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      Jascha Heifetz in the Case of the Violinist and the Fanatical Doorman

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      Nothing seemed amiss when a car dropped Jascha Heifetz back at the King David Hotel on April 16, 1953, after a recital at Edison Hall in Jerusalem.Heifetz had played the program, which included Richard Strauss’s E flat violin sonata, to his usual exacting standards and to thunderous applause.A lone doorman greeted his car, sandwiched between two police Jeeps, when it arrived at the hotel just after midnight. Having safely ferried Heifetz and his entourage — his bodyguard, his son, his accompanist — to the King David, the Jeeps drove away.The bodyguard got out of the car first and went through the hotel’s revolving door. Heifetz, carrying his violin case, was next. But before he could enter, the doorman rushed up to him, speaking Hebrew words Heifetz couldn’t understand.This was no doorman. He held an iron bar in his hand and brought the weapon down on Heifetz’s right arm, smashing his hand.Though Heifetz’s violin case deflected the blow, he clutched his hand in pain. As he entered the lobby, his bodyguard ran in pursuit of the attacker but found only the bar, wrapped in newspaper, a few feet from the hotel.Heifetz in Beersheba in April 1953. His next stop was Edison Hall in Jerusalem. A week before the Jerusalem recital, he received a note warning him not to play Strauss.via Getty ImagesSeventy years later, the man who attacked Jascha Heifetz has not been identified. A faction called Han oar Haivri (or Hebrew Youth), later linked to several right-wing extremist groups, took responsibility, but no one has ever been held accountable.Later, one man said he knew the assailant’s identity. This man, a future speaker of the Knesset, had good reason for his knowledge, having direct ties to the underground group that had sent Heifetz a threatening note about his choice of repertoire.An unsolved mystery involving a world-renowned violinist, the State of Israel’s early years, the shadows of collective trauma, and the uneasy mix of art and politics — this story ticked all of my professional and personal boxes.Figuring out what happened — through interviews with historians and those who knew Heifetz, looking at contemporary newspaper accounts and digging in archives — helped me make sense of this historical moment at a time when Israel is once again at a critical inflection point.HEIFETZ WAS ATTACKED because he had dared on this tour to play the sonata by Strauss, a composer then banned in Israel for his Nazi collaborations. In 1953, the State of Israel was just five years old and the Holocaust was still a very live memory. Playing the work of German composers — particularly Wagner — could still provoke extreme emotional reactions.A week before the Jerusalem concert, Heifetz had received a letter from an underground terrorist group: “You ought to know, as we do, that you dared play a Nazi melody in the Holy Land on the eve of Yom Hashoah” — or Holocaust Remembrance Day — “music composed by a partner to the destruction of our people.”The note warned: “Beware and never again repeat this crime.”A compilation of Heifetz’s program lists, which includes the April 16, 1953, concert in Jerusalem.Library of CongressTop government officials implored Heifetz to drop the Strauss from his repertoire. But no one could tell Heifetz, who was born in Vilnius and moved to the United States in 1917, what music to play, and the Strauss sonata was a particular favorite. “There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Heifetz told the officials.Audiences had applauded the sonata in Haifa, The New York Times reported, but in Tel Aviv, responded with stony silence.After the threatening note, Heifetz decided the Jerusalem recital would go on as planned but with tightened security. And any whiff of pickets or protests would scuttle the Strauss from the program.THE MAN WHO CLAIMED to know who attacked Heifetz was Dov Shilansky. A Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, he was determined never to let himself, or Israel, forget. In 1989, a year after his election as Knesset speaker, Shilansky urged lawmakers to read the names of each Holocaust victim, as six million felt like an incomprehensible number. “Every Person Has a Name” is now part of Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies all across Israel.Shilansky arrived in Israel in 1948 on the Altalena, a ship that sank when Israeli Defense Forces opened fire, killing 19 people. Most on the ship, Shilansky included, were members of Irgun, the right-wing underground resistance group.Shilansky maintained close ties to the group when Irgun morphed into a political party headed by Menachem Begin. In September 1952 the group was concerned with protesting Israel’s intent to receive 3 billion marks (or about $715 million) in reparations from Germany. Israel desperately needed the money to absorb the enormous number of Holocaust refugees.Both the right and left criticized the agreement, but consensus was that reparations could spur Israel forward rather than keep it focusing on an unspeakable atrocities. Shilansky, now 28 and married with a son, could not abide this. “I found no rest,” he wrote in his memoir “Diary of a Hebrew Jail.” “Whatever I did, that fact pierced my brain and pierced it again. I was a citizen of a treasonous nation; my inaction was one endorsement of that treason.”A month after the reparations agreement was signed, Shilansky brought a briefcase containing a device made out of six pounds of explosives to the office of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. Police arrested him before the device detonated, and he received a 21-month prison sentence.He was in jail when the agreement went into effect on March 27, 1953 — three weeks before the attack on Heifetz outside the King David Hotel. And he would still be in prison when a dozen members of another extremist group, Malchut Yisrael, were convicted in August of attempting to bomb the Ministry of Education building.