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      Review: John Luther Adams’s ‘Vespers’ Pray for an Earth in Crisis

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      John Luther Adams’s latest premiere, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” is a tear-splattered departure from his usual style.Lately, the composer John Luther Adams has been thinking about art — and artists — in times of crisis.Amid war, a pandemic, political precarity and looming climate disaster, someone like him can retreat into nostalgia, or turn to an aesthetic of proselytism, or speak directly to current events as if following Brecht’s famous epigraph from his “Svendborg Poems,” “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”Adams sees himself as something of a modern Monet, painting his monumental water lilies during World War I. “Like Monet, in my own lesser way, the best thing I can do now, for myself and for other people,” he wrote in a recent essay, “is what I’ve done throughout my life: to follow my art, with an ever-deeper sense of urgency and devotion.”That sense has led him to his latest work, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on Friday, one night after its unveiling in Philadelphia. Rarely, if ever, has Adams written music that has been so explicitly felt, and more directly stated — but also so ineffective.In a way, the urgency of climate-related art has caught up to Adams, whose career has been an extended exercise in marveling at the natural world through music. He was once an activist but settled on full-time composition, mostly from his minimalist, longtime home in Alaska, a place lovingly and eloquently documented in his books “Winter Music” and “Silences So Deep.”And his work, while not overtly political, has come from a place of wonder and conscience, qualities that extend to his everyday life: Rather than fly, he took a train to Philadelphia from his house in New Mexico. Adams has long been a master of creating environments in sound — not tone paintings per se, but immersive, inventive evocations of, for example, bird song, the desert and, most famously, the open water in “Become Ocean,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (and the love of Taylor Swift). Awe-inspiring, nearly religious to experience, his music is, at its finest, a font of appreciation for forces larger than ourselves.The “Vespers,” however, are different. Over five sections, this tear-splattered score mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed. It is, he told The New York Times in an interview, unusually expressive and personal. But in its bluntness — down to a spoken-word introduction, delivered on Friday by Charlotte Blake Alston, that laid out not the structure of the piece but its purpose — it feels like the work of a less assured artist.These first performances — by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing, one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles — didn’t happen under ideal circumstances. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, withdrew because of illness; and the original soprano soloist, Ying Fang, has been recovering from a vocal cord hemorrhage. She was replaced by Meigui Zhang, and the Crossing’s director, Donald Nally, took up the podium for the Adams (while at Carnegie, Marin Alsop filled in for the concert’s second half, a precise and transparent, yet terrifyingly alive “Rite of Spring”).But the reading didn’t seem to suffer. Nally is an experienced hand in Adams’s music, having premiered and recorded his “Canticles of the Holy Wind” with the Crossing. And on Friday, he navigated with cool command the idiosyncratic layout of the “Vespers” — four choruses and four string-and-percussion ensembles arranged across the stage, with a piano and harp in the middle, then woodwinds, brass and additional instruments aloft in the balconies.Adams’s score calls for brasses and woodwinds to be perched in balconies on either side of the stage.Chris LeeIn the first section, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” percussive ringing and ghostly breaths give way to geological texts — the names and colors of rocks — describing two billion years’ worth of layers in the Grand Canyon. The words, set against suspended, seemingly static strings, come quickly, unintelligible as they blend and best taken in, as with most of Adams’s music, as if letting them wash over you.Insistently downward melodic phrases appear to echo section’s title until they emerge as the idée fixe of the entire piece, doleful and reflecting a world in decline. The gesture takes form next, in “A Weeping of Doves,” as wailing vocalise; and is subtler in “Night-Shining Clouds,” as the slowly sloping sheen of harmonics in the strings.The clearest allusion to the work’s liturgical title comes in the fourth section, “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” which is set to the scientific binomials of 193 species Adams describes in the score as “critically threatened and endangered.” (Why that includes the Kauai O’o, the long-extinct bird whose call inspired the fifth section, “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” is beyond me.)If the litany doesn’t quite land, it’s not Adams’s fault — though he does overlay the names to the point rendering them indistinguishable, with no time to register, much less grieve for them. The bigger difficulty, though, is that since 2020, a list like this has lost its power; people routinely saw unfathomably high infection rates, and the deaths of more than one million Americans. If that hasn’t been enough to inspire collective mourning, what chance could there have been for him?The last name among the “Litanies” is Homo sapiens — uncharacteristic for Adams, and more expected of a comparatively immature artist’s rhetoric. But there is a return to form in that “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” in which the strings are again suspended, though foundational, under Zhang’s elegant but sorrowful vocal line, which is revealed to be drawn-out adaptation of the Kauai O’o call.That bird song — captured in 1987, in a recording of the last of the species — does appear as a transcription at the end, played by a piccolo and orchestral bells perched in a balcony at the rear of the hall. The moment unfurls with freedom, its long rests patient, its repeated call beautiful and heartbreakingly lonely. It’s here, as Adams turns his ear and pen back toward nature, that his music is most powerful.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: ‘Fragments’ Proposes a New Kind of Cello Recital

