis Star read over an article that said WIRE in Indiana had stopped playing the song. That step was taken by other radio stations as well.Len Hunt Chandler Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Summit County, Ohio. He started learning the piano at 9, but once he reached high school he wanted to join the school band, and the only instrument available was the oboe, so he began playing that.He continued to study music at the University of Akron, where he also showed the beginnings of the activism that would characterize his singing career. In a sharply worded letter to the editor published in The Akron Beacon Journal in 1954, he told of being barred from a public pool because he was Black.“When will we, the people of the United States, learn to practice the principles of democracy that we preach?” he wrote.After he earned his undergraduate degree, a $500 scholarship helped take him to New York to continue his music studies. He would eventually earn a master’s degree in music education at Columbia University, but by then he was immersed in the folk scene.By the mid-1960s Mr. Chandler was a familiar presence at coffee houses in the United States and Canada, and in 1968 his dexterity with topical songs landed him a seemingly impossible job at KRLA radio in Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Irwin was creating a current-events show there called “The Credibility Gap,” and Mr. Chandler was to write and sing three songs a day for the show, based on the news. The first song was due by 9 a.m., the second by noon and the third by 3 p.m.“Sometimes I start writing a half-hour, 20 minutes before the show,” he told The Los Angeles Times in November 1968, when he’d been doing the job for about five months, “so I rip it out of the typewriter and run upstairs without ever having played it on the guitar, decide what key I want to sing it in and put my capo in place. The engineer says, ‘Go,’ and I sing it.”In a Facebook post, Mr. Irwin estimated that Mr. Chandler wrote 1,000 songs from 1968 to 1970.“Reporters speak to the mind; Len aimed at the gut,” he wrote. “And always with gentleness to make his words land with the fullest impact.”Mr. Chandler was on the job at KRLA in June 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. A song he wrote for that occasion included these lyrics:Long line of mourners,Long lines of the slain,Long lines of teletypeSpelling out the pain.Long lines at the ballot boxCasting votes in vain.Long lines line the long, long trackOf another lonesome train.Mr. Chandler in 2009. After settling in Los Angeles, he was a founder of the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase and helped run it for 25 years.Brendan Hoffman/Getty ImagesMr. Chandler released two albums in the late 1960s, “To Be a Man” (1966) and “The Lovin’ People” (1967), though neither made much impact. He settled in Los Angeles, and in 1971 he and John Braheny founded the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase, where songwriters performed new material for music publishers and recording executives. They ran it for 25 years, providing exposure for up-and-coming artists including Stephen Bishop, Stevie Nicks and Karla Bonoff.Mr. Chandler’s survivors include his wife, Olga Adderley Chandler, who acted under her maiden name, Olga James, and was the widow of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who died in 1975. They also include a son, Michael Fox.“One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless,” Mr. Dylan recalled in “Chronicles.” “He didn’t suffer fools, and no one could get in his way.”“Len was brilliant and full of good will,” he added, “one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.”Kirsten Noyes More

Alexandre Kantorow, 26, joins an esteemed group of pianists who have won the Gilmore Artist Award, which is given every four years.The 26-year-old French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was not exactly sure what the man from Kalamazoo, Mich., wanted when he invited him to lunch last spring in Italy.So when that man, Pierre van der Westhuizen, the executive and artistic director of the Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival, began to tell Kantorow that he had won the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in classical music, he was stunned.“I was absolutely just on my knees,” he said. “It was a bit like a ‘You’re a wizard, Harry,’ kind of moment, from ‘Harry Potter.’”The Gilmore announced on Wednesday that Kantorow would join the elite and eclectic group of pianists who have won the award, which is given every four years. (The pandemic caused a yearlong delay; the last winner, Igor Levit, was announced in 2018.)The Gilmore is not awarded as part of a competition, so contestants do not even know that they are being considered for it. Instead, a small, anonymous jury of cultural leaders travels incognito to concerts around the world, searching for the winning artist with the potential to, according to the prize, “make a real impact on music.”The award is often thought of as the music world’s version of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants: a prize that cannot be applied for or sought. The long, confidential selection process aims to judge pianists over a sustained period of time, in contrast to the high-pressure atmosphere of competitions.Jury members had been attending Kantorow’s concerts without his knowledge for years, trailing him in Germany, Switzerland, Minnesota, Florida and elsewhere. They also listened to his recordings and watched videos of his performances. They were impressed by his charisma, curiosity and “inquisitive nature,” van der Westhuizen said.