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      Leonard Bernstein’s Children Defend Bradley Cooper’s Prosthetic Nose in ‘Maestro’

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      A teaser for the Netflix biopic has ignited a new round of criticism that the family described as a misunderstanding.Leonard Bernstein’s three children came to the defense of the actor and director Bradley Cooper on Wednesday after he drew fresh criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the midcentury American composer and conductor, who was Jewish, in the forthcoming movie “Maestro.”When the makeup was first revealed last year, some questioned the decision by Cooper, who is not Jewish, to play Bernstein, who died in 1990. In the Netflix film, he stars opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.The debut of a teaser trailer on Tuesday prompted further discussion on social media about both the prosthesis, which critics said played into an antisemitic trope, and about whether an actor who is Jewish should instead have been cast to play Bernstein, the “West Side Story” composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic.David Baddiel, a British comedian and author of the 2021 book “Jews Don’t Count,” cited Cooper as the latest instance of a gentile actor objectionably portraying a real-life Jewish figure. “I’ve talked about authenticity casting not applying to Jews — and what that means — many times,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The only difference here is it’s more — well — on the nose.”In a series of posts on X, the Bernsteins’ three children — Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein — said that Cooper had consulted with them “along every step of his amazing journey.”“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts,” they said of Cooper. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”They added, “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch.”Through a representative, Cooper declined to comment. Netflix did not reply to a request for comment.“Maestro” premieres next month at the Venice Film Festival and, in North America, in October at the New York Film Festival. A theatrical release in the United States will follow in November before a December debut on Netflix.In recent years, the question of which actors are eligible to play certain roles has been a hot-button issue in movies, television and theater, with an increasing consensus against actors’ portraying characters from marginalized groups whose traits they do not share.Tom Hanks told The New York Times Magazine last year that in contemporary times he would correctly not be cast as a gay man with AIDS, as he was in the 1993 drama “Philadelphia.” At the 2016 Emmy Awards, the actor Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be the last cisgender man to play a transgender character, as he did in the series “Transparent.”Some critics, like Baddiel, argue that there is a double standard when it comes to casting Jewish characters, whose portrayal by gentiles is widely tolerated.Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, plays the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a biopic coming out this month (even as Liev Schreiber, who is Jewish, plays Henry Kissinger in the film, “Golda”). In the recent biopic “Oppenheimer,” the Jewish title character was played by the non-Jewish actor Cillian Murphy. More

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      A Conductor Who Wants to Put You ‘Inside the Sound’

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      Maxime Pascal, a latecomer to classical music, forged an unusual path to the podium that has paid off for him and for audiences.Growing up, the conductor Maxime Pascal was a self-identified musical dilettante.As a child in the south of France, he had some skill on the violin, and sat in on the piano lessons his mother taught. At night, he watched his father play New Orleans jazz. But he didn’t really listen to classical music until he was 18.Now, though, Pascal, 37, is arguably his generation’s finest conductor of 20th-century music, as well as an essential interpreter of contemporary works. And his schedule reflects both the breadth of his ambition and the respect he has garnered on some of the industry’s most prestigious stages.He is “a fascinating artist who understands the times we live in and the role music theater can have on injecting new life in opera,” said Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. Pascal spent July at the festival leading his ensemble, Le Balcon, and performers from the Comédie-Française in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera,” in a slightly altered though polarizing orchestration of his own design.This month, Pascal is at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic for the Martinu rarity “The Greek Passion” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. And in November, in Paris, Pascal and Le Balcon will continue what he said has become his “life’s work” as they mount “Sonntag aus Licht,” their fifth installment in Stockhausen’s immense, seven-opera, 29-hour “Licht” — with an eye toward staging the entire cycle during the composer’s centennial year in 2028.Through it all, Pascal has emerged not only as a conductor of specialized repertoire, but also as a fundamentally persuasive musical communicator. His gestures can seem excessively physical; he takes his bows looking as if he had just fallen into a pool. Yet they don’t have the performative drama of, say, Leonard Bernstein.Pascal was a late bloomer, musically, but has been catching up with his colleagues, and in many cases surpassing them.Fredrik Broden for The New York Times“The audience understands immediately if a gesture is honest or if it’s fake,” said Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, who has made Pascal a regular guest there. “More interesting is honesty. That’s Maxime. In his gesture you get an immediate understanding of what’s going on.”If there’s an honesty to Pascal’s podium manner, it was cultivated unconsciously during his childhood. In retrospect, he said in an interview between performances of “Threepenny” last month, his entire upbringing and musical education funneled into his understanding of conducting today.He was born in Carcassonne, between Toulouse and Montpelier. Even if he wasn’t immersed in classical music, he was surrounded by sound sensations, he said, that he still feels. There was the brassy timbre of his father’s trombone, whether playing onstage or along with concerts on television. The first film he saw in theaters was “Aladdin,” and he was overwhelmed by being engulfed in the vivid images and songs.There was also the first time Pascal played in an orchestra, an experience that was practically epiphanic. “You realize you are part of a very high-level process that has existed since a very long time,” he said. “Musically, of course, and artistically, but also socially. If you want to know what the other child over there is playing, you have to listen. It’s something really strong.”So, when the time came to pick a path for his education, Pascal chose music, eventually making his way to the Paris Conservatory. Quickly realizing how much of a comparative head start his fellow students had, he devoted himself to catching up. From the media library he would check out six recordings a day, following no real agenda. “I discovered everything at the same time,” he said: the standard repertoire alongside the works of Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey and Pierre Boulez.Pascal has a similar headlong approach today. He and Le Balcon don’t repeat programs, so he is constantly learning new scores. In a sense, he has never stopped catching up. “Doing that,” he said, “you will keep a child’s curiosity forever. You will be marveling at small details until the end of your life.”As he attended shows, he wasn’t always satisfied with what he heard. At his first live experience with Boulez’s “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” he was so affected and stunned, he could barely applaud. But at some performances, he said, he felt “a bit too far from the sound and the work.” He wondered what would happen if he put on a concert that was entirely amplified.In 2008, with a small group of composers, a sound designer and volunteer musicians, Pascal put on a program of student works and Ravel songs performed by the soprano Julie Fuchs. When he heard the amplification — meticulously arranged and balanced — he snapped his fingers and said, “That’s it.”“I was no longer just watching and listening to something,” Pascal said. “I was inside the sound.” It felt like watching “Aladdin” all over again.They continued to put on performances, calling their ensemble Le Balcon, inspired by Genet’s play of the same name. The decision felt spontaneous at the time, Pascal said, but “we realized this text could be our manifesto. It talks about representation and what it means to incarnate.”Pascal and his ensemble, Le Balcon, constantly explore new repertoire. “The idea from the start,” he said, “was to always do something that would surprise us, to discover new things.”Fredrik Broden for The New York TimesAt the time, Pascal was familiar with Stockhausen’s music but didn’t yet know how similar the composer’s aims were to his, particularly in the completely amplified sound world of “Licht.” The cycle has been performed piecemeal over the years, especially as it was being written, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. But no company or artist had taken on the entire work before Le Balcon. (In 2019, Audi presented a three-day abridgment at the Holland Festival called “Aus Licht.”)Repeating the “Licht” operas in 2028 would be something of a first for Le Balcon. The ensemble constantly explores new repertoire, Pascal said, because “the idea from the start was to always do something that would surprise us, to discover new things.” Some of those moves have been driven by Audi and Hinterhäuser.Audi asked Pascal to conduct this summer’s “Threepenny” in part because of his talent with 20th-century works, but also because he is “always searching for an honest space for rethinking and reinvention.” Weill was new to Pascal, but, Audi said, “he plunged into it and emerged with a triumphant, refreshing and highly convincing result.” (A recording on the Alpha Classicals label is due for release in September.)In Salzburg, Pascal’s musical terrain has been vast: Debussy and Stravinsky, Grisey and Stockhausen, last year the large-scale “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher” of Honegger and the harrowingly intimate “Jakub Lenz” of Wolfgang Rihm. “The Greek Passion” is his first appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic, a risky debut for any conductor. But, Hinterhäuser said, “the response is very beautiful” in rehearsals.Critics have received “Passion,” which opened on Sunday and continues through Aug. 27, well. Pascal was praised especially for his handling of the stylistically eclectic, unwieldy score. “Sometimes it sounds archaic, sometimes modern, sometimes lyrical, then again passionate,” Meret Forster wrote in BR Klassik. “That all these facets can be heard and understood in Salzburg is mainly because of Maxime Pascal.”If he has one detracting critic, it’s himself. Pascal said he has spent years learning to be happy with his performances. “For a long time, it was really, crazily bad,” he added. “It happens still: People are saying it was fantastic, the orchestra is applauding, but I think it was so bad.”Whether with Le Balcon or a new orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, Pascal is striving to realize the ideal performance in his mind but also aiming for simple satisfaction. “It can be very difficult to accept, as an artist, that everything you will do is only a picture of what you are at that moment,” he said. “You may never reach what you are searching for, but you are always approaching it.” More