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      Alisa Weilerstein brought her new project, a mix tape of new works and movements from Bach’s cello suites, to Zankel Hall.Alisa Weilerstein, a cellist of explosive emotional energy, gave the New York premiere of her new project, “Fragments,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. I was there, but she wouldn’t want me to tell you exactly what happened.Journalists have been asked to include a spoiler alert if they plan to reveal the concert’s program — which I will do, so consider yourself warned.“Fragments” is a new, multiyear series in which Weilerstein plans to pair each of Bach’s six cello suites with new works she commissioned for the project in general, but not for any suite in particular.Weilerstein and her director, Elkhanah Pulitzer, are aiming to rethink how artists connect with their audiences by reconfiguring the traditional concert format, which they feel has gotten, if not quite stale, predictable. An element of surprise — and the abandonment of preconceived notions — is critical to their concept.Gone are the usual program notes, intermission, encores and set lists. On Saturday, an evening built around Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G, ushers handed out playbills that listed composers’ names but not their biographies, inspirations or influences. Left out, as well, were the pieces’ titles and the order in which they would be played.In fact, whole works would be broken up, scrambled out of order and integrated with the other pieces. The purpose, Weilerstein told The New York Times recently, came from a desire to foster “an appreciation for being in one communal space.” In that sense, the format was a success: Audience members, untethered from any explanation that could ground them, focused intently on Weilerstein and the kaleidoscope of sound emanating from the stage.The program wasn’t entirely random. Weilerstein’s unconventional means yielded a conventional arc, with a gradual start, fiery middle and contemplative end. The first selection came from Joan Tower, who contributed a single, unified, untitled piece instead of a work that could be split up and dispersed across the program: A long-held note, something of an invitation, gave way to harmony-driven momentum. The first movement of Reinaldo Moya’s “Guayoyo Sketches,” a tribute to Venezuelan coffee culture, came next. Its dusty pizzicato tremolo had the predawn rustle of someone waking up and shuffling to the kitchen to prepare the morning’s brew before the household had awakened. Without a title or program notes, though, a listener couldn’t so easily have connected Moya’s evocation with any personal experience.At times the concert felt like a TikTok-ified recital: a stream of strongly linked bits of content, broken down into parts and divorced from their original context, that came and went in brief, entertaining flashes without pause or time for reflection.Weilerstein sat on a powder-blue stool in the middle of the stage surrounded by 13 blocks resembling variously sized portions of a wall with picture molding. The scenic designer, Seth Reiser, made Weilerstein a room of her own by breaking down a wall and reassembling the scattered pieces into a circular shape that, in its own way, felt complete — fragments forming a new whole.The most compelling stretch of music came toward the end, when Weilerstein used the private wistfulness of the Bach suite’s Gigue — a quality that plenty of other players have found in it — to pivot toward a sequence of introspective pieces. The broad opening chords of Gili Schwarzman’s “Preludium” — a stand-alone piece like Tower’s — found strength in patience, and Bach’s Sarabande, already the suite’s most pensive music, felt utterly transformed in its murmuring solitude. Wrapping up the section, the ghostly harmonics of the second movement of Allison Loggins-Hull’s “Chasing Balance” and the whispered echoes of Chen Yi’s “Mountain Tune” seemed to emerge from the distant place of the Sarabande.It all was a tour de force, but those Bach movements took on a scratchy tone, coming as they did after the furious, screeching assertiveness of the third movement of Loggins-Hull’s piece and the bumblebee flight of Yi’s “Spin Dance.” And when Bach’s bouncy Courante followed that section’s extended contemplations, it sounded a little slick — a puzzle piece that had been smoothed out to fit a place where it didn’t belong.Each composer was assigned a specific color in Reiser’s lighting design, and that one bit of signposting flooded the walls as Weilerstein played — teal for Loggins-Hull, red-orange for Moya, a palate-cleansing white for Bach, and so on.But with so much randomness and manufactured confusion, I wonder whether future installments in the “Fragments” series would benefit from yet a different structure. Perhaps each Bach movement could introduce a whole work by a single composer, to give its ideas room to breathe.The program’s final piece, a greatest hit saved for last, was Bach’s Prelude, the suite’s first movement. It felt as though the preceding 60 minutes had been building to this pure, epiphanic point, turning an ending into another beginning.As concertgoers left Zankel, they were handed a set list so that they could piece together what they had seen and heard. But the catharsis of the Prelude, the comfort of its familiarity, rendered in a beautifully slender tone, made any explanation unnecessary.FragmentsPerformed on Saturday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Apple’s New App Aims to Make Classical Music More Accessible