“Nothing is ever the same twice,” he added. “It’s always fresh and always interesting. He has so much to say. There’s nothing that holds him back in what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.”In 2019, Kantorow won the gold medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, one of the world’s most important music contests. He also received the prestigious Grand Prix award there.He will receive $50,000 outright to spend as he wishes and can apply the rest to anything that furthers his career or artistry over a four-year period, subject to the Gilmore’s approval. Kantorow said that he was not yet sure how he would spend the money but that he hoped to create something “that lasts, that is concrete.” He is thinking about a film project, or possibly creating a space where musicians could practice and gather.Other winners of the award include Rafal Blechacz, Kirill Gerstein, Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes.Kantorow was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, to musicians, and began playing piano at age 5. He has recorded several albums, including Saint-Saëns piano concertos and works by Brahms.“His movements are free and loose yet precise, like a well-coordinated rag doll,” the magazine Gramophone wrote last year. “He is one of the most relaxed pianists you could imagine.”Kantorow will perform and speak in Kalamazoo on Sunday. In October, he will come to Carnegie Hall, playing a recital of works by Liszt, Brahms, Schubert and Bach.“This is the best kind of gift a young artist can receive,” he said. “I really feel I have wings for the future.” More

The leaders of the Belarus Free Theater, who fled the country more than a decade ago, are helping more recent refugees to rebuild their lives while putting on a new show.When the two founders of the renowned Belarus Free Theater claimed political asylum in Britain in 2011, they found themselves homeless, with few possessions and facing a bureaucratic labyrinth before they could work.It was only with help from British theater makers that the pair found places to stay and were able to restart their company from exile, using Skype to conduct rehearsals with actors in Minsk, Belarus’s capital.Twelve years later, the company’s founders, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, are using that experience to help other artists fleeing political repression.Belarus — an East European country of about nine million people that borders both Russia and Ukraine — has been ruled since 1994 by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a dictator and ally to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Belarus Free Theater’s political productions have often criticized Lukashenko’s authoritarian leadership and its troupe was long at risk of arrest. But as repression increased, the company decided it was no longer feasible for its other members to remain in Minsk. In 2021, they also fled to avoid long jail terms. Since then, Kaliada said, she and Khalezin had been helping the actors to find housing, therapy and visas.The company was also running acting classes for other Belarusian and Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Kaliada said, that had led to full-scale shows, and was providing help to some Ukrainians singers, too, who could no longer perform full time in their homeland because of the war.“The only thing we wanted was for people to not go through our experiences,” Kaliada said.Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada run the Belarus Free Theater. After their country’s 2020 election, they moved their entire troupe out of the country. Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn Warsaw this summer, Kaliada and Khalezin started rehearsals for their latest project, “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” a piece of experimental theater including opera singers and video projections that will premiere at the Barbican Center, in London, on Thursday, running through Sep. 16.In interviews with eight actors, musicians and production staff at those rehearsals, four said they were struggling to adjust to life in Warsaw. The composer Olga Podgaiskaya said it was only with a therapist’s help that she’d come to accept that she wouldn’t be returning to Minsk anytime soon. In Belarus, she said, she had been a fixture on the classical music scene: “Here, I’m a nobody. I need to prove from scratch who I am.”Raman Shytsko, an actor, said he still felt like a guest in Poland — and sometimes an unwelcome one. Once in the city of Wroclaw, he said, he was sworn at in the street for speaking Russian. “A lot of people here hate Belarusians now,” he added, because of the regime’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The conductor Vitali Alekseenok and the composer Olga Podgaiskaya rehearsing with musicians from the Five-Storey Ensemble, in preparation for “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt.”Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesMany of the exiled artists said that simply working on “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” had given them a much-needed sense of purpose.In the rehearsals, which took place at Warsaw’s main opera house, the cast helped each other learn lines and dance moves, and larked about between scenes. Yuliya Shauchuk, an actor, said that the studio was the one place where she always felt joyful.This show’s plot, which is drawn from a popular Belarusian novel and involves a group of ghostly huntsmen who terrorize a rural community, also felt analogous to what was happening now in Belarus, Shauchuk said, where every day the police track down and arrest people who have protested the president’s rule.Several Ukrainian opera singers involved in the production said the rehearsals were benefiting them, too. Mykola Hubchuk had driven overnight from Kolomyya, Ukraine, to take part. “This project is very important for me,” he said. “I need emotion and singing in my life.”Sveta Sugako, the Belarus Free Theater’s production manager, said that the company had renewed its sense of purpose in exile. Its members used to mainly “shout about Belarus,” she said. Now, the company was trying to raise awareness about the war in Ukraine, too, and about the political situation in Russia. It had become, she said, “about the whole region.”The troupe’s journey to exile began in 2020 with an election. That year, Belarus looked set for change, after Lukashenko’s landslide victory was widely dismissed as fraudulent. Members of the company took part in the subsequent mass street protests, hoping Lukashenko would be forced to step aside.Instead, he violently cracked down on opposition and in October 2021, Kaliada and Khalezin pulled the remaining members out. They first headed to Ukraine, with some members wading through swamps to cross the border, before some continued to Poland, and others to Britain.Ever since, Kaliada said, the situation in Belarus had gotten worse. Last year, Putin used the country as a staging ground for his invasion of Ukraine, then said he would move Russian nuclear weapons across the border into Belarus.Helping the troupe members who reached London had proved easier than those in Warsaw, Kaliada said, because of the company’s established connections in London’s theater world. Cate Blanchett and Juliet Stevenson had both provided accommodation for some members in London, Kaliada said.Shauchuk, left, and Kaliada outside the Polish National Opera. The entire company is now in exile, split between Warsaw and London.Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn Poland, the company had few relationships with similarly generous individuals, Kaliada said, but it had secured cheap rates for some actors at a hotel on the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish government also helped, letting the troupe rehearse for free at the state-run opera house.The company has been trying to deepen its ties in Warsaw. Whenever it stages a show in the city, including recent productions featuring refugee teenagers, it invites local dignitaries, and adds Polish subtitles.With the company approaching the end of its second year in exile, Kaliada said its members would soon have to do more to support themselves. Around 100 people were working on “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” she said, and the Belarus Free Thater didn’t have the resources to support them all.Many of the actors in Warsaw said they were already making efforts to find their own work. One said he’d taken on dubbing. Another said they were teaching and another was working as a coder.Shauchuk said she knew she needed “to build a life” in Warsaw and was looking to improve her Polish. But, she said, she would not give up hope of returning home. “Even if I build up a family outside Belarus,” she said, “I want the right to go back.”The company will perform “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” a piece of experimental theater including opera and video projections, at the Barbican Center in London.Anna Liminowicz for The New York Times More

