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      Lana Del Rey Talks Back to the Songbook

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      Hear a companion to her sprawling new album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.”Neil KrugDear listeners,I love these lyrics from the title track of Lana Del Rey’s sprawling ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” which comes out today:Harry Nilsson has a song, his voice breaks at 2:05Something about the way he says “Don’t forget me”Makes me feel likeI just wish I had a friend like himSomeone to get me byDel Rey’s music is both vividly intimate and highly referential. She writes like a devoted but conversational fan of music history — talking back to the modern songbook and to many of her favorite artists, guided by popular song to her own personal epiphanies.Del Rey’s old-soul reverence collapses the distance between generations, too. People listening to Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” when it first came out — on “Pussy Cats” from 1974, the notorious chronicle of his “Lost Weekend” with John Lennon — were just as likely to be moved by that wrenching part when his voice breaks, but they probably wouldn’t have known its precise time stamp. Del Rey’s homage speaks the language of digital-era listening (“his voice breaks at 2:05”), but her emotional connection to Nilsson is so deeply felt, it seems to transcend time and turn him into a peer.Elsewhere on the album, the much-covered, centuries-old folk standard “Froggy Went a Courtin’” makes Del Rey feel connected to her ancestors when she hears it at a funeral. Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” echoes throughout “Ocean Blvd” like a cherished mantra. On “The Grants,” the album’s stirring, gospel-tinged opening number, she interprets the words of a pastor by likening them not to, say, a particular Bible verse, but to “‘Rocky Mountain High,’ the way John Denver sings.”“Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” is as rich, challenging and singular as anything Del Rey has released yet, and given that its run time is a daunting hour and 17 minutes, it’s going to require a little time to sink in. Today’s playlist puts some of its best songs in conversation with the other artists it references or, in the case of Father John Misty, features. May it serve as an entry point, or maybe just as a means to tunnel deeper into Lana Del Rey’s slow, subterranean sound.Maybe Del Rey would even say that these are some of the songs that explain her. Which reminds me: I’m still reading through your (many) great submissions from earlier this week, and I look forward to sharing some with you in Tuesday’s Amplifier.That’s how the light gets in,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Lana Del Rey Talks Back to the Songbook” track listTrack 1: John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High” (1972)Track 2: Lana Del Rey, “The Grants” (2023)Track 3: Tex Ritter, “Froggy Went a Courtin’” (1945)Track 4: Father John Misty, “Goodbye Mr. Blue” (2022)Track 5: Lana Del Rey featuring Father John Misty, “Let the Light In” (2023)Track 6: Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” (1992)Track 7: Lana Del Rey, “Kintsugi” (2023)Track 8: Harry Nilsson, “Don’t Forget Me” (1974)Track 9: Lana Del Rey, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” (2023)Bonus tracksLana isn’t the only artist to appreciate the broken beauty of Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me,” of course. Here are two cover versions I love: Neko Case’s spirited rendition, from her great 2009 album “Middle Cyclone,” and a faithful take from the Walkmen, on which the frontman Hamilton Leithauser sounds so much like Nilsson that it’s a little bit spooky.Also, if you’re looking for some newer music: On Fridays, our chief pop music critic, Jon Pareles, and I select some of the week’s most notable new songs for the Playlist, which you can listen to here. More

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      Review: Lawrence Brownlee Makes Room for Black Composers

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      Often seen onstage as a star of bel canto opera, this tenor crafted a recital of works by Robert Owens, Margaret Bonds and their successors.“Wow, I need to take you all wherever I go,” the tenor Lawrence Brownlee told the audience when his return to the stage was met with raucous applause after the intermission of his concert at Zankel Hall on Thursday.It seemed, even, like every blistering high note, well-turned melisma and swooning falsetto note was greeted with hums of approval and the occasional shout of “C’mon!” Brownlee gave a lot of himself, and the audience was there to receive it.Thursday’s program, “Rising,” performed with the pianist Kevin J. Miller, was, Brownlee said, conceived during the uncertainty of the pandemic. It was hard to tell what the future might hold, he said, but in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he sensed that allies were “beginning to make space” for Black voices.Brownlee wanted to make room, too. As an opera star, he regularly spreads the gospel of Strauss, Debussy and Mozart, but he also wanted to champion the music of Black composers such as Robert Owens, Margaret Bonds and their successors.That’s what he did at Zankel: With a coruscating tenor densely packed with vibration and lightly worn confidence, Brownlee engraved his voice on a vast collection of pieces with a sure sense of how they should sound.“Rising” traces an ancestral link among Black composers by focusing on the common inspiration of Harlem Renaissance-era poetry. The program’s first half featured song cycles by Owens (“Desire” and “Silver Rain”) and Bonds (“Songs of the Seasons”), as well as recent pieces from Jeremiah Evans. The second half included new commissions from Damien Sneed, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Brandon Spencer, Jasmine Barnes and Joel Thompson, plus Carlos Simon’s “Vocalise.”Brownlee’s singing doesn’t sparkle so much as it sparks. It’s very much a coloratura instrument rather than a lyric one — a voice built more for dexterity than warmth — with a narrow spectrum of brilliant colors. Song repertoire rewards a softer touch, and it took some time on Thursday for Brownlee to round off the cutting edge of his sound. Perhaps after years of laser-precision bel canto, Brownlee has cultivated an elegant propriety, staying true to rhythm and seldom straying from a polished, ringing tone.As such, the subtleties in his singing only deviated minutely from his essentially brilliant timbre — a touch of duskiness here in “Juliet,” an echo of wistfulness there in “Night Song,” both by Owens. Bass-clarinet tones, warm yet reedy, emerged in Bonds’s “Winter Moon.” With an opera singer’s theatricality, he held the stage in the romantic expansiveness of Owens’s “In time of silver rain” and ended the program’s first half with a victorious high C.Miller’s playing was kinetic, especially in Owens’s vivid writing — efficiently obstinate in “Desire,” with