Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Met Opera-Bound ‘Semele’ Takes Its First Bows

      by

      Claus Guth’s entertaining and often sexy new staging of Handel’s opera-oratorio hybrid in Munich is a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera.Staging oratorios in the opera house is nearly routine nowadays, especially those by Handel; for every “Agrippina,” you’re likely to get a “Messiah” too.Somewhere in between is “Semele,” a dramatic work that Handel described as “after the manner of an oratorio.” It lends itself both to the concert hall and the opera house, and with a long list of principal characters thrives best with a luxury cast — which it received at the Bavarian State Opera in an entertaining, lucid and often sexy new staging by Claus Guth that premiered on Saturday, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that will eventually travel to New York.That “Semele” has been categorized as an oratorio has more to do with context than form. By the time it premiered at Covent Garden in 1744, Italian operas, which Handel had been composing for decades, were falling out of fashion, and he had moved on to English-language concert works like “Messiah.”In writing “Semele,” Handel and an unknown collaborator adapted William Congreve’s early 18th-century opera libretto of the same name. But rather than present it as a theatrical work, Handel disguised it as an oratorio for the Lenten concert season — even though the secular story, based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” wasn’t right for the occasion. There was hardly anything Christian about its brazen eroticism and adultery, or about a god having to explain to his mortal mistress that she needs rest because she doesn’t have his sexual stamina.Handel wasn’t able to have it both ways; “Semele” ran for several performances, then languished until the 20th century. But its resurgence has been richly mined, with musicians and directors continuously inspired by its Epicurean longing and sensuality, its psychological complexity and its timeless treatment of incompatible love — all thoughts and feelings, in Handel’s aria writing, repeated, examined sculpturally and reconsidered with doubt and revelation.From left, Nadezhda Karyazina, Rae and Emily D’Angelo in the production, in which the world of Semele’s fantasies is rendered in shades of black to contrast with the white of reality.Monika RittershausGuth’s production dives into the Semele’s subconscious, her frustrations and fantasies, on the day of her wedding. A reluctant bride, she is first shown posing next her groom, Athamas, before stepping out of a shell-like gown that maintains its shape without her. It’s not the last time that happens; she always seems to be getting into or out of a dress as she drifts between reality and daydream, between accepting her life and rejecting it.During the overture, crisply and briskly articulated in the pit under Gianluca Capuano’s baton, Semele and Athamas are seen posing with friends and family for increasingly cringe-worthy group portraits, their forced smiles as uncomfortably glaring as the enormous floral letters spelling out “LOVE” behind them. Distracted by a black feather — Guth’s nod to the libretto’s depiction of the god Jupiter as an eagle — Semele retreats into her mind, represented by a sudden change in light from bright to dark in Michael Bauer’s design.She imagines breaking out of her wedding’s austerely white, grand room with an ax as she tears a hole into the wall of Michael Levine’s bandshell-like set of a three-sided room enclosed with a ceiling. In doing so, she opens a portal into the world of the gods, where her affair with Jupiter will set off a chain of events that leads to her doom.Here, however, the story isn’t so straightforward. And neither are the performances. A Guth production often demands actorly skill of its singers, and in Munich — at the Prinzregententheater, one of the Bavarian State Opera’s smaller halls — the principal cast members were intimately close to the audience, exposed both visually and musically.No one more so than the soprano Brenda Rae as Semele, who rarely leaves the stage and is given one of the show’s most athletic arias, “Myself I shall adore.” As an actor, she sympathetically traced a downward plunge from hesitation to ecstasy, then harried despair and hollowed catatonia. Musically, however, she struggled to match the challenging score; her voice on Saturday was agile but thin, particularly through runs and ornamentation. Even the soft serenity she achieved in “O sleep, why dost thou leave me?” gave way, on a sustained trill, to a disorientingly jagged warble.As Jupiter, Michael Spyres, too, gave an unsteady account of a difficult role. His instrument remains baffling: immense in its power and remarkable in its baritone-tenor range, but also unwieldy and better suited to the legato phrasing of the famous aria “Where’er you walk” than the more acrobatically breathless “I must with speed amuse her.” At the end of that, though, he impressively joined a high-kicking chorus line choreographed by Ramses Sigl.He wasn’t the only singer given movement onstage. Jakub Jozef Orlinski, the countertenor in the role of Athamas, is also a breakdancer, which Guth spotlights when his character desperately attempts to entertain Semele. Charismatic and handsome, Orlinski stopped the show with the applause his dance earned. But more enchanting was the purity of his sound — sublimely crystalline in “Come, Zephyrs, come” — which blended warmly with the lower end of Athamas’s altolike tessitura.Orlinski, a break dancer beyond the opera house, is made to do so in a scene of his character trying to impress Semele.Monika RittershausThat aria, put in Athamas’s mouth rather than Cupid’s, made for a shattering juxtaposition with Semele’s “O sleep.” Orlinski and Rae sang near, but not at, each other, embodying that painfully familiar feeling of two people expressing themselves yet failing to truly communicate.As Jupiter’s enraged and scheming wife, Juno, the typically mighty but pleasant mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo seemed to have been handed a part not suited to her voice; but with the sprightly soprano Jessica Niles as Iris, she provided much of the show’s levity, through musical delivery and physical comedy. Charming, as well, was the bass-baritone Philippe Sly, his sound focused and vibrant as Semele’s father, Cadmus, and the drowsy Somnus.Among the smaller roles, Nadezhda Karyazina, as Semele’s sister, Ino, was prone to excessive gesture, but found a touching balance of outward emotion and poise in the climactic scene of her stepping in to marry Athamas.By that point, Guth shows Semele as alive, but so deep in her imagination that she can’t find her way back to reality; rather than reduced to ashes by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, she sits in the wedding hall lifeless as the world goes on around her. Semele may be free from the institution of marriage, but the institution endures without her.It’s a bittersweet ending that comes through persuasively and clearly. In that regard, when it reaches New York, Guth’s staging will be a fitting addition to the Met’s current era of many handsome, cosmetically modern productions. More uncertain, though, is how it will scale from the Prinzregententheater — whose seating capacity barely tops 1,100 — to the 3,800-seat Met, a company in desperate need of a second, smaller house.Semele transforms in the final moments from lifelessness to something like rebirth, suggesting that she may be more of a prophet than a mere dreamer. But the change occurs on her face alone; the question, now, is whether Guth can repeat that subtlety at the Met.SemeleThrough July 25 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich; staatsoper.de. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

