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      Michael Tilson Thomas Revels in the Present With the New York Phil

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      Thomas, who is fighting brain cancer, conducted two ruminative works, Schubert’s “Great” Symphony and his own “Meditations on Rilke.”The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a performer who communicates joy when sharing the music he loves. On Thursday, there was also a deep sense of gratitude: Speaking from the stage, he called his appearance with the New York Philharmonic “a lovely, affirming surprise.” Although he made no direct mention of his health, many in the audience understood the context: In the summer of 2021, Thomas, 78, learned that he had glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer. For him, every performance now is an opportunity to revel in the present.There are only two works on this program, both of them discursive and ruminative: Thomas’s “Meditations on Rilke,” which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2020, and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony.Thomas has always been a raconteur, and on Thursday he gave a 12-minute spoken introduction to “Meditations” from the podium. His speech may be more halting now, but the storytelling is as fluid as ever. And his quirky piece, which opens with a piano rag and quickly plunges into Mahlerian orchestration and psychic depths, needed at least some of that contextualization.“Meditations” is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano (the luminous Sasha Cooke), bass-baritone (an impassioned, rich-voiced Dashon Burton) and orchestra, with autumnal, meditative texts by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s also partly an instrumental fantasy based on an episode from the life of Thomas’s father, a scion of Yiddish theater giants who was thrust into a gig as a saloon pianist in an Arizona mining town (hence that opening rag); a zigzagging thesis on the similarities between cowboy songs and Schubert lieder; and a tribute to composers whose work is most deeply imprinted on Thomas, including Berg, Copland, Schubert and Mahler.Schubert’s “Great” Symphony did not need any introduction. It’s a broadly grand piece that was praised by Robert Schumann for its “heavenly length,” though many listeners have found it in need of a rigorous edit. In Thomas’s hands, it had a brilliant moment-to-moment tautness that made you forget the expanse of Schubert’s canvas, in which fine-honed details can sometimes get lost.The orchestra reveled in all those small turns — in each of the first movement’s gentle curves and crisply articulated angles, and in the surprising juxtapositions of the second movement, which shifts from proud march to sweet tenderness. Thomas, communicating with the most economical of arm gestures, made those internal transitions of mood and harmony seamless, their logic unstintingly clear. Many conductors treat the third-movement scherzo as an exercise in dance rhythm; here, the energy was certainly propulsive, but Thomas also coaxed out a riot of colors and textures.The final movement was nothing short of a joyous celebration, and more than a few of the Philharmonic’s players had barely sounded their last notes before erupting in laughter. Whether it was from the sheer pleasure of making music with Thomas or a quiet joke he might have made from the podium didn’t really matter; their delight was palpable — and shared.Michael Tilson Thomas at the New York PhilharmonicThrough Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      As a Film Revives Elvis’s Legacy, the Presleys Fight Over His Estate

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      After the death of Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s ex-wife initiated a legal battle with her granddaughter over control of the family trust.When the camera panned to Priscilla Presley and her daughter, Lisa Marie, they appeared enraptured.Austin Butler had rekindled the good memories of Elvis with his portrayal in a lauded biopic. And for a few magical minutes on that January evening, Butler was there, on the stage at the Golden Globes, conjuring the voice and radiating the charm of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll as he accepted a best actor award.Lisa Marie clasped her hands around her mouth. Priscilla placed her hand on her heart. Mother and daughter had had their run-ins over the years, but they were together again — nestled at a table, like family.“One of the greatest nights of my career,” said Jerry Schilling, a Presley family friend and business associate who escorted Lisa Marie that evening.But days later, the sadness that has long trailed the family had again taken hold. Lisa Marie, only 54, died suddenly. Within weeks, Priscilla, who had long helped administer Elvis’s estate, went to court to challenge the validity of documents that say her granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough, is now the sole trustee.The dispute got underway just as Keough prepared for the release of the new Amazon Prime Video series “Daisy Jones & the Six,” in which she stars. It is unclear what acrimony may arise as the litigation unfolds, but Keough stayed conspicuously quiet when her grandmother urged the public not to view it as a family fight. Keough’s lawyers have yet to file court papers in response.Riley Keough, who stars as Daisy Jones in a new Amazon Prime series, has not responded to her grandmother’s decision to challenge her standing as the sole trustee of the family trust.Lacey Terrell/Amazon Prime VideoReaction has been swift, though, at Graceland, Elvis’s former home in Memphis, where emotions over the Presley family run high. Lisa Marie Bailey, a visitor named after Elvis’s only child, said last weekend that she supported Keough.If the King knew what was happening, she said, standing near where Elvis is buried, “he would be turning over in his grave.”The latest Presley family dust-up echoes the messiness that marked Elvis’s life, which, beyond the hit records and Hollywood