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      Sean Paul Is Still Busy

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      The song is a giddy exaltation of oscillating hips in full swing, of beautiful backsides and the beautiful forms they belong to as they get jiggy, get crunked up, percolate. It is a knight’s declaration of courtly love to his five fair ladies: Jodi, Rebecca, Annabella, the Misses Donna and Cana. It is a lover’s sincere exhortation to his beloveds to shake that thing, made with a sly exuberance that is both worshipful and raunchy.This is the seminal dancehall classic “Get Busy,” a 21-year-old party anthem that has been the source of dance-floor awakenings for generations of horny teenagers and young adults. And the knight paying homage to the things he is so respectfully asking the ladies to shake is Sean Paul, arguably Jamaica’s most famous musical export to the United States since Bob Marley. Two decades ago, after dethroning 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” from its No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, “Get Busy” did for Sean Paul what “Taxi Driver” did for Paul Schrader and “Liebesträume No. 3” did for Franz Liszt. This was the work that made an instant legend of its creator, who until then had been only a moderately successful purveyor of dancehall, Jamaica’s musical successor to reggae.Young people today seem to be discovering Sean Paul with the same delight their elders once did in middle school. On TikTok, the barometer of all contemporary youth relevance, influencers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, who were un- or barely born in 2003, can be found participating in viral dance challenges to “Get Busy,” while millennial comedians 10 years their senior make videos about the unfairness of being in seventh grade when the song was ruling clubs. Like low-rise jeans, going-out tops and the “Fast & Furious” franchise, Sean Paul is one of those ubiquitous elements of Y2K-era American life that is experiencing a thundering resurgence.Paul performing at “MTV Spring Break” in Miami Beach in 2003.Scott Gries/Getty ImagesSting and Paul onstage at the Grammy Awards in 2004. Paul’s “Dutty Rock” won the award for best reggae album.Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesI sat down with Paul on a salubrious June afternoon — “salubrious” was his choice of word — on Hellshire Beach near Kingston, where sargassum clogs the shoreline and clusters of shacks jostle for limited space on the ever-shrinking sands. At one of these establishments (either Screechy’s or Screechie’s, depending on whether you believe the indoor spelling or the outdoor one), covers were removed from platters of fried red snapper as Paul, wearing bright-orange cargo shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “DUTTY,” unrolled his smoking paraphernalia. He was by turns sprightly and pensive. The party-boy persona that once made him a megastar has evolved into that of a fun but responsible uncle — the one who still knows how to throw a party but will also ensure that everyone eats well and gets home safely afterward. The night before, for instance, in the courtyard of a studio I was told had been built by Shaggy and his former manager, I watched some of Paul’s associates smoke from a many-feet-long chalice pipe as they waited to begin rehearsals for a coming tour. When Paul drove up, he announced that he had brought a case of mangoes from his own orchard, and I was treated to the wholesome tableau of a group of grown men tearing into a cardboard box, each extracting a mango and biting in with sighs and groans of unadulterated relish. The rehearsal featured breaks to crack open bottles of industrial-strength white rum — and loud shouts of laughter, including at my saying I shouldn’t drink while working and at my frozen expression when I did finally try a sip. This jovial gathering of dad bods, dad shorts and dad jokes more resembled the vibe of an after-school band rehearsal than a multiplatinum recording artist preparing to play a sold-out arena — perhaps because some of these guys really have known Paul since his earliest days in music.As Paul explained to me at Screechy/ie’s, for his life to become what it is now — that of a Grammy-winning artist with YouTube views in the multiple billions and a catalog of beloved classics — a series of extremely fortunate events had to occur. And a fair number of them, he didn’t have much say in. Long before he became the bandannaed and cornrowed Sean Paul who entranced the American public, Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques was just another young offshoot of Jamaica’s famous Henriques clan, one of the oldest Jewish families on the island, who immigrated there from Portugal in the 17th century. Paul, who has British and Chinese heritage on his mother’s side, actually grew up Catholic in solidly respectable Uptown Kingston, watching the raucous parties thrown at his grandmother’s home by an enterprising aunt who ran a sound system. Kingston is a city that takes parties seriously, and the sound system was a key 20th-century innovation — a portable setup of amplifiers, turntables and mountains of speakers, all orchestrated by a D.J. and an M.C., who truck the equipment to makeshift venues and use its booming sound to draw crowds. Paul and his younger brother, Jason, were both enamored of this family business; Jason actually recalls falling asleep in a bass box as a child. It was both brothers’ earliest immersion in music, listening to the Uptown crowds dance to Michael Jackson beats blended with the dancehall and reggae rhythms of Kingston. Despite the legacy Paul was born into, his childhood was shaped by absences — like that of his father, Garth, who would disappear for months at a time, leaving his wife, Frances, hunting door to door, asking neighbors if they had seen him. He would materialize, months later, perhaps having whiled away the time in Mexico, once having crashed a Cherokee 6 plane stuffed full of marijuana in the Everglades. When Paul was 13, his father was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison. This devastated Paul — not because his father had been much of a presence in his life but because what little he had of him would now be gone. It felt, he says, like “that’s forever — Oh, I’ll never see this dude again.”Paul with his father, Garth Henriques, at the National Stadium swimming pool in Kingston.via Sean PaulHis mother sent him to Wolmer’s Boys’ School, among the oldest in Jamaica. Paul, who until then had been a bit of a dreamer, was thrust into a teenage milieu far removed from his former Jewish prep school; he began getting in fights with kids who teased him about his father being in prison. He was saved from a descent into hooliganism by swimming, a sport for which the Henriques family is well known. Both of Paul’s parents were champion swimmers, and he carried on that legacy, representing Jamaica at international competitions and as a water-polo player, his days beginning at 5:30 a.m. and spent training furiously.Still, his grades weren’t good enough to get him into college, which was beyond his mother’s means anyway. He enrolled in a program for hotel management and learned the basics of French cuisine (yes, Sean Paul of “Temperature” fame knows how to make hollandaise); for a time he worked as a bank teller while making demo tapes in private. He would freestyle with a group called the Dutty Cup Crew, and there was a time when his father, newly released from prison, tried to introduce him to people in the music industry. But watching Sean — thoughtful, introspective Sean — pursue a career as an M.C. and dancehall toaster still seemed outlandish to those around him. He recalls a well-intentioned friend getting drunk at a party and crying while asking him why he was throwing his life away.Paul in 1992. While privately making demo tapes, Paul worked as a bank teller and learned the basics of French cuisine while enrolled in a hotel-management program.Michael WoodsThe real hitch in his early career wasn’t his demeanor; it was the subjects he wanted to write about. The young Sean Paul was intensely affected by the differences he saw in the quality of life between Uptown and Downtown Kingston. The early songs he wrote were of a subgenre classified as conscious reggae — socially minded stuff, meant to highlight the injustices he saw around him. He didn’t see any trouble with this until a producer took him aside and told him flat out: No one wanted to listen to conscious songs from a light-skinned Uptown kid. He might have had a father in prison for manslaughter and a mother who, he says, did tie-dye to support the family, and he might have grown up occasionally eating callaloo picked from the backyard, but on paper he was a posh boy with a surname and family legacy that made it impossible for him to be taken seriously while singing about wealth inequality. Crestfallen but persuaded, Paul pivoted, channeling his sensitivities into the topics producers wanted him to sing about: parties, women and weed. One result was “Baby Girl,” a stripped-down track in which Paul entreats a woman to dry her eyes, leave her no-good man and come to him — a man who will “love yuh fi yuh body, but more fi yuh brain.” To him, Paul says, this was still a conscious song: “In dancehall, you always sing big of the ladies, how good they look or about wanting to get with them. But you never sing about: ‘I hear you in trouble? You’re in a relationship where you’re being abused? I’ll be there for you.’ That’s what the song was about.”In dancehall, masculinity is often a kind of balloon animal the M.C. inflates and twists into aggrandized shapes. In her book “Dancehall: Origins, History, Future,” the professor Donna P. Hope identifies the “six G’s” lyrics tend to dwell on (gun, gyal, ghetto, gays, ganja, God) and how each can be used to underline the vocalist’s machismo. The genre had made inroads into the U.S. market before — from Super Cat, Shabba Ranks, Beenie Man, Ini Kamoze — but if Paul would one day top them all, perhaps it’s because even at the peak of his party-boy persona, he understood that longing for things you cannot have is a universal sentiment. He has spent his entire career writing soft-focus love songs and ballads of unrequited yearning; they’re just disguised as songs to grind pelvises to. “Temperature” promises to “shelter you from the storm.” “Rockabye” is an earnest tribute to single mothers. On “Give It Up to Me,” he promises “love so clear/It gonna make you shine, and once you are mine/We be rockin it until the end of time.” These are club tracks, but if you, just hypothetically, happened to be listening to them on repeat during your fifth hour of silently hiccup-sobbing into a pillow (don’t ask), they would absolutely deliver in that arena as well.“Baby Girl” was Paul’s first local radio hit, earning him some popularity in Jamaica and paving the way for his first U.S. studio album. But it was his sophomore LP, “Dutty Rock,” that made Sean Paul into the commercial leviathan he is today. In 2002, a brief New York Times article noted an interesting new record featuring 19 songs, by different artists, all built on the same bewitching “riddim,” a basic beat for dancehall artists to record over. Created by a producer named Steven (Lenky) Marsden, the Diwali riddim — named after the Hindu festival — was built on frenetic syncopated hand claps that escalate over an underlying boom. At the time, Marsden had no sense of the classic he had created. But if you were alive in the early 2000s, you simply could not escape the contagious sound of this percussive loop, which would bounce and undulate its way through the culture everywhere, from Lumidee’s charmingly off-key hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” to Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go.” Paul in Norbrook, an upscale neighborhood in Kingston, in July. A younger Paul had wanted to sing about wealth inequality, until a producer told him that no one wanted those songs from an uptown kid like him. Naila Ruechel for The New York TimesMarsden received a phone call from VP Records asking if he would lend the riddim to one of their buzzy new artists: Sean Paul. The result was “Get Busy,” a monstrous hit that transformed Paul’s career and helped sell nearly six million copies of “Dutty Rock.” Back in the clubs-cars-and-Cristal era of R.&B., the “Get Busy” music video was an anomaly, too, depicting a party that would be recognizable to suburban diasporas everywhere: adults gathered around a dining table, young people crowding the unfinished basement below, an angry Caribbean dad in a loud batik-print shirt yelling at the youths to “stop banging on the damn furnace.”Paul is now closer to the age of that video dad than the basement party-starter he played. In the intervening years, he has remained booked and busy, ushering in a steady procession of hit songs, both his own and in collaborations with other pop stars. Whether you have recognized it or not, a new song of his has likely made its way to you in the past eight years — perhaps by way of “No Lie,” his collaboration with a sandpaper-voiced, prefame Dua Lipa; his work with the actor Idris Elba on the rambunctious “Boasty”; or his guest feature on Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” which seemed to blare constantly from the stock-exchange-size H&M in Times Square in the summer of 2017. Paul may now be an elder statesman of dancehall, but he is still producing, recording and performing with vigor. As for the Jodi in “Get Busy,” she’s now his wife. I am one of those millennials who discovered Sean Paul at age 12 — but I also grew up in a secluded, almost cultlike boarding school in India, where we were forbidden any sort of internet access and had little idea what was popular among people our age in the outside world. My only familiarity with reggae was by way of an English guy named Steven Kapur who grew dreadlocks, called himself Apache Indian and sang in a Punjabi-inflected patois about wanting an arranged marriage with a dainty Indian girl who would make him rotis. I did recognize the Diwali riddim, but only because the Lumidee hit based on it would play when Megan Fox’s character appeared onscreen in the Lindsay Lohan classic “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” Still: Somehow, by way of some entrepreneurial soul who knew how to burn pirated music onto CDs, “Get Busy” would play on repeat at my all-girls school’s gatherings with boys from a neighboring school, where chaperones were stationed at every corner to prevent anyone from getting even remotely busy. Whether it’s at a grimy nightclub or in an auditorium full of emotionally stunted teenagers avoiding eye contact in Dehradun, India, there are a few things likely to occur whenever a D.J. puts on “Get Busy” for a crowd of the right age. There will be squeals of recognition as Paul booms “SHAKE … THAT … THING,” each word with its vertiginous pause. Then the delirious, almost incantatory hand claps will start to register: “It’s the ignition of those butterflies,” he told me. As Paul’s exuberant melodies combine with the boisterous throb of the Diwali riddim, listeners’ hips and waists acquire a sentience of their own, moving as if threatening to secede from the rest of the body.This was true in 2003 — some 40-year-olds I asked wistfully confirmed this for me — and it remains true two decades later. I watched Paul live in concert, not once but twice, last year in New York. He was a consummate showman, with unflagging reserves of energy, leaping around in front of the giant Jamaican flag draped over the D.J. console overseen by his brother. Paul seemed to know exactly who his audience was, and to this audience he gave exactly what we wanted: his biggest hits, opening immediately with the iconic intro of “Get Busy,” to which we all lost our minds. On both occasions, I witnessed elder millennials try hip movements far beyond our joints’ collagen levels. Each time I felt as though I had been factory reset as a person.Paul at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2022.Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressThe members of Paul’s preteen fandom — whether that means me in 2003 or the kids browsing TikTok a year ago — might not have had any frame of reference for the parties and spliffs that he was singing about, the Jamaican patois he was singing in or his place in the lineage of dancehall. But a thumping party track is a thumping party track, and not knowing the lyrics would not stop any of us from, as one recent video elegantly put it, “throwing ass” to his bangers, then or now. For decades, Paul has offered the service so much great pop does: distilling a mythical idea of the perfect party, the always-pumping club, and delivering it into the minds and ears of people who will not learn for years that real clubgoing tends to be much more tedious and involve uncomfortable shoes. For someone like me — someone who, until I moved away from home, wasn’t even allowed to go to parties, let alone parties with sexually suggestive dancing — Paul’s songs were about the poetry and promise of dark, sweaty basements and libidinous gyrations. Neither was part of my life at 12, and neither are part of it as a not-so-young-anymore adult with an office job. But Paul’s best songs take all your amorphous longings and feelings of exile — whether imposed by a pandemic or a boarding school or a lost youth — and exorcise them.I can’t wait for the weekend, I can’t want to see that girl again: That, Paul told me in Kingston, is the type of anticipation he puts into his songs. Because if there is one thing he has understood since he was 14, it is the stultifying restlessness that lurks beneath the lives of suburban teenagers. Today he considers it his artistic purpose to exalt uncomplicated ease and pleasure. His legacy is the pure euphoria that erupts on faces when he performs “Get Busy.” The fact that he has been doing this for more than 20 years struck him, recently, when he realized that the nieces and nephews who were infants when the song took off are now old enough to drink and party and experience their uncle’s concerts. “And then they start going to the shows,” he giggled, “and they’re like, Yo?!” At 22, he said, he had wanted to sing about social evils. At 50, he has found peace simply taking people’s minds off them.Iva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine, where her past articles have included an ode to the delights of eating raw onions and an exploration of the popularity of the TV show “Emily in Paris.” This is her first feature for the magazine. Naila Ruechel is a photographer originally from Jamaica known for lush, elegant imagery with a heightened sense of intimacy. More

