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      Matthias Pintscher to Lead Kansas City Symphony

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      He will take the podium in 2024, with a mandate to help draw new audiences to classical music.The German-born composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher didn’t know what to expect when he traveled to Missouri in March to lead a series of performances with the Kansas City Symphony. He had never been to the city, nor had he worked with its orchestra.But after a few days of rehearsing and performing works by Ravel, Ligeti and Scriabin, Pintscher felt a deep connection with the ensemble. “There was magic,” he said in an interview. “A willingness to really give the best.”The orchestra was impressed, too: On Tuesday, it announced that Pintscher, 52, had agreed to serve as its next music director, beginning with a five-year term in 2024. He will succeed Michael Stern, who has been the orchestra’s leader since 2005, and lead the orchestra for 10 weeks each season.Danny Beckley, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, offered Pintscher the job only a couple of days after his March visit. He described Pintscher’s relationship with the orchestra as “electric” and said he hoped Pintscher could help to get more people into the concert hall.“We are committed to making orchestral music more appealing to a far wider audience, and I think Matthias can really help make that happen,” Beckley said in a statement.Pintscher, who lives in New York City, rose to prominence as a composer, writing a range of music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, as well as solo pieces for piano and voice. His compositions are often evocative and mysterious, showcasing the ability of instruments like the clarinet and the double bass to whisper.He has also won accolades as a conductor, serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, a new music group, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra in Switzerland. (His tenure at the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which he has led for a decade, ends this season.) He is a member of the composition faculty at Juilliard.In Kansas City, he said, he felt a sense of belonging. He recalled chatting with a stranger at a supermarket; after he introduced himself, she immediately bought tickets to a concert.“It was such a warm welcome, by the city, the locals, the public, the musicians,” he said. “It was a happy arrival.” More

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      Morgan Wallen Postpones Six Weeks of Shows After Vocal Cord Injury

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      The country superstar, who has held No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for nine straight weeks, said the pause was recommended by his doctors.Morgan Wallen, the chart-dominating country star, is postponing six weeks of shows on his current tour, saying in a statement on Tuesday that he had injured his vocal cords and that the pause was recommended by his doctors.“I performed three shows last weekend in Florida and by the third one I felt terrible,” Wallen said in a video posted on social media. “So I went in and got scoped yesterday, and they told me that I reinjured my vocal cords and that I have vocal fold trauma. Their advice is that I go on vocal rest for six weeks, so that’s what I’m going to do.”He also announced that he would not perform as scheduled at the Academy of Country Music Awards show this Thursday, where he is up for entertainer of the year.A spokeswoman for Wallen said that 14 shows would be postponed, starting with a planned date in Hershey, Penn., on May 18, and including two shows at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. The tour is set to resume on June 22 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.Rescheduled dates will be announced.Last month, Wallen canceled a stadium show at the University of Mississippi shortly before he was to take the stage, saying that he had lost his voice. Even so, angry fans took to social media to complain.Wallen has held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart for the last nine weeks with his 36-track new album, “One Thing at a Time,” which has now been streamed about 2.3 billion times in the United States alone. His last LP, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” was No. 1 for 10 weeks two years ago, even amid an industry rebuke — including his temporary removal from country radio playlists — after he was caught on video using a racist slur.In his statement on Tuesday, Wallen said: “They told me that if I do this the right way, I’ll get back to 100 percent, and they also said that if I don’t listen and I keep singing, then I’ll permanently damage my voice.”“So for the longevity of my career,” he added, “this is just a choice I had to make.” More

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      Boston’s Mayor, Michelle Wu, Trades City Hall for Symphony Hall

