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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

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      The Hottest Jay-Z Merch: Limited-Edition Library Cards

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      Fans are rushing to collect all 13 of the Brooklyn Public Library’s limited-edition cards, which feature imagery from each of the rapper’s solo albums.Patrons streamed toward the returns desk at the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch on Friday afternoon, buzzing with excitement. Several posed for pictures in the building’s lobby, which was newly plastered with images of Jay-Z, then signed up for special library cards that feature artwork from the rapper’s albums.The limited-edition library cards are the marquee souvenir from “The Book of Hov,” an exhibition honoring Jay-Z that took over the library last month.The cards are free for New York State residents and are available at Brooklyn Public Library branches in 13 different designs, each featuring the cover art from one of Jay-Z’s solo albums. Fans, who see the cards as instantly classic pieces of hip-hop memorabilia, are tracking them down with the sort of fervor usually reserved for vinyl records or concert tees.“Jay-Z being a Brooklyn native, he goes hard for Brooklyn, and his fans go hard for him,” said Chaz Barracks, 35, an artist and postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University. He had taken a five-hour bus ride to Brooklyn to visit the library. “The card was worth it,” he added.According to the library, 11,000 new accounts have been created with associated Jay-Z cards. Branches that offered the limited-edition cards recorded a more than 1,000 percent increase in registrations in the last two weeks of July over the same period in June, according to the library.Roc Nation and Brooklyn Public LibraryLinda E. Johnson, the Brooklyn Public Library’s chief executive, said she had proposed a limited-edition card early in the library’s conversations with Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment company, which created the exhibition. The library had previously released cards featuring the work of Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are.”“Swag in the form of T-shirts or mugs, that’s not really what we’re about,” Ms. Johnson said. “The card is your ticket to everything we have.”Roc Nation came back with the suggestion that they make 13 cards instead. The library decided to allow patrons to collect one of each style, but to rotate different card designs through many of the library’s branches to encourage fans to visit several locations.That plan appears to have worked, with some Brooklyn residents rushing out to collect the set of cards “like Pokémon,” as one social media user described it. Olayinka Martins, 26, a writer living in Brooklyn, spent three days visiting nine different branches in order to collect all 13.Mr. Martins, who learned to read through the Brooklyn library system, said he thought it was smart to plug into the hype cycle that exists around hip-hop merchandise. “The library leadership understands that hip-hop and Black culture have been the site of cool, and cool sells,” he said. “It’s very savvy.”The cards have caught the attention of Jay-Z fans outside the state, who cannot register for them because they lack New York addresses. Online, some are begging New Yorkers to mail them the cards. Complete sets are listed on eBay for upward of $1,000.Mr. Martins did not collect the cards planning to sell them, but he said he had been tempted by offers of more than $700.Ms. Johnson said the library had not been surprised to learn that people were trying to resell the cards. “We wish they weren’t doing it,” she said, “but it’s a small enough number that we’re not so worried right now.”The Brooklyn Public Library is just one of several New York City institutions recognizing the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, which had its origins in the South Bronx. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has released four MetroCards honoring LL Cool J, Pop Smoke, Rakim and Cam’ron, which are being sold near each of the artists’ birthplaces. And the New York Public Library, which has locations in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, has released a special-edition card featuring imagery from the cassette that accompanied the 1983 film “Wild Style.”Brooklyn residents have been especially excited by the Jay-Z exhibition, which traces the artist’s life from his childhood in the Marcy Houses, a public housing complex in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, to his career as a musician and mogul.Olivia Shalhoup, 26, who runs a digital marketing agency and lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, said she found out about the exhibition on social media. She described herself as “a massive Hov fan” who has a “Vol. 3 … Life and Times of S. Carter” rug in her apartment.The Jay-Z card she picked up a few days later is the first physical library card she has owned. “Seeing a rapper be on something as mainstream and as massive as a library card, it’s just phenomenal,” she said.Dr. Barracks felt similarly. While waiting in a 20-minute line for his card, he said he had heard fans “bro-ing out” about which album was superior.“We don’t always see Black stories like Jay-Z’s take over everyday public spaces,” said Dr. Barracks, whose research centers on Black joy. “Every time people go to get other books, maybe it’ll encourage them to remember that our stories exist in the library, too.” More