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      The company says it has a fix for the unwieldy world of classical streaming. But it’s unclear how much traction a stand-alone app can get.In the streaming era, fans of classical music have had reason to grumble.It can be hard for veteran listeners to find what they want on platforms like Spotify, Tidal, Amazon and YouTube, which are optimized for pop music fans searching for the latest by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. And for curious newcomers, it can be difficult to get beyond algorithmic loops of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” and Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca.”Apple last week released a stand-alone app meant to address these problems. The app, known as Apple Music Classical, features a refined search engine, a sleek interface and a host of features aimed at making classical music more accessible, including beginners’ guides to different musical eras and commentary from marquee artists like the violinist Hilary Hahn and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.Apple hopes that the app, which has been in development since 2021, when the company acquired Primephonic, a classical streaming start-up in Amsterdam, will attract die-hard classical fans and new listeners alike. But it remains unclear how much traction the app can get in a crowded streaming market, in which Apple competes with behemoths like Spotify as well as dedicated classical services like Idagio.“This is just the beginning,” Oliver Schusser, a vice president at Apple, said in an interview, adding that Apple would continue to improve and build the app’s database. “We’re really serious about this.”I spent a few days putting Apple Music Classical to the test, trying out its search, playlists and guides to classical music. (The app is currently available only on iPhone, though an Android version is in the works; at the moment, there is no desktop version.) Here are my impressions.Cutting Through the MetadataFor pop music, a listing of artist, track and album is generally sufficient. But in classical, there are more nuances in the metadata: composer, work, soloist, ensemble, instrument, conductor, movement and nickname (like Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto or Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony).Apple has amassed 50 million such data points, the company says, in the app — encompassing some 20,000 composers, 117,000 works, 350,000 movements and five million tracks — and its search function generally feels more intuitive than its rivals.On many streaming platforms, I have struggled to find Rachmaninoff’s recordings of his compositions. A search for his name on Spotify, for example, returns a disorderly display of his most popular works, such as “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” performed by a wide variety of artists.But on Apple Music Classical, it is easier to quickly locate his recordings because the app can distinguish between Rachmaninoff the composer and Rachmaninoff the pianist or conductor. The search function is not perfect; a Rachmaninoff track by the Chinese pianist Niu Niu also shows up in the mix of recordings by Rachmaninoff. But the app makes it much easier to hunt down specific pieces of music.A Sprawling CollectionApple Music Classical has a clean and inviting interface that mimics the main Apple Music app. But it still struggles with a problem that has long vexed classical streaming: the sheer volume of the catalog.A search for Verdi’s “Aida,” for example, turns up an eye-popping 1,330 recordings. Apple has tried to make it easier to navigate a sprawling list like that. A page for “Aida,” for example, has a brief description of the opera, an “editor’s choice” recording (Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) and five of the most frequently played versions.But it can still feel overwhelming. It helps to know exactly what you’re looking for: the list can be searched, scrolled or sorted by popularity, name, release date or duration. If you’re interested in recordings of “Aida” featuring Leontyne Price in the title role, for example, you can type in “Leontyne” and find her performances under the baton of Erich Leinsdorf, Georg Solti, Thomas Schippers and others.
      Opera can be especially difficult to navigate on streaming platforms because of long lists of cast members. While Apple comprehensively lists singers on each track, it can be hard to figure out quickly who the stars are when perusing albums. This could be fixed through more consistent album descriptions, or an option to enlarge album covers to make the words more legible. And while Apple has introduced the ability to search by lyrics for pop songs, no such feature exists in classical yet.Apple makes the vastness of the classical repertoire more manageable through inventive playlists, which help resurface celebrated recordings. These playlists cover a variety of genres, including opera, Renaissance music, art song and minimalism. There are also lists for composers, including the usual suspects — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven — as well as contemporary artists like Kaija Saariaho and Steve Reich. “Hidden Gems” highlights overlooked albums (“Breaking Waves,” a compilation of flute music by Swedish women, for instance, or “Consolation: Forgotten Treasures of the Ukrainian Soul”). “Composers Undiscovered” showcases lesser-known works by prominent composers, like Beethoven’s Scottish songs.Attracting NewcomersApple hopes the app will help draw new listeners to classical music, and many features are aimed at shedding its elitist image.On the home screen, the app offers a nine-part introduction called “The Story of Classical,” described as a guide to the “weird and wonderful world of classical music.” The series takes listeners from the Baroque to the 21st century, with forays further back, into medieval and Renaissance music.