a lovely pitter-patter of raindrops in “In time of silver rain.” He seemed to relish putting a little dirt into the opening of Evans’s “Southern Mansion.”Among the new pieces, Barnes’s “Invocation,” which turns Claude McKay’s poetic address to an “Ancestral Spirit” into an incantatory refrain, drew intense applause. Spencer showed a wonderful sense of prosody and storytelling in “I Know My Soul,” and Thompson sounded an exultant, if sometimes strident, call to celebration in “My People.”There is a compelling will to melody and mood, reminiscent of Owens, in the work of Sneed and Okpebholo. Okpebholo’s “Romance” — a sensual, desultory evening come to life from a blissful McKay poem — unwound in an aimless but seductive way. Miller and Brownlee brought out the piece’s mingling of desire and vulnerability.Brownlee had an enchanting way of cascading through the highly pitched melody of Sneed’s “Beauty That Is Never Old.” And his “To America” was a gut punch. “How would you have us, as we are?” begins James Weldon Johnson’s poem. “Rising or falling? Men or things?”The title of Brownlee’s program provides an answer — rising, always rising — but his encores made that point, too. Crossing himself before launching into two spirituals arranged by Sneed, Brownlee was positively infectious as he took his voice high and leaned into gospel-style runs: joyful, and sure of his place in the world.Lawrence BrownleePerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Myke Towers Is Seizing His Moment

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      In just a few years, the rapper has become one of the most sought-after collaborators in Latin music. His new album, “La Vida Es Una,” surveys his many aesthetics.Myke Towers could tell you that he never knew he would make it big, but that wouldn’t be true. Because back in 2014, six years before the rapper would put out his debut, he was preparing for a make-or-break show in his hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and breaking wasn’t an option.“Puerto Rico is the most difficult crowd to please,” he said this month, video-chatting from a Miami hotel room a few weeks before the release of his new album, “La Vida Es Una” (“Life Is One,” a reminder that we only live once). “They don’t just give out approval, you have to show that you are good enough. If you make it in P.R., you’re going to make it anywhere.”Over the course of two back-to-back albums, he did just that. “Easy Money Baby” from 2020 went triple platinum, building off the success of his 2016 mixtape, “El Final del Principio” (“The End of the Beginning”), while incorporating reggaeton, Brazilian funk and Colombian melodies. “Lyke Mike,” released in 2021, was a firm statement of purpose that strung together harder trap bangers. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart and cracked the Top 50 on the all-genre Top 200. With his new album, out Thursday, Towers aimed to marry the two approaches, striking a balance that illustrates his creative flexibility.“In this album, I want to make music to perform live,” he said, speaking animatedly in a casual white tee and a gold chain. “I want to give energy to people so they can go out and forget about their problems, forget about what’s stressing them.”Almost a decade ago, Towers, now 29, was still waiting for his shot. Raised in the barrio of Caimito in south San Juan, he grew up surrounded by music, mainly his grandmother’s: salsa, merengue, old school boleros — if it was classic Latin music, she was playing it. But Towers wanted to cut his own path in rap, and by the time he graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud, initially fairly anonymously. “At the beginning, I didn’t even want to show my face,” he said with a laugh. “I just wanted to show my skills. I knew that I had to put in a lot of work to be in the mix.”“Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico,” Towers said. “When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.”Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesHe didn’t just practice music, he analyzed it, dissecting every move idols like Daddy Yankee and Jay-Z made, and seeing how he could apply them to his own life. “I studied the game,” he explained. “I have my own identity, but I started with them, and the respect that I had for them.”As his SoundCloud releases gained more traction, he began putting his name on the tracks — styling “Mike” as “Myke” — and performing around the city. He viewed his first shows as tests, and by 2014 he was ready for graduation: that important hometown performance, in La Perla.For artists who grew up in the area, performing in La Perla, the island’s famous slum — located on a stretch of rocky coastline in Old San Juan — is a rite of passage. In video of Towers’s set posted to YouTube, the rapper is dressed in all black, standing under a white beach canopy as he confidently delivers the verses of the aspirational “Dinero En Mano.” (He later released the track, filled with ominous strings, on “El Final del Principio.”) By the end of the song, the crowd is singing along with him.“It was one of my most important shows,” he recalled. He shook his head and grinned, almost as if he was still in disbelief that he had pulled it off. “A lot of people, they didn’t even know my songs, but they were like, ‘Who’s that? Why is he confident performing like that?’”Even before he released his first full-length album, Towers had already teamed up with Bad Bunny and Becky G, laying the groundwork that would make him one of Latin music’s most in-demand collaborators. Since then, the rapper’s features with Rauw Alejandro, Luis Fonsi and Farruko have all been certified platinum.With “La Vida Es Una,” Towers agonized over the track list, sifting between more than 50 songs to select the set that could demonstrate his transition from a vanguard of Puerto Rico’s grass-roots trap scene to a self-assured hitmaker. His versatility is what first grabbed the attention of Orlando Cepeda, known as Jova, one of Towers’s frequent co-writers and the co-founder of the Puerto Rican label that first signed him in 2018. After hearing his rap music, Cepeda asked if Towers had anything more commercial. He was impressed.“He’s an artist without limits,” Cepeda said in a phone interview. “He’s a writer, he’s a composer, he’s a lyricist. I think that hearing someone who comes from the hood like he does, when you listen to his music, it inspires, it excites, it makes people want to work with him.”By the time Towers graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud.Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesIn addition to tapping some of his past collaborators, including Ozuna and J Balvin, for “La Vida Es Una,” Towers also enlisted producers from across the Latin music diaspora, including Sky Rompiendo (from Colombia) and Tainy (Puerto Rico). “I want to show my fans the difference between ‘Mike’ and ‘Myke,’” he said, explaining his efforts to blend his grittier rap roots with his mainstream ambitions. “In the beginning, my fans would say things like, ‘Oh, you went commercial. What are you doing?’ Those comments would get in my head, and I felt like I was losing who I am, but I like to challenge myself. I took a lot of risks on this album, but I feel confident that when people listen to it, they’ll hear something they needed from me before.”The new album includes songs for his more pop-minded fans: “Sábado” and the Daddy Yankee collaboration “Ulala (Ooh La La),” two dance-floor-ready tracks produced by the Texas duo Play-N-Skillz. Towers heats things up on “El Calentón,” a sparse track that begins as a reggaeton jam before building to a display of his lyrical dexterity. And as its title might suggest, “Flow Jamaican,” produced by Di Genius, dives into reggae rhythms, with Towers switching up his flow in the lead-up to the song’s earworm of a hook.The album was primarily recorded in Puerto Rico, a place with such a long, diverse musical history, Towers said, that anyone who taps into it comes away overflowing with ideas, influences and potential: “Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico. When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.” He lit up, a wide smile spreading across his face as he described his usual routine of returning home from tour to his wife and son, and then heading to the studio.“My family is my home base,” Towers said. “Going back to them is spiritual to me. Before I had my son, I would be in the studio until 7 a.m., every day. I’ll always have that hustler spirit, but when I found out I was going to have a kid, it was about working smarter, not harder.”Towers ends the album with a triumphant celebration, “Lo Logré” (“I Made It”). “It’s an anthem that a lot of people are going to relate to,” he said.“People think I made it and it was easy, they forget the process, everything that it took to make it happen. I value every moment in my career because years ago I was even crying trying to make it come true. There are trials you go through, but when you come out on the other side, people just see that you made it. And I have, but I haven’t. I have more dreams to achieve.” More

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      Renée Fleming Adds a New Role to Her Repertoire: Pat Nixon

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      The superstar soprano discusses her debut in John Adams’s “Nixon in China” at the Paris Opera. For starters, she spends the second act with a dragon.In May 2017, the star soprano Renée Fleming sang the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” for the last time — and with that, said goodbye to one the roles that had defined her career.Since then, Fleming, 64, has appeared in concerts and on Broadway, and premiered a new opera, “The Hours,” which was written for her. Now, for the first time in a decade, she is preparing a role debut in the established repertoire: Pat Nixon in John Adams’s 1987 opera “Nixon in China,” which opens at the Paris Opera on Saturday in a new production by Valentina Carrasco.Some sopranos in their 50s and 60s have voices that darken and thicken, making them perfect for character roles, often vengeful older women like Klytaemnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra” or the Kostelnicka in Janacek’s “Jenufa.” Fleming, who has always had both a fastidious technique and a strong instinct to protect her voice, still sings with her characteristic pure, blooming tone.This makes Pat Nixon, the former first lady whose musings on “the simple virtues” and “the fruit of all our actions” are the beating heart of the opera’s second act, a logical, though initially surprising, choice. Fleming has thrown herself into preparation with her typical studiousness: reading books and articles about the Nixons, studying film reels to capture what Carrasco called Nixon’s “gestures, smoking — she was a heavy smoker — and slightly constricted and strained smile.” Fleming discussed her approach to the role in a video interview from Paris. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Nixon in China” is defined in so many people’s heads by the iconic original production by Peter Sellars that came to the Met. How does this staging differ?It’s a bit madcap, I would say, in a good way. There’s a lot of creative choices to bring this piece alive that are quite different than anything I’ve seen. I’ve watched most of what’s available, at least on the internet; it’s just been tremendous fun. People have treated the piece in an insistently serious way. This is the first time where — I think enabled by the passage of time — a director could say, “We all know what happened, we’re familiar with the piece, and now we can think about it in a different way.”In Valentina Carrasco’s production, Fleming spends Act II with an onstage dragon, “which is quite delightful,” Fleming said. Here they stand behind a screen of scattered Ping-Pong balls.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisWhy Pat Nixon?I’ve been a tremendous fan of John Adams forever. There was a period when I was emailing him on a regular basis to see if there was anything of his that he thought I could do. I’ve always loved new music and have been performing a lot of it since I was a student. But nothing worked out until this.How is it to play someone like Pat Nixon who — as opposed to a princess, or mermaid or other standard opera heroine — is in our cultural memory?It’s really different. These are people who lived during my lifetime. I don’t remember them well. I was in middle school around the time all of this happened; I wasn’t paying attention. But there’s all this archival material to look at — and they come to life once you start reading. There were books about the Nixons and their marriage that were quite interesting, especially “Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage,” by Will Swift and “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” by Julie Nixon Eisenhower.In every single video or photograph from the visit, Pat stands out because of her fashion, which was all very carefully chosen. I get to wear the red coat, which is helpful. I had a talk, thanks to a friend, with Frank Gannon, who knew the Nixon family for about five years and was a special assistant in the White House at the time of the trip. He was able to shed light on their marriage — on how crazy they were about each other, especially him for her. She was extremely protective of him and of their children.The piece is not mocking her.On the contrary, I think the creators genuinely respected her. I was surprised, too, because they really aren’t as kind to some of the other characters, namely Henry Kissinger. Alice Goodman’s text is so exquisite. Especially for Chou En-lai, and for Pat Nixon it’s beautiful and poetic. The images in Pat’s main aria, “This is prophetic,” are a vision for what this alliance could look like in a positive sense.I love singing it, and I love portraying her — and in this production, I spend the whole second act with a dragon, which is quite delightful, and which exemplifies her positive vision for this alliance. There are so many beautiful vibrant pictures created in this scene, and all of them heartfelt. It feels to me like a particularly feminine point of view.What is it like to sing this score, in Adams’s distinctive style?It’s challenging to learn, because it changes meter every bar pretty much, and the aria has a quite high tessitura; it sits consistently too much up at the top of the staff. It’s beautiful music, and what makes it possible is that the higher phrases are separated by a few bars so you can relax, get a rest. I also love the unique use of the orchestra. Just to look down into the pit and see five or six saxophones and two pianos creating an extraordinary texture gives me an enormous pleasure. The top of the second act, Pat’s act, is such a joy. It has a sparkling quality to it that you just can’t help but respond to.Playing Pat Nixon is different from typical opera for Fleming: “These are people who lived during my lifetime,” she said.