“There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Heifetz told top government officials when they asked him to drop the Strauss from his program.via Getty ImagesHEIFETZ WASN’T SERIOUSLY INJURED in the attack beyond bruising and an eventual scar. Nor did his violin sustain any damage. But his assault seemed to chasten Israel’s media and chattering classes.Before, the Israeli press had seemed almost gleeful in its attacks on Heifetz for daring to play music by a banned composer. But as international papers, including The Times, hotly took notice, the tone became more conciliatory. Even the group that took responsibility for the attack, in a call to the Voice of Israel radio station, said it intended to damage Heifetz’s violin, not him.Heifetz now had to decide: should he continue his tour or leave Israel? His instinct was to flee, enraged, “that music had been made a political pawn,” as his son Robert recalled in a 1988 article for The Strad magazine. But the same officials who had implored Heifetz to nix the Strauss sonata now urged him to carry on. So, too, did David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister.Two days after the assault, over tea, Ben-Gurion apologized to Heifetz on behalf of the nation. As he later wrote in his diary, he asked Heifetz to continue, and “to play Strauss as well.”Heifetz continued. But the Strauss sonata was not on the program of his next concert, a benefit in Rehovot for the Chaim Weizmann Institute. Still, security guards and police filled the concert hall, though the only misadventure was when police noisily tried to break up a band of pigeons cooing on the rooftop.Despite having to hold his bow “rather gingerly between thumb and forefinger,” Heifetz was his usual near-flawless self. The audience applauded enthusiastically. But his bowing hand still hurt, and he canceled his final appearance in Tel Aviv.Three days later, hand still bandaged, Heifetz was back on tour, playing in Italy.DOV SHILANSKY BECAME A LAWYER and started his own firm. When the Likud party swept into power in 1977, making Menachem Begin prime minister, Begin rewarded his longtime friend Shilansky with a deputy minister post.In 1982, Shilansky told the historian Tom Segev that he knew who had attacked Heifetz, but would not say who it was. By then, Shilansky was embroiled in another music-related controversy.At the end of a concert by the Israeli Philharmonic in 1981, the orchestra’s conductor, the Indian-born Zubin Mehta, told the audience that the encore would be by Richard Wagner; anyone who felt uncomfortable was free to leave, he said, and the musicians would not take offense. (A violinist and trombonist, both Holocaust survivors, walked out.)It was the first time Wagner had been played officially in Israel since 1938, and reactions quickly turned ugly. Press attacks brought up all the old arguments, but Shilansky added something new.In a radio interview, he grew angry at Mehta’s chutzpah and suggested that he “go back to India.” He later said his comments had been taken out of context: he’d meant that Mehta should “leave Israelis in peace.”Begin said little publicly, but privately defended Shilansky in a letter to the Israel Philharmonic: “He saw our people in the process of annihilation. He himself was in a Nazi concentration camp.”WAS SHILANSKY RESPONSIBLE for the attack on Heifetz? The time frame doesn’t seem to work; Shilansky wasn’t released from prison until months after the assault. And he didn’t match the assailant’s description: a “tall, dark thug.”But several newspaper reports say that on April 12, Shilansky received a 10-day furlough for his second son’s birth. (That son, Shafir Shilansky, also a lawyer, did not return requests for comment.) Begin was the boy’s godfather. Shilansky would have been free when Heifetz received the blow to his bowing arm.When I brought this up to Segev, he insisted Shilansky wasn’t the attacker, that it wasn’t his style. It “makes absolutely no sense,” Segev said. I’m inclined to agree. A more plausible culprit might be a Malchut Yisrael member convicted in August 1953. Most were minors; their whereabouts at the time could not be definitively established.As Shilansky rose to power, his vociferous criticism of efforts to play German composers, and his passionate arguments that even speaking the German language could cause tremendous harm, never wavered. But whatever he knew about the Heifetz attack he took to the grave.FOR ME, THE ATTACK on Heifetz became less a mystery to solve than a thorny emotional and political journey to the heart of Israel’s founding, a reminder of its contradictions and aspirations. For Heifetz, it was simpler.“He just thought it was a stupid thing this man did,” Ayke Agus, the author of “Heifetz as I Knew Him” and a close friend, said in an interview. “He would tell anybody who called him up for an interview that he didn’t like to mix politics and music.”Anna Lou Dehavenon, the widow of pianist William Kapell, told Heifetz’s biographer John A. Maltese about meeting Heifetz for dinner in Paris during his 1953 tour. “I said to Jascha, ‘What has happened to your hand?’ And, of course, he didn’t want to talk about it.”Heifetz remained an active supporter of Israel. He visited a final time in 1970 for a five-week tour with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Upon meeting prime minister Golda Meir, Heifetz handed her a check for about $25,000 and told her “to do with it as she sees fit.”This trip may have been more harmonious because of another decision Heifetz made: Early drafts of his recital programs included a Strauss piece, but he chose not to play it. More