Nicki Minaj hosted and helped close out a nearly four-hour show heavy on performances and reaction shots of Taylor Swift in the audience.The MTV Video Music Awards returned to the Prudential Center in Newark on Tuesday night, as Nicki Minaj hosted a nearly four-hour show that included the members of ’N Sync coming together to present a Moon Person trophy to Taylor Swift (who gushed directly to the boy band, “I had your dolls”) and Sean Combs receiving a global icon honor (and telling the crowd his career had humble beginnings, as a paperboy). The Brazilian pop star Anitta delivered one of the event’s most solid one-liners — “I want to thank myself because I worked so hard,” she said in an acceptance speech — which she also proved onstage, performing both a solo medley and a collaboration with the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together. At the end of the night, the following five moments stood out.Most Memorable Performance: Doja CatOne of pop-rap’s most unpredictable voices turned out the night’s most polished and high-concept performance, capturing the anxiety of return to office in a look perhaps best described as “business sexual” while surrounded by dancers doused in ghoulish red paint. The audience looked confused and a little terrified as Doja Cat glided around the stage nailing her marks, the calm in an increasingly hectic storm.Most Memorable Fake-Out: Olivia RodrigoOlivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” video dramatizes an awards show performance gone wrong, and though it has 54 million YouTube views, none of those evidently came from V.M.A.s audience members like Selena Gomez, who looked stricken when Rodrigo partly recreated the clip Tuesday night. After the song’s first section, lights seemingly burst onstage and a curtain fell as a “stagehand” ushered the singer away — only to return seconds later grinning and performing another song from her new album, “Guts,” the bouncy “Get Him Back!”Most Memorable Return That (Likely) Didn’t Attract F.C.C. Attention: Cardi B and Megan Thee StallionCardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s first televised performance of their hit “WAP” came at the 2021 Grammys, and their salacious choreography caught the attention of over 1,000 viewers who complained to the Federal Communications Commission, Rolling Stone reported. The duo reunited last week with a fresh collaboration called “Bongos,” and played it relatively safer on the V.M.A.s stage. The censors caught most of the profanities and the audience camera caught one of the night’s many shots of Swift dancing along.Most Memorable 10-Minute Performance Involving Knives: ShakiraPerforming a mega medley to celebrate receiving the video vanguard award, the Colombian pop star didn’t appear to be doing much live singing, but her lengthy number included plenty of choreography, hair flipping, microphone stand tossing, guitar playing, a quick wardrobe adjustment, crowd surfing and a lift bringing her high above the crowd. But a truly eye-grabbing moment came halfway through, when she wielded two knives, dramatically running one across her torso before tossing them aside.Most Memorable Flashback to MTV’s Past: Hip-Hop Anniversary MedleyThe Grammys went big with a tribute to 50 years of hip-hop earlier this year, but MTV’s celebration of rap’s anniversary had some highlights, too: After Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh gave the crowd a lesson on the genre’s beginnings, Minaj emerged with “Itty Bitty Piggy,” one of her beloved early mixtape tracks, then reunited with her mentor Lil Wayne for “A Milli.” LL Cool J commanded the stage for two of his own songs, then went (shell) toe to toe with Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels on “Walk This Way.” (The performance mostly elided the 1990s, but Diddy’s eight-minute performance earlier in the night covered that era.) It was a reminder that MTV was once the home of “Yo! MTV Raps,” and used to spend a lot more time on music. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOlivia Rodrigo just released her second album, “Guts,” which is, at least in some ways, an extension of her 2021 debut album, “Sour.” She plays with similar musical approaches, splitting her time between piano balladry and punkish pop-rock. (She is still working with the same producer, Daniel Nigro.)But in other ways, it’s an evolution. Before, she was a young performer just out of the Disney ecosystem singing about teen heartbreak. Now, she’s got two years of pop stardom under her belt, and she’s experienced all of the lows that come with fame (and presumably some of the highs, too). That exposure has deepened her songwriting, and made her a prominent pop skeptic operating in the heat of the spotlight.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Rodrigo’s rapid rise, and the ways in which she’s chosen to reflect on it in her songs; her playfulness with genre and vocal style; and the potential futures in front of her.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York Times and writer of The Amplifier newsletterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The donation from Oscar L. Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, is the largest endowment gift in the orchestra’s history.The New York Philharmonic has a sparkling home: the recently renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. It has a charismatic new conductor: the superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who will take the podium in 2026.And now it will start its next chapter with a groundbreaking gift: the Philharmonic announced on Tuesday that it had secured a $40 million donation from the financier Oscar L. Tang, a co-chairman of its board, and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, an archaeologist and art historian, the largest contribution to the endowment in the ensemble’s 181-year history.The donation will be used to endow the Philharmonic’s music and artistic director chair starting in the 2025-26 season, when Dudamel, the 42-year-old leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, becomes music director designate.Gary Ginstling, who took over as the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive in July, described the gift as “visionary” and said it would allow the ensemble to “reimagine what a 21st-century orchestra can be and ensure that the Philharmonic’s music-making will serve future generations.”Dudamel, who has spoken of his desire to expand the Philharmonic’s social programs, possibly by creating a youth education program similar to one that he started in Los Angeles, praised Tang and Hsu-Tang.“Their deep belief in the power and importance of art has been self-evident from our first encounter and is something that bonds us closely,” he said in a statement. “I’m certain that we will accomplish extraordinary things and build many beautiful bridges together.”The gift is a coup for the Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, which has been led by giants including Mahler, Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein.Just a decade ago, there were concerns about the Philharmonic’s future, given the languishing efforts to renovate its lackluster hall and questions about its artistic direction and financial health.But it has seen a revival in recent years, stabilizing its finances and, with the help of Lincoln Center, pushing through the long-delayed $550 million renovation of Geffen Hall, which reopened last year. In February, the Philharmonic announced it had signed Dudamel, one of the world’s most in-demand maestros.Tang, who has served on the Philharmonic’s board since 2013, said he hoped the gift would help usher in a “new golden age” under Dudamel, with a focus on music education and social change, as the Philharmonic works to connect with new audiences, especially young people and Black and Latino residents. Tang recalled coming to New York to start his career on Wall Street in 1962, when Bernstein was music director and the Philharmonic had a broad audience.“We like to think of returning the New York Philharmonic back to an age of prominence and leadership, which existed when I came to New York,” he said. “We wanted to encourage that and set the tone for the next stage of what hopefully is the transformation of the New York Philharmonic.”Hsu-Tang, who has worked on international cultural heritage protection and rescue, advising UNESCO in Paris as well as the Cultural Property Advisory Committee under President Barack Obama, said the gift reflected the couple’s confidence in the Philharmonic’s new leaders.“We support institutions that are game changers — that want to make changes, that act on changes — rather than institutions that were forced to make changes because of the pandemic,” she said. “This is not just a golden age for the New York Philharmonic. It’s a renaissance for New York, and it’s a renaissance for music, arts and culture.”Hsu-Tang, who also serves as chair of the board of the New‐York Historical Society, and Tang are among the city’s most prominent cultural philanthropists. In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that the couple had pledged $125 million to help rebuild its wing for modern and contemporary art, the largest capital gift in the museum’s history.Now retired, Tang was a founder of the asset management firm Reich & Tang in 1970 in New York. Born in Shanghai, he was sent to school in America at 11, after his family fled to Hong Kong from China during the Communist revolution.After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, he teamed up with the architect I.M. Pei, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and others to establish the Committee of 100, a Chinese American leadership organization for advancing dialogue between the United States and China.Tang and Hsu-Tang have also championed efforts to fight racial discrimination. In early 2021, the couple founded the Yellow Whistle campaign to combat anti‐Asian hate, distributing 500,000 free yellow whistles emblazoned with the slogan “We Belong.”Their gift represents around a fifth of the Philharmonic’s endowment, which totals about $221 million. The funds will be used to support programming and education, in addition to compensation for the music director.While Dudamel does not become the Philharmonic’s 27th music director until the 2026-27 season, he is gradually increasing his commitment to the orchestra.On Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced that he would come to New York in April for a festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, which have helped introduce new generations to classical music. Dudamel, who had not been previously scheduled to appear this season, will lead the ensemble’s spring gala concert and participate in educational activities. More