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisAdams insists that singers in his operas are enhanced with microphones given the thickness of the orchestral textures. How does that feel?I find being miked helpful. I think that as orchestras and conductors have less time to work on balance, and the demands being made on singers just to be loud — if that continues to increase, I don’t think it’s helpful to the art form to insist that there never be any enhancement on the stage. There’s a huge difference between a subtle enhancement — already being used in a lot of theaters because the acoustic is poor — and full-blown amplification. I appreciate it, especially because a lot of what I’m doing is way upstage. And many set designers don’t want to be forced into building boxes all the time to help us with the acoustic.When “Nixon” premiered, it was sometimes dismissively called a “CNN opera” because of its engagement with current events and politics. Now, this production premieres amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China and protests in Paris.Travel to China for artists had just opened up — but now surveillance balloons, or the American discovery of surveillance balloons, seems to have messed that up. I hope that communication continues. It serves everyone, and both sides know that. It’s a really sensitive time. There are a lot of Chinese artists in the show, some of whom live in China, and even doing this piece is sensitive for them. There were images to be used in a montage at the end of the opera that had to be changed or modified because of those sensitivities. The montage is trying hard to be objective about these conflicts and their relationship to what happened at the time the opera is set. It seems to be more sensitive to discuss what’s happening now than what happened in Mao’s time.Outside of our dressing rooms last night, there were fires on the street. There were demonstrators running from the Place de la République to the Bastille. That’s what it’s been like every day. It’s ironic, because my [1991] debut here in “Figaro” had demonstrators outside, who then during the show broke into the theater. It was quite uncomfortable, because someone actually came onstage with a huge machete. So thus far, it’s really been not too terrible. More

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      Review: The New York Philharmonic’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’ Is a Surprising Achievement

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      Jaap van Zweden is not known for Bach. But the “St. Matthew Passion” made for one of his finest New York Philharmonic concerts this season.You could be forgiven, recently, for not remembering that Jaap van Zweden is the music director of the New York Philharmonic.After he inaugurated the renovated David Geffen Hall in October, he disappeared from the orchestra’s performance calendar until a week ago. During that absence, the orchestra announced his successor, Gustavo Dudamel — whose visit to New York in February, to do little more than smile for the cameras and sign a piece of paper, was organized with so much fanfare, you almost felt bad for van Zweden, still the music director for one more season, as he quietly returned to the podium last Friday.His current residency, though, while just two weeks, is hardly modest. On Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced his final season, in which he will lead eight subscription programs, including, as his farewell, Mahler’s colossal “Resurrection” Symphony. And for his concerts this time around — part of a barely advertised mini festival called “Spirit” — he has taken up a pair of monumental works: Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”The Messiaen, sprawling and operatically excessive, would seem the better fit for van Zweden, who revels in enormity. But last week, it was mostly flattened and impatient, loud but not powerful.And the Bach didn’t hold out much promise. Van Zweden has never had a true grasp of the fleet litheness of the Classical repertoire, almost never touches Baroque music with the Philharmonic. His performance of the “St. Matthew Passion” at Geffen Hall on Thursday, however, proved a pleasant surprise — perhaps his finest appearance this season.After the thick bombast of the Messiaen, it was disorienting to hear van Zweden lead a “St. Matthew Passion” of wise, often deferential restraint and transparent, balanced counterpoint. The score’s nearly three hours of music moved along at a mostly unhurried pace, a calmly flowing mood set from the start: the opening chorus gently pulsating, the layers of sound smoothly accumulating.Not that it was a consistently clean evening. The “Passion,” typically performed during the Lenten season but not limited to it, is a mammoth undertaking for double choir, double orchestra and soloists to recount the betrayal, death and burial of Christ. On Thursday, the Philharmonic — joined by Musica Sacra and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus — didn’t seem to have had enough time to prepare it.Some sections unfurled without a fault; others were messy. Arias struggled to gain traction, and at times solo instrumentalists weren’t properly integrated with the larger ensemble. What’s lost, during lapses like that, are the moments that inspire awe, replaced by a kind of white-knuckle anxiety in, for example, the grand chorus that closes the oratorio’s first part.But more memorable than those imperfections was van Zweden’s refreshingly measured treatment of the orchestra, particularly in its support for the vocal soloists.And what soloists! The tenor Nicholas Phan was a lyrical, actorly guide through the story as the Evangelist, standing alongside the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s Jesus, sung with a rich, creamy tone that, in Christ’s final words on the cross, turned compellingly momentous. The soprano Amanda Forsythe, her sound soaring and pure, shone in the longer, abstracted lines of the aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben.” Tamara Mumford’s penetrating mezzo-soprano was well