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      Pharrell Williams Shares His Inspirations, From Henry Taylor to ‘Jabberjaw’

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      Pharrell Williams — the clothing designer who succeeded Virgil Abloh in February 2023, just over a year after his death, as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director; the Grammy-winning record producer behind such pop masterpieces as Justin Timberlake’s “Justified” (2002) and Clipse’s “Hell Hath No Fury” (2006); the musician and performer who in conversation casually refers to the French electronic duo Daft Punk as “the robots” and Karl Lagerfeld as “Karl” — doesn’t like talking about himself. “This is absolutely Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” he said over the phone this past June, a few days after lighting up Paris’s Pont Neuf with his spectacular debut for the French fashion house. At one point, it seemed like he might give up on the conversation altogether. “This is straight up like voice mail syndrome,” he said. “I mean, do you like listening to yourself on voice mail?” Williams, 50, was raised in Virginia Beach by his father, Pharaoh, a handyman, and his mother, Carolyn, a teacher. It was there that he met numerous lifelong collaborators, including Chad Hugo, his producing partner in the Neptunes, a duo as important to the sound of hip-hop over the past 30 years as the Funk Brothers were to Motown in the 1960s. A dedicated polymath who shifts between styles, genres and media, Williams is his best, most creative self in the presence of water. He grew up in a housing project called Atlantis, right by the beach; today, he holds an annual music and art festival in Virginia Beach called Something in the Water. And when he’s not in Miami on Biscayne Bay, he spends his time in Paris, where he has a music studio at the LVMH headquarters overlooking the Seine.At top: “This was taken in Los Angeles last year, a few months before the Louis Vuitton announcement. Being a producer and a creative director are similar. I can go from apparel to drums, from trunks to melodies. Within my design studio, I have a section allocated to music, so I go back and forth all day.”Left: Launchmetrics/Spotlight. Right: © Henry Taylor, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Fredrik NilsenLeft and right: “I wanted to work with [the American artist] Henry Taylor [whose paintings, one of which is shown here, were embroidered onto garments and bags from Williams’s first collection for Louis Vuitton]. It’s not lost on me that this appointment was given to another Black man from America. This is pivotal for us, you know, after Virgil, our brother who’s gone back up to the stars. I think it’s important that we continue to tell interesting stories. I don’t have an agenda — I am the agenda. I want not only people who look like me but people who don’t look like me to be inspired by this moment. And working with an artist like Henry Taylor helps tell that story.”From left: Dre Rojas; courtesy of Helen Williams; Sam HayesLeft: “This was taken at a Chanel show in Africa last year. [Williams was a brand ambassador from 2014 to 2022.] We went to Dakar, Senegal, and I had on a fresh pair of [Adidas] Sambas. Years ago, I’d asked Karl [Lagerfeld, Chanel’s longtime creative director who died in 2019] to take the house to Africa, and he said we would get to it, but he passed before we got a chance to.”Center: “My oldest son [Rocket, pictured here with Williams at Disney World in 2012] makes beats. We [Pharrell and his wife, the model and fashion designer Helen Williams] also have triplets. It’s a triple handful. We say it’s beautifully intense and intensely beautiful.” Right: “We turned a house in Miami into a studio. I have no idea [when we set it up], but it’s been a couple of years. I’m terrible with chronology: I live in the moment, but I process things in the future and I get lost in the past. In Miami, it’s all about the weather and the humidity. It’s always been very inspiring to me. It’s fun to record there on the water, which sounds like a flex, but it’s really not.” From left: Kourtrajmeuf; Vinyls/Alamy; Dre RojasLeft: “With this Vuitton appointment, it’s like I’m a perpetual student. If I’m the king of anything, it’s the king of being a pupil. I knew I wanted to work on Damier [the brand’s signature checkerboard pattern]. I’ve always loved pixelated camo, so we did it with Damier, leveling it up, and that’s how we got Damouflage [pictured here on a model during a fitting earlier this year]. Being surrounded by so many talented people is the best. I mean, I’m an Aries, so I’ve always been superimpulsive. But without the resources and the people, I’d be just like every other person with a great idea.”Center: “As a kid, I listened to a lot of records my aunt would play in her house. Parliament-Funkadelic had songs that blew my mind. I also think [Kraftwerk’s sixth studio album] ‘Trans-Europe Express’ (1977) happened around that time. Atlantis was like this neighborhood in a bubble. It’s where music was everything and, when certain songs came on, it was like a musical happening right there in front of you. You could either be a part of it or you could stand back and watch.” Right: “This picture was taken earlier this year at Le Café V [a Louis Vuitton cafe in Osaka]. Japan is my favorite place. On my 50th orbit, I had a birthday party organized by [the Tokyo-based artistic director of Kenzo and hip-hop producer] Nigo. One of the most amazing gifts is his presence in my life. Twenty years ago, I needed to go to Japan to record something, so Nigo arranged for me to come to his studio, which is basically a compound on five floors of a building. One floor is a showroom, one is a photo studio, another is a recording studio, and I was like, ‘Wow, this guy lives what’s in his head.’ That changed me. I was so used to bragging because that was the world I came from. And then I met Nigo, who barely said anything. He didn’t have to. Humility is in the Tokyo air like the humidity in Virginia.”From left: Dr. Carolyn Williams; Hanna-Barbera/Photofest; Columbia/PhotofestLeft: “I think this picture is from around 1976, so when I was 3 years old. I’m the third of eight kids — two sisters and five brothers. I want to say ‘Star Wars’ (1977) came out around then. I just remember being back in the Atlantis apartments in Virginia Beach. I didn’t know life was as hard as it was, because it was fun to me.” Center: “My favorite cartoon as a kid was ‘Jabberjaw’ (1976), and the band he played in was called the Neptunes. So that’s where the name [of his songwriting and production duo with Chad Hugo] came from.”Right: “I love watching movies to escape. But the funny thing is, I couldn’t tell you from what. My favorite movie is ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977). I relate to Richard Dreyfuss’s character and the alien.” More