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      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

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      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

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      Review: ‘Ainadamar’ Turns Lorca Into Death-Haunted Opera

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s poetic 2003 work is being presented in a new production at Detroit Opera that will travel to the Met.DETROIT — Spain is “a country of death, a country open to death,” the poet Federico García Lorca wrote.Those words come from his classic lecture on “duende,” the spirit he saw as presiding over Spanish culture — the dark, earthy, imperfect, wild, morbid quality of its greatest art, music and bullfighting. When an ancient woman with barely a wisp of voice left takes the stage of a dimly lit country cabaret, cracks her way through a line of song and still gives you chills, duende is in the room.And duende should be in the room, too, for “Ainadamar,” Osvaldo Golijov’s death-haunted opera about Lorca, which opened at the newly ambitious Detroit Opera on Saturday evening in a production headed for the Metropolitan Opera in the 2024-25 season.A poetic meditation that keeps erupting in sensual, riotous flamenco rhythms, the 80-minute piece — which premiered in 2003 and was substantially revised two years later — crosses time with seductively blurry ease in David Henry Hwang’s libretto, translated by Golijov into Spanish.Part takes place in 1969, when the Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, near the end of her life, tells a student about collaborating with Lorca decades before on his first successful play, “Mariana Pineda,” about a 19th-century martyr of Spanish liberalism.Flashbacks bring us to the summer of 1936, as Xirgu tries to persuade Lorca to escape with her to Cuba, where they will be safe from the right-wing revolt in Spain. But he refuses, and is soon killed by Nationalist forces — another saint who dies for freedom. (Ainadamar, the “fountain of tears,” is a natural spring in the hills above Granada where he is believed to have been murdered.)There is a ritualistic, dreamlike, sometimes even delirious quality to the work. Its “images” — Golijov and Hwang’s name for their three sections — each begin with a distinctive rendering of the choral ballad from the start of “Mariana Pineda,” repetitions that eventually give the sense of an endless, circular festival of mourning.Daniela Mack, left, as Lorca and Reyes in the Detroit production.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaWhile the storytelling and structure are quite grounded, even straightforward, the text has the heightened, often surreal quality of Lorca’s verse. Xirgu and Lorca’s debate about going to Cuba seems to transport them to the island in a woozy fantasy. A group of statues of Mariana Pineda join the poet in song at one point, and — just in time for Easter — the scene at Ainadamar brings in the “voices of the fountain” in a fevered vision that draws explicit comparison to the crucifixion.Xirgu’s memories and the present-tense action flow together amid the pitch-bending wails of a female choir, the “niñas.” Some of its members remain offstage, but some come on and join a small troupe of flamenco dancers, choreographed by Antonio Najarro in Deborah Colker’s stark staging here in Detroit.Jon Bausor’s set, somberly lit by Paul Keogan, is dominated by a circular playing space rounded by a translucent curtain of floor-length strings — part stylized fountain, part screen for projections, part evocation of the beaded divider you pass through at the back of a dusty small-town store.The pit orchestra is buttressed by flamenco guitars; a guitar and a box-drum cajón are played onstage. Suggestive use is made of the sampled, amplified sounds of horses’ hooves, water dripping and ominous spoken passages from ’30s radio broadcasts.In one arresting sequence, Golijov morphs gunshots into a hallucinatory beat that’s half flamenco, half techno. Ingeniously, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the right-wing politician who was a leader in Lorca’s arrest and murder, sings his few but crucial phrases in the wailing cante jondo (or “deep song”) style.Isaac Tovar with chorus members and dancers in “Ainadamar,” which has choreography by Antonio Najarro.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaAs much as it gestures to the 1930s and ’60s, “Ainadamar” is a throwback to the turn of the 21st century, when Golijov was among the most celebrated figures in classical music.Born in 1960 in Argentina into a family of Eastern European Jewish descent, he also studied in Israel and came to live in the United States, and brought all those strands — old world and new; global north and south — to bear in a musical style of artful yet explosive eclecticism, incorporating tango, flamenco, rumba, klezmer, folk ballads and more.Within the fusty classical music world, his disparate, energetic mélange of influences was swiftly embraced amid the multiculturalism that was fashionable in the 1990s, and Golijov nearly drowned in honors and commissions: Grammys, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a festival devoted to him at Lincoln Center, a concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.His defining success, the irrepressibly percussive Afro-Latin oratorio “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” a bold updating of the tradition of the Bach Passions, premiered in 2000. (It was a good year for sprawling, polyglot recastings of religiously minded choral works: John Adams’s “El Niño,” about the Christmas story, was first heard three months later.)“Ainadamar” was one of the often achingly lovely works that followed “La Pasión” in the handful of years before Golijov ran into a wall of unbearable pressure, missed deadlines and a plagiarism kerfuffle — leading to a decade of, essentially, silence before “Falling Out of a Time,” an intense, intimate song cycle about a grieving father, appeared just before the pandemic.His work never quite went away, and “Ainadamar” is well traveled in a variety of productions. But it and him feel newly relevant in our time — even if the language of the “multiculti” ’90s has shifted to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”Spanish is still a language rarely sung in mainstream opera houses. And amid fresh calls for broader representation at all levels of the arts, Golijov’s work, while generally written for standard forces, often also gives the opportunity for performers from nonclassical traditions to contribute on their own terms. He doesn’t just translate flamenco for a symphony orchestra; he also demands a place in the pit and onstage for flamenco singers, dancers and players.But even with its creativity and beauty, “Ainadamar” has weaknesses. Though Golijov introduces enough intriguing ideas to keep the accessibility of his music from blandness — trembling marimba and warily sliding yawns of strings somehow perfectly conjure martyrdom — there is, as in much of his work, sometimes a sense of vamping when he intends the effect to be incantatory. And though it isn’t long, “Ainadamar” seems ready to end several times before it does.When it does end, though, in this production, it’s memorable, with the curtain falling on the poignant, fantastical sight of lanterns dimming underwater. Colker’s staging has an appealing simplicity that splits the difference between the realistic and more symbolic scenes, though the rotating murder sequence and the final “image” — in which past and present, living and dead, collide — could be clearer. And Tal Rosner’s projections tend to be busy or obvious — hands, droplets of water, close-ups of women crying out — more than elegant or expressive.Reyes and Mack in the production directed by Deborah Colker.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaConducted by Paolo Bortolameolli, the orchestra played with poised sobriety, and the all-important battery of percussion was lively. But the textures should be lusher to get the full hypnotic effect of Golijov’s score, and some passages of frenetic activity were vague rather than urgent.As Xirgu, the soprano Gabriella Reyes was sympathetic, with haunting rises up to ethereal floated high notes late in the piece. Vanessa Vasquez, another soprano, was tender as her student, Nuria. As Lorca, the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack — Golijov nods to the operatic tradition of the woman-as-man “trouser role” — had mellow charm.They were impressive, but none was harrowing; the overall effect of the opera was muted, bloodless. The same was true of the flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada, who as Ruiz Alonso gets the keening lines of a call to prayer. Tejada’s wails, though, were pretty rather than heart-piercing.There was much to admire about this “Ainadamar.” But it was solid, stable, attractive — not wrenching or raw. Duende, which should have permeated the opera house, was all too hard to come by.AinadamarPerformances continue on April 14 and 16 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More

