Music

The conductor Susanna Mälkki brought her orchestra to New York in something of a farewell to her tenure in Finland.Until Tuesday, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra hadn’t been to Carnegie Hall since 1968.Its chief conductor at the time was Jorma Panula, who was at the podium for that visit. Now, 55 years later, the group is led by one of his former students: Susanna Mälkki.Her tenure in Helsinki, where she has been the chief conductor since 2016, ends this season. And the classical music world is watching to see what comes next. A maestro at the height of her powers, she was until recently the principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so an obvious possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel when he leaves to lead the New York Philharmonic in three years.In Los Angeles, Mälkki’s repertoire has been varied: a lot of well-shepherded contemporary music, but also insightfully transparent interpretations of the classics. Her work in Helsinki has been similar, though you wouldn’t know it from her Carnegie program, a thoroughly Finnish evening of works by Sibelius, that country’s most treasured composer, and Kaija Saariaho, its finest living one.Sibelius — at whose namesake school Mälkki studied with Panula — was represented not just by two planned works, but also by two encores: “Valse Triste” and, after Mälkki asked the audience to indulge a bit of patriotism, “Finlandia.”That piece is too famous for its own good and is often played with ineffective sentimentality. But under Mälkki’s baton, and with this orchestra — Sibelius’s sound world etched in its bones — “Finlandia” was newly disarming, modestly dignified in its touching harmonies and iron-willed fanfares.It was a delivery reminiscent of the program’s opener, “Lemminkäinen’s Return,” the fourth legend from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite,” based on the “Kalevala,” Finland’s national epic. A brief finale to a long work, the “Return” is all climax, but Mälkki maintained a level head, unleashing a bit of fiery folk aggression here and there, but for the most part emphasizing color and letting it bloom with grandeur that was assured rather than insistent.Saariaho’s flute concerto “L’Aile du Songe,” from 2001, was a quietly personal touch of programming: Mälkki, who like Saariaho lives in Paris, is a friend and eminent interpreter of her music. And for the Carnegie performance, Mälkki was joined by another previous collaborator, the flutist Claire Chase, in the solo part. (Those two recently brought Felipe Lara’s excellent Double Concerto, which had premiered in Helsinki, to the New York Philharmonic.)The flute — human, elemental — has been one of Saariaho’s favored instruments, for which she has written some of her most dreamily poetic music. Here, it sings in brief phrases above suspended textures that aren’t melodies per se, but that build to broadly expressed gestures.In the second movement, the soloist vocalizes alongside notated playing, which Chase dispatched with her trademark theatricality. She and the Finns were satisfyingly united in their treatment of some of the work’s most exquisite details: downward glissandos that evoke a quickly passing, or perhaps dying, flare of sound; a celestial slow fade that ascends yet ebbs, in the end, to inaudibility.Part of that character, of course, comes from Mälkki’s conducting, which was at its wisest in Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The first movement’s pulsating motif rose and fell like breath, richly built from the lower voices upward and giving way to warm calls from the horns. An organic spirit permeated the reading, with momentum that was neither propulsive nor slack but simply natural, patient. When Dalia Stasevska led this piece with the New York Philharmonic earlier this year, it took on a hard-edged, assertive nationalism; here, its Finnish pride was more reverential, and awe inspired.Mälkki picked up the pace for the finale, resisting extravagant Romanticism and allowing the scale of the music to speak for itself. This was typical of a conductor who has risen to the top of her field on artistry alone, without the shameless bids for celebrity of her peers.We will see whether Mälkki’s stature, after Helsinki, translates to a new music directorship or a more self-driven freelance career. Regardless, any orchestra would be lucky to have her at its podium.Helsinki Philharmonic OrchestraPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