      A series called “Track by Track” features commentary by renowned artists, including Hahn and Ma. The cellist Abel Selaocoe, introducing an album of pieces by Bach and South African and Tanzanian folk songs, describes how hymnal music from England and the Netherlands mixed with African culture. The pianist Víkingur Olafsson talks about feeling naked onstage when he plays Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16, “a piece we all have to face as pianists.”Part of Apple’s mission appears to be to help elevate overlooked artists, particularly women and people of color. For example, a tab of composers begins with Beethoven, Bach and Mozart but then expands to Clara Schumann, Caroline Shaw and Errollyn Wallen, as well as William Grant Still.The pianist Alice Sara Ott and the conductor Karina Canellakis are featured on an exclusive recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
      While using the app on a recent morning, I encountered the music of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century Benedictine nun and composer of Gregorian chants. Hildegard, I soon discovered, is something of a star on the app, where she is described as a scientist, mystic, writer and philosopher and sits adjacent to Tchaikovsky on a composer roster. (Many of the great composers have been given enhanced digital portraits as part of Apple’s efforts to make them more realistic; Hildegard is shown in a habit, with a piercing stare.)Hildegard’s music could easily be lost in the chaos of streaming. But in the Apple universe, it gets fresh life. More

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      Chloë Tangles With Future, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bettye LaVette, Abra, Tyler, the Creator 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.Chlöe and Future, ‘Cheatback’Chloe Bailey contemplates getting even for infidelity — “pulling a you on you” — in “Cheatback,” an almost-country ballad like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” from her debut album, “In Pieces.” Backed at first by basic acoustic guitar chords, she thinks through the details. “Say I’m with my girls while he spendin’ the night,” she sings, and “I might make a video.” Future semi-apologizes — “Should’ve never let you down, feelin’ embarrassed/Temptation haunting me” — and asks her to “Make love, not revenge,” knowing he hasn’t lost her yet. JON PARELESGeorgia, ‘It’s Euphoric’“You don’t have to say nothing when you start to feel something,” the British pop musician Georgia sings on this dreamy, upbeat reverie, co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, which captures the buzz of new love. She settles for a simple, repeated refrain of “it’s euphoric,” giving that last word a prismatic luminosity. LINDSAY ZOLADZAbra, ‘FKA Mess’Save for recent, one-off collaborations with Bad Bunny and Playboi Carti, the self-proclaimed “darkwave duchess” Abra has been quiet since her head-turning 2016 EP “Princess.” The throbbing, six-minute “FKA Mess,” though, is a promising return to form: The bass-heavy track is murky and echoing but cut through with infectious melody and a kinetic beat. It sounds, in the best way possible, like a strobe-lit, after-dark dance party in an abandoned mall. ZOLADZBettye LaVette, ‘Plan B’Bettye LaVette taps into deep blues and the anxiety of age in “Plan B,” a Randall Bramblett song from her coming album, “LaVette,” produced by the drummer and roots-rock expert Steve Jordan. “Plan B” is wrapped around a minor-key guitar riff and a production that harks back to both Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and, yes, Pink Floyd’s “Money.” LaVette, as always, is raspy and indomitable. Even as she sings “My mojo’s busted and I ain’t got a spare,” it’s clear she’s tough enough to keep going. PARELESKassa Overall featuring Nick Hakim and Theo Croker, ‘Make My Way Back Home’The drummer, singer and rapper Kassa Overall wishes for the “family that I never knew” and a place “where the love is real” in “Make My Way Back Home,” a dizzying jazz-hip-hop production that never finds a resting place. Multitracked trumpets, flutes, keyboards and voices cascade across the drummer’s light, ever-shifting beat, building chromatic harmonies that continually elude resolution — a structure of endless longing. PARELESTyler, the Creator, ‘Sorry Not Sorry’Repentance turns to belligerence in “Sorry Not Sorry,” a new song from “Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale,” the expanded version of Tyler, the Creator’s 2021 album. At first, over a sumptuous 1970s soul vamp (from “He Made You Mine” by Brighter Shade of Darkness), Tyler admits to mistakes: “Sorry to my old friends/the stories we could’ve wrote if our egos didn’t take the pen.” But he’s definitely not abandoning that ego; as the track builds, remorse turns to pride and sarcasm: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” PARELESMadison McFerrin, ‘God Herself’In “God Herself,” Madison McFerrin — like her father, Bobby McFerrin — revels in all the music that can be made without instruments: vocals, breaths, percussive syllables, finger snaps. “God Herself” is a multitracked, close-harmony construction that draws on gospel to equate carnality and spirituality: “Make you want to come inside and pray to stay for life,” McFerrin vows. “You gonna see me and believe in God herself.” It’s meticulously calculated to promise delight. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)’Kelsea Ballerini promises to give a friend an alibi — paying attention to both the physical and the digital — in “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” It’s a foot-stomping country tune about friendship and perjury. “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband/Hand on the Bible, I’d be lyin’ through my teeth,” Ballerini sings, with bluegrassy fiddle and slide guitar backing her up. It’s a successor to songs like the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” but it’s no direct threat, just a contingency plan. PARELESJess Williamson, ‘Hunter’The Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — who released a collaborative album last year with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, under the name Plains — yearns for connection on the bracing, country-tinged “Hunter,” the first single from her upcoming album, “Time Ain’t Accidental.” The song oscillates between muted disappointment and, on a surging chorus, defiant hope: “I’ve been known to move a little fast,” Williamson sings. “I’m a hunter for the real thing.” ZOLADZ More

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      Keith Reid, Who Brought Poetry to Procol Harum, Dies at 76

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      He did not perform with the group, but his impressionistic words made it one of the leading acts of the progressive-rock era.Keith Reid, whose impressionistic lyrics for the early progressive rock band Procol Harum helped to fuel emblematic songs of the 1960s, most notably “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has died. He was 76.His death was announced in a Facebook post from the band. The announcement did not say where or when he died or cite a cause, but according to news media reports he died in a hospital in London after having been treated for cancer for two years.During its heyday in the late 1960s and ’70s, Procol Harum stood out as musically ambitious, even by prog-rock standards — as demonstrated by its 1972 album, “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The band’s music, which at times bordered on the sepulchral, required lyrics that soared along with it. Mr. Reid was happy to oblige. “I always write them as poems,” he said of his lyrics in a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, the British music magazine. Indeed, with Procol Harum, the words tended to come first.As the lyricist Bernie Taupin has long done for Elton John, Mr. Reid generally submitted his lyrics to the band’s singer, pianist and primary songwriter, Gary Brooker, or sometimes the band’s guitarist, Robin Trower, or organist, Matthew Fisher, who also wrote songs.While Mr. Reid was a founding member of the group, he was more a rock star by association, since he did not sing or play an instrument and thus did not record or perform with Procol Harum. Still, he rarely missed a gig.“If I didn’t go to every gig, I would not be part of the group,” he told Melody Maker. Touring, he said, helped him write: “I find it much easier to shut myself away in a hotel room for two hours than to work at home, where there are far too many distractions.”Procol Harum showcased its musical ambitions on the 1972 album “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The results of such focus were apparent with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the first single off the band’s debut album, released in 1967. The song, which hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, sold around 10 million copies worldwide. And it endured long after the ’60s drew to a close.By the ’80s, it had achieved canonical status. It was often used to underscore the wistful memories of veterans of the flower-power era in films like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hippies-to-yuppies midlife crisis tale, “The Big Chill,” and Martin Scorsese’s May-December romance installment in the 1989 film “New York Stories,” which also included short films by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.The song’s famous opening lines (“We skipped the light fandango/Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor”) conjure bawdy images of drunken debauchery at a party, illuminating a failing romantic relationship. They are set to a haunting chord progression with echoes of Bach, rendered in ecclesiastical fashion by Mr. Fisher’s organ, and sung by Mr. Brooker in a raspy voice, soaked with longing and regret.She said “There is no reasonAnd the truth is plain to see.”But I wandered through my playing cardsWould not let her beOne of sixteen vestal virginsWho were leaving for the coastAnd although my eyes were openThey might have just as well’ve been closed.“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song,” Mr. Reid said in a 2008 interview with the British music magazine Uncut.“I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story,” he continued. “With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born on Oct. 19, 1946, in Welwyn Garden City, north of London, one of two sons of a father from Austria and a mother who had been born in England to Polish parents. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna but was among more than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938. He fled to England upon his release.His father’s experiences at the hands of the Nazis left emotional scars that Mr. Reid said influenced his worldview, and his writing.