films, was filled with its share of public dramas, including divorce, profligate spending and, late in life, a struggle with drug addiction.Despite those troubles, the Elvis brand today continues to take in more than $100 million a year as the licensing juggernaut behind apparel, pink Cadillac plush toys and tickets to tour Graceland. But the family trust receives only a fraction of its proceeds, according to court filings that detail its earnings.In 2005, Lisa Marie and her business manager sold off 85 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises for roughly $97 million in cash, stock and debt relief, according to court documents — funds that have since been nearly depleted. Still, last year, before her death, Elvis’s daughter drew an income of $1.25 million from the trust, which continues to be worth tens of millions of dollars, according to financial filings. The beneficiaries are now Keough and her two younger half sisters.This weekend, the curious are likely to search for Keough and Priscilla at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, where Butler is a strong contender for the best actor Oscar.Neither camp would comment on whether the women plan to attend.The family today owns only 15 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which operates Elvis’s former home Graceland, a major draw for fans. Brandon Dill/Associated PressSuccess and excess in the house of ElvisWhen Elvis died unexpectedly in 1977, his estate was worth roughly $5 million. His spending had drained his earnings, which had long been limited by his business arrangement with his longtime manager, Col. Tom Parker. He received as much as half of the King’s income, including roughly half the $5.4 million fee that RCA Records paid in 1973 when Presley gave up future royalty rights from sales of recordings he had made, which included the majority of his hits.The money that remained was left in a trust and, after several family members died, Lisa Marie, emerged as its sole beneficiary. Priscilla, who divorced Elvis four years before his death, became a trustee and eventually engineered an overhaul of the estate, turning it into a moneymaker, in part by opening Graceland to the public in 1982.It was a painful but necessary tactic — “like being robbed,” Priscilla said later of watching strangers enter the home. The Los Angeles Times estimated in 1989 that the value of the estate had climbed to more than $75 million and that Elvis Presley Enterprises was bringing in an estimated $15 million a year in gross income.The assets grew to more than $100 million by 2005, according to court documents. By that time, they had been moved into a new vehicle, the Promenade Trust, established by Lisa Marie in 1993. She was its beneficiary; her mother and Barry Siegel, the family’s business manager, served as trustees.Then began what Lisa Marie’s lawyers have called her “11-year odyssey to financial ruin.”Siegel and Lisa Marie would later trade accusations over who was to blame for her precipitous financial decline. In a 2018 court fight, which was eventually settled, Siegel contended that, though the trust received millions of dollars in annual income, “Lisa’s continuous, excessive spending and reliance on credit” drove it into significant debt.In 2005, as the bills mounted, Lisa Marie and Siegel engineered the sale of 85 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises to a group led by the investor Robert F.X. Sillerman.The deal paid about $50 million in cash. The trust also received $25 million in stock in Sillerman’s entertainment company, CKX, and $22 million in debt relief, according to court documents. The trust kept the remaining 15 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises and the main Graceland house, appraised at $5.6 million in 2021.In 2013, Sillerman sold Elvis Presley Enterprises to Authentic Brands Group in partnership with Joel Weinshanker, who now operates Graceland. Three years later, Sillerman’s company declared bankruptcy, rendering Lisa Marie’s CKX stock almost worthless, according to court documents.And by that time, the $50 million in cash that Lisa Marie’s trust had received was also largely gone, spent on things like a $9 million home in England. In her court papers, Lisa Marie blamed Siegel for allowing that purchase and said he had enriched himself with exorbitant fees and failed to alert her to how dire the financial situation had become.By 2016, her lawsuit said, the trust “was left with $14,000 in cash and over $500,000 in credit card debt.”Siegel’s lawyers were blunt in their 2018 cross complaint, which denied their client was responsible for the diminished assets. “Sadly, since inheriting her father’s estate in 1993, Lisa has twice squandered it,” they wrote. “She now has only herself to blame for her financial and personal misfortunes.”Meanwhile, Elvis Presley Enterprises was churning along. Last year, it pulled in $110 million, at least $80 million of which was generated by operations at Graceland. Another $5 million came from the sale of the rights for the Baz Luhrmann biopic, according to Forbes, whose estimates were confirmed by two people with knowledge of the company’s finances.In addition to the $1.25 million she got last year from the trust, Lisa Marie received a monthly salary of roughly $4,300 as an employee of Graceland, according to a financial filing she made last year. It also listed roughly $95,000 in liquid assets, $715,000 in stocks and bonds, and debts that exceeded $3 million.Priscilla and Elvis were married for six years before divorcing in 1973. GETTY‘Family is everything’Though it’s surrounded now by a hotel and other amenities, Graceland is largely the same home Elvis bought in 1957, at 22, and lived in for two decades. The large, once bustling kitchen remains, as does the pool room and the jungle room, with its waterfall and carved wooden furniture.The audio tour offers visitors a glimpse of Presley family life.