The musician, whose new album was released in March, discusses disguises, recording and why they find karaoke so off-putting.Karin Dreijer’s is a face of many masks. Around 20 years ago, when the Swedish musician first began releasing songs with the eerie, beloved electronic duo the Knife, Dreijer and their brother, Olof, were often photographed wearing black, face-obscuring beaks — a little bit bubonic plague doctor, a little bit “Eyes Wide Shut.” The solo project Fever Ray, begun in 2009, offered Dreijer more opportunities for striking visual imagery and character work. They once accepted an award from Sweden’s Sveriges Radio wearing an eerily realistic mask that made it look like their flesh was melting.As Fever Ray, Dreijer invents another uncanny guise on the cover of their latest album, “Radical Romantics,” which finds them embodying a kind of zombified office drone character with thin, stringy hair and eyes and mouth rimmed with a sickly yellow. That image, Dreijer said in a recent Pitchfork interview, was influenced by a seminude self-portrait of the 79-year-old Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum. “I thought of it as a Grindr pic,” they said of the Nerdrum piece. “It contains so much longing: throwing yourself out there, head over heels. I tried to do a face like his.”Dreijer and their longtime friend and collaborator Martin Falck, taking their daily lunchtime walk in the wilderness.Rebecka UhlinDreijer is, by contrast, barefaced and bundled in a nondescript, oversize black hoodie when I reach them by video call in their studio in Stockholm. Their white-blond hair is cropped artfully, and they sit in front of a white wall as blank as a primed canvas. They would be leaving for the States in two days to embark on the five-city North American leg of the “Radical Romantics” tour, but they were looking further ahead, too. “I am thinking about what I will do next,” Dreijer says. “Which is a good thing, so you don’t just drop after the tour. Touring is intense and a lot of fun — there are so many people around. I am planning what I’m going to do afterward.”Fever Ray’s music is somehow both brooding and ecstatic — a sonic kaleidoscope that explodes with infinite variations of gray. Throbbing synthesizers and driving electronic beats provide a steady backbone for Dreijer’s bracing, shape-shifting vocals and restless experiments in genres as varied as punk, ambient and industrial-tinged psych-rock.Some sketches and visual ideas illustrating the mood of the latest Fever Ray album, “Radical Romantics.”Rebecka Uhlin“Radical Romantics” finds Dreijer working with some familiar collaborators (like Olof, for the first time since the Knife released its final studio album, “Shaking the Habitual,” in 2013) and some new ones, like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who add an edge of industrial menace to two of the album’s boldest tracks. The visual language of “Radical Romantics” was, like much of Dreijer’s work, developed with longtime friend Martin Falck. “We’re always sending each other pictures and film clips and stuff on Instagram,” Dreijer said. “‘Look, we should do this next time! This looks amazing, we should try this!’ We collect everything in a folder and then try to organize it, which is almost impossible.”For all its imaginative character play, “Radical Romantics” is Dreijer’s most vulnerable album — an open hearted exploration of love and its possible failures. “I think we started to really work on a gut feeling for what we find fun,” they said. “And then we talk about what we find fun in relation to what we are really, really afraid of, what we find scary.”“Me and Martin, we are afraid of everything,” they add. “I think we are both the world’s most scared people. But then I think we have become quite brave, as well.”A banally patterned tie, one of the key accessories of the zombified office drone character that Dreijer embodies in some of the album’s visuals.Rebecka UhlinMakeup — and lots of it — is another important visual tool in Dreijer’s many transformations.Rebecka UhlinWhat time of day do you work?I have two kids, so I’ve had to work proper office hours, because that’s when you have child care. And I think also, to have a good routine, to go [to the studio] in the morning and you work during the day and then you go home and you have a social life, you can meet friends and hang out with your kids. I think that has been quite important for me. Then I also do really like to go there on holidays. Like for Christmas, or in the middle of the summer. Because that’s when you feel like you get so much time and nobody interrupts. And everybody thinks you’re away doing Christmassy stuff, but you’re actually there working.My oldest kid is turning 20 this year, so I have had that routine for a long time. But now I feel like when they are about to move out, and they also don’t need me the same way in the evenings and weekends and stuff, then yeah, I think I started to enjoy going there in evenings and nights, as well.A shocking pink jacket makes the familiar a little uncanny.Rebecka UhlinAre there set hours that you sleep?I have understood that I need to sleep, eat and work out to be able to function properly. Which is a bit annoying, because it doesn’t feel like fun stuff when the only thing you want to do is just continue working. But it’s not so helpful to skip those three things.What type of exercise do you do?It’s a good biking distance to my studio, so I try to bike there. I really do like hot yoga. Going to the gym is really boring, but I do that, especially now, when I’m on tour, I have to do that. In the winters, I ski a lot.What embarrasses you?It’s interesting what embarrasses people. I don’t like to sing to a small group of people. [Laughs.] I really find it difficult to do karaoke. It’s this idea of authenticity that I find very difficult. Maybe it’s not embarrassing, it’s more like, it’s really frightening.Planning the many component parts of