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      Michelle Wu, a lifelong pianist, has played to prepare for mayoral debates. Last weekend, she joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra onstage.BOSTON — There are things that a big-city mayor just has to do. Cut a ribbon here. Plant a tree there. Throw out the first pitch. Play Mozart with the local symphony orchestra.Hang on a second.Plenty of politicians might say that they support the arts, but Michelle Wu, a Democrat who became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected mayor of Boston, in November 2021, is one of the few who will court embarrassment to prove it.At the free “Concert for the City” on Sunday afternoon, put on by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its sister ensemble, the Boston Pops, Wu took the stage before a nearly full house at Symphony Hall here to perform as the soloist in the dreamy slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. She may not quite be ready for a world tour, but with the Symphony and its music director, Andris Nelsons, in support, she captured more of the composer’s characteristic elegance than an amateur might. And she barely missed a note.“I think Michelle did it so wonderfully,” Nelsons said during a news conference after the performance.While political figures, including Edward M. Kennedy, the former Massachusetts senator, and Thomas M. Menino, the former Boston mayor, have from time to time stood on the podium while the Pops has played such staples as “Sleigh Ride” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the Symphony’s archivist said that Wu, 38, was almost certainly the first officeholder in the orchestra’s more than 140-year history to take the far greater risk of stepping into the spotlight as a soloist.Some players in the ensemble — which had rehearsed with her on Saturday, before giving a ferociously intense reading that night of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 to end its subscription season — stayed onstage to watch, even though they had no music to play.Wu played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with the orchestra as part of Boston’s “Concert for the City.”Robert Torres“I have been playing piano since long, long before I ever thought about politics, and my parents are probably more than skeptical still about the politics thing,” Wu said at the news conference, adding with a laugh, “This is probably the proudest that they’ve ever been of me, and it took getting elected to mayor to be able to do this.”For the Boston Symphony, the performance was a chance to showcase its quickly strengthening commitment to community engagement. For Wu, it was a platform to promote her policies as the city’s arts institutions steadily right themselves after the pandemic, including her insistence that every child in a Boston public school should have access to an instrument. But it was also an occasion to reflect on the deeper connections that she — as a pianist who trained from age 4 and, as The Boston Globe reported, keeps an upright in her City Hall office — sees between music and politics broadly.Classical artists often talk in platitudes about music being a universal language that can transcend borders, but for Wu, who grew up in Chicago as the first child of immigrants from Taiwan and who also learned the violin, the commonplaces were a reality.“I remember very vaguely when I was young, we would go drive really far so my mom would sing in a community chorus concert,” Wu said in an interview. “My mom has a gorgeous voice, so much of my function learning piano growing up was to be her accompanist.”Music offered Wu’s parents continuity amid change, as they learned English and adapted to a new culture. She remembered seeing that her mother had transliterated the words in her score for Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” into Chinese, so that she could pronounce them correctly.“My parents were in a very modest situation,” Wu said. “We were initially receiving benefits and as my dad’s career moved up, kind of moved more firmly into the middle class. But piano lessons were, I’m sure, at that time just a luxury splurge for them. But it was important because my parents were both musical, and again, it was their way to feel like the barriers maybe weren’t so high in this country.”As a high schooler, Wu played the solo part in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and she became a subscriber to the Boston Symphony while she was studying at Harvard University. Although she practiced hard for Sunday’s performance, she said, she had made a tradition of playing for herself the night before mayoral debates.“My go-to to really calm myself is Liszt’s ‘Un Sospiro,’” Wu said. “With the flowing of it, you can really lose yourself quickly. And then if it was that kind of day, it’d be a little Rachmaninoff.”Wu’s Boston Symphony appearance came about after she and her children attended a family and youth concert last year, and she played a few bars of Liszt backstage for that program’s conductor, Thomas Wilkins. The orchestra approached her about Sunday’s concert of short, mostly Boston-related works about a month and a half ago, offering her three Mozart pieces to choose from. She took a few weeks to think about it, she admitted.