shaped in “Buss und Reu” and “Erbarme dich,” even at a nervously rushed tempo.Each appearance by the tender, earnest tenor Paul Appleby felt too brief. In “Geduld,” as he sang alongside the viola da gamba player Matt Zucker — who, like the organist Kent Tritle, offered a dose of historically informed performance style — he spun trickily long melodic lines of complex rhythms so precisely articulated and elegant, you wished he would return to this piece as the Evangelist.The standout was Philippe Sly, in his Philharmonic debut. This bass-baritone has a robust opera career — assured as either Leporello or the title character in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” — and sang Jesus in a “St. Matthew Passion” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall last season. Commandingly resonant, but also sweetly warm in his upper range, he was more satisfying as a chameleonic soloist on Thursday: bringing dramatic color to the few lines of Judas, a desperate sadness to Peter and sensitivity to arias like “Komm, süsses Kreuz.”His “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” already a high point of the score, was the high point of the concert, while also standing in for the evening as a whole. It had an unsteady start and could have been slower, yet once it found its footing, the aria was serene, balanced and — regardless of your faith or the time of year — profoundly moving.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro’s Love Trilogy, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks from Meshell Ndegeocello, the Japanese House, Hannah Jadagu 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.Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Beso’“Beso” (“Kiss”) quivers with fear of separation, as Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro tell each other that “Being away from you is hell.” The song is part of a three-track collaborative project called “RR” the couple released on Friday; the “Beso” video hints at an engagement. They keep their voices high, small and tremulous over a brusque beat topped with quasi-Baroque keyboards and strings, a genteel backdrop for deep neediness. PARELESMeshell Ndegeocello, ‘Virgo’“They’re calling me back to the stars,” Meshell Ndegeocello declares in “Virgo” from her coming album, “The Omnichord Real Book.” It’s a funky march that revels in cosmic imagery, cross-rhythms and multifarious vocals: singing, chanting, making percussive sounds, high harmonies, husky low confidences and an occasional “la-la.” Morphing through nearly nine minutes, the track struts on Ndegeocello’s synthesizer bass lines; twinkles and hovers with Brandee Younger’s harp; and sprints toward the end with double time drumming, headed somewhere new. PARELESMoor Mother featuring Kyle Kidd, Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, ‘We Got the Jazz’Moor Mother seethes about Black achievements met with disrespect in “We Got the Jazz”: “We ain’t ’bout to stand for no national anthem,” she declaims. “When we was swinging they couldn’t even stand in attention.” Her testy voice is surrounded in a rich, polytonal murk: multiple tracks of Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet, Keir Neuringer’s saxophone and Kyle Kidd’s vocals over a slowly heaving bass line, burdened but determined. PARELESThe Japanese House, ‘Boyhood’The British musician Amber Bain, who records as the Japanese House, reckons with her past and present on the flickering synth-pop track “Boyhood,” which pairs smooth sonic surfaces and effervescent electronic flourishes with her yearning, achingly human vocals. “For a moment there, I swear I saw me,” Bain sings, her 20-something growing pains palpable as she yearns — in vain — for a stable, unchanging sense of self. ZOLADZRina Sawayama, ‘Eye for an Eye’The British-Japanese pop musician Rina Sawayama makes her film debut on Friday in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” and has released a new song from the soundtrack, the slinky “Eye for an Eye.” The track splits the difference between Sawayama’s gloriously bombastic debut album, “Sawayama,” and the softer, more recent “Hold the Girl.” Propelled by a mid-tempo, industrial chug, Sawayama vamps with the confident menace of an action star. “A life for a life,” she sings. “I’ll see you in hell on the other side.” ZOLADZBully, ‘Days Move Slow’“Days Move Slow,” from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy indie-rock project Bully, is a song about being caught in the muck of grief — she wrote it after the death of her beloved dog, Mezzi — but it also has a propulsive, bouncy energy that promises eventual forward motion. “There’s flowers on your grave that grow,” Bognanno sings in her signature holler, battling her buzzing guitar. “Something’s gotta change, I know.” ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Woe (I See It From Your Side) (Björk Remix)’Björk’s remix of Shygirl’s “Woe” is equal parts endorsement and disruption. Shygirl, born Blaine Muise in England to parents from Zimbabwe, has worked with pop experimenters like Sophie, Arca, Tinashe and Sega Bodega, and she was a founder of the label Nuxxe. “Woe,” from her 2022 debut album, “Nymph,” was a smoldering counterattack to a toxic partner: “Smiling faces fade just to leave a shell,” she charged. Björk, playing fourth-dimensional chess, offers both sympathy — agreeing with Shygirl that “I see it from your side” — and outside perspective. The new track lurches from the dark groove of “Woe” to something else: Björk’s vocal harmonies, warped keyboard vamps and mystical life lessons. “Forever we shoot for the sublime,” she advises. PARELESHannah Jadagu, ‘Warning Sign’“Warning Sign” is a hushed, hazy song that maps interpersonal tensions onto musical contrasts: quiet and loud, sustained and rhythmic, dulcet and distorted. Jadagu is an N.Y.U. student who grew up in a Texas suburb and recorded her first EP, in 2021, entirely on an iPhone. She has more resources since signing to Sub Pop. “Warning Sign” could have been an easygoing R&B vamp, but Jadagu has other imperatives; the song coos with keyboard chords and airborne harmonies, then crashes or glitches. What she hears goes with what she feels: “I can’t stand to hear your voice when it’s oh so loud/Could you quiet down?” PARELESLucinda Chua featuring Yeule, ‘Something Other Than Years’The songs on “Yian” (Chinese for “sparrow”), the new album by the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua, are meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings. In “Something Other Than Years,” she sings, “When all I fear is all I know/Show me how to live this life,” and she’s answered by the higher voice of Yeule, who promises, “There’s more in this life/Angel being of light.” PARELES More

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      Everything but the Girl Breaks a 24-Year Silence With a Bang