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      Clarence Avant, Mighty Engine Behind Black Superstars, Dies at 92

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      Behind the scenes, he furthered the careers of numerous entertainers, as well as some athletes and politicians.Clarence Avant, a record executive who shaped the careers not only of Bill Withers, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and other Black singers, but also of politicians, actors and sports figures — exerting so much influence that a 2019 documentary about him was called simply “The Black Godfather” — died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.His family announced his death in a statement.Mr. Avant (pronounced AY-vant), born in a segregated hospital in North Carolina and educated only through the ninth grade, moved easily in the high-powered world of entertainment, helping to establish the idea that Black culture and consumers were forces to be reckoned with.He started out managing a nightclub in Newark in the late 1950s and moved on to representing some of the artists he met there. Joe Glaser, a high-powered agent who handled Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and many other top acts, took Mr. Avant under his wing; perhaps, the documentary suggested, Mr. Glaser, who was white, thought it would be advantageous to have a Black man representing some of his Black clients.In any case, Mr. Avant was soon handling artists including the jazz organist Jimmy Smith and traveling in rarefied circles. Not all his clients were Black; he said Mr. Glaser sent him to Los Angeles in 1964 with the Argentine pianist Lalo Schifrin, who was then working with Dizzy Gillespie, to try to get Mr. Schifrin started on a career composing for film and television. Though he knew nothing about the movie business, Mr. Avant worked his brand of magic on the West Coast: Mr. Schifrin has to date been nominated for six Oscars.In 1960 Mr. Avant formed Sussex Records — he said the name was his combination of the two things people want more than anything else, success and sex — which lasted only about half a decade but released, among other records, Mr. Withers’s early albums.“Clarence made some great choices musically,” Mr. Withers, who died in 2020, said in the documentary. “‘Lean on Me’” — Mr. Withers’s only Billboard No. 1 hit — “was not my choice for a single.”Later in the 1970s Mr. Avant founded Tabu Records, and for a time in the 1990s he was chairman of Motown. He also helped Jim Brown, the football player, build an acting career and negotiated an endorsement deal for Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player, as well as supporting the political careers of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.“One of the things he understands is, there are different kinds of power,” Mr. Obama said in the documentary. “There’s the power that needs the spotlight, but there’s also the power that comes from being behind the scenes.”In 2013, accepting the entrepreneur award at the BET Honors, one of many he received in his career, Mr. Avant summed himself up.“I can’t make speeches,” he told the crowd while clutching his trophy. “That’s not my life. I make deals.”Clarence Alexander Avant was born on Feb. 25, 1931, in Greensboro, N.C., to Gertrude Avant Woods, a domestic worker. In the documentary, he said his mother was not married to his father, Phoenix Jarrell, whom he barely knew.Mr. Avant with Quincy Jones and Whitney Houston.NetflixHe grew up in Climax, N.C., in difficult circumstances and stayed in school only through ninth grade.“We were poor,” he said in the film. “I’m talking about poor, poor, poor. We had chicken-feet soup.”Racism was omnipresent, and the Ku Klux Klan loomed large.“My mother would just tell us, if you hear a car coming, run and hide; lay down flat,” he said.He grew up with a stepfather, Eddie Woods, who was abusive, and he said he left home when he was a teenager after his attempt to kill the man by putting rat poison in his food failed. He went to live with an aunt in Summit, N.J.For a time he held a low-level job at Martindale-Hubbell, publisher of a law directory. In his 20s he started working at a Newark nightclub that featured Black musicians. That was his introduction to the entertainment business, and he proved a natural.“I think Clarence exemplifies a certain cool,” Mr. Obama said in the documentary, “a certain level of street smarts and savvy that allowed him to move into worlds that nobody had prepared him for and say, ‘I can figure this out.’”As his career representing entertainers began to flourish, Mr. Avant met Jacqueline Gray, a model. They married in 1967, and as the couple prospered Ms. Avant became noted for her philanthropic work.In December 2021 a man burglarizing the Avants’ home, Aariel Maynor, shot and killed her. He pleaded guilty to multiple charges the next year and was sentenced to life in prison.In the documentary, friends remarked on their long marriage, somewhat unusual in the entertainment world.