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      Mötley Crüe Guitarist’s Lawsuit Says He Was Kicked Out

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      Mick Mars accused his bandmates of gaslighting him and cutting him out of future profits after he said he was retiring from touring.Mick Mars, the guitarist for the veteran hair-metal band Mötley Crüe, filed a lawsuit this week accusing his bandmates of pushing him out of the group and cutting him out of its future profits.The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in Superior Court in Los Angeles County, details a falling out that the band had with Mars after he announced in October that he was retiring from touring, citing chronic pain from an inflammatory disease that affects the spine.The rest of the band responded, the suit says, by convening an emergency shareholders’ meeting of Mötley Crüe’s main corporate entity to throw Mars out of the band, fire him as a director of the corporation and take away his shares. The lawsuit says Mars has a 25 percent stake in each of the band’s affiliated business entities.“It is beyond sad that, after 41 years together, a band would try to throw out a member who is unable to tour anymore because he has a debilitating disease,” said Edwin F. McPherson, Mars’s lawyer. “Mick has been pushed around for far too long in this band, and we are not going to let that continue.”Mötley Crüe formed in Los Angeles in 1981 and became one of the most popular of the so-called hair-metal bands. Mixing glam-rock theatrics, heavy metal riffs and radio-friendly pop hooks, they were fixtures on MTV in the 1980s and, by that decade’s end, had topped the Billboard 200 chart with their 1989 album, “Dr. Feelgood.” The band’s tell-all memoir, “The Dirt,” which chronicled their rise to fame and rocky history, was adapted into a Netflix biopic in 2019.Mars, 71, whose real name is Robert Alan Deal, joined Mötley Crüe shortly after it was founded and, according to the lawsuit, came up with the band’s name. He was diagnosed at 27 with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that can cause the vertebrae to fuse over time. The disease has caused his spine “to seize up and freeze completely solid,” the suit says, adding that he is in chronic pain and is not able to move his head in any direction.Last fall, Mars told his bandmates that, because of his “debilitating” ankylosing spondylitis, he couldn’t physically “handle the rigors of the road” and would no longer tour with the band, the suit says. Mars, who last performed with Mötley Crüe in Las Vegas on Sept. 9, 2022, said he would still record and perform with the band in a “residency situation.”After Mars publicly announced the change on Oct. 26, the band issued a separate statement saying that he had “retired” and that a guitarist named John 5 was replacing him.The other band members — Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil and Tommy Lee — called the emergency shareholders’ meeting, where they sought to fire Mars from seven band-affiliated corporations and limited-liability corporations, the lawsuit says. Those entities — Mötley Crüe Inc.; Mötley Crüe Touring Inc.; Red, White and Crue Inc.; Masters 2000 Inc.; Cruefest LLC; Mötley Records LLC; and Masters 2008 LLC — are listed as defendants in the lawsuit, which demands that Mars be allowed to review the band’s business records. He is also seeking reimbursement for his legal fees.Mars claims in his lawsuit that the band also demanded that he sign an agreement that his share of future touring profits and sales of merchandise featuring the band’s name and logo be reduced to 5 percent from 25 percent, and that he receive no income from sales of merchandise that “named or depicted” his replacement in the band.Sasha Frid, a lawyer for the band, said the lawsuit was “unfortunate and completely off base.” He said that Mars and other band members signed an agreement in 2008 that nobody would receive money from performances if they resigned.“Despite the fact that the band did not owe Mick anything — and with Mick owing the band millions in advances that he did not pay back — the band offered Mick a generous compensation package to honor his career with the band,” Frid said in an emailed statement. “Manipulated by his manager and lawyer, Mick refused and chose to file this ugly public lawsuit.”The lawsuit sheds light on the band’s tumultuous personal relationships, accusing Sixx, Mötley Crüe’s bassist, of making decisions on the band’s behalf without consulting his bandmates. Sixx also “gaslighted” Mars in recent years, the suit says, telling him that his guitar playing was subpar, that he often played the wrong chords onstage and that he had “some sort of cognitive dysfunction.”Frid provided The New York Times with signed declarations from seven members of the band’s crew, including the band’s production manager, who said Mars’s performance on Mötley Crüe’s 2022 stadium tour was “by far the worst I have ever seen in my years with the band.”“Mötley Crüe always performs its songs live, but during the last tour Mick struggled to remember chords, played the wrong songs and made constant mistakes which led to his departure from the band,” Frid said. “The band did everything to protect him, tried to keep these matters private to honor Mick’s legacy and take the high road.”In his lawsuit, Mars acknowledged occasionally playing the wrong chords on tour, but said it was because of a faulty in-ear monitor that made him unable to hear his guitar. Instead, he accused the other band members, including Sixx, of miming to recordings onstage. More