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      How Metallica Hard-Wires a Different Set List Every Night

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      On Aug. 4, Metallica played the first North American date of its M72 World Tour in New Jersey.Each show is designed to be different, with its own distinct set list. The band’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, broke down the opening night set — and explained some of the other cues, too. How Metallica Hard-Wires a Different Set List Every NightThe metal institution is on the road supporting its 11th album. Drawing on four decades of songs, the drummer Lars Ulrich keeps fans, and his bandmates, on their toes.Aug. 16, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ETIn Metallica’s frenetic 1983 ode to headbanging, “Whiplash,” the band’s guitarist and lead singer, James Hetfield, barks, “We’ll never stop, we’ll never quit, ’cause we’re Metallica.” Somehow, across four decades marked by success but also death, addiction and at least one very public near-implosion, the band has kept its word.This year, Metallica released its 11th full-length studio album, “72 Seasons.” Its debut LP, “Kill ’Em All,” also turned 40, just days before the quartet arrived in New Jersey for the first North American date on its M72 World Tour. Metallica isn’t the only band doing stadium tours even as its members pass 60, but not every band makes its bones slamming through songs that regularly top 190 beats per minute.That tenacity was evident on a Friday night this month at MetLife Stadium as the tour touched down in East Rutherford. Drums pounded. Riffs chugged. Solos melted the faces off an all-ages crowd of about 80,000, dressed almost exclusively in black.But how does a band keep it fresh after, by the drummer Lars Ulrich’s count, performing “Master of Puppets” 1,697 times onstage? The answer is by constantly “mixing it up,” said Ulrich, who creates the band’s set lists the day of each show — a “safeguard,” he added, “against ending up on autopilot.”That may sound obvious, but it wasn’t always the case. “Thirty years ago, we took going out and executing a set really seriously,” Ulrich explained by phone last week, when the goal was nailing everything “almost like in a robotic way.”Metallica — which also features the guitarist Kirk Hammett and the bassist Robert Trujillo — started fiddling with its encores and covers as its catalog kept growing. About 20 years ago, on the “St. Anger” tour, the group set an ambitious goal: Never again play the same set list twice.From left: Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield of Metallica onstage at MetLife Stadium on Aug. 4.Bryan Derballa for The New York TimesDates on the M72 tour, which run through September 2024, are organized around “no repeat weekends,” featuring two shows in each city with two different lists and two different sets of opening acts. (The band will play two weekends in Mexico City, where the tour wraps up.) The stage is doughnut shaped, with fans standing inside and out; the setup allows band members to face different parts of the crowd at different times, and it relies on four drum setups, creating multiple front rows.“Mixing it up” with the set list itself is a surprisingly complex affair. Metallica productions go big, and the band’s elaborate program of pyrotechnics, lighting and interstitial audio-video, among other flourishes — the New Jersey show included a drop of dozens of giant black-and-yellow beach balls — has historically discouraged major changes to the list. Having four drum kits this time didn’t simplify things.Eventually, the band developed what Ulrich called a “slot” system based on the band’s different “food groups” of songs, a reference to their feel and tempo. Slot 1 (of 16) on the M72 tour, for example, will always be an upper-mid-tempo fan favorite — Day 1 at MetLife, it was “Creeping Death” — that has a quickly recognizable opening riff: not too fast or complicated. But the songs in that slot will rotate. Slot 10 should always be a ballad, like “Nothing Else Matters.” The closer is always “Master of Puppets” or “Enter Sandman.”Ulrich also keeps careful data about what song the band has played where, and tries to tailor the set list accordingly.“At times it turns into a science” he said. “We’re in Montreal now, and I’ll have all the info for the last 20 years that we’ve played Montreal in front of me. And I can put a set list together where the deeper cuts will not be repeated.”Certain songs, like “Sandman,” “Puppets” and “One,” are in constant rotation. Ulrich said the band calls them the “toe-tapping favorites” — an odd, and perhaps ironic, choice of words for songs better known for headbanging.A lot of bands begin to mellow as they mature; by most accounts, that happened to Metallica over three decades ago, enough time for the band to have since come full circle. Like the band’s two most recent albums, “72 Seasons” continues Metallica’s return to the thrash-metal style that defined its early years, and the tour supporting it has thus far followed suit: light on covers and ballads, heavy on the heavy. New shredders like “72 Seasons” and “Lux Aeterna” slot tightly into lists packed with thrash classics like “Seek & Destroy” (1983), “Battery” (1986) and “Blackened” (1988).Ulrich spoke in detail about the set list from that first night at MetLife and helped decipher some of the notes. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.‘Creeping Death’“This is one we would call a fan favorite, and it’s not one that we always play. It’s got really good energy in the riff, and it sits in a kind of an up-tempo place without being so super fast that it just becomes, like, an indistinguishable roar. But it’s got good accents, good dynamics. It’s got a breakdown after the second chorus and the guitar solo, where it goes to a shout-along part where James gets everybody pretty engaged. [‘Die! Die! Die!’]What makes a good opening song? I mean, ask a hundred people, you get a hundred different answers. So none of this is science. But after a while, you start figuring out instinctively that this song maybe works better than this other song. Often when you are touring on the back of an album, the default is to open with the opening track off the album that you’re touring with. I wanted purposely to not do that, just to sort of challenge ourselves.”‘72 Seasons’“’72 Seasons’ is the opening song on the latest album, and it’s also the title track. It has a real forward motion and a lot of energy, and I think it’s really representative and indicative of the head space and the mood and the energy of the new album. So it feels like a great way to kind of introduce what we’re doing these days.The title refers to the first 18 years of your life; in broad strokes, it’s basically the idea that the first 72 seasons of your life shape who you become, for better or worse — and as you move through life, you’re trying to expand on those experiences, or maybe shake them, get away from them.”‘Fade to Black’“We’re all very open about where we’re at with our moods and all of us dealing with various levels of mental health. And that feels like it’s less of a taboo than it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago. I think James, increasingly, is very comfortable onstage talking about how he’s doing and how he’s feeling, and often he’ll send ‘Fade to Black’ off with some personal thoughts or something that relates to how he’s doing in that moment, in the spirit of sending good energy to people who are receiving it from a place of struggle. And the takeaway message is that you’re not alone, and that we’re in this together. I’m an only child. I’ve struggled with being an outsider and a loner all my life. And, you know, being in a band, playing concerts and all that is the best remedy for me to feel that I’m not alone.”‘Orion’“It’s one that we have enjoyed playing a little bit more in recent years — we actually opened with it when we played with the Rolling Stones. It has a unique palette and illustrates the different songwriting inspirations and influences that exist within the band. When we’re playing it, the spirit of Cliff [Burton, the band’s original bassist, who died in a 1986 bus crash] is definitely present in the building. And Robert channels Cliff’s spirit in the part that he’s playing so incredibly well. It’s a beautiful, beautiful moment.”‘Master of Puppets’“‘Master of Puppets’ is actually the song we’ve played the most live; it’s been a part of every tour since we released it. It got a significant, unexpected boost last year when it became part of the ‘Stranger Things’ finale. And who would’ve thought that a 37-year-old song that’s over eight minutes long and is pretty heavy throughout would resonate in the way that it does with a new and younger generation of listeners? But how crazy cool is that?”What’s the ‘Hang’ Cue?“‘Hang’ means basically the songs are connected — that there’s no, like, full stop. It doesn’t go to silence. So it just means stay on a chord. And then the next song comes out of that rather than out of a vocal introduction or a tape.”From left: Hetfield, the bassist Robert Trujillo and the drummer Lars Ulrich. The band is always mixing up its set lists, Ulrich said, to avoid “ending up on autopilot.”Bryan Derballa for The New York TimesThe Four Drum Kits“This is the first time we’ve done a 360-degree stage in a stadium setup. We tried to crack the code on that for years. Everything that we had done always had a center point. We were going down this rabbit hole a year ago, and all of a sudden it was like, Well, hang on, why does the band have to be in the center? And then it was like, What’s the opposite of the band being in the center? And that would be the fans being in the center. And that’s when we came up with the doughnut concept, where you play on the doughnut itself and then the fans are in the doughnut hole. And then, well, where do the drums go? Then the concept of the four drum kits — one drum kit in each of the four different directions — came up, and then it sort of went from there.You know, all this [expletive] makes a lot of sense when it’s in an email or it looks really good on a napkin. Nine months later you’re in the first venue trying to figure out what the [expletive] you’re doing.”