“They still look like they’ve got wedding cake on their feet,” the actor Jamie Foxx said, “like they just walked off a soul wedding cake.”Mr. Avant’s daughter, Nicole Avant, said in a phone interview that after the tragedy, her father made a conscious effort to press on.In 2013, Mr. Avant was presented with the entrepreneur award by the producers Jimmy Jam, center, and Terry Lewis at the BET Honors in Washington.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters“Music was, I think, the lifesaving force for him,” she said, especially that of Ellington, Frank Sinatra and other artists from his youth. “His mood changed when the music came on.”At about the time he was getting ready to marry Jacqueline, Mr. Avant was growing more vocal about racial matters. A 1967 article in The Pittsburgh Courier quoted a strongly worded letter he had written to the management of WLIB, a radio station in New York that was aimed at a Black audience but at the time was white-owned.“Is your station managed by Negroes,” he wrote, “and I am not referring to Negro disc jockeys?”“I think radio stations whose programs are supposed to appeal to the so-called Negro market,” he added, “should at least be staffed by Negro personnel.”He was also becoming active politically. He supported the early campaigns of Andrew Young, who made an unsuccessful run for a Georgia congressional seat in 1970 and a successful one two years later. It was Mr. Young who connected Mr. Avant to Hank Aaron when he was about to break Babe Ruth’s career home run record in 1974.“Clarence called me up and said, ‘Andy, do you know Hank Aaron?’” Mr. Young recalled in the documentary, which was directed by Reginald Hudlin. “I said, ‘Yeah, he lives around the corner.’ He said, ‘If he’s about to break Babe Ruth’s record, he’s supposed to make some money.’”Mr. Avant wanted to help Mr. Aaron secure some endorsement deals.“Will you tell him that I’m not crazy and I’m going to call him?” Mr. Avant asked Mr. Young.“I said, ‘Well, I can’t vouch for you not being crazy,’” Mr. Young said, “‘but I’ll tell him that you’ve been very helpful to me.’”It was fraught territory — Mr. Aaron was receiving death threats over the prospect that he would break a hallowed record set by a white player. Mr. Avant, though, according to the documentary, marched into the office of the president of Coca-Cola and told him, in unprintably blunt language, that Black people drink Coke.Mr. Avant’s guidance helped Mr. Aaron secure a substantial deal from Coke and otherwise market himself, which fueled his later charitable endeavors.“Henry Aaron would not be Henry Aaron if it were not for Clarence Avant,” Mr. Aaron, who died in 2021, said in the film.Mr. Avant also helped other athletes, including Jim Brown as he transitioned from football into acting in the 1960s. Interviewed for the documentary, Mr. Brown, one of the biggest Black stars of the 1960s and ’70s, had a hard time pinning down what Mr. Avant did — not an uncommon thing among those who knew and worked with Mr. Avant.“You have this guy called Clarence Avant that everybody’s talking about, but nobody seems to understand just what his official title was,” Mr. Brown, who died in May, said, recalling their early meetings. “I couldn’t tell you now exactly what he — was he an agent, a manager, a lawyer? — what he was.”Mr. Avant had rocky times in the mid-1970s, when the Sussex label went bankrupt and KAGB-FM, a radio station he had bought (making it one of the first Black-owned stations in the Los Angeles area), floundered. But, he said, friends were always his most important asset, and some of them helped him get back on his feet.Tabu Records, which Mr. Avant founded in 1975, released records by the S.O.S. Band, Cherrelle and others.In addition to his daughter, who was a producer of “The Black Godfather,” Mr. Avant is survived by a son, Alexander, and a sister, Anne Woods.The Avant home was always abuzz with A-list visitors. Nicole Avant recalled a day, when she was 12, that she and a friend got into trouble at school. The friend’s mother, driving Nicole home, was fuming — until she saw Harry Belafonte walking out of the Avants’ house.“Is that Harry Belafonte?” the woman asked her.”I said, ‘Yeah, how do you know Harry Belafonte?” — not realizing he was anyone other than a friend who would come around to visit her parents from time to time.Ms. Avant, who served as ambassador to the Bahamas during the Obama administration, said that Mr. Belafonte and others who would gather at the Avant home were serious about breaking down racial barriers, in the entertainment world and in society in general.“They knew that they were on a mission,” she said.The flood of tributes offered to Mr. Avant on Monday included many from younger performers who appreciated his legacy.“He is the ultimate example of what change looks like, what architecting change looks like, and what the success of change looks like,” the rapper and producer Pharrell said in a statement. “He stared adversity in the face in climates and conditions that weren’t welcoming to people that looked like him. But through his talent and relentless spirit in the pursuit to be the best of the best, he garnered the support and friendship of people who otherwise wouldn’t look in our direction.” More