“Today, Lisa Marie and her family still have dinner around this table when they’re in town,” the audio intones during a stop in the dining room, where Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding china is displayed on a table near a portrait of Priscilla and a young Lisa Marie.The relationship between mother and daughter had become strained in recent years, according to people close to the family who requested anonymity to describe intimate Presley matters. One family confidante said Lisa Marie became particularly upset in 2016 when she filed to divorce her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood, and felt her mother was siding with Lockwood in the dispute.Still, they sat together at the Golden Globes.Schilling, who escorted Lisa Marie that night, declined to discuss Presley family matters. But he said the celebration of the “Elvis” film and the King’s legacy had been something of a salve for Lisa Marie, helping her “come out a little bit” after a difficult period. Her son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020.On Jan. 26, two weeks after Lisa Marie’s death, Priscilla filed papers in Superior Court in Los Angeles challenging a 2016 amendment to the trust purportedly authorized by Lisa Marie. That amendment had removed Priscilla and Siegel as trustees. It had also designated Riley Keough and Benjamin, her brother, as co-trustees in the event of Lisa Marie’s death.Siegel had acknowledged receiving notice of his removal as trustee during his 2018 court battle with Lisa Marie. But Priscilla’s lawyers argued that the amendment was invalid, saying that it had never been delivered to her during Lisa Marie’s lifetime as required under the language of the trust. They also argued that the amendment was potentially fraudulent, asserting that Lisa Marie’s signature was “inconsistent” with her usual penmanship. Priscilla asked the court to recognize her as a trustee.Discord in the Presley family appears to have grown since the death of Lisa Marie, left, in January. She is shown with her mother, center, and daughter, Riley, at an event in Los Angeles last year.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated PressA spokeswoman for Priscilla did not respond to requests for comment on her motivations for the court challenge. But Priscilla, in a statement last month, asked the public to “allow us the time we need to work together and sort this out,” imploring fans to “ignore ‘the noise.’”Keough’s representative declined to comment on the estate matters.Weinshanker, the managing partner of Graceland, also declined to comment but has said since Lisa Marie’s death that he believed it was her intention to have Keough and her brother run the trust.“There was never a question in her mind that they would be the stewards,” he told Sirius XM’s Elvis Radio, “that they would look at it the exact same way that she did. And obviously when Ben passed, it really sat with Riley.”In Memphis last weekend, people touring Graceland said they had been closely watching the dispute unfold. Many have been Elvis fans for their entire lives and have grown accustomed to Presley family drama. Still, some worried that the schism might lead to Graceland’s being sold.Kristie Gustafson, 54, said she grew up listening to Elvis’s music with her mother. “I’m a very family-oriented person, so I would say it’s very important to keep it in the family,” she said, beginning to tear up.“Family,” she said, “is everything.”Nicole Sperling contributed reporting from Los Angeles, Jessica Jaglois contributed reporting from Memphis and Ben Sisario contributed reporting from New York. Sheelagh McNeill and Jack Begg contributed research. More

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      Miley Cyrus and Brandi Carlile’s Raw Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, Nicki Nicole, Caroline Rose and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Miley Cyrus featuring Brandi Carlile, ‘Thousand Miles’From Miley Cyrus’s new album, “Endless Summer Vacation,” comes this rugged, low-to-the-ground duet with the polished roots-rock yowler Brandi Carlile. Both are capable of broad vocal theatrics, but it should be said, Carlile is holding back here, in order to allow Cyrus the space to ruminate in this song about failure: “I’m not always right/but still I ain’t got time for what went wrong.” In her post-Disney career, Cyrus has flirted with various forms of adulthood in terms of performance — sexual defiance, hippie experimentalism and so on. But she’s perhaps at her most appealing when applying restraint. JON CARAMANICANicki Nicole, ‘No Voy a Llorar’Latin R&B enjoys a whiff of hyperpop helium in “No Voy a Llorar” (“I’m Not Going to Cry”), a preemptively defensive breakup song. The 22-year-old Argentine songwriter Nicki Nicole insists she’s fully prepared if things go wrong. “When you leave, I’m not going to suffer,” she predicts. The song’s chord progression could have come from the 1950s, but its production is as contemporary as its brittle attitude. Her pop soprano gets pitched further upward as the track begins; elusive background vocals and synthesizers puff their syncopations around the beat. Even the exposed voice-and-piano coda, the sincere payoff, gets computer-tweaked. JON PARELESBaaba Maal featuring the Very Best, ‘Freak Out’The Senegalese songwriter Baaba Maal, with an extensive catalog behind him, has lately been heard worldwide with vocals on the soundtracks of the Black Panther films. He collaborated with the African-tinged English group the Very Best on “Freak Out,” from his coming album, “Being.” Ignore the song’s psychedelic title. The lyrics draw on an old proverb from Maal’s culture, the Fulani, instructing that someone who has deep knowledge should say neither too little nor too much. Its music merges programmed and hand percussion with a desert drone, an electric-guitar lick and the backup vocals of the Very Best’s Malawian singer, Esau Mwamwaya. It’s both up-to-the-minute and resolutely grounded in traditional wisdom. PARELESEladio Carrión featuring Future, ‘Mbappe’ (Remix)Last year, the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión had a hit with “Mbappe” a drowsy and delirious Migos-esque boast. Future appears on this remix