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      The Metropolitan Opera Guild Will Wind Down Amid Financial Woes

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      The organization, founded in 1935 to support the opera house, will lay off 20 employees and stop publishing Opera News as a stand-alone monthly magazine.The Metropolitan Opera Guild, a nonprofit that supports the storied opera house and publishes the magazine Opera News, will wind down its operations and lay off its staff this fall in the face of financial troubles, the organization announced on Tuesday.The guild, which was founded by Eleanor Robson Belmont in 1935 to help the Met survive a funding shortfall caused by the Great Depression, has supported the company and its education programs ever since, bringing thousands of schoolchildren to dress rehearsals each year and working to promote interest in opera through the publication of Opera News, which became one of the leading classical music publications in the United States.Opera News will end its run as a stand-alone monthly magazine. The Met and the guild said it would continue in a different format, under new editorial direction, as part of a new section in Opera magazine, a British publication, focused on the United States that will bear the Opera News logo. The magazine will be sent to guild members and Opera News subscribers in the United States.Opera News, which became one of the leading classical music magazines in the United States, will cease publication as a stand-alone magazine. The British publication Opera magazine will increase its coverage of the Met and opera in the United States, and will be sent to Guild members and Opera News subscribers.Opera News“We greatly appreciate the valuable efforts of our employees over the years, but it is no longer economically viable for us to continue in our current form,” Winthrop Rutherfurd Jr., the Guild’s chairman, and Richard J. Miller Jr., its president, said in a statement.The guild will be reclassified as a supporting organization under the Met; it will no longer operate as an independent nonprofit. The guild said that it would provide severance to its 20 employees, and that it expects the Met to hire some of them. Its board members will be offered positions on the Met’s board.Under the guild’s membership program, patrons pay $85 or more per year for benefits including subscriptions to Opera News, access to dress rehearsals and advance ticket sales.The guild, like the broader opera industry, has faced serious financial pressures in recent years. It draws much of its revenue from its roughly 28,000 members. But contributions and grants have fallen in recent years: they totaled $8.1 million in 2021, compared with $9.1 million a decade earlier. And to some extent the Met and the guild found themselves competing for support from the same opera lovers.The Met, grappling with its own financial woes as it works to recover from the pandemic, said it would continue some of the guild’s offerings, including the program that brings schoolchildren into the opera house to watch dress rehearsals.Guild events including the annual Opera News awards and luncheons at the Waldorf Astoria, such as this one in 2006, will be discontinued. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesUnder Peter Gelb, who became the Met’s general manager in 2006, the company has expanded its oversight of the guild. Gelb said in an interview that the changes came after several months of discussions. He said the problems facing the guild reflected the “difficulties for nonprofit performing arts companies,” including the Met.“It’s the same pressure that, on a large scale, the Met feels,” he said. “We tried to find a way forward that would enable some of the programs of the guild to continue, even if the guild in its current structure would not continue.”The partnership with Opera magazine that will replace Opera News — which began publication in 1936 and has a circulation of about 43,000 — will start in December. The Met will not have editorial input but will provide a share of fees paid by guild members to help offset the magazine’s production costs, as it did with Opera News. Opera magazine named Rebecca Paller its U.S. editor; since 2003, Opera News has been led by F. Paul Driscoll.John Allison, the editor and publisher of Opera, vowed in a statement to preserve the “rich editorial history” of Opera News. He said in an interview that he hoped to engage former Opera News writers when possible.“Coverage of opera at the Met and throughout the United States will continue to be just as comprehensive as guild members and Opera News subscribers have grown accustomed to over the years,” he said.Opera fans reacted with concern to news of the guild’s demise on Tuesday, saying that it was another sign that the art form was struggling.Posy Ryan, a guild member, said that she was “very surprised and deeply saddened” by the changes, including the end of the stand-alone Opera News.“It’s an institution that will be missed,” she said. “For me, it was an introduction to so many young American singers. I’d see a feature, a review and then research them on YouTube. I’ll miss that.” More