“The tone of my work is very dark, and I think it’s probably from my background in some subconscious way,” Mr. Reid said in an interview with Scott R. Benarde, the author of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories” (2003).In 1966, Mr. Reid was introduced by a mutual friend to Mr. Brooker, who was with a band called the Paramounts, whose members also included Mr. Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson. Mr. Reid and Mr. Brooker became friends and started writing together; they, Mr. Trower, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Fisher would all eventually form Procol Harum.Mr. Reid, fourth from left, made a rare on-camera appearance when the 1970 version of Procol Harum posed for a group photo. With him were, from left, Gary Brooker, B.J. Wilson, Robin Trower and Chris Copping.Mike Randolph/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesProcol Harum never again scaled the heights it achieved with its first single, but it continued to be a major act through the mid-1970s, regularly releasing albums and scoring the occasional hit single; a live orchestral version of “Conquistador,” a song from the band’s first album, reached the Top 20 in 1972.Mr. Reid said he felt lost after the band broke up in 1977 (it would reform, in various incarnations, over the years). In 1986 he moved to New York, where he started a management company and composed songs (music as well as lyrics) for other artists.That year, he collaborated with the songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on “You’re the Voice,” which was recorded by the Australian singer John Farnham, and topped the charts in several countries, although it made little impact in the United States.During the 1990s, Mr. Reid wrote songs for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Heart and many others. He would eventually turn the focus on his own talents, releasing two albums by what he called The Keith Reid Project, “The Common Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018), which included artists like Southside Johnny, John Waite and Mr. Thompson.Mr. Reid’s survivors include his wife, Pinkey, whom he married in 2004.Unlike the rock luminaries he came of age alongside, Mr. Reid did not bask in the lights of the stage. Even so, he experienced his own form of glory, gazing on as the members of Procol Harum brought life to his words at shows he refused to miss.“You wouldn’t expect a playwright not to attend the rehearsals of his play,” he told Melody Maker in 1973. “My songs are just as personal to me. They’re a part of my life. They are not gone from me.” More

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      4 New Artists You Need to Hear

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      Listen to Jana Horn, Water From Your Eyes, Debby Friday and Anna B Savage.Debby Friday is on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Katrin BragaDear listeners,Each year when I watch the Grammys, I am reminded of the absurdity of the best new artist category. New to whom, I always wonder. The qualifications are notoriously fuzzy and historically unstable — just ask the country musician Shelby Lynne, who released her debut record in 1989 and was amused to find herself winning best new artist in 2001. (“Thirteen years and six albums to get here,” she remarked wryly from the stage.) In 2007, Justin Vernon’s folk-pop project Bon Iver put out the lauded “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but it took five years and two more acclaimed releases to pull off one of the category’s most dramatic upsets, when he took home the 2012 trophy by beating the fan favorite, Nicki Minaj — who, as it happened, put out her first mixtape all the way back in 2007, too.And yet I did feel sympathy for the Grammy nominating body while putting together today’s playlist, which is full of up-and-coming artists who have recently caught my ear. No, they’re not exactly “new” — all have previously released music, and in some cases a few albums. But they’re new to me, and I hope that means at least a few of them will be new to you, too. They’re an eclectic bunch, making confessional acoustic folk, brash electro-pop and off-kilter art-rock. All have fresh albums that have either just been released or will be very soon. I would happily break Milli Vanilli’s (rescinded) best new artist Grammy from 1990 into four pieces and redistribute it to the following acts.Listen along here on Spotify as you read, or hit the YouTube links as you go.Jana HornJana Horn is a native Texan with a poised, glassy voice that reminds me a bit of the great ’60s folk singer Vashti Bunyan, except Bunyan’s voice evoked pastoral realism instead of Horn’s subtly mischievous mirror-world. The sparse, spine-tingling “After All This Time” — from a new album coming out next week, “The Window Is the Dream” — was what first caught my ear, but it’s since led me back to her great 2020 album, “Optimism,” and the absolutely haunting song “Jordan,” a poetic meditation on a Bible verse that Horn unfurls with the fixed gaze and confident pacing of an expert storyteller.Water From Your EyesSonic Youth never made a guest appearance on “Sesame Street,” but what the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes presupposes with its latest