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      At 81, Ann-Margret Is Finally Living Her Rock ’n’ Roll Dream

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      Ann-Margret has always spoken in a voice that falls somewhere between a purr and a coo. But at her home on a recent rainy day in Los Angeles, she broke up her usual gauzy tones with deep and gutsy growls. “One, two, three o’clock rock!!!” she half-bellowed and half-yelled over a video chat, echoing the opening line from “Rock Around the Clock,” Bill Haley’s raucous 1954 smash.A few minutes later, she snarled through the opening salvo of “Splish Splash,” the highly caffeinated 1958 hit by Bobby Darin, only to follow it with the outburst, “I love rock ’n’ roll!” Her tone was far more Joan Jett than Kim McAfee, the sprightly character she played in “Bye Bye Birdie,” the movie that simultaneously made her a household name and the hottest pinup of 1963.Ann-Margret — pronounced as one name, not two — has always been rock ’n’ roll adjacent, though that’s rarely talked about today given her long and varied career as an actress and a singer of lounge classics. She co-starred with Elvis Presley in one of his most beloved films, “Viva Las Vegas,” provided a flirty foil to a character meant to affectionately send him up in “Birdie,” and had a personal relationship with him of varying description.Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley on the set of “Viva Las Vegas.” “We looked at one another and all of a sudden, I would do a pose and he’d be doing the same pose. We connected that way,” she said.Silver Screen Collection, via Getty ImagesShe also commanded a lead singing role in Ken Russell’s gaudy movie version of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy,” and earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist in 1962 after scoring a Top 20 hit with “I Just Don’t Understand,” one of the first recordings to feature a fuzz-toned guitar. Her song inspired a Beatles cover on the BBC two years later and, in 2014, the band Spoon recorded a version of her take, not the Fab Four’s.Yet, it’s only now, at the improbable age of 81, that Ann-Margret is getting the chance to assert herself as a full-on rock ’n’ roll goddess — if a winking one. On Friday she will release “Born to Be Wild,” the first album in the star’s career of 60-plus years to focus squarely on rock standards, all of which she handpicked, including Steppenwolf’s biker anthem referenced in the title and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which Elvis famously gyrated through in his own version.A host of legit rockers leaped at the chance to support her in this lark of a project, including the “Tommy” creator Pete Townshend, who sang and played whiplash guitar on her version of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye-Bye Love”; Steve Cropper, who added Memphis cred to “Son of a Preacher Man”; and Joe Perry, who shot stinging solos into her take on “Rock Around the Clock.” The album also features cameos from peers like Cliff Richard (82) and Pat Boone (88).“What she has done is extraordinary,” Townshend said by phone from London, adding an expletive for emphasis. “She picked up the silver thread that links her to the very genesis of rock ’n’ roll history. There’s a mischievousness to that, a light touch that’s perhaps necessary but also real.”Townshend compared receiving the invitation to play on her album to the time, in 1993, when he “was summoned to play with the Ramones. You know you won’t say no,” he added.“I feel the way I felt when I was 10 years old whenever the music plays,” Ann-Margret said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesFrom the dining room of the Benedict Canyon home she has lived in since 1968, Ann-Margaret said she’d long harbored hopes of making a record like “Born to Be Wild.” “Deep inside I’ve wanted to do this kind of album forever,” she explained. She alluded to her outfit — a black sweater, tight leggings and leather boots that rose past the knee: “This is what I’ve been wearing since I first came to Los Angeles,” she said. “This is what I’m comfortable in.”She’s just as comfortable with language that dates from the ’50s, peppering her speech with words like “gadzooks” and “egad.” Looking youthful with her trademark auburn sweep of hair, Ann-Margret has also retained the coquettish character that first made her a star, giggling often when she speaks and never giving away more than she wants to. It was her original image, more than her music, that inspired Brian Perera, the head of Cleopatra Records, which specializes in projects of a historical nature, to propose the album to her.