“Just as I try to be honest about the challenges that can come with being a working parent,” Wu said at the news conference, “in the hopes that that means we change our systems faster and encourage other people to believe that it’s possible to live their lives and give their fullest in every way, I hope that people will see that we can come to our positions — if you might be so fortunate to have a position of leadership or whatever platform you have — to bring your whole self to that.”Wu talks about the role that the arts can play in society with a conviction that many musical institutions are still working to acquire, describing them as, among other things, “a vehicle to talk about and address our biggest challenges in new and interesting ways,” such as climate change and race. These are beliefs that, she said, she might not hold with the same intensity if she had not played the piano.“I would imagine that even as someone who would not necessarily play but be a passionate audience member, there’s something about the feeling and the connection that you can’t put words to when all of it comes together,” Wu said in the interview. “The power of how people felt connected in Symphony Hall today, hanging on every note, delighted at each individual piece and the surprises and twists of every composition — that’s a model for how we want our community to be, day in and day out, in this city.” More

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      ‘Teeth’ Adaptation and ‘Stereophonic’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

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      The company’s 2023-24 lineup includes works by Michael R. Jackson, Anna K. Jacobs, David Adjmi and Will Butler of Arcade Fire.Playwrights Horizons will present three large-scale productions and three solo works as part of its eclectic lineup for its 2023-24 season, with a range of genres and price points, the company announced on Tuesday.“These last few years are still asking us to pivot and be creative in ways we didn’t know we’d be asked to be,” said Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, who added that the company has had to scale back on producing new and commissioned works because of budgetary constraints.“Our job is to put as much new writing as possible in front of people,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to do more with less.”“Teeth,” based on the horror comedy film about an evangelical teenage girl with toothed genitalia — which the critic Stephen Holden called a “twisted sex-education film,” “quasi-feminist fable” and an “outrageous stunt” — will make its stage premiere in February.The musical production, which has been in the works since before the pandemic, and which Greenfield called “an examination of ancient misogyny,” is written by Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”) and Anna K. Jacobs, and will be choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and directed by Sarah Benson, who will soon be leaving her leadership role at Soho Rep.“It’s bigger than any room that can try to contain it,” Greenfield said. “It’s incredibly fun and incredibly irreverent and brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant.”The season will kick off in October with the world premiere of David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” with original music by the Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, about a band whose members keep clashing while creating a new album. Set over two recording sessions, with fragments of the in-progress songs teased throughout, the show is “a valentine and a cautionary tale to the act of creation itself,” Greenfield said.The 2023-24 season will also feature three solo works written and performed by the playwrights. Milo Cramer’s “School Pictures,” which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in November, is a musical journal of song-poems that present a portrait of the New York City education system. Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which recently ran at the Abrons Art Center, is a clown cabaret about a young woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu will perform his stand-up act, “Amusements,” a mix of storytelling, music and multimedia, which will also make an appearance at Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer.Presented in repertory, the solo performances will begin previews in November; tickets will be offered at a discounted rate.Rounding out the season is Abe Koogler’s “Staff Meal,” a comedic play, directed by Morgan Green, about a wait staff working to keep service running smoothly at a mysterious New York City restaurant while the world falls apart. Previews begin next April.Playwrights Horizons will also present a slate of programming with the Movement Theater Company, a troupe dedicated to developing and producing new work by artists of color. The residency begins in May 2024.“I think people are craving variety,” Greenfield said. “This new season speaks to that cultural shift.” More