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      At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Displays Its Heritage and Uncertain Future

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      The orchestra is in a period of transition, but one thing that remains consistent is the enduring quality of its summer home.Ah, Tanglewood. What a pleasure it remains to spend a weekend here: to stroll the green lawns, to sniff the flowers, to guess the music that some earnest young student is learning, as the sound of that laboring drifts through the trees from a practice room. And what a reminder a few days spent in the Berkshires can be of the fundamental, enduring quality of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which enjoys Tanglewood its summer home.Visitors last Friday through Sunday might have recalled the grand old heritage that this ensemble calls its own, as they found an old wooden seat in the Shed or listened as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was played with almost proprietary command, nearly eight decades after this orchestra gave the work its premiere.They might have admired the group’s enduring prestige, too, as one distinguished musician after another graced the stage. Anne-Sophie Mutter reprised a violin concerto written for her by John Williams, who was in the audience to hear it and took the podium for a couple of encores. Seong-Jin Cho, among our more urbane young pianists, offered some delightfully vivacious Mozart in partnership with the conductor Susanna Mälkki, who amply demonstrated there and in her thrillingly exact Bartók why her star burns ever brighter. Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony’s music director, was supposed to accompany Yo-Yo Ma in a Shostakovich concerto, but a positive Covid test and a cancellation by the cellist led the orchestra to place a call to Renée Fleming instead. The empress of the sopranos obliged.Renée Fleming, left, stepped in to perform Strauss songs after the cellist Yo-Yo Ma tested positive for Covid-19.Hilary ScottAs a display of professionalism, of power, of permanence, all of that was clarifying, even formidable. And you could have been forgiven for needing that demonstration, given the Boston Symphony’s dysfunction of late.After the retirement of Mark Volpe, who served as the orchestra’s president and chief executive for 23 years until 2021 and amassed an endowment of around half a billion dollars, the Boston Symphony turned for inspiration to Gail Samuel, the chief operating officer of the daring Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she had worked for nearly three decades. Hints of a progressive Californian spirit were soon in evidence, as composers started appearing onstage at Symphony Hall in Boston to introduce their works, and the atmosphere began to feel more engaged. But Samuel lasted a mere 18 months, stepping down in January for reasons that are still not clear. Nelsons, conspicuously, offered no public comment when her departure was announced; much of the senior staff had already left in alarmingly short order and are yet to be replaced.Filling out those ranks will be one of the tasks that falls to Chad Smith, who, in a peculiar case of déjà vu, will start work as the orchestra’s next president and chief executive in mid-September, after more than 20 years at, yes, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Smith, who for a long time was the adventurous Philharmonic’s programming guru, is hugely respected, and his hiring is cause for excitement, if some trepidation. Whether the Los Angeles model, or anything like it, can be applied to an institution that takes such pride in its past remains to be seen, although the Samuel debacle offers a clue; whatever else the Boston Symphony may be, it is not an organization known for its agility.But this is not the only problem that Smith needs to solve. The orchestra itself, which recently signed a three-year labor agreement that will add flexibility to its concert schedule, has not had a leader on paper since 2019, when Malcolm Lowe retired as concertmaster; in practice, the matter has been unstable for longer than that. Auditions to fill a chair that, since 1920, has been occupied only by Lowe, Joseph Silverstein and Richard Burgin, reached a final stage this season, when several violinists competed for the post in concert, including Alexander Velinzon and Elita Kang, internal candidates who have admirably held the fort while the first associate concertmaster, Tamara Smirnova, has been away. Incredibly, the search remains ongoing. So, too, the slackness that can sometimes be detected in the first violins.In addition, Elizabeth Rowe, the principal flutist whose distinctive, ever-so-slightly melancholy tone has defined the sound of the modern Boston Symphony, has announced that she will leave her position next year. She sued the orchestra in 2018 to secure pay equal to that of the oboist who sits to her left, John Ferrillo. She has drawn on the experience of that lawsuit, which was settled in 2019, to fashion a new career as a career coach and gender equality advocate. She returned from a period of leave with these concerts, and her immaculate, expressive playing was so exquisite that it brought back to mind the view of Ferrillo, as it was quoted in legal filings, that she is “the finest orchestral flutist in North America.” She should be celebrated, and will be missed.Susanna Mälkki, left, led the Boston Symphony in a concert that featured the pianist Seong-Jin Cho.Hilary ScottThese issues speak not only to a lack of leadership, but to the Boston Symphony’s struggle to chart a course from its storied history to an unclear future. It is finding its way, slowly. Four years ago, I wrote that it seemed complacent, “content simply to abide” while equally traditionalist ensembles were starting to experiment. Happily, it would be wrong to level the same charge now.Since its return after the pandemic, the orchestra has tried to connect with a wider swath of Bostonians, enlisting Mayor Michelle Wu in the cause, and its artistic concerns have become more varied and more connected to our time. There was a three-week festival in March that, although miserably attended, posed important social questions about race and gender. The two concerts I heard, which included a brilliantly raucous staging of Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story” with the singers of the Lorelei Ensemble, were bolder than anything I had previously witnessed at Symphony Hall. Even the ensemble’s standard repertoire concerts are no longer so beholden to the standards: In January, Karina Canellakis led a fiery account of the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra just a few days after Alan Gilbert had found a way to get Stenhammar’s glorious Serenade onto a program.Where does Nelsons fit into this? Oddly, the Boston Symphony seems to be at its most creative when its music director is away. He continues to do his duty by new music: For Sunday’s concert at Tanglewood, he programmed Julia Adolphe’s “Makeshift Castle” for the third time in a year or so, granting beautifully evocative detail to its memories of a childhood sunset, and on Friday he was a sincere advocate for Williams’s wistful Violin Concerto No. 2, which Mutter played with her trademark commitment. Nelsons remains an enviable accompanist, too, drawing a strong roster of soloists to his side; Fleming can rarely have received such sensitive support as she did in her six Strauss songs here, which ended with a touching “Morgen.”But over the course of a subscription season, Nelsons is frustratingly inconsistent. His readings can come off as run-throughs rather than proper interpretations, and for every score that he conducts in a manner befitting his stature — a mighty, tensile Mahler Sixth in October, for instance, or his searing double bill of Britten’s Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony in May — there is another that exasperates. He was in typical form last weekend: perfectly satisfactory in Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” on Sunday, when he seemed to celebrate the intense virtuosity of his principal players, but desperately sluggish in works by Strauss and Ravel on Friday.His contract is likely to be extended, but as of today it has not been renewed past the end of the 2024-25 season. In classical music, that is no time at all. Count it as another decision that Smith has to make. More

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      9 Songs From Pop’s ‘Middle Class’ That Deserve to Be Hits