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      Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s personal partnership has thrived since their duo’s last release. During the pandemic, they reconnected musically for “Fuse,” reclaiming the group’s modern melancholy.At first, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt didn’t want to admit to themselves that they were re-emerging — after 24 years — as Everything but the Girl.The duo, who built a dedicated following in the 1980s and ’90s making elegantly troubled music and had an international smash with “Missing” in 1995, returned to writing and recording together during the pandemic. But Thorn and Watt carefully labeled their first new collaborations “TREN” — for Tracey and Ben — instead of reviving a moniker with as much of a back story as Everything but the Girl. They were well aware, as Thorn said understatedly in a video interview, that “it’s not going to be a small deal to come back after this length of time.”They spoke from their home in London, sitting side by side and dressed in shades of gray and black, in a room where they’ve sometimes recorded music. There was a small keyboard on a table behind them, next to full bookshelves. Each listened fondly and attentively as the other spoke.Thorn and Watt, both 60, remained partners while Everything but the Girl was dormant. They have been together since 1982, when they were students at University of Hull in England, and they raised three children — now adults — after suspending Everything but the Girl, which gave its last performance in 2000. In April, the duo returns with “Fuse,” its first album since 1999 and one that fully lives up to its best work.During the intervening decades, Thorn and Watt maintained separate, prolific careers. Watt produced albums; traveled the world as a D.J.; founded a label, Buzzin’ Fly; and made solo albums and toured as a singer-songwriter, which he’d been planning to do in 2020 when the pandemic shut things down. After some years devoting herself to their toddlers, Thorn got back to songwriting, releasing four solo albums; she also wrote books, including the wryly revealing career memoir, “Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star,” and “Naked at the Albert Hall,” her reflections on the physicality and mentality of being a singer.Working independently, with projects appearing at different times, allowed them to “tag-team” bringing up their family, Watt explained.“We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” he said. “And I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”But they hadn’t entirely put Everything but the Girl behind them. In the 2010s, Thorn and Watt oversaw expanded reissues of the group’s catalog that found an eager audience. By then it was clear that their music had aged to sound classic, not dated.“There’s an emotional simplicity and directness that’s just so powerful to me lyrically,” Romy Madley Croft of the British band the xx said in a phone interview; she first heard Everything but the Girl because her parents were fans and “Missing” was on the radio. Thorn has recognized their musical kinship by recording her own version of the xx’s “Night Time” in 2011.“You feel close to Tracey and in her words and voice that is very, very intimate and just the emotion that is carried,” Madley Croft said. “One of my goals always is to say a lot while saying very little, and to leave people with space to make their own minds up about what it means, and I definitely think that Tracey does that. When you hear that line that just says a huge amount very, very simply, it’s very satisfying.”Everything but the Girl got its name, with post-punk cheekiness, from the sexist tagline of a local furniture-store advertisement that showed a model next to the goods on sale. “For God’s sake, if we had known we were going to carry on for years we would have come up with a better name,” Thorn wrote in “Bedsit Disco Queen.”For its first decade, the group maintained a solid midlevel recording career — until 1995, when a remix of “Missing,” by the American D.J. Todd Terry, became an international smash. With each album, Everything but the Girl took a different approach: from skeletal to maximal, bossa nova to rock, retro Wall of Sound to sleek Los Angeles pop. Its songs used subtlety as a stealth tactic, with smooth, richly tuneful music concealing lyrics that challenged political and psychological assumptions. Through every change of style, Thorn’s voice — low, smoky and pensive, rarely indulging in vibrato or ornamentation — gave the duo’s songs an emotional equipoise.“I can see the through line,” Thorn said. “We’re exploring things with a different costume on. You know, if you were a film director, your vision, or the ideas that you keep, might be identifiable whether you make a western or a detective movie or a romance. There’s something of that going on in these records. Complexity and simplicity is very key to it.”Watt picked up her thought. “Ambivalence and mixed feelings is a big through line in all our stuff as well,” he said. “That’s true both in the choice of notes we use and in the lyrics that we write. There’s that element of suspension. The space that you leave allows room for the listener. I always like the idea that people can step into our audio picture, you know, and almost walk around in the reverbs.”A life-threatening health crisis for Watt in 1992 — he has a rare autoimmune disorder, Churg-Strauss syndrome — led Everything but the Girl to pare away verbal and musical frills to reveal rawer feelings on “Amplified Heart” and “Walking Wounded,” the albums that would mark its artistic peak in the 1990s.“There was a period in the ’90s where we had to learn what it was like to live with each other again, mostly because of the aftermath of my illness, which left me a very changed person,” Watt said. “And Tracey had to witness that change, which was very difficult in its own way. Both ‘Amplified Heart’ and ‘Walking Wounded’ — it’s there in the titles of those albums, you know? — they’re very much songs about us both feeling isolated by the experience, but also learning to live with each other again.”“Amplified Heart,” released in 1994, included the original version of “Missing.” Then Terry’s club-ready remix with a new, danceable beat, carried Everything but the Girl to a worldwide audience; the single went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain. The song has had an endless afterlife, and a broad influence, for its precise chemistry of melancholy, suspense and propulsion. With Thorn’s voice leaping as she sings “like the deserts miss the rain,” “Missing” is a dance-crying milestone: equally potent on the dance floor or at home alone through headphones.Watt and Thorn were already intrigued by the fast-evolving music in London’s dance clubs. For its late-1990s incarnation, Everything but the Girl merged moody introspection with electronic dance music for two albums: “Walking Wounded,” and “Temperamental” from 1999. It’s a sound that “Fuse” reclaims and determinedly expands.“We talked about trying to find new ways of writing, new ways of using our voices, new ways of landing on different notes,” Watt said.