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      6 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      Listen to recent highlights from Foo Fighters, Avalon Emerson, Q and more.On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins,Leo Correa/Associated PressDear listeners,Avid Amplifier readers know that each Friday, the Times pop critics put together a selection of our favorite new songs in a feature called the Playlist, and now I am delivering a digest version right to your inbox. No more excuses that you don’t have time to keep up with new music anymore; I’ve got you covered.This mix is probably a combination of some names you know — Jessie Ware, Foo Fighters — and, ideally, a few that you don’t. It gets off to an upbeat start, drifts into some luminous ambience with a wordless, eight-minute Four Tet song, and then ends up somewhere right between those two extremes, with some soothing, synth-driven melodies from Avalon Emerson and Christine and the Queens.I field-tested this playlist while doing chores in my apartment and found it to run the exact length of time it took me to fold a load of wash and put on a fresh duvet cover. Its final moments were an adequate soundtrack for that blissful moment of relief and deep-seated pride when I turned the duvet cover inside out and realized that I had, indeed, put it on correctly. I am unstoppable.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Q: “SOW”I must tip my hat (that I am not wearing) to Jon Pareles for introducing me to this moody number from the profoundly difficult-to-Google R&B artist Q. The son of the Jamaican dance hall producer Stephen (Lenky) Marsden (who is responsible for the Diwali Riddim that was ubiquitous in the early-to-mid aughts), Q Marsden makes music that, in Pareles’s words, echoes “the introspective-verging-on-depressive sides of Phil Collins, Prince and Michael Jackson.” Similarly, on “SOW,” I hear the faintest tinge of Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (certified banger) updated for the age of the Weeknd. (Listen on YouTube)2. Jessie Ware: “Freak Me Now”It takes a special musician to suddenly kick things into a higher gear about a decade into her recording career, but on her 2020 neo-disco breakthrough “What’s Your Pleasure?” the British pop singer Jessie Ware proved to be one of those rare gems. That release was going to be a tough one to follow, let alone top — and then came “That! Feels Good!,” a record of such effervescent joy that even its punctuation makes me grin. This new album continues her streak of lovingly detailed, sumptuously atmospheric dance music, but it’s not just “What’s Your Pleasure? II.” Ware’s fifth album has a vampy sonic ’tude all its own (cut through with a hint of new-wave sass) as you can hear on the electric and immaculately titled dance floor anthem “Freak Me Now.” (Listen on YouTube)3. Foo Fighters: “Rescued”A good Foo Fighters song makes me want to give Dave Grohl a lozenge. Or maybe I shouldn’t, because there’s something distinctly powerful (… Grohlian?) about the way he can sound like he’s shredding his vocal cords beyond repair while still staying effortlessly in tune. I do not know how he does it, but it sounds very cool. On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins, and if the first single “Rescued” is any indication, some of these songs are going to be about processing that tragedy, and at least one of them is going to make me cry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Four Tet: “Three Drums”Kieran Hebden, the British electronic musician who records as Four Tet, has been a known quantity in the relatively niche world of underground dance music for the past two decades, but he’s recently been getting some mainstream attention thanks to his appearances D.J.ing with the somewhat strange bedfellows Fred again.. and Skrillex. (The Three Caballeros of EDM? The Haim of EDM? I’m still workshopping a nickname.) The meditative “Three Drums” is proof that he’s not going pop just yet, though: The song contrasts live-sounding percussion with glowing gradients of synth sounds that unfurl like a sunrise. It’s bliss. (Listen on YouTube)5. Avalon Emerson: “Entombed in Ice”Avalon Emerson is known primarily as a techno D.J., but you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the serene and glacial “Entombed in Ice,” from her new album “& the Charm.” In some sense, she’s reinventing herself as a dream-pop singer-songwriter, but even her D.J. mixes had a kind of smeary intimacy that carries over into this latest release. I like the way she layers her murmured vocals, giving off the impression that the listener is eavesdropping on a conversation she’s having with herself. (Listen on YouTube)6. Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake: “True Love”“True Love,” from the French singer-songwriter Christine and the Queens, is a skeletally arranged low-burner, but it suddenly bursts forth with melodramatic pathos as Chris shifts into a sublime hook. “Angel of light, take me higher,” he sings in a trembling voice. “You’re making me forget my mother.” Not to leave you with a cliffhanger, but that’s a decently foreshadowing hint about the theme of Friday’s playlist. Till then! (Listen on YouTube)I always feel like somebody’s watching me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“6 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Q, “SOW”Track 2: Jessie Ware, “Freak Me Now”Track 3: Foo Fighters, “Rescued”Track 4: Four Tet, “Three Drums”Track 5: Avalon Emerson, “Entombed in Ice”Track 6: Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, “True Love” More

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      A 19-Year-Old Pianist Electrifies Audiences. But He’s Unimpressed.