      by

      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Rick Froberg, Singer of Artful Intensity, Is Dead at 55

      by

      A longtime linchpin of a 1990s underground music scene, he built a devoted and enthusiastic following and was also a prolific visual artist.Rick Froberg, the vocalist and guitarist best known for his work with the influential 1990s post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, whose urgent howl was one of rock’s most distinctive voices, died on June 30 in San Diego. He was 55.His partner, Britton Neubacher, said the cause was an undiagnosed heart condition.Mr. Froberg, a beloved linchpin of the San Diego underground music scene that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, sang in a raspy roar that segued smoothly between snarl and scream. “He always wanted to effortlessly sound kick-ass,” said John Reis, Mr. Froberg’s longtime bandmate and songwriting partner in the bands Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes.Mr. Froberg particularly loved the gnarled growls of the Australian vocalists Bon Scott of AC/DC — his favorite band — and Chris Bailey of the proto-punk Saints, and he strived to follow them, Mr. Reis said. “I would tell him, ‘Dude, you have that in spades, and you actually have another gear those people don’t have.’”Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis met as teenagers in 1986, at a picnic organized by a local anarchist publication at a San Diego park. They bonded immediately and soon joined up in Pitchfork, with Mr. Froberg on vocals. The band was inspired, Mr. Reis said, by the noisy music being issued at the time on independent labels like Dischord, Touch & Go and SST. By the time Pitchfork’s debut album was released in 1990, however, the band had broken up.Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis quickly regrouped in Drive Like Jehu, where Mr. Froberg also began playing guitar, inspired by Sonic Youth’s atonal, unorthodox guitar tunings — which “made it seem like you could just do anything you wanted to do,” Mr. Froberg said in a recent web interview.Drive Like Jehu’s two albums featured dissonant, tightly coiled compositions with off-kilter rhythms and cathartic explosions. The group built a small but fervent following, with the enthusiasm it inspired far outstripping its record sales. The band’s single “Bullet Train to Vegas”/“Hand Over Fist,” a marvel of feral intensity and relentless locomotive force released by Merge Records in 1992, was described by the author Nabil Ayers in a recent Substack post as “arguably the best 7-inch single ever to be released.” A tribute to Mr. Froberg on the Merge website called it “one of the most revered in our catalog.”Mr. Reis soon became busy touring with another of his bands, Rocket From the Crypt, and Drive Like Jehu fizzled out after its second album, “Yank Crime.” Released on Interscope, it was Mr. Froberg’s only recording for a major label.Mr. Froberg was also a prolific visual artist. His artwork gradually evolved from fliers, posters and album covers into silk-screened graphics, linocut etchings and gouache paintings. He had three solo exhibitions, most recently at Trash Lamb Gallery in San Diego in 2022, and his work was included in over a dozen group shows.He moved to Brooklyn in 1998 and pursued a career as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer; he also had a stint doing animation with the artist Gary Panter. His illustrations were published in The New Yorker and The New York Times; Matt Dorfman, a Times art director who worked with Mr. Froberg, described his style as “a hysterical pastiche of 1920s surrealism and Tex Avery cartoons.”Eric Gerald Froberg was born on Jan. 19, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Eric and Sylvia (Phillips) Froberg. His father, a business consultant and entrepreneur, legally changed the Swedish family name from Froberg to Farr in 1979; Mr. Froberg used the ancestral surname professionally, though he sometimes signed his artwork “Rick Farr” or “Rick Fork.”His parents divorced soon after his birth, and he never had a relationship with his birth mother, who died in 1992. His father married Lynne Wacker, a sales training manager for Hooked on Phonics, in 1973. The family lived in Glendale and Playa del Rey before moving to Carlsbad when Mr. Froberg was 8. He lived primarily in the North County area of San Diego until he moved to Brooklyn.He married Amelia Halverson in 2003. They divorced in 2015. In addition to Ms. Neubacher, he is survived by his father, his stepmother and three younger brothers, Christopher, Justin and Gregory.In 1999 Mr. Reis formed a new band, Hot Snakes. Dissatisfied with his own vocals, he sent a cassette to Mr. Froberg, who agreed to join even though they lived on different coasts. In contrast to Drive Like Jehu’s distortion, Hot Snakes favored a clean guitar sound and short, efficient tunes, Mr. Reis said, “letting Rick’s voice and the attack of the pick carry the power.”Mr. Froberg also sang and played guitar from 2006 to 2015 in the Brooklyn band Obits, which released three albums on Sub Pop. The name was Mr. Froberg’s idea, said Sohrab Habibion, Obits’ other guitarist, a comment on ageism in music.Painters, photographers and filmmakers can grow old, Mr. Habibion said, “and jazz musicians and classical players are allowed to get long in the tooth. But rock ’n’ roll is stuck in this youth culture rut, so we wanted to put a stake in the ground and say that middle-aged people could make rock music that was relevant, vital and worthy of being part of the cultural conversation.”Drive Like Jehu reunited in 2014 for an outdoor concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in San Diego, attracting a crowd estimated to be the biggest since Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address there in 1915. “Intoxicated by the high of that day,” Mr. Reis said, the band later reconvened to tour.After moving back to San Diego in 2021, Mr. Froberg collaborated with Ms. Neubacher, a botanical artist, on large-scale installations at the San Diego Museum of Art and at Mothership, a space-themed tiki bar. “Watching him get lost in the secret places of his imagination was a daily pleasure of mine,” Ms. Neubacher said.Mr. Froberg had recently been working on what would have been Hot Snakes’ fifth studio album. “He was really firing on all cylinders,” Mr. Reis said. “His voice gave me a lot of freedom as a songwriter, because I didn’t have to worry about where the chorus or the melody was. I could go wildly off into what I considered uncharted territory for myself, and always knew that he would make sense of it and turn it into something beautiful.“I’m just lost without him,” he added. “I don’t know what to do now.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      How Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Became the ‘Scary’ Version