the “Radical Romantics” experience.Rebecka UhlinHow is that different from performing your own material onstage?Because then it becomes a performance, and I can play around much more with the ideas of authenticity and what’s a natural voice. It’s easier, I think, to play with those ideas than it is if you can’t use props or lights or effects. If I say, “This is the authentic me, this is authenticity,” then people will believe you.There’s something uncomfortably sincere about a lot of karaoke.And you’re also supposed to sound a specific way. You’re supposed to sound like the original. That is at least what people are striving to do. And I have never been able to sing in that classically “good” way of singing. I don’t know how to do it.I was reading another interview with you that said on one of the effects machines you use to process your vocals, there’s actually a knob that says “gender” on it, that you can twist.Yes, there is a machine that has that. It’s fun. [Laughs.]Driving beats provide a sturdy backbone for Dreijer’s shape-shifting vocals and restless experiments in genres as varied as punk, ambient and industrial-tinged psych-rock.Rebecka UhlinHow do you think of music as a place to play with gender?I think I have found out that making music, for me, is to create spaces where I feel free. And playing around with gender is one aspect of it. Early on, when working with the Knife, we tried to find this space where you couldn’t exactly tell what kind of voice this is, if it’s male or female or something in between. To find that space, for me, is a very freeing thing. And it can be done in so many different ways. It also has to do with how you perform the vocals, if the vocalist sounds very close or far away or [like] whispering or screaming. All these things work together to find this space.What are you reading right now?I have it here because I got it for my birthday a couple of weeks ago from my brother, actually. [Holds the book up to the screen.] “Dear Senthuran” by Akwaeke Emezi. I think it’s amazing. It’s a way of seeing a nonbinary identity from a place that I didn’t know about. It’s more of a spiritual way of seeing gender. I’m also into reading a lot of poetry about love. I have a new favorite writer called Chen Chen, who also writes really amazing poetry.The striking album cover was inspired by the work of the Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum. “I thought of it as a Grindr pic,” Dreijer said of the Nerdrum self-portrait they tried to emulate here.Rebecka UhlinYou’ve also mentioned that bell hooks was a big inspiration on this album. When did you first encounter her work?I was so enthusiastic on the last Knife tour, 10 years ago, that I gave [hooks’s 1999 book] “All About Love” to all the band and the crew to read. It’s been with me for a long time. And I still think it’s great. It’s so strange when everybody has some kind of relationship with love, but there are so few people who have a definition of what it is they mean when they say they are in love. What does it mean to say, “I love you”? I think it’s really important to share a definition with the people you want to have close relationships with. What do I need to feel loved? And what do you need to feel loved? And I think she writes about that really well.I’ve found your music to be so referential to other texts in a way that is rare. It seems like books are an important part of your musical world. Is it difficult to incorporate that in a way that doesn’t feel too academic?When we did the last Knife album [“Shaking the Habitual”], it was pretty academic, I would say. Even though I have never studied at the university, we read a lot and we had a lot of literature lists and stuff like that. And I think after that, both me and Olof talked about how we’re not so into that kind of process anymore, that starts through the head and then into the body. I am more interested in things that go into the body directly. But I think I’ve been as inspired by film and images because I normally have a clear feeling of a song when I start. It’s more of a feeling or an emotion. And then I know the colors of it and what kind of setting it should take place in.Martin Falck’s notebook — one of six he kept during this Fever Ray project.Rebecka UhlinDo you consider yourself a visual artist? You’re a musician, but there’s such a visual component to Fever Ray.I think I’m still trying to find out what I am, or what I do. I know I do music, and I’m very involved in making the visuals. The music is sort of the hard, difficult work that I have to do. I work mostly by myself for a really long time, and then when I have the sketches and I know what the tracks are about, then I invite people to collaborate. Then when the music is finished, we get to do the fun stuff, which is the visuals. I work with Martin on those.Is it easy for you to invite new collaborators in and figure out how to work with them?I ask people who I think do interesting and fun things. You never really know how it will turn out. So I did start a couple of collaborations with people that didn’t really work out. During Covid and the pandemic, I didn’t meet anybody in person except my brother. We have built studios just next to each other.Dreijer’s