single, “Barley,” is, well … what if the band did? “1, 2, 3, counter,” the vocalist Rachel Brown intones in a bone-dry deadpan. “You’re a cool thing, count mountains.” Nate Amos provides the perfect complement by kicking up dust storms of distorted, deconstructed guitar riffs. “Barley” stacks familiar words and musical elements in unpredictable shapes, creating an internal logic as alluring as it is mysterious. It all bodes very well for the group’s album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26.Debby FridayThe Nigerian-born, Toronto-based singer and rapper Debby Friday’s ambitious, charismatic album “Good Luck” is one of my favorite debuts of the year so far. The strobe-lit club banger “I Got It,” which features Uñas, has been a mainstay of my running playlist for the past few months — it’s bona fide sprint fuel! But Friday shows off her range on the more introspective “So Hard to Tell,” which she frames as a tender but direct address to her younger self: “Lady Friday,” she sighs in a voice weighted down with the wisdom of hindsight, “all you do is rebel.” No matter her mood, though, Friday has what the kids call main character energy: She’s a shape-shifting, swashbuckling dynamo journeying through different tempos and genres, always on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Anna B SavageWhere does love go — like, energetically speaking — after the relationship that contained it ends? That’s the question that the British singer-songwriter Anna B Savage stares down in “The Ghost,” a quivering, emotionally raw incantation that begins her gripping new album, “In/Flux.” “I thought you were gone, but six years on, you’re back again,” Savage sings through gritted teeth before unlatching her jaw to let out a keening plea: “Stop haunting me, please.” There’s a rattling immediacy to Savage’s music; she writes like someone with a direct, unimpeded channel to her innermost feelings. “The Orange,” the album’s cautiously optimistic closer, provides a satisfying counterpoint to “The Ghost” and, I’d venture, a pretty good ending to this little playlist. “My new love is wind in the poplar trees,” Savage sings, finally free of the ghost’s interruptions and able to take stock of the simple pleasures all around her: “Round pebbles, poetry/Orange peel hacked on my knee.”If that’s not enough new music, Jon Pareles and I have 9 more song recommendations for you in this week’s Playlist.Yours in imagining Kim Gordon meeting Cookie Monster,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Best New (to Me) Artists, 2023” track listTrack 1: Jana Horn, “After All This Time”Track 2: Water From Your Eyes, “Barley”Track 3: Debby Friday, “I Got It”Track 4: Anna B Savage, “The Ghost”Track 5: Jana Horn, “Jordan”Track 6: Debby Friday, “So Hard to Tell”Track 7: Anna B Savage, “The Orange”Bonus tracksI cannot mention Vashti Bunyan without stopping everything and listening to “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind,” and if you have two minutes and 15 seconds to spare, I suggest you do the same.Another absurd Grammy fact I learned this week and must share with you: Guess which song earned Bob Dylan his first ever solo Grammy? Actually, don’t guess, you’re never going to get it so I’m just going to tell you: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won best rock performance in 1980. Think about that: Bob Dylan didn’t win a single solo Grammy until 1980. (In 1973, when Ringo Starr accepted a podium full of album of the year awards for the many artists featured on “The Concert for Bangladesh,” Dylan got one of those. But still.) As it happens, I do love “Gotta Serve Somebody” — even more after seeing him play it at the Beacon Theater in November 2021 — so here’s to Bob Dylan’s first Grammy. Maybe that is what Soy Bomb was trying to protest. More

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      Review: Philip Glass and the Meaning of Life

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      The director Phelim McDermott, who has acted like a visual translator of Glass’s music, pays tribute to the composer in their show “Tao of Glass.”Once, when the theater-maker Phelim McDermott was a child, he missed out on the show of his dreams.It was an “Aladdin”-like play called “Billy’s Wonderful Kettle” in Manchester, England, and the 7-year-old McDermott was so excited the night before, he got a stomachache that kept him from going. He often thought about that show in the years that followed. In his mind, it was a thing of magic — the best piece of theater he never saw.“I’ve spent my whole life trying to make a show as good as ‘Billy’s Wonderful Kettle,’” McDermott says in “Tao of Glass,” his fragmentary, fantastical and often moving tribute to the composer Philip Glass and the power of art to flow through our lives, as he describes it, like a river.If McDermott hasn’t matched the idealistic image he has of “Kettle,” he certainly has made an earnest effort with Improbable, the inventive theater company he co-founded in 1996. Some of his most inspired creations have been stagings of Glass’s operas — especially the ritualistic set pieces of “Satyagraha” and the juggling spectacle of “Akhnaten.”McDermott truly gets Glass’s music, and so can act as a kind of visual translator. That, we learn in “Tao of Glass,” which opened at NYU Skirball in New York on Thursday, comes from an affection that runs deep, and far