“When you look at vintage photos of her, she’s wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle, so the thought of her doing a rock ’n’ roll record really fit,” he said in an interview.The “Born to Be Wild” album cover drives that home. It reproduces a 1967 poster created for her first Vegas show that finds her in a form-fitting jumpsuit while straddling a Triumph Tiger motorcycle. “I don’t think I can get into that jumpsuit today,” she said, and laughed. “But I can sure try!”Ann-Margret has always been rock ’n’ roll adjacent, though that’s rarely talked about today given her long and varied career as an actress and as a singer of lounge classics. Bettmann, via Getty ImagesAnn-Margret has always been hot for motorcycles. Her father and uncle rode them when she was a child in Sweden, and when she saw Marlon Brando straddle one in “The Wild One,” “that was it. I had to have one,” she said. “I didn’t know many women who rode bikes back then.”She still rides a Harley specially designed for her in lavender. It makes a perfect complement to her Cadillac, finished in her favorite shade: “Hot pink!” she exclaimed.It could be a twin to Elvis’s famously pink Caddy. The relationship between Ann-Margret and E.P., as she calls him, has been the subject of gossip for decades, but she still won’t speak about the personal aspects of it — only their creative link. “We looked at one another and all of a sudden, I would do a pose and he’d be doing the same pose. We connected that way,” she said.Her record company tried to stress the connection by having her record “Heartbreak Hotel,” but she never had much of a career as a hitmaker. It was her acting in “Carnal Knowledge” — praised in a New York Times review from 1971 — that convinced Townshend that she could really deliver in “Tommy.” While he called the major male actors in the 1975 film — Jack Nicholson and Oliver Reed — “egomaniacal, whiskey drinking lunatics,” he said that Ann-Margret was a consummate professional. She even carried off the absurdity of playing Roger Daltrey’s mother though she was just two years his senior.“I’m just happy to be alive,” Ann-Margret said. “I have the same friends I’ve had for 60 years, and I feel the way I felt when I first met them.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOne of Ann-Margret’s most famous moments in “Tommy” involved geysers of baked beans being shot directly at her. “They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!” she said. “And it smelled!” She recalled that Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. “That’s fine with me!” she added brightly.Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. “Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,” he said. “Let’s just do it again!”For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. “My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,” he said.Pat Boone, who played Ann-Margret’s love interest in the 1963 musical “State Fair,” was at first taken aback by the song she chose for their duet, “Teach Me Tonight,” which he called “a love scene in a song.” “I thought, ‘What am I doing singing this?’” Boone said. “I’m 87 at that point and she’s got to be 80. I had to do it humorously.”So he ad-libbed the lines “I think we just wrote an octogenarian love song” and “I’ll have to turn up my hearing aid.” For the record, “I don’t wear hearing aids,” Boone added with a laugh.More saucy wit appears in a song Ann-Margret chose from her Vegas act, “Somebody’s in My Orchard,” which includes lines like “Somebody digs my fig trees/Somebody loves their juice.” “Oh, to see people’s faces when they finally realize what I’m singing about,” she said mischievously.Despite all the album’s humor, Paul Shaffer, who played piano on “The Great Pretender,” insists that her Vegas-style approach to music isn’t just camp. “She delivers the goods,” he said.When comparing her with young female entertainers like Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato, he added, “Aren’t they really doing Ann-Margret’s act?”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesLike all of the album’s guests, Shaffer recorded his parts separately from the star. He noted that her voice on the recording is lower and huskier than when she last cut an album, a gospel work reflecting her faith that was released 10 years ago. But Perera of Cleopatra Records believes Ann-Margret’s chestier tone works for the grinding sound of early rock. He added that “there isn’t a lot of new music coming from artists whose careers started in the ’50s and early ’60s. That makes it special.”The musicians who appear beside Ann-Margret on the album marveled over her ability, at 81, to convey a come-hither sexuality in her singing. To her, it makes an important point — that eroticism doesn’t have a cutoff date. At the same time, she made sure to deliver her sensuality with humor, and kept the tone of the music light.The only time she turned sad in our talk was when mentioning her husband, the actor Roger Smith, who served as her manager for much of their 50-year relationship and who died in 2017. Last year, she also lost her old friend and “Bye Bye Birdie” co-star Bobby Rydell, who died before he could finish a track he started for the album. Small wonder, when asked about how she feels about her upcoming 82nd birthday, she said, “I’m just happy to be alive. I have the same friends I’ve had for 60 years, and I feel the way I felt when I first met them.”Singing has the same effect: “I feel the way I felt when I was 10 years old whenever the music plays.” More