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      Yunchan Lim’s victory at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year made him a sensation. He says the attention makes him uneasy.After six hours of sleep and a breakfast of milk and curry rice, Yunchan Lim, the South Korean pianist, was in a rehearsal studio at Lincoln Center on Tuesday morning working through a treacherous passage of Rachmaninoff.“A little bit faster,” Lim, in a black sweatshirt and sneakers, said casually to the conductor, James Gaffigan, as they prepared for Lim’s New York Philharmonic debut this week. Gaffigan laughed.“Usually pianists want the opposite!” the conductor said.Lim — shy, soft-spoken and bookish — stunned the music world last year when, at 18, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. His victory made him an immediate sensation; a video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the finals has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube. (He will play that piece with the Philharmonic this week, under Gaffigan’s baton.)Still a college sophomore, Lim has inspired a devout following in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has become a symbol of pride in South Korea, where he has been described as classical music’s answer to K-pop. Like a pop star, his face has been printed on T-shirts.Lim at the Van Cliburn competition, playing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.Richard Rodriguez/The Cliburn, via Associated Press“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. It’s really quite something.”But Lim is uneasy with the attention. He does not believe he has any musical talent, he says, and would be content to spend his life alone in the mountains playing piano all day. (He limits his use of social media, he says, because he believes it is corrosive to creativity and because he wants to live as much as possible as his favorite composers did.)“A famous performer and an earnest performer — a true artist — are two different things,” he said in an interview this week at the Steinway factory in Queens, where he was shopping for a piano.Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy. He was drawn to the piano, he said, because he had grown up hearing Chopin and Liszt on recordings that his mother had purchased when she was pregnant. He was also taken by the majesty of the instrument.Lim was taken by the majesty of the instrument when he was young. “The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“Technically, he’s phenomenal,” Alsop said of Lim, “and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal.”Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.At 13, he enrolled in a prep school at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. His teacher, the pianist Minsoo Sohn, was impressed by the sensitivity of his interpretations.“At first he was a little bit cautious, but I immediately noticed that he was a huge talent,” he said. “He’s very humble, a student of the score and he isn’t over expressive.”Sohn initially steered his student away from competitions, worried about the pressure. But when the pandemic delayed the Cliburn competition, which is held every four years, making it possible for Lim to qualify, Sohn suggested he give it a try, telling him to treat it as a performance, not a competition.“I thought the world needed to listen to what Yunchan could play in his teenage years,” Sohn said.When Lim arrived in Fort Worth for the competition, which took place over 17 days, he said he felt the spirit of Van Cliburn, the eminent pianist for whom the contest is named.Lim sometimes practiced as much as 20 hours a day, he said, sending recordings to Sohn, who was in South Korea, for guidance. He existed on a diet of Korean noodles and stews prepared by his mother, who had accompanied him, as well as midnight snacks of toasted English muffins with butter and strawberry jam made by his host family.“I knew it was like Russian roulette,” he said of the competition. “It could turn out well, or you could end up shooting yourself in the head. It was a lot of stress.”As he prepared to walk onstage to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, he said he thought of Carl Sagan’s idea of Earth as just a “pale blue dot” in the universe.“When the stage doors open and the audience applauds, when I nervously sit down at the piano and press the first key, that moment is like the Big Bang for me,” he said. “I’m nervous, but the image of the pale blue dot gives me courage. I just think of the moment as something occurring in that small little speck.”His Rachmaninoff won ovations, but he was dissatisfied with the performance, believing that he achieved only about 30 percent of what he had hoped to accomplish. Since the competition, he said he had been able to watch just the first three minutes of the YouTube video before growing dispirited.When he returned to South Korea after the Cliburn, he said he was unchanged. “I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” he said at a news conference with his teacher.“I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” Lim said at a news conference with his teacher.Ayesha Malik for The New York TimesLim, who is still enrolled at Korean National University of Arts, plans to transfer this fall to the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where Sohn now teaches.As a student, his international career has taken off, with a recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January and an appearance with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in February. This summer, he will reunite with Alsop to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next year, he will make his Carnegie Hall debut with an all-Chopin program.The New York Philharmonic booked him soon after Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, saw YouTube videos of his performances at the Cliburn — a Beethoven concerto as well as the Rachmaninoff.