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      Magoo, Rapper and Former Timbaland Collaborator, Dies at 50

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      Melvin Barcliff, who rapped under the name Magoo, was a teenager in Virginia when he joined a hip-hop scene that still influences music today.The rapper Magoo, a foundational member of a groundbreaking hip-hop scene that emerged in Virginia in the 1990s and that included his collaborators Timbaland, Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams, has died at 50.Magoo, whose birth name was Melvin Barcliff, died this weekend in Williamsburg, Va., according to his wife, Meco Barcliff, and a statement from his family. Barcliff said that he had no known health problems other than asthma, but that he had not been feeling well in the past week. The coroner’s office was still investigating the cause, she said.Magoo was a child when rap music was first broadcast on the radio, and he credited it with helping save him from a difficult early childhood in Norfolk, Va. At first, he thought hip-hop was something he could dance and listen to, but was made only by people in the Northeast, he said in an April 2013 interview for the hip-hop oral history collection at the College of William & Mary.As rap music began to drift from the coasts and Atlanta to radios and record stores in Virginia, Magoo realized at 14 years old that it was an art form he could practice, too. At Deep Creek High School in Chesapeake, he made friends with other teenagers who also wanted to rap including Timothy Mosley, also known as Timbaland, who became a renowned music producer.Magoo and his associates in the Virginia Beach area, including Pharrell Williams and Missy Elliott, would go on to exert a heavy influence on music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Magoo and Timbaland formed a duo and between 1997 and 2003 put out three albums. “Welcome to Our World,” their first collaboration, included the track “Up Jumps da’ Boogie,” featuring Elliott and Aaliyah, which reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, their highest charting effort. Critics noted the project as a step in Timbaland’s development as a producer, and compared Magoo to Q-Tip, one of the rappers in the Queens group A Tribe Called Quest.On Monday morning, Timbaland posted on Instagram several videos and photos of the two together and said in one caption: “Tim and Magoo forever.”Elliott wrote on Instagram on Monday that she met Magoo when they were teenagers and that he gave her the nickname “Misdemeanor,” telling her it was because “it’s a crime to have that many talents.”Though Magoo faded from the spotlight as his early collaborators’ stars continued to rise, Barcliff said that her husband had always preferred to be behind the scenes.She said that they separated five or six years ago but that they were still family.The couple met on Aug. 10, 1996, at a club, she said. Even though Magoo was a great dancer, she said, she would learn a few months later that he did not like to go out because it was too much like being at work. “That’s when I found out: No more clubbing for me,” she said.Magoo met Tim Mosley, also known as Timbaland, in 10th grade. They were part of a group of friends who started rapping together in the 1990s.Johnny Nunez/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarcliff said that she had a 2-year-old daughter, Detrice “Pawtt” Bickham, when they met, and that Magoo raised her as his own. As a family, they loved going to theme parks, including Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion.Magoo’s survivors include the aunt and uncle who raised him and whom he considered his mother and father, Magdaline and Hiawatha Brown, and his two sisters, Portia Brown and Lynette Hawks.In the William & Mary interview, Magoo said that his aunt, who went by Mag, inspired his rap name, Mag-an-ooh, which he then shortened.He said in the interview that his aunt took him in when he was 4 years old. He said he most likely would have been taken into state custody without his aunt’s care and he “probably would have ended up away from family and wouldn’t have been in the position to become what I was able to become.”He treasured the memory of the first time he heard a rap song, he said. He could still remember where he was standing, in another aunt’s house, when he heard the track, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang.“It just changed my whole perspective on life because, like I said, I was, 6 or 7 at the time,” Magoo recalled. “I was only three years away from being with my real mother who had abused me, so I hadn’t completely get over that abuse, but rap music became my blanket.”Alain Delaquérière More