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      Inside “Night of 1000 Kates,” a Kate Bush-Themed Variety Show

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      The “Night of 1,000 Kates,” an annual variety show in Philadelphia, taps into the singer Kate Bush’s lasting appeal.PHILADELPHIA — For the last nine years, a variety show inspired by the British art pop singer Kate Bush has promised a “Night of 1,000 Kates.”This year’s edition, held on April 1, delivered on the event’s numerical promise for the first time; some 1,100 people attended, according to the show’s organizers. Many of the celebrants wore crimson dresses, dark sequins and other fancy goth attire inspired by Ms. Bush, who, as in years past, was present only in spirit.Some 80 other performers, including professional and amateur musicians, dancers and video artists, participated in more than 20 acts inspired by the sexagenarian British singer. The crowd at Union Transfer, a concert hall just outside Philadelphia’s Chinatown, was almost twice as big as that of last year’s show.Danielle Redden, 45, a founder of “Night of 1,000 Kates,” said it started as a party for “our friends and community of queers and weirdos” to celebrate their appreciation for Ms. Bush. Cookie Factorial, 42, another founder, said: “I don’t think that any of us thought it would be an enduring, legacy-type event.”Some 80 performers — including a harpist, left, and other musicians, dancers and video artists — participated in more than 20 acts at the event.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesThe rising interest in “Night of 1,000 Kates” reflects the lasting appeal of Ms. Bush, whose 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (a Deal With God)” topped charts in 2022 — some 37 years after it was released — thanks largely to its prominently use in “Stranger Things” on Netflix.Aaron Mack, 23, a wardrobe supervisor for a theater group in Philadelphia, was born decades after Ms. Bush’s career started to take off in the 1970s. He nevertheless identified himself as “Kate Bush’s No. 1 fan.”Mr. Mack said he wants to get “a Kate Bush tramp stamp” tattooed on his lower back to express his admiration for the singer. “It’s going to be a portrait of her,” he added, surrounded by things that have come to symbolize Ms. Bush, like the red shoes on the cover of her 1993 album, “The Red Shoes.”Donna Petrecco, 48, a real estate agent in Fallsington, Pa., said she has been listening to Ms. Bush’s music for most of her life. Ms. Petrecco, a former cheerleader for the Philadelphia Eagles, came to the show for the first time with two friends — Lisa Coslanzo, 51, and Kita Delgado, 46 — both of whom also used to cheer for the Eagles.Ms. Delgado, who lives in Fairless Hills, Pa., wore shimmering silver pants for the occasion. She said she was most excited about seeing the dance performances. But she also came to dance herself, at the after-party.This year’s “Night of 1,000 Kates” delivered on the event’s numerical promise for the first time; some 1,100 people attended, according to the show’s organizers.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesCelebrants in crimson dresses cut a rug during the after-party, which raged until about 2 a.m.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“You’ll find these sparkly pants dancing in the corner in two hours,” said Ms. Delgado, who runs a dog-boarding business. She and her friends, she added, “can still throw down a little bit.”Many performers and attendees said part of the event’s appeal is its unbridled enthusiasm. “I would describe it as a bunch of fabulous weirdos decked out in their best ready to have a great time,” said Alex Melman, 33, a director of technology at an advocacy group in Philadelphia.Mr. Melman’s band, Roof of the World, was new to the performance lineup this year. The group performed Ms. Bush’s song “Wild Man,” about spotting Yetis in the Himalayan mountains. Its act was preceded by a harpist-keyboardist duo’s rendition of Ms. Bush’s song “And Dream of Sheep,” and was followed by a group of dancers wearing white-lace outfits and holding scepters filled with dry ice, which turned into vapor as they performed.“The tone of the show, like Kate’s work, is a mix of deeply earnest and really, really silly,” said Kelly Crodian, a 38-year-old artist in Philadelphia, whose video art set to Ms. Bush’s song “Suspended in Gaffa” was featured at the event.Brian O’Sullivan, 31, an occupational therapist in Philadelphia, described the show as having “avant-garde, weird, Enya and Bjork vibes” and the humor of “Cathy” comics.Mr. O’Sullivan, a three-time attendee, hopes the event can retain its eccentricity as it grows. “We’ve got to keep it a little bit underground,” he said. “My biggest fear is that this is going to become corny.”From left, one of the more avant-garde outfits at the show; a sign used Ms. Bush’s likeness to encourage mask-wearing; and a guest enjoying a performance. Aaron Richter for The New York TimesThough the “Night of 1,000 Kates” has evolved, certain elements have remained the same, including the final act of the show: a dance lesson, led by most of the night’s performers, to some of the choreography from the video for Ms. Bush’s 1978 hit single, “Wuthering Heights.” Another tradition is the after-party, which this year raged until about 2 a.m.Keira Wilson, a 37-year-old career counselor in Baltimore, has attended the show off and on since it started in 2014. She said it has managed to retain its unique spirit even as it has become bigger.“Over the last couple of years I have watched many of my friends take on many formations of Kate Bush,” Ms. Wilson said. “Each year this entire project gets bigger and bigger. And I’m really excited to see that happen.” More

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      Nora Forster, 80, Who Married (and Stayed Married to) a Sex Pistol, Dies