      by

      A fan thought she had ordered a new vinyl pressing of the pop star’s album. But what came out of the speakers was entirely different.Rachel Hunter could not wait to play her new vinyl recording of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”After waiting weeks for its arrival, Ms. Hunter placed the orchid-colored vinyl with Ms. Swift’s face on its center on her record player, lifted the needle and let it play. But instead of Ms. Swift’s catchy choruses, acoustic guitar and banjo strums, another woman’s voice came out.“I quit seeing people, quit looking at the flakes of flesh and dancing organisms,” an echoing voice said, without music in the background.Maybe there was something wrong with the speed, Ms. Hunter thought, or maybe it was one of Ms. Swift’s notorious Easter eggs. She flipped the record to the other side, but it only got weirder.“The 70 billion people of Earth, where are they hiding?” a man’s eerie voice said repeatedly.“It was a little scary. I was by myself,” Ms. Hunter recalled. “I thought, Is this a horror film? Because it didn’t feel like real life, especially when you’re expecting Taylor Swift.”The record wasn’t haunted. It was just British electronica music.Universal Music Group, which represents Taylor Swift, and Above Board Distribution, a small British label, use the same printing plant in France. But instead of pressing Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” album, the plant accidentally pressed “Happy Land,” a compilation of British electronica from the 1990s, onto the purple vinyl and put it into the “Speak Now” jacket.The first song Ms. Hunter heard was “True Romance,” which features more than 11 minutes of electronica by Thunderhead, and the second was “Soul Vine,” a deep-house track by Cabaret Voltaire, one of the most influential groups of the genre.That revelation materialized only after Ms. Hunter posted about her experience on TikTok: “Does anyone else’s ‘Speak Now’ vinyl not have Taylor Swift on it?” she asked. The video has been viewed over four million times.Now she’s fending off offers of $250 for the record. Her video set off a lengthy discussion on Discogs, an online music database, among collectors who are hoping to find another copy. Fans of Cabaret Voltaire have reimagined the band’s vinyl sleeves with the names of Ms. Swift’s albums; one even mixed Ms. Swift’s song “All Too Well” with Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag.”