with a pair of verses that are somehow both utterly rote and also grossly charming, rapping about the place where carnality and expensive jewelry intersect, and the elation of toxic love. CARAMANICANF, ‘Motto’NF has always rapped as if full of anxiety, and on a core level, that hasn’t changed on “Motto,” a clever narrative about unshackling oneself from the stressors of pop music success. But over classicist boom-bap production amplified with a whimsical swing and some of the howling dynamics of rock groups like Imagine Dragons, “Motto” feels somehow lighter. In his early career, NF sounded as if he was internalizing all the pressures of the world, but now he sounds free and calm, dismissing those same pressures with a shrug. CARAMANICABartees Strange, ‘Daily News’“Daily News” was tucked away on the vinyl version of the album Bartees Strange released in 2022, “Farm to Table.” Now it’s streaming, and it sums up and expands the album’s moods and dynamics. Strange sings about alienation, numbness and anxiety — “I can feel the weight/Crashing over me again” — as electric-guitar lines coil and intertwine around him. A bridge finds him even more alone — reduced to nervous, isolated vocals — but someone rescues him. Perhaps it’s a partner; perhaps it’s an audience. “I’ve found you,” he exults, in a full-band onrush of drums, saxophone and tremolo-strummed guitars, and the connection sounds rapturous. PARELESCaroline Rose, ‘Tell Me What You Want’A breakup could hardly be messier or more noisy than the one Caroline Rose depicts in “Tell Me What You Want.” “I am just pretending not to lose my mind,” she explains, in a track that swerves between acoustic-guitar strumming and full grunge blare. She blurts both “I can’t bear to lose you” and “Boy you’re going to hate this song!” She wonders if she should hold on; she wants to smash everything and move along. The video clip, a drunken trek through Austin, Texas, spells out all of her conflicting impulses. PARELESAngel Olsen, ‘Nothing’s Free’The steadfastness of vintage soul carries Angel Olsen through “Nothing’s Free,” as she sings about an unspecific but primal revelation. Slow gospel organ and piano chords, bluesy saxophone and patiently hand-played drumming sustain her amid — and in a long closing instrumental, beyond — something that sounds both life-changing and inevitable, as she sings, “Nothin’s free like breaking free/out of the past.” PARELESNoia, ‘Verano Adentro’Noia is Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, a songwriter from Barcelona who’s now based in Brooklyn. In “Verano Adentro” (“Summer Inside”), she wafts her voice over an amorphous, ever-shifting electronic backdrop. At first it’s tentative — chords and pauses, the clatter of a rainstick — but other, more ominous sounds crowd in: distorted guitar, insistent drums, rumbly low arpeggios. Nothing ruffles her as she basks in bliss: “All I need is an ocean, all I need is time,” she coos. PARELESSarah Pagé, ‘Premiers Pas Au Marécage’“Premiers Pas Au Marécage” translates as “First Steps in the Swamp,” and it’s a meditation on evolution — formlessness into forms — by Sarah Page, a harpist and composer from Montreal. She mingles electronics and plucked strings in this piece, which opens with yawning, amorphous sounds and recordings of Hungarian frogs, then deploys a quintet of Japanese kotos to join her in a measured, echoey waltz and march, a tentative climb toward order. PARELES More

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      Composers Find Transcendence, and Inspiration, at Berghain in Berlin

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      The storied Berlin techno club Berghain has changed the way some composers think about and make music.BERLIN — In 2018, after a visit to Berghain, the storied techno club here, the saxophonist and curator Ryan Muncy called the composer Ash Fure, a friend and collaborator.“God spoke to me in the subwoofers,” Muncy told her. “‘Bring me Ash Fure.’”Soon Fure, at the time a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, boarded a plane to Berlin. She and Muncy went straight to Berghain. “I remember so vividly every single detail,” Fure said in a video interview. She recalled watching as the other club-goers shed their coats and donned futuristic outfits. She explored the labyrinthine architecture, discovering vantage points from which to watch and listen. She got close to the famous Funktion-One sound system, which engulfed her with its volume but never hurt her ears. She stayed for 14 hours.“It all had this wild warping effect,” Fure said.Back in Rome, she felt the experience staying with her. “It felt really spiral,” she said, referring to Berghain. “You keep going around and around, you get deeper and deeper in this place.”Classical musicians are no strangers to clubs. In 2001, the record label Deutsche Grammophon founded a concert series, Yellow Lounge, that included performances in places like Berghain.Separately, classical artists have often attended Berghain’s techno Klubnächte, or club nights — a rave with queer origins that attracts locals and techno pilgrims from around the world, and often lasts from midnight Saturday to late Monday. They emerge with encouragement and inspiration.When Fure first went to Berghain, a performance the year before of “The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects” (2017), which she created with her architect brother, Adam Fure, was fresh in her mind. That work uses subwoofers, aircraft cables, vocalists, instruments and abstract set design and choreography to dramatize the vast scale of climate change.Fure felt at home in this genre, somewhere between abstract contemporary opera and sound art, but like many composers she had to reconcile her interests with the financial pressures of a traditional career. In 2012, Fure had started making what she described as “full-bodied, multisensory work.” But, she said, “then I would go back and try to hustle some more commissions, and I’d ultimately get a prize that gave me access to some resources. That allowed me to make another one of these weird wild things, and then I had to keep doing that cycle.”The experience at Berghain in 2018 encouraged Fure to focus more resolutely on her immersive compositions. “In so many ways, it felt like the actualization of a lot of these more private hungers and more private desires for sound and experience and collectivity,” she said. “It felt confirming that it’s possible.”That confirmation has been a common experience for composers who visit Berghain. In 2015, a friend of Wojtek Blecharz brought him to the club for his birthday. Like Fure, Blecharz, a 41-year-old composer, was interested in the physicality of sound and dissatisfied with the predictability of a typical classical concert. He found his time at Berghain literally hair-raising.