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      A Farewell to Mostly Mozart, and to Its Music Director

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      Louis Langrée led a week of concerts to conclude his two-decade tenure with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.After 21 years, Louis Langrée’s tenure as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra has ended. As a farewell, he conducted two programs across four evenings last week, and the music he made was uplifting, staggeringly beautiful and, finally, triumphant.The ensemble used to be associated with a festival of the same name, but that was quietly shuttered after the 2019 season. Next year, the players will have a new name and a new music director. But the sound of the orchestra — which draws its musicians from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s and several other groups — as it is known today was built by Langrée.“What I have learned and shared has made life more beautiful,” Langrée told the audience on Friday, during an evening that became an extended goodbye, with breaks for recollections, reflections and even musical demonstrations à la Leonard Bernstein (whom he cited as an influence). Langrée struck up the band as he explained the deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s melodic writing or the off-kilter minuet of the 40th Symphony. But he caught himself: “It’s a concert, not a lecture,” he said with a chuckle.His first program of the week, on Tuesday, was a motley assortment of pieces by Lully, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Kodaly and Valerie Coleman, taking the orchestra’s tasting-platter approach to an extreme. Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times,” written without strings or woodwinds, was a study in layered, graduated brass timbres. The orchestra dug into the saturated colors and whiz-bang energy of Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta” and brought a bountiful tone to a Mozart overture and selections from Lully’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”The 27-year-old violinist Randall Goosby, making his Mostly Mozart debut, was luminous in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto — his tone luscious, elegant and sweet without being syrupy. His unforced ease and alluringly relaxed vibrato gave his legato suppleness, and his trill was an act of gracefulness instead of athleticism. When the orchestra re-entered with the first movement’s main theme, it felt like a catharsis of the joy Goosby had cultivated.Compared with the stylistic whiplash of Tuesday, Friday was magnificently lucid: a jubilant tour through Mozart’s final three symphonies. Langrée referred to the pieces as the “holy trinity” of Mozart’s symphonic output, all written in the summer of 1788. The program’s sense of occasion, its feeling of culmination, turned Langrée wistful; he thanked the ushers, stage crews and security personnel and expressed pride in the Mostly Mozart players, most of whom he hired himself. “This place will stay magical for me,” he said.At the final program, Langrée was presented with a bouquet of roses that he then gave out to each member of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterLangrée is a Mozartean of vibrancy, potency and efficiency. Mozart is about harmoniousness — requiring an orchestra to balance color, style and execution in a reflection of the music’s essential consonance — but Langrée treats that quality as a starting point. Then he finds expressive freedom, something like romance, but attacks it incisively. The music bursts with feeling as it flies by in tidy fashion.The works came in chronological order, starting with the Symphony No. 39, in which the players unleashed sonorous drama in the Adagio-Allegro and wholly conceived melodic statements in the Andante con Moto (which featured Christopher Pell’s dreamy clarinet). Langrée didn’t shortchange the minuet’s clipped phrases, and the concluding Allegro had a windswept quality.He brought expansiveness to these late symphonies without distending them and let them breathe without slowing them down. In the 40th, Langrée crafted a fast, finely wrought opening filled with slender sound that kept anxiety and release in constant tension. The Allegro Assai, full of life, had dash as well as elegant form.After intermission on Friday, Langrée got candid. He pushed back against the way “Lincoln Center wants to present less classical because it’s elitist,” adding that the center can and should embrace hip-hop and R&B without abandoning Mostly Mozart fare. He pleaded with the audience to return next year to support the musicians, even if Mozart’s name is being “erased from the orchestra.”Langrée located the greatness of the “Jupiter” Symphony in its compassion rather than its grandeur. He cushioned the assertive opening and deftly scaled back to something human — a sly smile, a sense of generosity. The winds peeked through with their peculiar colors, and the fugato finale churned briskly.There will invariably be lapses in music whose finery never allows players to hide. Occasionally, the violins turned gray, or the horns lost their gleam. The endless runs of the Andante Cantabile in the “Jupiter” had an admirable singing quality most, if not all, of the time.On Saturday, for Langrée’s last concert with the orchestra, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation when he entered, and applauded him and the players for nearly 20 minutes at the end.The previous night, Langrée had talked — and sung — through the five parts that make up the “Jupiter” fugue before leading the orchestra in an even more effervescent encore of it. At each of the final two concerts, he was presented with a bouquet of red roses and gave out stems to each of the players. He tossed one to the audience, then kept one for himself. More