“I was blown away by how fluent he was in both styles,” Borda said. “He was just brilliant.”Ahead of his debut in New York, Lim has been fine-tuning his interpretation of the Rachmaninoff. In preparing the concerto’s somber opening notes, he said, he imagines the “angel of death” or cloaked figures singing a Gregorian chant, following his teacher’s advice.This performance is especially meaningful, he said. On his commute to and from middle school, he often played a 1978 recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the Philharmonic. He said he had listened to the recording at least 1,000 times.Lim said he felt nervous to follow in the footsteps of Horowitz, one of his idols, and that he would always consider himself a student, no matter how successful his career might be. He said artists should not be judged by the number of YouTube views they received, but by the authenticity of their work.“It’s a bit hard to define myself as an artist,” he said. “I’m like the universe before the Big Bang. I’m still in the learning phase.”“I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he added, “just like the universe.”Jin Yu Young contributed research from Seoul. More

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      The Real Star of Bradley Cooper’s Film “Maestro” May Be a House

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      Leonard Bernstein’s country house hasn’t changed much since the composer hosted Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins there. Jamie Bernstein is OK with that.In the early 1960s, after a number of summers renting on Martha’s Vineyard, Jamie Bernstein’s family bought a vacation home on a wooded hill in West Redding, Conn. There, 9-year-old Jamie and her younger brother, Alexander, devised various games of make-believe, chief among them a fantasy that they lived the same sort of low-key, small-town existence as the characters on their favorite television shows.It was a testament to the imaginative gifts of children whose actual home was a duplex apartment across the street from Carnegie Hall, and whose father was the celebrated, heat-seeking “West Side Story” composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein.“Once we had this little house, we weren’t going to Martha’s Vineyard and we were much closer to Manhattan, which was probably way more convenient for my parents,” said Ms. Bernstein, 70, the author of the 2018 memoir “Famous Father Girl” and the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York,” a new podcast about the Philharmonic produced by the orchestra and the public radio station WQXR. “It meant that we could go there on the weekends during the regular part of the year.”“The front of the house makes it look very grand,” said Jamie Bernstein, the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York” podcast, who spends weekends at the Fairfield, Conn., house that she and her two siblings inherited from their father, the composer and  Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein. “But it isn’t as grand as it looks.”Allegra Anderson for The New York TimesThen, when her sister Nina was born in 1962, “we were a family of five,” Ms. Bernstein continued. “Plus the nanny and the cook who sometimes came up with us on the weekends. And suddenly the house seemed too small.”A few months later, her mother, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, an actor and artist, announced that she had just bought a big, new country place. “And I guess I must have asked, ‘Well, how much did it cost?’” Ms. Bernstein recalled. “And my mother said, ‘Oh, I can’t talk about that. It was so expensive I can’t even say it out loud.’ And my brother and I were saying, ‘Oh, come on, how much was it? How much was it?’ We badgered her until finally she whispered, ‘80.’”Her children gasped: “$80 — it cost $80?”In that same whisper, Mrs. Bernstein corrected them: “$80,000.”What in those days seemed a lordly sum bought a former horse farm with a pool, a tennis court and outbuildings on six and a half acres in Fairfield, Conn. Over the years, additional parcels of woodland — almost 12 acres’ worth — were acquired to give the family more privacy and more of an escape from urban cares.“It was marvelous,” Ms. Bernstein said. “We spent many summers here, and almost every weekend during the rest of the year. We all loved it.”Ms. Bernstein shows off a photo of herself as a child flanked by her parents.Allegra Anderson for The New York TimesJamie Bernstein, 70Occupation: Author, filmmaker, podcast hostTaking the cure: “We go to the house to be completely relaxed. It’s like the antidote to New York life.”After Mr. Bernstein’s death in 1990 (Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978), the three children inherited the property. But it is Jamie who is most frequently in residence — pretty much every weekend.As when their parents were alive, the compound is a gathering spot for birthdays and holidays, and for fiercely contested rounds of Anagrams. Lately, it has also served as a set for the upcoming film “Maestro,” a portrait of the Bernsteins’ complicated marriage directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. (Carey Mulligan plays Felicia.)