      @mischief_marauder send help I got speak now (not Taylors version) this is so funny #speaknowtaylorsversion @Taylor Swift @Taylor Nation #erastour #speaknoworchid ♬ original sound – Rachel ✨ In a statement, Universal said it was “aware that there are an extremely limited number of incorrectly pressed vinyl copies in circulation and have addressed the issue,” adding that if customers receive a misprinted vinyl, they should contact their retailer.Ms. Hunter, who purchased the album through Ms. Swift’s official store in Britain, requested a new copy but had not received it as of Friday.Dan Hill, the managing director of Above Board, said the label had printed a couple hundred records of “Happy Land,” and he assumed that the stamper had been accidentally left on the machine and used for the “Speak Now” discs.“What’s happened in the making of this record is kind of like making a cake — they mixed up the ingredients,” he said, adding that misprints had happened from time to time, including with albums by Beyoncé and the Beatles, “but maybe not with this profile.”Mr. Hill believes there might be at least one more pressing out in the world like Ms. Hunter’s. He is looking as hard as the next record collector.“This is a total Willy-Wonka-style golden ticket. If someone has one, these could be worth thousands,” he said. “But no one knows how far they are.”Joe Muggs, a British music writer who reviewed the reissue of “Happy Land” for the online magazine The Quietus earlier this spring, said the tracks came from a variety of genres, including heavy dub reggae, industrial and electronica, that come together to make a “very narcotic kind of sound” that was emblematic of the 1990s.“That’s what makes the music on this album really exciting,” he said, “its ability to startle even now when someone hears it out of the blue.”The Cabaret Voltaire song is one of the darker tracks, he said, but many of the songs had a “pop compatibility” and were “very funky; there’s a lot of melody in there.”“The fact that TikTok will fling up these random things does leave the window open to magic in terms of changing people’s tastes or sparking little fires,” Mr. Muggs said.That’s exactly what Stephen Mallinder, a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, is hoping for. Cabaret Voltaire has always appealed to new audiences, he said, but being jump-started by Ms. Swift’s audience “is a different kind of magnitude.”“It has captured everyone’s imagination because it’s a cultural clash of big proportions,” Mr. Mallinder said, adding, “If we can convert a few and get them into electronica stuff, clubby stuff, that’s all right by me.” More

    • 63 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Listening to Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ References