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      Travis Scott’s ‘Utopia’ Repeats at No. 1

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      The rapper’s latest solo album is the first hip-hop release to spend more than a single week atop the Billboard 200 in over a year.Travis Scott is No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second time this week, while Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” logs its 16th time as the top single.“Utopia,” Scott’s first new solo album in five years — and the first since his Astroworld Festival in 2021, where 10 people were crushed to death — holds the top spot on the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 147,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total includes 146 million streams and 37,000 copies of the LP sold as a complete package.With fewer rap albums topping the charts these days — country, pop, R&B and Latin have been more in favor — “Utopia” is the first in over a year to notch more than a single week at No. 1. In April 2022, Tyler, the Creator’s “Call Me if You Get Lost” logged its second time at the top, thanks to the delayed release of that album’s vinyl version. (“Call Me” had opened at No. 1 nine months before.) The last rap album to spend at least its first two weeks at No. 1 was Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” in September 2021; it held at the top for three weeks, then later returned for another two.Wallen’s album “One Thing at a Time” is No. 2, while his song “Last Night,” a monster hit on streaming services and pop radio, holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100. With 16 weeks atop the singles chart, “Last Night” is on a rare streak, tying Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” from 2017, and “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, from 1995. Only Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” with 19 weeks in 2019, had a longer run at the top.Also this week, the “Barbie” soundtrack, featuring Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Lizzo, is the No. 3 album, and Taylor Swift logs four albums in the Top 10: “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (No. 4), “Midnights” (No. 5), “Lover” (No. 6) and “Folklore” (No. 9). More

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      At Time Spans Festival, New York Shows Off New Music