“He wanted an authenticity about how he was evoking our dad and his world,” Ms. Bernstein said of Mr. Cooper. “He was very curious to come up here and visit, and that’s when he decided he wanted to come back and shoot in and around the house. Bradley totally got why this place was so great and how it contains the family DNA.”Indeed, the house, with its graciously proportioned rooms, has barely been altered since the days when it was populated by the senior Bernsteins and their great and good friends — among them, Stephen Sondheim (who did not quite take it in stride when Jamie beat him at Anagrams), Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols and Richard Avedon (who took the picture of Jamie that sits among a clutch of family photos in the living room).The Steinway baby grand in the living room was a gift to Mr. Bernstein from a childhood piano teacher, Helen Coates, who later became his secretary.Allegra Anderson for The New York Times“When we got older, we realized, ‘Boy, we had a lot of cool people at our house,’” Ms. Bernstein said. “But when we were little, they were just our parents’ friends. To us, they were just Steve and Jerry and Mike and Dick.”It may have been Mr. Sondheim who bought his “West Side Story” collaborator the abacus that sits on a shelf in the dining room — “I can’t guarantee that’s the case,” she said — and it was Mr. Sondheim or maybe Mr. Nichols who bought the fine telescope on the floor nearby.“There was a while there when our parents would have these Christmas parties for all their pals,” Ms. Bernstein said. “And there was a competitiveness about the present-giving that became so oppressive that my mother said, ‘We’re not having these parties anymore.’”The furniture — heavy on rattan, wicker and bamboo — conjures a summer pavilion. So does the dining room, which is anchored by a white-painted table and chairs, and filled with plants. Its entryway, framed by a trellis, adds to the illusion.“Our mother was a kind of brilliant, instinctive decorator,” Ms. Bernstein said. “Everyplace we lived was elegant but comfortable.”She recalled dinners with her father or mother at the head of the table. Under the carpet was a plug for a bell to summon the help, “and my parents would start disappearing,” Ms. Bernstein said. “They would go lower and lower down in their chair, as their foot groped for the buzzer.”The Steinway baby grand in the living room was a gift to Mr. Bernstein from a childhood piano teacher, Helen Coates, who later became his secretary. It was Ms. Coates who determinedly made the winning bid when, in 1949, there was an auction to raise money for the library in Lenox, Mass., and Mr. Bernstein made a painting, supposedly of Salome doing her Dance of the Seven Veils, to aid the cause.The pool was one of the family’s favorite spots. At least one guest has reported seeing the ghost of Ms. Bernstein’s mother, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, in the garden next to it.Allegra Anderson for The New York Times“Helen acquired it, so that for the rest of time nobody would see it,” Ms. Bernstein said, pointing to her father’s well-meaning work hanging in a corner not far from the piano.“My father,” she added, quite unnecessarily, “was not visually talented.”The recollections that Ms. Bernstein and her siblings have of their childhood at the Fairfield house — family swims; their father carrying a saltshaker to the vegetable garden in the morning to properly season his chosen breakfast; elegant lunches of stuffed tomatoes with homemade mayonnaise on the terrace — have been overlaid by more recent memories. And the next generation, the children of the Bernstein children, now have their own history here and, of course, their own memories.“That,” Ms. Bernstein said, “is the beauty of having a house that stays in the family.”“If some wallpaper is coming unglued, if some fabrics are fading, if some drawer fronts are hanging by a thread and cabinets are stuffed with baffling detritus — well, it’s all part of the family DNA.“We don’t fix things,” Ms. Bernstein conceded. “There is a distinct element of funk in this house now. It’s kind of funky. But we’re kind of funky, too.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      in Music

      Frank Ocean Shows Us a More Human Way to Perform

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      As live concert broadcasts have grown increasingly staid, his electrifying Coachella set gave us an unruly digital experience to share.Frank Ocean was constructing an ice-skating rink in the Sonoran desert. This was his reported plan — to headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on the night of April 16 inside, or in front of, or atop a frozen pool, defying the basic logic of weather. What better metaphor could there be for an artist seemingly allergic to the typical mechanisms of the music industry than to accept the headlining slot at Coachella and then subvert it, to stage the opposite of the festival’s arid environment by scheming an icy exhibition among the sickening dust and heat? The rumored set design was ultimately scrapped, but the very concept of Ocean’s doomed ice rink felt symbolic — maybe of how distant this king of pop-world disenchantment felt from Coachella’s surroundings to begin with.I was not in the desert. Nor did I really believe that I would be able to watch Ocean’s set — his first major public performance since 2017 — on an officially sanctioned livestream. Before he came onstage, YouTube clarified that Ocean’s 10:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time set would not be broadcast on Coachella’s own stream — his representatives say he was, in fact, never scheduled to appear on the stream — though this was not surprising. Enigma has always been a tenet of Ocean’s public persona. Having previously spurned the Grammy Awards, dismissed major record labels and called attention to the very nature of livestreaming with his 2016 visual album, “Endless,” Ocean was primed to opt out without apology.It did not stop fans; links to spontaneous Instagram Live streams, by those on the ground, abounded. As it approached 1:05 a.m. in New York, I opened one of these links on my desktop and sat for an hour, waiting. Tens of thousands of us clicked on and waited. It was democratizing — there are no V.I.P. sections that I know of on Instagram Live — and the rumor was that Lorde was waiting in the same stream, too. We were all in it, waiting in the Frank Ocean IG Live, together.When the music finally started, this particular improvised stream proved to be shaky — while the set quickly revealed itself to be an unconventional, at-times rough-hewed spectacle — cutting in and out as Ocean sang a rock version of “Novacane,” his 2011 breakthrough single about emotionless sex and a couple who meet at Coachella. Fortunately, I soon found @Morgandoesntcare, a young musician from North Carolina who facilitated the guerrilla video stream that brought Ocean’s set to the masses, reaching 130,000 viewers. Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Maybe Ocean said no to the sanctioned livestream because he knew his set wouldn’t be what he “intended to show,” as he acknowledged in a statement later that week. (According to that statement, he sustained a leg injury in the days before Coachella, requiring a rework of the show.) Maybe the choice was intuitive. It’s enticing, however, to wonder if he made the decision in order to reject our on-demand culture of convenience. Some industry prognosticators have wondered if livestreams could supplant in-person concerts in the future — though it doesn’t seem likely — as ticket prices surge at the hands of exploitative corporations and make large-scale concertgoing increasingly unattainable to anyone but the rich. Livestreamed concerts by mainstream artists are often more like note-by-note recitals. With streaming more broadly, the data-driven music companies want to find patterns, to engineer us further into a culture of predictability. Intentionally or not, Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Watching a teenager’s ad hoc broadcast instead made for a more unruly digital experience that could not be predicted, planned for, optimized or controlled.The day after Ocean’s set, it still consumed my thoughts. Though I had watched it on a trembly hand-held broadcast that cut in and out, I felt that I had not only witnessed but participated in something significant — not in spite of but because of the spontaneous stream. Most reviews disagreed, criticizing how Ocean stoked “confusion” and commenting that his songs didn’t sound the way they do on his records. When I watched alone in my bedroom more than 2,000 miles away, these qualities made the music feel alive. Liveness has always carried with it an expectation of, and invitation into, risk and imperfection. But the media landscape’s flood of manicured concert-film and livestream events has largely normalized staid, smooth performances, a trend that mirrors the streaming era’s broader preference for formulaic culture. Lauryn Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests.Ocean’s set seemed like a rebuke of this trend. New arrangements of his most beloved songs, like “Bad Religion” and “White Ferrari,” sounded more astral and expansive than ever. “Solo” approached something resembling starry electric jazz and nearly brought me to tears. The speech Ocean gave about his younger brother, who died in a car accident in 2020 and with whom he went to Coachella multiple times, immediately did. The songs sometimes showed their seams, letting his voice reach higher and skate the sky. Delicate acoustic takes of “Pink + White” and “Self Control” brought to mind the intimacy of a theoretical Ocean appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”Pop music history is filled with incidents in which celebrated artists polarized their audiences from big stages, but one important precedent is Lauryn Hill’s 2001 performance on “MTV Unplugged.” On that show, and the unvarnished album that followed the next year, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she sang her biblical hip-hop folk profundities in a gorgeous raspy voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar. In between songs, she delivered monologues of uncompromising creative wisdom. At the time, this live session was considered bewildering and met with divided reviews. Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests. “Fantasy is what people want,” Hill said then, “but reality is what they need.”You can imagine the now-35-year-old Ocean growing up, absorbing Hill’s messaging and reflecting his own unpolished reality in concert. When he played Coachella in 2012, he covered “Tell Him” from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Ocean has a documented fondness for her “Unplugged” performance: His song “Rushes,” from “Endless,” interpolates Hill’s “Just Like Water”; he once rapped over a sample of “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a track on which Hill cries. “What I am is what I am, and I can’t be afraid to, you know, to expose that to the public,” Hill said during the “MTV Unplugged” performance. She defended her right to let her voice crack, which was a reflection of her lived experience. Such honesty calls people to be artists. But contemporary streaming culture, and the rigid aesthetic standards it widely supports, are hostile to frayed edges.On the spontaneous Ocean Instagram stream, I caught glory in flickers. Ocean’s set, which he himself called “chaotic” while emphasizing the “beauty in chaos,” was a presentation of his own humanity. In a just popular culture, that is what a “live” album, “live” stream, “live” concert and “live” artist is: raw, fallible and human.Source photographs: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images; Timothy Hearsum/The Image Bank/Getty Images.Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer, contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of “The Raincoats.” More