“I’m quite hairy,” he said in an interview. “So all the hair on my body was vibrating with this massive energy. I could dive into the sound.”Berghain is famous for, among other things, the lines people wait on to get inside.Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance, via Getty Images“I could almost touch it,” he added. “I could float in it. That was one of the most beautiful experiences in my life as a classically trained musician.”Blecharz channeled the tactility of the techno music at Berghain into “Body Opera,” an opera installation, for up to 100 viewers at a time, that premiered in England at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2016. He provided each audience member with a yoga mat, a blanket and a pillow outfitted with an integrated transducer speaker. Touching the pillow sent sound waves directly into a listener’s body. “I realized,” Blecharz said, describing his visits to Berghain, “that it would be nice to create analogous ways to translate this experience, when you go there for the first time, and you hear this wave of sound that embraces you.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“Body Opera” includes a nod to the drugs some find essential to raving. Blecharz asked audience members to consume a white, crystal powder from a small resealable bag. It was just Pop Rocks candy, but attendees didn’t know that in advance; they were meant to become sensitized to the sound of the sugar popping, and to perceive the resonating effect of their mouths.The composer Joshua Fineberg had long been interested in the mechanisms that encourage transcendent experiences, which he believed were rare at classical concerts. “You can only really get to that place in the concert world when your deep listening can take you out of yourself, which not everyone is ready to do every night,” he said in a telephone interview.In 2015, Fineberg, 53, went to a snake church outside Birmingham, Ala., in search of an ecstatic experience. With the pastor’s permission, Fineberg observed a ceremony in which a poisonous snake was passed from worshiper to worshiper. But it wasn’t until a year later, after he discovered Berghain, that he found the transcendence he was looking for.“They found this way to kind of industrialize the Gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art, Fineberg said. “To make, let’s say, 85 or 90 percent of the feeling of the most amazing night of your life reproducible almost every weekend.”In “take my hand,” a 2017 piece written for Ensemble Dal Niente, Fineberg used blindfolds, smoke machines and strobe lights to evoke disorientation analogous to the winding architecture and gloomy lighting of Berghain. Fineberg’s complex timbres, including a memorable overlay of harp on a bed of rich noise, remain static for long periods, in the same way that a D.J.’s tracks might stay in a limited harmonic and rhythmic world for hours.Partying at Berghain, Fineberg said, creates an “infusion of joy” into his regular life. But it has also encouraged a shift in the drama of his works. “Maybe my music can move more toward catharsis and release than in the past,” he said, “where it would have just been tension and angst.”When the viol player Liam Byrne, 40, began going to Berghain, in 2017, he noticed a surprising parallel between techno dancing and stylized Baroque choreography. The steps of Baroque dance, he said in an interview, are often the most effective ways of moving at a given speed, to a specific groove.At the club, he noticed dancers were adapting their movements to different tempos in a comparable manner. While speaking, Byrne shook his shoulders back and forth on his chair to demonstrate a step suited to the fast techno on Berghain’s main floor. Upstairs at the Panorama Bar, where the tempo is usually a little slower, dancers prefer a two-step, shuffling motion, he said.“That’s exactly like Baroque dance,” Byrne said. “That’s your pas de bourrée, your pas de gavotte.” He added, “These types of movements are perfect expressions or perfect marriages with very specific types of rhythmic feel.”A visitor inside one of Berghain’s cavernous spaces, where the composer Sergej Newski said he has seen many other classical musicians.Felipe Trueba/EPA, via ShutterstockMuch of the Baroque repertoire Byrne plays alludes to dance forms. The techno at Berghain helped him “understand the importance of your responsibility when playing dance music: to make somebody want to move, because it’s a way of giving the listener agency in the music, by inviting them in.”“You create a groove that the listener gets into,” Byrne said. “Then they’re in the piece with you. Then we’ll pay more close attention to exactly the way you’re lingering on that trill.”For other classical musicians, Berghain offers liberation from professional pressures. The violinist Ashot Sarkissjan, 46, is a member of the Arditti Quartet, which is known for its performances of thorny, avant-garde classical music. For Sarkissjan, Berghain is a refuge from the spotlight. Occasionally, he goes to the club right after a concert. “Performing is always a responsibility,” he said in a video interview. “When I’m clubbing, I don’t have it. And yet, at the same time, it’s still a musical event that I’m actively part of. It’s just me in a cocoon.”The composer Sergej Newski, 50, discovered techno music around 1994, when he was a student at the University of the Arts in Berlin. For a few years, the Love Parade, an outdoor techno party, took place on the same day as his annual ear-training finals — right under the classroom window. Since then, he has associated the music with a certain freedom that he rediscovered at Berghain.