“Fuse” embraces electronic soundscapes and grown-up empathy. It opens with a subterranean bass throb and a declaration of vulnerability in “Nothing Left to Lose,” as Thorn sings, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” And it ends with a husky, ardent mission statement that sums up Everything but the Girl’s dual imperatives. In “Karaoke,” Thorn vows that she sings both “to heal the brokenhearted” and “to get the party started.”In between, “Fuse” proffers compassionate advice in the gloomily majestic “When You Mess Up,” goes on a surreal European club-hopping chronicle in “No One Knows We’re Dancing” and makes a pinging, handclapping, gamelan-tinged plea for “something I can hold onto” in “Forever.”It took the pandemic to bring Thorn and Watt back to working together. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now? Are we going to go back to what we were doing? Or is this the start of something new? And we weren’t really sure.”Isolated at home — and sometimes distancing even from each other because of Watt’s illness — they began trading small musical ideas: chords, lyrics, sounds.“We were trying to do that thing that artists sometimes do,” Thorn said, “where you trick yourself into thinking that we’re not really doing this thing that feels like a bit of a big deal. We’re doing something much smaller and more manageable. We’re just making some music. We don’t need to tell anyone. We don’t need to have anyone waiting on it or expecting anything of it or putting pressure on. Let’s just see what happens.”The album’s beginnings were decidedly lo-fi. “I started to put things on my phone,” Watt said. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”The music that emerged at first was slow and atmospheric. Danceable, upbeat songs came later, after the duo relocated to a recording studio in Bath, England. “The record started out in this mood of, you know, ‘We’re not putting any pressure on,’ with a couple of fairly downbeat, quite ambient-sounding tracks,” Thorn recalled. “And within about three days of being in the studio, we started getting more and more excited. There was a period when we had about eight tracks and, ostensibly, you know, we’ve almost got an album here.“But I think that was the moment when we both had a kind of awakening and sat up and went, ‘Do you know what? This can be better,’” she added. “We started with low expectations, but actually we’ve impressed us. Our expectations had gone right up. And if you’re going to come back after a long gap, then come back with a bang.”It took the pandemic to reunite Everything But the Girl. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now?”Edward BishopThey also reveled in technology that arrived after Everything but the Girl last made an album. In some songs, digital effects warp Thorn’s vocals. “We allowed ourselves to be a bit more disrespectful of Tracey’s voice,” Watt said. “It wasn’t just this kind of sacred sound that always sat on the top of the music. We started mistreating it with pitch-shifting plug-ins and Auto-Tune, seeing if we could just turn it into a texture rather than a vehicle for the lyrics and the emotion of the track. It was another interesting color to add onto the canvas.”In one new song, “Lost,” Thorn sings a list — “I lost my place/I lost my bags/I lost my biggest client” — that moves from prosaic to heartbreaking. Some of the lyrics, Watt said, came from typing the words “I lost” into Google. But as the song unfolds, a quietly devastating line arrives: “I lost my mother.”Amid all of the electronic modifications, Everything but the Girl never hides its heart. Thorn and Watt strove to stay in a freely creative state as they made the album, but their usual self-consciousness wasn’t far away. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency in a lot of the lyrics about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”There are no plans for a tour. “It brings a lot of baggage with it, more so than with recording an album,” Thorn said.“One of the problems with touring, in part, is that you have to constantly look backwards for your audience,” Watt said. “You’re expected to perform the hits, so you are as much an entertainer as you are a creative artist. And if we’re really honest, neither of us have a great appetite for the old stuff. You know, it was good at the time. We respect it.” He shrugged. “We did our best.” More

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      A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

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      Alisa Weilerstein’s latest project is a series of staged solo recitals that weave Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works.When the cellist Alisa Weilerstein found herself cooped up with her family at the start of the pandemic, her first instinct, like that of so many classical musicians, was to find some way — any way — to communicate.She joined the artists who found solace on social media, streaming a movement of Bach’s cello suites each day, for 36 days in a row. “I just want to have a kind of outpouring of music, of thoughts, and everything else,” she told The New York Times then. “Right now all I really want to do is give.”It didn’t last. Come that November, Weilerstein had put her cello away, and she was taking long walks on the beaches near her home in San Diego instead of practicing. When she finally forced herself to play again, she found herself staring out of the window, wondering what her field might look like when, or if, performers returned to the stage.“To everyone’s credit, I think, everyone is wrestling with this issue,” Weilerstein said in a recent interview from Toronto. “We all had a lot of time to think about what it means to really connect with an audience, what it means to connect with each other, and an appreciation for being in one communal space.”If Weilerstein’s response was a common one to a common crisis, the result of her reflections shines with uncommon ambition, so much so that it is hard to think of many soloists of a similar stature who would dare to bring anything like it to the stage.Meet “Fragments,” a project whose first installment — of six — Weilerstein will perform at Zankel Hall on April 1. Certain aspects of it may be familiar. She will be there, playing solo. She will perform a Bach suite in its entirety, and she will play it with her typical, heartfelt passion. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned.Weilerstein at the “Fragments” premiere in Toronto.Lisa SakulenskyBut this project is intended to reimagine what a cello recital can be, to challenge some of the conventions that Weilerstein thinks might inhibit a listener’s immediate response to the music, and to add layers of theatricality to the arguably staid traditions of the concert hall, in an acceptance that a musician is, after all, performing on a stage.So each of the six programs, which Weilerstein will offer over the next few seasons, will have a dramaturgical element: Hanako Yamaguchi, the former, longtime director of music programming at Lincoln Center, is her artistic adviser, and her production team includes the director Elkhanah Pulitzer, the set and lighting designer Seth Reiser, and the costumer Carlos J. Soto. There will be limited program notes in advance, little to guide listeners except their ears and eyes through a collagelike narrative arc assembled from musical fragments.