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      A German publishing heiress and music promoter, she settled in London in time for the 1970s punk-rock explosion and became the muse to its baddest boy.Nora Forster, a German-born publishing heiress and music promoter who gained fame as the wife of John Lydon — otherwise known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols — and the mother of Arianna Forster, or Ari Up, the lead singer of the influential all-female punk band the Slits, died on Thursday. She was 80.Her death was announced by Mr. Lydon on Twitter. “Nora had been living with Alzheimer’s for several years,” the announcement said. “In which time John had become her full time career.” He did not say where she died.For more than four decades, music fans knew Ms. Forster as the emotional rock for the ever-volatile Mr. Lydon, who in the late 1970s became Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of British polite society for spitting invective in every direction, including the Queen’s, as the frontman for the incendiary punk progenitors the Sex Pistols.When the band imploded after its brief, explosive career, he scarcely mellowed; he continued on as the creative force of the fiery post-punk band Public Image Ltd., or PiL.Because of her husband’s enduring notoriety, particularly in England, Ms. Forster’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease unfolded as a public drama after he went public about her diagnosis in 2018.“It’s vile to watch someone you love disappear,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in February. “All the things I thought were the ultimate agony seem preposterous now.”Her illness, he said, had “shaped me into what I am.”“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he added. “I don’t see how I can live without her. I wouldn’t want to. There’s no point.”The previous month, he had teared up when taking a more wistful turn in an interview on the television show “Good Morning Britain” about “Hawaii,” a haunting PiL ballad that he had written as a tribute to her and that was the Irish entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. (Mr. Lydon was born in England to Irish parents.) “Remember me,” Mr. Lydon sang, “I remember you.”“I can see her personality in her eyes,” he said. “She lets me know that it’s the communication skills that are letting her down.”Nora Maier was born on Nov. 6, 1942, in Munich. After the war, her father, Franz Karl Maier, was a prosecutor who helped bring wartime Nazis to justice. He was later the editor and publisher of the newspaper Tagesspiegel.Ms. Forster went on to work as a model and to marry the singer Frank Forster, who was “kind of a swing pop star, always appearing on TV back in the ’60s,” Arianna Forster said in an interview with the music site Pitchfork in 2009, a year before she died.Nora Forster’s survivors include her husband and three grandchildren.As the 1960s unfolded, Ms. Forster promoted West German tours for acts like Jimi Hendrix and Yes, which gave her prominence on the German rock scene. “People were walking around in the living room back then, like the Bee Gees and all these big groups,” her daughter recalled in the Pitchfork interview.The bohemian lifestyle of her rock friends eventually ran afoul of the local authorities. “In Munich, the police were knocking at the door every night because of the loud acid parties,” her daughter once said. “She was fed up with it. You have to go to London to live that lifestyle.”Ms. Forster did just that in about 1970, and by the middle of the decade she had become enmeshed in the punk-rock scene that was starting to roil Britain and the music industry as a whole. She became “a den mother to all the young punks,” said Arianna, who in 1976, at age 14, would rename herself Ari Up and join with a drummer called Palmolive to found the Slits, which became a leading female punk band of the era.In 1975, Ms. Forster met Mr. Lydon, who was nearly 14 years her junior, at Sex, the boundary-pushing clothing boutique on London’s King’s Road run by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren.It was anything but love at first sight.“There was no physical attraction at first,” Ms. Forster said in a 2004 interview with The Sunday Mail of Britain. “I didn’t even think to be nice to him. I was at another gig and John passed by my table and said, ‘Drop dead.’”Despite the mutual hostility, Mr. Lydon was intrigued. “Her nose went 10 feet in the air in her ’40s film star outfit,” he said in the same Sunday Mail interview. “Long blond hair, padded shoulders — that entire femme fatale look, which I was a complete ham for.”Eventually she softened. “I fell in love with John because he surprised me,” she said. “He had a sweet attitude. He was more innocent and not like the rest of the group.”The couple married in 1979, to the horror of Ms. Forster’s father. And, to the likely amazement of those who considered Mr. Lydon a human mushroom cloud, the marriage endured.Even so, it might never have happened if Ms. Forster had listened to her friends’ advice in those early days. “One day he came up and asked why I had never invited him to my house,” she later said of Mr. Lydon. “I replied, ‘People told me you would destroy everything.’” More

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      James Bowman, Who Helped Resurrect the Countertenor, Dies at 81

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      He took up the repertory for the highest male voice at a time when few were performing it. He was particularly known for two roles in Britten operas.James Bowman, a British countertenor who championed repertory for that voice at a time when few singers were attempting it and inspired more composers, including Benjamin Britten, to write for it, died on March 27 at his home in Redhill, south of London. He was 81.Terry Winwood, his civil partner, confirmed the death but said the cause had not yet been determined.When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”Mr. Bowman’s breakthrough came in 1967, when he was working as a teacher and was doing most of his singing in choirs. He described the moment to The Santa Fe Reporter in 1987.“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”He was invited to audition.“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.“James Bowman’s ringing Apollo sounded authentically unterrestrial,” Martin Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the world premiere of the piece at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, England.Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”In a tribute on the website of the London-based choir Tenebrae, Nigel Short, the choir’s director, recalled the crucial support Mr. Bowman gave him early in his career. He also shared fond memories of Mr. Bowman’s impish sense of humor.“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”Mr. Bowman made for a lively newspaper interview as well. He was always eager to dispel stereotypes about countertenors, especially unflattering ones that branded them as effeminate and made them the target of jokes.“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”When Mr. Bowman performed Handel’s “Messiah” with the St. Thomas Choir at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan in 2005, one critic wrote that he “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesJames Thomas Bowman was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in Oxford, England, to Benjamin and Cecilia (Coote) Bowman. He attended the centuries-old school King’s Ely, beginning in 1951; originally a boy chorister there, he soon became head chorister. According to an obituary published by the school, he gave his first concert as a countertenor in 1959 to a small school group in a chapel at Ely Cathedral. The school now hosts an annual James Bowman Lecture promoting the creative and liberal arts.Mr. Bowman attended New College, Oxford, as an organ scholar and was a member of the New College and Christ Church choirs. In 1965 he met David Munrow, who invited him to join his Early Music Consort of London. He continued performing with that group well into the 1970s, and he was also a member of the early music choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua.Mr. Bowman and Mr. Winwood were together for 48 years. He leaves no other immediate survivors.Producing the countertenor voice, Mr. Bowman told The Sunday Telegraph, involved “using the edge of your vocal cords, and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area.”“I can sing bass,” he added. “I use my bass voice to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can’t keep up a bass voice for long — it feels odd.”Although he was a champion of the countertenor and urged composers to write for it, not all of them hit the mark, he told The Independent of Britain in 1990.“People say, ‘I’ve written you an opera,’ and either the range is too wide or they want you to be something bizarre like a singing corpse,” he said. “I’ve spent my life fighting the idea of being a piece of exquisitery on a table — trying just to be a singer, not a countertenor.” More