“Every composer walks alone, in a way,” Newski said in an interview. “Berghain gives him the possibility to feel like part of the crowd.” He added, “I’ve met many, many classical musicians there.”After completing her fellowship in Rome, in July 2018, Fure received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and moved to Berlin, where she continued visiting Berghain. In January 2020, she integrated her club experiences into a new work, “Hive Rise,” with the artist and choreographer Lilleth. In that installation-like piece, a group of performers created sound with 3D-printed megaphones and moved in abstract patterns around the space, their choreography and their futuristic outfits recalling Berghain clubgoers.“Hive Rise” premiered at Berghain. “It was crazy to be able to give back to that whole architecture that had been so transformative for me and for so many people I love,” Fure said. “It was such an incredible feeling to have my sound move through those speakers.”This October, Fure will premiere a new immersive work, “Training Ground: A Listening Gym,” at the Schwarzman Center at Yale University. She is continuing to explore the pathways Berghain opened for her.“I really think of sound as a social technology and as a somatic technology and a tool of the herd and a tool of the species,” Fure said. “Berghain activates that technology in an extremely potent way that was very formative and very singular in my life.” More

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      Lincoln Center Chooses Hearst Chief as Next Board Chair

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      Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, will replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Lincoln Center faces a series of challenges in the coming years: recovering from the pandemic, reaching new audiences and making its campus more welcoming to the public.Now it will have a new board chair to help tackle those priorities: Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, whom the center announced on Thursday would replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Swartz, who has been a Lincoln Center board member since 2012, said in an interview that he would continue the vision of Farley and Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, who have worked to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.“We’ve really done an amazing job of making our campus and our programming open and accessible and inclusive,” he said. “We just want to keep it going.”Farley, who took over as board chair in 2010, said in an interview that she thought it was time for a change after the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, which reopened last fall, a year and a half ahead of schedule.Farley was a major force behind the renovation, a project that had languished for years, working with the leadership of the New York Philharmonic, including its president and chief executive, Deborah Borda, and the chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang. She secured a gift of $100 million from Geffen, the entertainment mogul, in 2015 to help kick-start the renovation. (Lincoln Center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord.)“The hall is finished, all the money’s been raised, our budget is balanced,” Farley said. “It just seemed like this was the right time to pass the baton.”During her tenure, she worked to bring more racial and gender diversity to Lincoln Center’s executive ranks, helping create a fellowship to build a pipeline of board members for the entire campus.She also faced criticism during her tenure, including during a turbulent time in the mid-2010s when the center endured leadership churn and financial woes.Swartz praised Farley, describing her tenure as an “extraordinary chairmanship.” She will remain on the board’s executive committee.He said that under his leadership the center would try to reach the broadest possible audience.“Now as the city looks to recover from the pandemic,” he said, “I think the arts give us hope and give us inspiration, and they give people across the city, from all walks of life, just much-needed entertainment.” More

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      ‘Rewind & Play’ Review: Thelonious Monk Dazzles Even When an Interview Falls Flat

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      Alain Gomis’s documentary uses rushes from a 1969 French TV interview to make a smart indictment of music industry bias and offer viewers a subtle tribute to Monk.The documentary “Rewind & Play” makes damning use of a 1969 interview Thelonious Monk did with Henri Renaud for the French television program “Jazz Portrait.” Monk’s European tour was set to end in Paris and the show was recorded shortly before. The interview took place nearly six years after Monk was featured on a Time magazine cover under the banner “Jazz: Bebop and Beyond” and one year before he stopped making music.Directed by the French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, this 65-minute, freighted documentary creates a portrait — or two — out of rushes and outtakes Gomis received from the National Audiovisual Institute while researching a fiction film about Monk. One is a study of an interview turned wincing for reasons of glib arrogance — racial but perhaps personal, too. The other is a more gleaming portrait of Monk at work.More film essay with critical chaser than straight-up documentary, the film suggests that Renaud — a jazz pianist turned record producer and later music executive — aimed for something revelatory, but also something that shined a spotlight on his own insightfulness. But Renaud is continuously dissatisfied with Monk’s answers to his questions: about not being understood by French audiences in the 1950s, about his wife Nellie’s role in his life, about being avant-garde. Renaud asks for take after take, unable to improvise when seemingly thwarted by Monk’s responses. (In the actual 30-minute show, Monk speaks eight words, according to Gomis.)The film is not merely playback or payback on behalf of one Black artist by another. “Rewind & Play” dazzles because it is and will remain a wonder to witness Monk seemingly discovering his compositions again and again, his fingers conjuring, his right foot etching rhythms.Rewind & PlayNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Russian Singer Shaman Changes His Tune to Support Putin