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      The festival is a bright spot on the August calendar, with casual yet tightly plotted concerts of modern and contemporary music.Classical music’s global summer season is full of destination-worthy presentations. In August, New York makes a contribution: The Time Spans Festival, a modern and contemporary-music event that is the equal of anything on the international circuit.So after a couple weeks covering operas and starry premieres in Europe, I made sure to be home in New York for the first shows in this year’s festival, which runs through Aug. 26. It all takes place in the refreshingly cool, subterranean hall of the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen.Saturday’s opener was dedicated to works by the 20th-century composer Luigi Nono. This Italian modernist worked frequently with the resident electronic specialists of the SWR Experimentalstudio, a German public radio electronic studio from Freiburg. At the DiMenna Center, this group collaborated with musicians in Ensemble Experimental, giving these performances the feeling of deep investment and institutional know-how.Brad Lubman conducting the Nono concert.George EtheredgeFirst up was “Omaggio a Emilio Vedova” from 1961. A fixed-media piece — for tape only — it was spatialized in the hall by the SWR technicians, with eight speakers surrounding the audience. And though just over four minutes in length, this slashing, vertiginous work made a strong impression: its brief metallic shards of prerecorded sound revolving around audience-member eardrums with a grace that made Nono’s supposedly harsh aesthetic seem balletic.The short presentation also blasted into dust the recent, expensive and much-ballyhooed spatial-music presentation at the Shed, the Sonic Sphere. There, audience members were hoisted up into a giant dome, only to listen to a surround-speaker system with blurry low-end sonic fidelity. At the DiMenna Center, listeners kept their feet on the underground floor, but the whirling sound production was pristine — and transporting.When live instrumentalists from Ensemble Experimental joined the fray, this sense of fun continued, even during gnomic works with generally quiet dynamics, like Nono’s “A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum” (1985).Maruta Staravoitava (flute) Andrea Nagy (clarinet) and Noa Frenkel on Saturday.George EtheredgeJozsef Bazsinka.George EtheredgeHere, the subtle electronic processing of live instrumental playing was a consistent delight: When astringent live notes, played by a bass flutist and a bass clarinetist, came back around in the electronic part, they seemed somehow softened by the electronic merging and transformation. With those newly mellowed-out sounds crawling across the back of your head — courtesy of speakers in the rear of the room — the piece then turned its bass clarinetist loose, by asking for yawping but controlled overblowing from the reed player. (Here it was Andrea Nagy making those striated and punchy sounds.)That piece and one that came next — “Omaggio a Gyorgy Kurtag” — have been recorded on a fine SWR release on the Neos imprint. But that’s a two-channel stereo recording. Here, as led by the guest conductor Brad Lubman, both took on greater depth in the immersive surround-sound setting.The festival’s second night kept the European-experimentalist trend going, but in a fully acoustic fashion, with the JACK Quartet’s renditions of the second and third string quartets by Helmut Lachenmann.Electronic processing of live instrumental playing in the Nono concert was a consistent delight.George EtheredgeSpeaking from the stage between pieces, the violist John Pickford Richards described Lachenmann’s reputation as someone who makes Western classical instruments seethe and twitch in ways previously inconceivable. (His influence can be felt on other German composers of his generation, as well as adventurous American composers like David Sanford.)Richards also noted that “Grido,” the third quartet, which the ensemble had just played, was one that the JACK instrumentalists had performed together before they were a formal group. And so they think of Lachenmann as a father of the ensemble.That deep familial relationship was already apparent in JACK’s reading of that third quartet. That performance seemed to say: Forget everything you think you know about how weird this guy’s sound-production techniques are; just get lost in the confident, persuasive flow of these unusual ideas.

      Complete String Quartets (mode267) by Helmut LachenmannAs on a recording for the Mode label, the JACK players proved they know how to get the most out of this pathbreaking music, savoring the crisscrossing flurries of steely motifs. (They did it with enviable clarity, creating a spatialized feel through purely acoustic means.) At other points, the violinist Christopher Otto in particular seemed to relish the brief touches of more familiar vibrato that Lachenmann allows into the piece.Lachenmann’s second quartet, which on Sunday followed the third, came across more like a notebook of ideas — ideas that would later find their ideal expression in the third quartet. Still, it was a pleasure to experience such a focused, hourlong tour through this composer’s string writing.George EtheredgeAnd audiences seem to have caught on to the Time Spans model — of casual yet tightly plotted concerts, usually lasting an hour to 90 minutes, with no intermission. This weekend’s programs looked close to sold out. And affordable tickets, just $20, are still available to most remaining shows.There are no dress codes, and no complicated advance-festival planning is required. In this way, Time Spans is part of the (necessary) genre-wide effort to make classical music more approachable. Crucially, the festival does that assuming that new audiences can handle new music. More