      by

      A tour through key samples, references and influences on the pop star’s 2022 album as her world tour arrives in North America.A scene from the screens at Beyoncé’s North American Renaissance World Tour opener in Toronto.The New York TimesDear listeners,Last weekend, I traveled to Toronto to catch the first North American date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour. I returned home feeling like the human incarnation of the starry-eyed emoji (so many sparkles!) and with a new appreciation for “Renaissance,” the loose and sprawling album that Beyoncé released this time last year.“Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, is a sonic odyssey through the history of dance music, with a specific focus on the genre’s Black and queer pioneers. It achieves the perfect balance of many opposing forces: “Renaissance” is studied and referential but still maintains a fun lightness. It celebrates community and a kind of artistic plurality while still centering Beyoncé’s singular star power. It contains a few of Beyoncé’s strongest stand-alone singles and yet plays like a continuous D.J. set: Sometimes I will get an urge to hear one particular song and, before I know it, I will have listened to the rest of the album in its entirety — again!Witnessing the way Beyoncé staged some of these songs live has helped me hear new elements in an album I have already played approximately four billion times. Some of that has to do with the way she contextualized the “Renaissance” songs within the evolution of her own catalog (the vampy, hard-hitting “Diva,” from 2008, sounds like a transmission from Beyoncé’s future), but she also made sure to situate “Renaissance” within a larger continuum of pop music, electronic sounds, and Black and queer culture.That’s a project I’d like to continue with today’s playlist, which is a kind of musical tour of the samples, references and influences heard on “Renaissance.” It is highly indebted to a great piece that the music journalist and electronic dance music scholar Michaelangelo Matos wrote for The Times right after the album was released, which served as a listening guide to its many sonic footnotes.Come along for the ride as Beyoncé pays homage to the Chicago house of Adonis, the postmillennial bounce of Big Freedia, the pulsating bass of Reese and much more. May this playlist help you hear “Renaissance” anew, learn a little about electronic music history or maybe just make like Beyoncé and Grace Jones and move.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Adonis: “No Way Back”One of the formative early classics of Chicago house — a localized subgenre of dance music that spread through the Windy City’s underground club scene in the mid-80s — Adonis’s 1986 track “No Way Back” has a menacing intensity and a grimy low-end that would prove enormously influential … (Listen on YouTube)2. Beyoncé: “Cozy”… and “Cozy,” the second song off “Renaissance,” certainly bears that influence. Production and a writing credit from the Chicago-born D.J. and musician Honey Dijon also add some house-music credibility to this hypnotic track. (Listen on YouTube)3. Chic: “Good Times”Sumptuous, timeless, transcendent — Chic’s glittering “Good Times,” from 1979, remains one of the best-known and most frequently referenced tunes in the history of dance music. Bernard Edwards’s bass line is a thing of beauty, rightly given its own extended solo. (Listen on YouTube)4. Beyoncé: “Cuff It”If you’re going to pay homage to Chic, as Beyoncé does on this groovy disco throwback, you might as well get Nile Rodgers on the track. “When I got called to play on this song, it was the most organic thing that ever happened to me,” Rodgers said, accepting a Grammy when “Cuff It” won best R&B song. (Beyoncé was fashionably late.) “I heard the song and I just said, ‘I wanna play on that. Right now.’ And it was one take, I promise.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Robin S.: “Show Me Love”Driven by the unmistakable sound of the Korg M1 Organ 2, this 1992 hit — technically a remix, by the Swedish producer StoneBridge, of a little-heard 1990 track by Robin Stone — brought house music to the mainstream in the early ’90s, and its much-sampled keyboard riff is still ubiquitous today. (Listen on YouTube)6. Big Freedia: “Explode”Beyoncé first sampled Big Freedia, a.k.a. the Queen of Bounce, on her 2016 hit “Formation.” She once again drew upon the New Orleans musician’s highly flammable energy on “Break My Soul,” which samples her 2014 single “Explode.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Beyoncé: “Break My Soul”A house homage updated with some fresh zaps of New Orleans bounce, the “Renaissance” leadoff single “Break My Soul” was a worthy introduction to the album’s kinetic, highly referential sound. (Though, as the reporter Rich Juzwiak found when speaking to StoneBridge and Robin S., exactly how directly “Break My Soul” references “Show Me Love” is up for debate.) (Listen on YouTube)8. Reese/Kevin Saunderson: “Just Want Another Chance”The term “Reese bass” refers to the dark, warbling low-end that rumbles through the foundation of “Just Want Another Chance,” a pivotal Detroit techno track released by Kevin Saunderson — under the moniker Reese — in 1988. The Reese has become so popular that there are innumerable patches and presets that now replicate Saunderson’s groundbreaking bass sound. (Listen on YouTube)9. Beyoncé: “America Has a Problem”The most bonkers staging on the Renaissance World Tour comes when Beyoncé plays this one live — donning a custom Mugler bee costume and performing from behind a desk like she’s a newscaster attempting to brainwash the world. The Reese-indebted tones give this song, and its live performance, an ominous edge. (Listen on YouTube)10. A.G. Cook: “Beautiful”In the mid-to-late 2010s, the experimental production collective PC Music pushed pop to its most frenetic, gloriously synthetic extremes, reveling in surface sheen and outré ideas. The English producer A.G. Cook was at the forefront of this wave (sometimes called hyperpop), and his zanily infectious “Beautiful,” from the 2015 compilation “PC Music Volume 1,” is emblematic of his distinct sound. (Listen on YouTube)11. Beyoncé: “All Up in Your Mind”Beyoncé goes hyperpop — sort of — on this distorted earworm co-produced by Cook himself. The instrumentation sounds like a malfunctioning computer program, but there’s a growly physicality to Beyoncé’s vocal that gives the song an intriguing textural friction and keeps things in the realm of flesh and blood. (Listen on YouTube)12. Donna Summer: “I Feel Love”Arguably the most innovative and influential dance record of all time, “I Feel Love” is Giorgio Moroder’s wholehearted embrace of electronic music’s nascent, seemingly boundless possibilities. Donna Summer plays the ghost in the machine, unfurling an ecstatic vocal and achieving a kind of cyborgian bliss. (Listen on YouTube)13. Beyoncé: “Summer Renaissance”It’s risky business, referencing the iconic “I Feel Love” as blatantly as Beyoncé does here. But over the course of four-and-a-half minutes of airy falsetto and giddy sass, she effectively makes the argument that quoting Summer is the only way to end an album like “Renaissance.” It’s the ultimate, inevitable conclusion — a fireworks-display finale to this dazzling tour through dance music past, present and future. (Listen on YouTube)Release your wiggle,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ References” track listTrack 1: Adonis, “No Way Back”Track 2: Beyoncé, “Cozy”Track 3: Chic, “Good Times”Track 4: Beyoncé, “Cuff It”Track 5: Robin S., “Show Me Love”Track 6: Big Freedia: “Explode”Track 7: Beyoncé, “Break My Soul”Track 8: Reese/Kevin Saunderson, “Just Want Another Chance”Track 9: Beyoncé, “America Has a Problem”Track 10: A.G. Cook, “Beautiful”Track 11: Beyoncé, “All Up in Your Mind”Track 12: Donna Summer, “I Feel Love”Track 13: Beyoncé: “Summer Renaissance”Bonus tracksSpeaking of dance floor anthems that pull knowingly from house music history: I am very much digging Troye Sivan’s new single “Rush.” I don’t know if the Song of the Summer is a thing anymore, or if it ever really was, but I nonetheless appreciate him making a run for it.