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      MOSCOW — He cuts the figure of a typical leather-wearing pop star heartthrob. He has a fan base of young and middle-aged women who bring him flowers and stuffed animals when he performs. But Yaroslav Y. Dronov, better known by his stage name, Shaman, is also beloved by an exclusive and powerful Russian fan base: the Kremlin.The young singer’s star has been rising as the war in Ukraine continues into a second year and Mr. Dronov aligns his music with Moscow’s party line. When Vladimir V. Putin staged a patriotic rally last month coinciding with the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Mr. Dronov performed “Vstanem,” or “Let’s Rise,” a ballad of gratitude to veterans, just before the Russian president came onstage.And when Mr. Putin celebrated the annexation of four Ukrainian regions in late September, Mr. Dronov, 31, shared the stage with him, singing Russia’s national anthem while his trademark blond dreadlocks fell into his eyes.More and more, as the Kremlin seeks to remake the country’s institutions to comport with Mr. Putin’s militaristic worldview, cultural figures in Russia are picking a side. Many have chosen to leave the country because of political pressure or to signal their disagreement. Others have spoken out against the war, only to see their concerts or exhibitions canceled. They include musicians, theater directors, actors and artists.But many have stayed and are aligning their art to Mr. Putin’s messaging — out of either pragmatism, pursuit of wealth or true conviction. As the Kremlin seeks to win over Russians in support of the war, performers like Mr. Dronov have become willing — and sometimes well-compensated — messengers.“Shaman is a very interesting phenomenon from a cultural and sociological point of view, but I think that he is not a single phenomenon. He is a continuation of a long-lasting evolution of Russian subculture, a nationalist and parafascist one,” said Ilya Kukulin, a longtime cultural historian at Moscow’s National Research University Higher School of Economics and now at Amherst College in Massachusetts.Members of the crowd waving Russian flags at Shaman’s concert. His song “Vstanem” was released on Feb. 23, 2022, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesThe shift to more nationalistic themes has been lucrative for Mr. Dronov. Apart from regular features on national TV, he was placed on a list of recommended artists to perform at official New Year celebrations. He is often invited to state-sponsored shows. For instance, the cultural center for the city of Cherepovets paid 7.5 million rubles, about $100,000, for a concert, of which 5.5 million rubles went to Mr. Dronov.Fees for private concerts are usually not disclosed, but in October, the Russian media listed Mr. Dronov as among the top five most in-demand acts since the war, with an estimated cost of 55,000 euros for a private concert, almost $60,000.Patriotic, Kremlin-backed pop music isn’t something new for modern Russia, where Mr. Putin has ruled for almost 23 years and where performers favored by the government were always at least moderately nationalistic or militaristic.The State of the WarBakhmut: A Ukrainian official claimed that Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in the embattled city to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners. The Ukrainian military sees an opportunity in that.Nord Stream Pipelines: The sabotage in September of the pipelines has become one of the central mysteries of the war. A Times investigation offers new insight into who might have been behind it.Action in the Skies: Against the odds, Ukraine’s helicopter brigades are using aging vehicles to fight a better equipped adversary.But Shaman is different. He belongs to the freer culture of independent pop music, which thrived despite increasing censorship until February 2022, when the invasion of Ukraine began. It exists today in a diminished form, and while he has not started a wave of young overtly patriotic followers, he is pulling independent music in Russia closer to the Kremlin.His success prompted some of his rivals from the old guard, already close to the Kremlin, to reshape their work to stay in favor. Oleg Gazmanov, 71, re-recorded one of his hits, “Russian Soldiers,” about the glory of Russian fighters, with a modern video that features the same 1980s glam rock camp Shaman uses in his own video. Another longtime star, Dima Bilan, released his own nationalist song, “Gladiator,” with an introduction that sounds far-right themes.Mr. Dronov’s song “Vstanem” was released on Feb. 23, 2022, on the eve of the invasion. He wrote it for Defender of the Fatherland Day, a Russian version of Veterans Day, and in an interview last year with Russia-1, the country’s main state-controlled news channel, said he believed it “was dictated to me from above.”The events of the following months ensured that it became a hit with patriotic hard-liners and ordinary Russians alike. In June, it became the first song ever played in its entirety on “News of the Week,” a program led by Russia’s chief propagandist, Dmitry Kiselyov.The song, which celebrates fallen soldiers, has become a soundtrack to the current war, and its wide reach on social media is evidence of its importance to the Kremlin’s wartime communication strategy.Shaman with a portrait given to him by a fan. He accepts presents between songs as his admirers rush the stage.