“There’s a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and it’s important to preserve those things,” Weilerstein said. “I do think, though, that we clearly have a problem, that we are not connecting with enough people, and that we are relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.So “Fragments” is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé genre of “response” programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past. Having scoured the internet to survey the new-music scene, and consulted with past collaborators including Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher, Weilerstein invited 28 composers to participate. The 27 who agreed — including Tania León, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon and Daniel Kidane — make up a roster that is remarkably diverse demographically and stylistically, but almost all of them asked if they should write with specific reference to Bach, Weilerstein recalled. She left the choice up to them.“Some did,” she said, “and some very much did not.”Caroline Shaw, whose “Microfictions” for Weilerstein is the second volume in a run of collected miniatures that she has also written for the Miró Quartet and the New York Philharmonic, said that her piece is not an explicit response to Bach, but that his influence was surely present in it.“Fragments” is an attempt to fix a problem, Weilerstein said of “relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”Evelyn Freja for The New York Times“I live with his music all the time, I love it deeply,” Shaw said, adding that the second book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” has been her “soundtrack” for the past year. “It’s very hard to write anything for solo cello and not have some subconscious relationship to Bach.”Weilerstein did set some rules. She asked that the new pieces be about 10 minutes long, and that they come in two or three fragments that she could intersperse with other scores without violating the meaning of the music. Bach was not available for consultation, but she is subjecting his suites to the same treatment.“There was a temptation to write something really virtuosic, really out there, really avant-garde,” said Reinaldo Moya, one of the more junior composers in Weilerstein’s group, “because you’re not going to have the chance to work with a soloist of that caliber every time. At least I don’t.”Free to write what he wanted, Moya drew on the personal ties that he has to Weilerstein through the conductor Rafael Payare, her husband. Earlier in their careers, Moya and Payare both played in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, a country that has such an addiction to caffeine that it has a precise linguistic taxonomy for coffee and its functions. Moya’s fragments depict an early-morning brew, an after-lunch pick-me-up and a sludgy cup needed for staying up late.“It felt a little bit — all right, it felt a lot risky to give her a piece about coffee like that,” Moya said. “But I wanted to go with my gut, and relate my work to something that might connect with her on that level, not a technical or a composer-y level.”WEILERSTEIN HAS NEVER had the reputation of being a new-music specialist, but she has given her fair share of premieres, and few of her colleagues on the international circuit can list anything so bold as her recording of Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto on their discographies. She has evidently thought hard about how contemporary composers can be given a fairer chance to break through to audiences, especially to those people for whom contemporary art, say, is an easier ask.“There are myriad reasons, of course,” Weilerstein said, exploring the apparent divergence in the fields, “but there is one very fundamental thing, which is, you walk into an exhibition, you see the painting or you see the work of art before anything, and it can hit you right where it needs to hit — and then you can find out all the context around it. With contemporary music, there’s so much context put around it even before we’ve heard anything.”For that reason, the lack of program notes — before the lights go dark, the audience will be given only the most basic information about the project, and the names of the composers they will hear — is a core part of “Fragments,” and a sign, its creators said, that, for all the deliberate, thoughtful artifice, the focus is on the music.“To shed the Rorschach inclination towards finding meaning in the program before hearing the music was a really important piece of the puzzle,” Pulitzer said. “How many of us do that, where we look at the bio, we’re making assumptions about gender, race, nationality, compositional precedent, who where their teachers, and when were they born?”The aim, she added, is to strip as much of that presumptive meaning as possible away, so that listeners can follow Weilerstein’s attempts to create new meaning in her musical quilts, and “dare to embark on this journey of not knowing, and allow it to be OK.”For Shaw, that was part of the attraction of “Fragments,” beyond the obvious appeal of writing for a soloist whose visible commitment expresses such a clear love of music.“Going to hear a concert and not looking at what’s on the program and not knowing what comes next — those have been some of my deepest and most revealing listening experiences,” Shaw said. “There’s also something beautiful and important about presenting different composers side by side, and behind a curtain, so that you’re not focusing on their name, or whether or not they’re Bach.”The staging does offer some hints about the music, as if to hold the listener’s hand. Reiser’s set stays constant, a deconstructed theater arrayed so that it evokes soloists’ constant struggles to create “a room of one’s own” as they travel the world’s halls, Pulitzer said, and at the same time “reawakens the spaces for the people who are familiar with them.” Each composer has a specific lighting color, to give a sense of which fragments combine to make wholes.There may be people, Weilerstein admits, who are put off by even a modest staging, or by her tinkering with performance traditions. For her though, “Fragments” is an attempt to make the concert hall more of a place of adventure again, and less of a dead end.“It’s like the E.M. Forster phrase, ‘only connect,’” Weilerstein explained. “This is the philosophy behind the project, fundamentally: connecting the pieces, connecting the voices of our time together, connecting the familiar and the new, connecting this music with the audience without the barrier of so much contextualization, categorization, bias, all of these things.”“And connecting,” she added, “our contemporary world with the concert format. This is what it’s about for me.” More