“Rush” is just one of the 11 new songs we recommend in this week’s Playlist. Check out the full selection, featuring tracks by Billie Eilish, Jamila Woods and Jlin, here. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Billie Eilish’s ‘Barbie’ Ballad, and 10 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Troye Sivan, Jamila Woods, C. Tangana and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Billie Eilish, ‘What Was I Made For?’Billie Eilish draws a connection between the public’s consumption of pop stars and plastic dolls on “What Was I Made For?,” a sparse, forlorn piano ballad from the “Barbie” soundtrack: “Looked so alive, turns out I’m not real,” she sings in a quivering whisper. “Just something you paid for.” The song hews closer to the more traditional, crooner-inspired fare on Eilish’s album “Happier Than Ever” than to the rest of “Barbie the Album,” which features upbeat tunes from Dua Lipa and Charli XCX. Still, Eilish knows how to tease out the pathos and a subtle sense of macabre from a particular kind of feminine malaise. “I’m used to float, now I just fall down,” she sings, making life in plastic sound less than fantastic. LINDSAY ZOLADZMargaret Glaspy, ‘Memories’Margaret Glaspy sings as if every word is a struggle in “Memories,” a song of sheer grief and loss: “I’m lonesome without you/but I’m a wreck thinking about you.” Her voice arrives behind the beat and then leaps onto the note; the vocal quivers, cracks and sometimes breaks, conjuring emotions that are still raw. JON PARELESJamila Woods featuring duendita, ‘Tiny Garden’Jamila Woods sings about incremental, ordinary but genuine feelings of love in “Tiny Garden”: “It’s not gonna be a big production/It’s not butterflies and fireworks,” she sings. “It’s gonna be a tiny garden/But I feed it every day.” As she describes a real but undemonstrative connection and the testing phase of a romance — “You want to be sure that I want you/Not just someone fun to do” — the track pulses with keyboard chords and rises with gospelly backup vocals, promising that there’s a true spiritual link. The artist duendita joins her near the end, more than willing to “watch all the purpose we place multiply slowly over time.” PARELESTroye Sivan, ‘Rush’Troye Sivan — the Australian pop musician, ex-YouTuber and rare musician who actually proved to be a watchable screen presence on “The Idol” (ahem!) — returns triumphantly with “Rush,” a sweaty, kinetic, gloriously hedonistic summer dance-floor anthem with a lightly NSFW video to match. Sivan’s breathy vocals dance atop an insistent beat and house-inspired piano riff, while a chorus of deep male voices chant the song’s infectious hook: “I feel the rush, addicted to your touch.” At last, Xander is free! ZOLADZSid Sriram, ‘The Hard Way’Born in India, Sid Sriham grew up in California, studying Carnatic (South Indian) music with his parents while soaking up American R&B and jazz. He built a career in India, singing Bollywood hits along with Carnatic ragas. For his American debut album, “Sidharth,” due Aug. 25, Sriham veered toward the experimental, working with the producer Ryan Olson (from Poliça) and musicians including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). “The Hard Way” is a lovelorn ballad — “I would do anything, anything, anything to make you smile,” he insists — that’s chopped up and placed within a jittery electronic exoskeleton: racing double-time beats, pitch-shifted vocals, bursts of multitracked harmony. It’s bold; he could easily have chosen a more commercial, less thorny approach. PARELESYard Act, ‘The Trench Coat Museum’It is a law of nature that there is never too much cowbell. Yard Act, the post-punk band that could almost be LCD Soundsystem with a British accent and a social-media update, has re-emerged after its debut album. That means post-punk nostalgia folded in on itself like origami. “The Trench Coat Museum” imagines that there might be such an institution — celebrating a garment that’s assertive, concealing, protective, too long and too evocative — in a spoke-sung eight-minute track that easily gives way to its early 1980s groove: beat, bass riff, turntable scratching, clawing rhythm guitar, synthesizers and Latin percussion that definitely includes cowbell. The open secret of post-punk is that no matter how cynical the vocal gets, the song is always about the groove. PARELESC. Tangana, ‘Oliveira Dos Cen Anos’C. Tangana, the Spanish songwriter who started as a rapper and has delved ever deeper into the musical past, stays out of the foreground of his latest project, a hundredth-anniversary song for a soccer team from Galicia, Real Club Celta de Vigo; his father is from the town of Vigo. “Oliveira Dos Cen Anos” (“Hundred-Year-Old Olive Tree”) is rooted in Galician folk tradition but underpinned by electronics. C. Tangana is one of the songwriters and co-producers and the director of a sweeping, scenic video; Galician musicians sing lead vocals. An ardent choral anthem, with folk-song lyrics vowing love and loyalty, gives way to a traditionalist six-beat stomp, with a fierce cameo from the drumming, singing women of As Lagharteiras, along with a glimmering harp interlude and a stadium-sized singalong. “I will always be here,” men shout. “Celta forever! PARELESLoraine James featuring RiTchie, ‘Déjà Vu’“Not everything is quite audible,” the rapper and singer RiTchie calmly observes in “Déjà Vu.” The producer Loraine James constructed a perpetually disorienting mix of jolting electronic glitches, soothing piano and furtive snippets of percussion and synthesizer. RiTchie, from the group Injury Reserve, layers on multiple vocals, sung and spoken, and sounds completely unfazed by his surroundings: “You just gotta soak it all in,” he advises. PARELESOxlade featuring Dave, ‘Intoxycated’Oxlade, a singer and songwriter from Nigeria, and Dave, a rapper from England with Nigerian roots, commiserate about straying lovers and social media in “Intoxycated.” Oxlade decides “love is overrated” after seeing his girlfriend with another guy on Instagram; Dave reflects, “Love’s easy to find, harder to hold/Most stories end and start with a phone.” A minor-key Afrobeats groove with little guitar curlicues sums up the mood: sleek and resigned. PARELESJlin, ‘Fourth Perspective’The composer and producer Jlin — Jerrilynn Patton — built head-spinning electronic music out of percussive sounds, so it made perfect sense for her to write music for live acoustic performance by the ensemble Third Coast Percussion, which appeared on the group’s 2022 album, “Perspectives.” Now, Jlin has reworked those compositions for her own mini-album “Perspective,” due in September. Her new version of “Fourth Perspective” brings back electronic sounds, moving a ghostly, plinking, minimalistic waltz toward the ratchety, foreboding terrain of trap. PARELESmaJa, ‘A Vivir en Desacuerdo’MaJa — the Dominican songwriter Maria-José Gonell — sings about contentedly being a fish out of water in “A Vivir en Desacuerdo” (“To Live in Disagreement”). Her airy voice makes her seem tentative at first, but the production — by her songwriting collaborator Gian Rojas — radiates growing confidence, as a beat slips in and electronics sparkle ever more brightly. She’s not diffident; she’s above it all. PARELES More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      “The Greek Passion” Takes Center Stage at the Salzburg Festival