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesWhat the Kremlin wants Russian people to feel, said Mr. Kukulin, the historian, are “the emotions of overcoming, of resistance to any obstacles and self-confidence that all obstacles will be defeated.”For his fans, it works.“When I found out about Yaroslav, I was filled with feelings of purity, light, joy inside, the same way I feel in a church,” said Alina, 38, who attended a recent concert in the Russian resort town of Rosa Khutor, near Sochi, on the Black Sea. “It seems to me that he is the one who has such a mission to ignite people inside.” She declined to give her last name for privacy reasons.The success of “Vstanem” and its airing on national TV last June was followed a few weeks later by another patriotic anthem by Mr. Dronov, “Ya Russki” (“I Am Russian”), with a campy music video that since then has registered 28 million views on YouTube. “Ya Russki” doesn’t mention the war, but its goal is clearly to unite Russians against the “collective West,” as Mr. Putin calls it, with lines like “I am Russian, to spite the whole world.”Mr. Dronov’s spokesman declined requests to interview him. In comments he made to Russia-1, he said: “Every moment each of us has to make a choice. People made their choice — this is their way, and I made my choice — and this is my road.”Mr. Dronov’s music resonates with the public not just because of his messaging but also because he is very talented, said Anna Vilenskaya, a Russian musicologist in exile.In his shows, he interacts with his fans by bringing the microphone to audience members to sing with him, and he accepts presents between songs as his admirers rush the stage.“I don’t know any other song with such an effect,” Ms. Vilenskaya said, calling both “Vstanem” and “Ya Russki” “absolutely genius.” She recalled playing the song to a class full of antiwar students who felt a strong reaction to the music despite their revulsion to the lyrics.“For many people, it is something unholy, because they like this song with their bodies but they hate it in their minds because they know it is about war and about a lie,” she said.Shaman performed his song “Vstanem,” or “Let’s Rise,” at a patriotic rally staged by President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last month.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesSoon, “Ya Russki” was everywhere. In celebration of National Unity Day, more than 10,000 people from across Russia’s 11 time zones were organized to perform the song, with some included in an official clip promoted on state television. Teachers have encouraged students to study the songs as an example of patriotism.In October, Mr. Dronov received a prize at the Russian Creative Awards ceremony, which Mr. Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Sergei V. Kiriyenko, handed to him personally.It was the culmination of a long road for Mr. Dronov. He pursued music from the age of 4, studied in musical high schools and universities and appeared on Russian versions of “X Factor” and “The Voice,” finishing second in both competitions.In 2020, Mr. Dronov changed his name to Shaman and started promoting his own songs. They still had almost no hints of patriotism and simply followed global trends, and they didn’t get much attention.Then he released “Vstanem.”Less than a week later, just days after the invasion, Vyacheslav V. Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s lower house of Parliament, called on cultural figures to determine their positions on the war.“Today is the moment of truth,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “Everyone must understand: Either we will rally around the country, overcome the challenges, or we lose ourselves.”Two days after Mr. Volodin’s imperative, Mr. Dronov performed his first major solo concert in Moscow, and then began a cross-country tour.The money to be made is substantial, but having the Kremlin as a patron can be a tricky endeavor. A poster in Moscow on Tuesday advertising a coming Shaman concert.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesMr. Dronov has already made an enemy of Vladimir Kiselyov, the head of Russian Media Group, which was overhauled in 2014 to incubate patriotic art. In November, Mr. Kiselyov questioned Mr. Dronov’s patriotism because he had not performed in occupied Ukraine. His songs were no longer played on the company’s radio stations.In January, Mr. Dronov traveled to the occupied Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Lugansk, playing for soldiers.Despite Shaman’s overall influence, his hold over Russia’s youth, the demographic most likely to oppose the war, is not pervasive, analysts say. A year in, Shaman is the only young artist writing the soundtrack of wartime Russia, and the prospect for a youth-driven wave of musical nationalism is uncertain.It’s something the Kremlin seems to have recognized. The Ministry of Culture recently announced ‌‌plans for what it called “agitation brigades” ‌to‌ promote pro-war artists, possibly in hopes of repeating Shaman’s success story.Valerie Hopkins More

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      36 Hours in Nashville: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Stroll the strip, then kick off your shoes
      Roughly a mile south of downtown is the 12South neighborhood, which includes a walkable corridor of shops, restaurants and cafes; it’s an easy excursion to grab a quick gift, a latte or lunch. Plunder the vintage goods at Savant, at the north end of the strip, and then swing by Draper James — the actor Reese Witherspoon’s brick-and-mortar salute to all that is Southern and genteel — which sells clothes, home goods and Ms. Witherspoon’s book club picks. For lunch, grab a few of Bartaco’s light-yet-satisfying roasted-cauliflower tacos ($3.25 each). At the corridor’s south end, White’s Mercantile sells everything from books to organic dog treats to candlewick trimmers. Finally, Sevier Park, next door, is where you can kick off your shoes and lie on the grass, but be wary of cold noses: This park is dog-friendly. More