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      Hear songs by Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX, Troye Sivan and more.Carly Rae Jepsen, likely cutting to a feeling.Jason Cairnduff/ReutersDear listeners,On Monday, The Times published a piece by the critic Shaad D’Souza that asked a question I’ve been pondering a lot over the past decade: “What happens when a pop star isn’t that popular?”D’Souza created a taxonomy of a relatively varied assortment of musicians — among them Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX, Kim Petras, Troye Sivan and Rita Ora — who embrace pop musical sounds and command devoted, internet-savvy fan bases but still operate below the visibility of “major” pop stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. “For these artists,” D’Souza writes, “pop stardom isn’t a commercial category, but a sound, an aesthetic and an attitude.”“Pop,” though, is of course short for “popular,” and some purists might dismiss D’Souza’s question as a futile thought experiment: If a tree in a forest releases a single that fails to crack the Hot 100, does it even make a sound? And with detractors quick to label any perceived misstep as evidence that a pop star has entered her flop era, success and failure can now feel like an irreversible binary.But there are plenty of gray areas, too, and I appreciate the optimism of D’Souza’s conclusion: Hey, it’s a living. “It may be miles away from the spectacle and flash usually associated with pop music,” he writes of this broad career trajectory, “but it does provide a path toward something that, for decades, has proved elusive for a lot of aspirant pop stars: career sustainability.”The article made me think of something I mentioned in last Friday’s newsletter: Jepsen’s recent sets at Rockwood Music Hall (save it, please!), a tiny venue into which she crammed 150 fans at a time after her outdoor concert at the larger Pier 17 was cut short because of weather. Jepsen seemed to be having a ball leading direct-to-fan singalongs with her frenzied devotees, who may not fill Swift-sized arenas, but who nevertheless adore her. With Eras Tour tickets either impossible to come by or prohibitively expensive anyway, maybe pledging allegiance to a pop star with a more modestly sized fan base is, these days, the more sustainable way to stan.Though D’Souza makes the argument that the majority of these performers operate in a relatively safe pop playground, adjusted commercial ambitions also free up many of these artists to stop chasing fickle chart trends and make bolder, stranger and more sonically adventurous pop music. I want to celebrate that freedom on today’s playlist, which culls some of my favorite songs from a few of the artists D’Souza affectionately called “pop’s middle class.”My personal favorites of these are-they-actually-pop stars are generally the more outré ones: the eternal club kid Charli XCX, the vocally dexterous former Chairlift frontwoman Caroline Polachek and the genre-omnivorous British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama. But, as you’ll hear, I appreciate a solid Jepsen banger as much as the next Jepfriend.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Carly Rae Jepsen: “Surrender My Heart”One of my favorite songs from Jepsen’s 2022 album, “The Loneliest Time,” “Surrender My Heart” — a surging synth-pop tune about how difficult it can be to open up to the possibility of new love — has one of Jepsen’s signature anthemic choruses and even some of her wry humor: “I paid to toughen up in therapy/She said to me, ‘soften up.’” (Listen on YouTube)2. Troye Sivan, “Rush”The lusty, effervescent “Rush” is the first single from the Australian musician Sivan’s upcoming album “Something to Give Each Other.” Sivan was one of the few cast members not to embarrass himself on HBO’s recent narratively challenged series “The Idol”; it remains to be seen if that increased visibility will push him closer to pop’s A-list. (Listen on YouTube)3. Caroline Polachek: “Welcome to My Island”Maybe one of my favorite pop choruses in years? Every time I hear it, I want to shout it off the top of the mountain like the guy from that Ricola commercial: “DESIIIIIIIIIIRE! I want to turn into you!” That lyric from “Welcome to My Island” also gives Polachek’s latest album — easily one of my most-played of 2023 — its charmingly ridiculous title. (Listen on YouTube)4. Charli XCX: “Constant Repeat”“I’m cute and I’m rude with kind of rare attitude,” Charli XCX sings, summing up her own unruly musical personality on this highlight from her sleek 2022 album “Crash,” which lets a flighty would-be lover know exactly what they missed out on. (Listen on YouTube)5. Ava Max: “Million Dollar Baby”At her best, Ava Max sounds like Lady Gaga would if she were still making “Fame Monster” B-sides in 2023. I mean this as a compliment; in my opinion, most pop songs should sound like they could have been included on “The Fame Monster.” Ava Max’s biggest hit, “Sweet but Psycho” from 2019, certainly fits this description, but I’m also a fan of this driving 2022 single, which cleverly employs an interpolation of LeAnn Rimes’s 2000 “Coyote Ugly” smash “Can’t Fight the Moonlight.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Troye Sivan, “Rager Teenager!”This wistful track, from the 2020 EP “In a Dream,” shows off the softer, sparser side of Sivan’s dreamy pop. It also would have worked as an entry on last month’s exclamatory playlist! (Listen on YouTube)7. Rina Sawayama: “Bad Friend”Man, I love this one. File it under “incredibly common life experiences that no one really writes pop songs about”; Sawayama’s wrenching “Bad Friend” chronicles, to the tune of a beautifully melancholy melody, the gradual erosion of a once-close friendship. “So don’t ask me where I’ve been, been avoiding everything,” Sawayama sings, before finding solace in a chorus of people confessing that they can relate: “Put your hands up if you’re not good at this stuff.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Carly Rae Jepsen: “Cut to the Feeling”Jepsen — bless her — has an unfortunate tendency to bury some of her best work, and it’s possible that has hampered her ability to achieve another pop radio smash. Consider that the single she released after “Call Me Maybe” was a painfully twee duet with the guy from Owl City (if you don’t remember Owl City, I’m jealous of your brain), or that she kicked off her “Emotion” era by releasing as a leadoff single that excellent album’s very worst song, “I Really Like You.” (At least she got Tom Hanks in the video.) “Cut to the Feeling,” from 2015, is an absolutely perfect, ecstatic, 10-out-of-10 pop song, and if you have never heard of it before that’s because it was released on the soundtrack of a Canadian-French animated film called “Ballerina.” At least you get to hear it now! (Listen on YouTube)9. Charli XCX: “Track 10”Many of Charli’s Angels — this one included — consider the gleefully forward-thinking 2017 mixtape “Pop 2” to be Charli’s magnum opus (so far) and this epic finale to be one of her most successful experiments. D’Souza highlights Charli as a musician who has straddled the worlds of mainstream pop and its more risk-taking underground, and a clear distillation of that contrast can be heard in the two different versions she’d recorded of one particular song. “Blame It on Your Love,” from her 2019 album “Charli,” is a glossy, radio-friendly tropical house jam, complete with a by-the-numbers guest verse from Lizzo. “Track 10,” though, is something else: A wildly weird deconstruction of a pop song, culminating in an escalating bridge that sounds like it’s being sung by a malfunctioning laser printer. Some songs are so special that something would be lost by even giving them a title. So this one, fittingly, is just “Track 10.” (Listen on YouTube)Desiiiiiiiiiiire,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Best of Pop’s ‘Middle Class’” track listTrack 1: Carly Rae Jepsen, “Surrender My Heart”Track 2: Troye Sivan, “Rush”Track 3: Caroline Polachek, “Welcome to My Island”Track 4: Charli XCX, “Constant Repeat”Track 5: Ava Max, “Million Dollar Baby”Track 6: Troye Sivan, “Rager Teenager!”Track 7: Rina Sawayama, “Bad Friend”Track 8: Carly Rae Jepsen, “Cut to the Feeling”Track 9: Charli XCX, “Track 10” More