      by

      Bohuslav Martinu’s “Greek Passion” poses a timeless question: when a group of refugees seek protection in a new community, what will the locals do?Bohuslav Martinu’s final opera, “The Greek Passion,” explores a story that was as explosive in the mid-twentieth century as it is today. When a group of refugees seeks protection in the village of Lycovrissi, the community is thrown into upheaval: Will the villagers reaffirm their Christian virtues or indulge in acts of selfishness?This Aug. 13-27, the opera will be performed for the first time at the Salzburg Festival in a production directed by Simon Stone. Maxime Pascal, the 2014 winner of the summertime event’s annual Young Conductors Award, leads — his first fully staged opera here — in the Felsenreitschule.The festival has performed Martinu’s work occasionally since 1950, presenting the world premiere of his orchestral piece “Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca” in 1956. Recent editions have seen mostly chamber music.“The Greek Passion” had personal resonance for Martinu, who was perpetually homesick in his last years. Born in 1890 in Policka — a town in Bohemia just over the Moravian border (in the modern-day Czech Republic) — he came into maturity as a composer in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1941, as a member of the French Resistance, he fled the Nazis for the United States. Martinu would die in Switzerland, in 1959, unable to return to his native country for political reasons.Bohuslav Martinu in 1948.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesAfter a long search for a tragic subject matter that he could personally adapt into a libretto, he discovered the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis and won approval to adapt his book “Christ Recrucified.”“I now feel ready for another step,” the composer wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1956, “which is most difficult and entails the greatest responsibility, and that is a musical tragedy.”Martinu collaborated closely with Kazantzakis as he worked through the novel, in an English translation by Jonathan Griffin. The original conflict, involving Turkish rule, was tightened, so that the standoff in Lycovrissi (a town north of Athens) involved only Greeks.Ales Brezina, director of the Bohuslav Martinu Institute, explained that the story line, as such, had particular import to the composer in the context of Cold War politics that pitted people of the same nation against each other. Having taken up American citizenship, Martinu was considered a traitor in his home country. In the United States, he had to face the repercussions of being a Czech native during the anti-communist McCarthy era.“In the context of a bipolar world where everything was suspect,” Mr. Brezina said, “Martinu was moved by the topic of what people were capable of doing to their fellow countrymen.”Mr. Pascal, the conductor, also emphasized the centrality of this dynamic to the work. “A group of Greeks arrives in a Greek village, and they start to chase them away,” he said. “This reveals the viciousness of an angry mob toward another human being and humanity itself.”The score features two choruses — one representing the people of Lycovrissi, another, the refugees — a structure that follows a long tradition of musical settings of the Passion, or the story of the Crucifixion, as told in the Gospels of the Bible. In “The Greek Passion,” art becomes life as the villagers re-enact a Passion play. The shepherd Manolios, who portrays Christ, is ultimately murdered after he challenges his fellow villagers about the authenticity of their values.Mr. Pascal pointed out that Kazantzakis was considered a heretic for reinterpreting the doctrines of faith as they had been handed down by the church. “He saw a revolutionary figure in the figure of Christ but most of all saw in the mystery of Christianity something along the lines of a legend or myth,” he said.Simon Stone is directing the production.Jan Friese/SFMartinu left behind two very different versions of “The Greek Passion” because of an unusual twist of events. He chose the Royal Opera in London as the location for the premiere, although there was also interest from the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival and La Scala in Milan.Yet the opera was ultimately rejected by external advisers to the theater’s board. The musicologist and conductor Anthony Lewis argued that certain works by the Czech natives Smetana and Janacek had yet to be heard in London, and that the house needed to champion contemporary English composers.Despite the relentless support of the Royal Opera’s music director, the Czech-born Rafael Kubelik, the board would not reverse its decision. Martinu, for his part, believed that the war for independence in Cyprus — which was affecting diplomatic relations between Britain and Greece — might have tainted the subject matter.He revised and tightened the score for the Zurich Opera, where the show premiered in June 1961, after Martinu’s death, under the baton of his friend and patron, Paul Sacher. The original version, intended to premiere in London, did not hit the stage until 1999 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.Mr. Brezina, who reconstructed the score for that production, compared the original version to a “dramatic fresco” or a “mosaic in which individual scenes and appearances blaze against each other.” The Zurich version, which will be performed in Salzburg, by contrast resembles “a kind of oratorio with wonderful melodies and choral scenes,” he said.Martinu’s mature works achieve an unprecedented synthesis of Czech and French elements, combining Bohemian rhythms and Moravian cadences with the influences of such composers as Stravinsky and Debussy. His “Greek Passion,” however, is distinct in that he carefully absorbed Greek Orthodox music, only occasionally alluding to his Czech roots. In 1955, Martinu traveled to New York to meet with friends of Kazantzakis and learn about Greek folk music and liturgy.Mr. Brezina explained that Martinu was keen to portray simple people while keeping his distance from the “farmer’s music” that can be found in the works of Janacek, who was the first composer to adapt Moravian speech patterns and melodies to the operatic stage. “He found in Kazantzakis exceptional intelligence, but also a down-to-earth person,” he said. “All the characters in the ‘Greek Passion’ have almost no education. They behave instinctively.”Mr. Pascal noted that the displacement of peoples in Greece echoed developments in Martinu’s native Czechoslovakia. “The oral songs and dances that migrated from region to region must have spoken enormously to him,” he said.The conductor also pointed to the score’s strongly Impressionist character. “There is incredible violence, but at the same time everything seems to be bathed in sunlight,” he said.Mr. Pascal further reflected on the superimposition of time periods that can be typical for a composer’s ultimate statement: “The after-war period, the period of Christ, Greece: There is a continuity between the past and present that is vertiginous.This is also found in Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ — in which 8th-century Chinese texts bifurcate with a text that the composer wrote himself — or Gérard Grisey’s ‘Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.’”Although it is rarely performed, “The Greek Passion” is considered Martinu’s greatest operatic achievement, alongside his 1938 surrealist masterpiece “Juliette.” “It is the self-proclaimed pinnacle of his work for the stage,” Mr. Brezina said. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Baritone Andrè Schuen Performs at the Salzburg Festival