into the past.Here, for the first time, McDermott and Glass have built something together from scratch — written, co-directed (with Kirsty Housley) and performed by McDermott, with an original score by Glass. On its most basic level, the production is “the story of a show that never happened,” McDermott says, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” But eventually, “Tao” becomes the story of its own creation.The show is metatheatrical from the start. As the lights go down, McDermott is in the aisle, carrying a Skirball tote bag on his shoulder, pretending to look for his seat in the dark. Then a spotlight shines on him, and he looks out at the audience in shocked horror, playing out a bad dream many have. The comedic moment past, he begins, “This is my favorite bit.”McDermott is an effortlessly endearing, self-deprecating host, so passionate when speaking about Glass’s music that he’s reminiscent of the Man in Chair from “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a narrator with an infectious delight for his favorite Broadway cast album.Over a series of nonlinear, discursive vignettes, McDermott illustrates a vision of reality, laid out by the psychologist Arnold Mindell, on three levels: Consensus Reality, Dreamland and Essence. The goal is to experience what Mindell calls “Deep Democracy,” the state of all three levels activated at once. And that provides something of an outline for how “Tao” is presented, down to the concentric rings that hang above or sit on the stage in Fly Davis’s design.McDermott, left, with Wright and Janet Etuk operating a bunraku puppet in the show, which blends memory with Eastern philosophy and a new score by Glass.Tristram KentonOn the first level, Consensus Reality, “Tao” has the appearance of a workaday one-man show, with McDermott sharing memories and fondly miming Glass conducting with his hair at the keyboard during early performances. In the second half, McDermott is joined by three puppeteers as the scenes becomes dreamier, drifting for what feels like too long before returning to the initial focus on music — the Essence, “the Tao which cannot be said.”Your tolerance for this might depend on your relationship with Glass’s music. If you think of it as an extension of his Eastern-inspired meditative practice, everything here is of a piece: McDermott’s obsessions with Lao Tzu, the I Ching and the Rig Veda weave naturally with the slowly transforming, churning arpeggios that are Glass’s trademark. If not, the digressions into states of being could come off as a bit silly.Among the stories McDermott shares are memories of the nights he drove his family mad while he played “Glassworks” on repeat; of using that album in his first professional theater gig; of the time he met Sendak, “a grumpy, gay Oscar the Grouch”; of losing his cool over the destruction of a beloved, ahem, glass table. Interspersed are interludes about Eastern philosophy, flotation tanks and the practice of pretending to be in a coma.With an aesthetic that is whimsical but not twee, McDermott and his fellow performers — David Emmings, Avye Leventis and Sarah Wright — conjure a shadow play of “In the Night Kitchen,” a fantasia that transforms briefly into a silhouette of Glass at the keyboard, and bring to life additional characters with, for example, surprisingly human sheets of tissue paper and bunraku puppetry.There is a version of “Tao” — call it the best piece of theater we never saw — that would have featured Glass playing piano alongside the action onstage. But early in development, the idea was shot down by his manager; Glass just didn’t have the time.But his score is a substantial, crucial contribution. This is late Glass — far from the echt Minimalist sound of “Glassworks,” McDermott’s obsession — performed by a quartet of the percussionist Chris Vatalaro (the show’s music director), the clarinetist Jack McNeill, the violinist Laura Lutzke and the pianist Katherine Tinker.There is experimentation with found-object percussion, and recent Glass touches including colorful texture, expressive shifts in harmony and soundtrack-like tone painting. McDermott’s childhood memories are matched by naïvely excited music; the flotation tank, by a soporific étude; the simulated coma, by a melody so shapeless yet alluring that it could have been written by Satie.Glass does appear briefly, in the form of a Steinway Spirio piano — an instrument that can record sound and touch then reproduce it, like an advanced player piano. He tells McDermott that this way, he can be with him onstage “like a ghost.”It was a reminder that while Glass, 86, is still with us — he was in the theater on Thursday, and bowed with the performers — he won’t always be. But his art will remain, and it’s through his music that McDermott reaches the Essence level. Culture, McDermott suggests, is the route to our deepest selves.With a running time of two and a half hours, “Tao” doesn’t make that point quickly. By the end, though, McDermott’s scattered thoughts satisfyingly cohere like kintsugi, the Japanese art of rejoining broken pottery pieces with golden lacquer, which he describes near the beginning. Some of his memories reveal a clear, clean image; others are imperfect shards that don’t seem to fit. But together, they create something new, and beautiful.Tao of GlassThrough April 8 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. More