      by

      Andrè Schuen stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”Andrè Schuen, a fast-rising young Italian baritone, brings innate musicality to his performances. Born in La Val, a small village in Südtirol, the mountainous region at the border with Austria, Schuen grew up speaking three languages: Ladin, Italian and German.This summer, Schuen, 38, stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” running from July 27 to Aug. 28. With rehearsals underway in late June, he spoke in a video call about his background and upcoming performance. The following conversation, translated from German, has been edited and condensed.You hail from a remote region and are part of a cultural-linguistic minority, the Ladin people. How did this background influence your musical formation?From childhood onward, music was always the most important thing. That was also the case with my father, who got his love of music from his father.You need to remember that 100 years ago people were very poor where I come from. Before tourism, they were all farmers who lived off their fields and cows.My grandfather acquired a small collection of instruments, which my father passed on to us. That means that we grew up with music, including many folk songs, with my father playing accordion and clarinet, my two sisters on violin, and me on cello.We also made music together as a family and put together a program connected to our Ladin national saga, about the legend of the Kingdom of Fanes. Later, I was in a band and did covers of everything, including punk songs.You weren’t listening to Schubert alone in your room.Not at all! Quite the opposite. For instance, when I was 13, soccer meant everything to me. I was on a team. It’s not like my parents forced me in a musical direction. If I had said I wanted to be a carpenter, then I would have become a carpenter.When did you start playing cello?When I was about 7. I studied cello for 12 years. I knew that I liked to sing, but singing classically would have never occurred to me. One of my sisters told me, “You sing well. Why don’t you give it a shot?”So I auditioned for voice at the Mozarteum [University] in Salzburg. And that’s how it happened. Without ever thinking about it too much, everything pretty much came together harmoniously.What does singing give you that playing the cello doesn’t?I think it has a bit to do with the fact that you are the instrument yourself, that you don’t have to take something in your hand and practice on it. And of course, there’s the added element of text. I think being an opera singer has more parameters. It’s not just about singing.This summer you’ll be appearing as the Count in “Figaro.” You’ve also sung the title character many times. What’s it like being both upstairs and downstairs in this opera?Personally, I prefer singing the Count. He’s not exactly a positive character, but that’s exactly what makes him interesting. He has more layers than Figaro. He has a soft, seductive side, but he’s also aggressive or irascible and you need to switch quickly between emotions.Most recently, you sang the Count in Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed, comically astute Vienna production of “Figaro.” Is Martin Kusej, the director in Salzburg, going to show us a different side of “Figaro”?Definitely. [Kusej] doesn’t want to reproduce the piece the way it was intended in [Mozart’s] time. He’s trying to bring out something relevant that still touches or concerns us nowadays. But I don’t think he’s looking for that through the comedy.You recently sang your first Wolfram in “Tannhäuser.” How was it singing such a meaty Wagner role?I was emotionally transported. As for other Wagner roles, we’ll see where else my voice leads me. But Mozart will probably remain a key part of my repertoire until the end. The Count is not a part I want to retire, because it’s a role you can still sing when you’re 60. More