shoes also blend the flashy with the banal.Rebecka UhlinIs it important for your creative process to have your brother close by?I don’t know if it’s important. It was just a practical thing that he moved back from Berlin like five years ago and we both needed studios, so we decided to build together. Because I was just renting different rooms here and there. So it’s my first studio that’s my own. With a window, so I can see the sky. I’ve only been in basements before.Tell me more about your studio space.First it was a huge sort of industrial space, and then we built this cube in the middle with two studios in it. It’s a wooden cube inside this huge space. And in the big space, I think the most important thing, because it’s so dark here most times of the year, is that we have daylight light tubes. I don’t know what they’re called in English. It’s like full daylight — to go there is a bit like having light therapy. Or just having proper daylight, which I think helps a lot. To be able to be here in the winter. So I think that is the best thing about the studio. In my little work studio room, it’s not full daylight. Then it’s more cozy.Early in the process of dreaming up the “Radical Romantics” aesthetic, the Knave was an important character for Dreijer and Falck. Rebecka UhlinWhat’s the worst space you’ve ever worked in?I’ve rehearsed and recorded in really, really [expletive] places. I think one of my first rehearsal spaces, with one of my first bands — this is like early ’90s — we were sharing a space with another band with only guys. They peed in glasses and left them in the rehearsal space, because there was no real bathroom around. That was very disgusting, but it also tells a lot about the time, how it was when I started to make music. It was super male-dominated and it was really difficult to find a space where you felt safe and free.How do you know when a song is done?That is a very difficult thing to know — but when you listen to it in many different places and leave it for some time and can come back to it and still feel like it makes sense. But then if you listen to it one year later, you probably would feel differently and want to redo a lot and change things because you are in a different place yourself. This time I worked with 10 tracks: To have them all done at the same time, that is a bit of a challenge.What is your relationship to deadlines?I set my deadlines myself. And then when I’m completely done with everything, I start to work with my management and the different labels. I’m very happy not to have anybody involved in the musical process that tells me, “Oh, you have to be ready now.” That would never work for me.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

He will take the podium in 2024, with a mandate to help draw new audiences to classical music.The German-born composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher didn’t know what to expect when he traveled to Missouri in March to lead a series of performances with the Kansas City Symphony. He had never been to the city, nor had he worked with its orchestra.But after a few days of rehearsing and performing works by Ravel, Ligeti and Scriabin, Pintscher felt a deep connection with the ensemble. “There was magic,” he said in an interview. “A willingness to really give the best.”The orchestra was impressed, too: On Tuesday, it announced that Pintscher, 52, had agreed to serve as its next music director, beginning with a five-year term in 2024. He will succeed Michael Stern, who has been the orchestra’s leader since 2005, and lead the orchestra for 10 weeks each season.Danny Beckley, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, offered Pintscher the job only a couple of days after his March visit. He described Pintscher’s relationship with the orchestra as “electric” and said he hoped Pintscher could help to get more people into the concert hall.“We are committed to making orchestral music more appealing to a far wider audience, and I think Matthias can really help make that happen,” Beckley said in a statement.Pintscher, who lives in New York City, rose to prominence as a composer, writing a range of music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, as well as solo pieces for piano and voice. His compositions are often evocative and mysterious, showcasing the ability of instruments like the clarinet and the double bass to whisper.He has also won accolades as a conductor, serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, a new music group, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra in Switzerland. (His tenure at the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which he has led for a decade, ends this season.) He is a member of the composition faculty at Juilliard.In Kansas City, he said, he felt a sense of belonging. He recalled chatting with a stranger at a supermarket; after he introduced himself, she immediately bought tickets to a concert.“It was such a warm welcome, by the city, the locals, the public, the musicians,” he said. “It was a happy arrival.” More

The country superstar, who has held No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for nine straight weeks, said the pause was recommended by his doctors.Morgan Wallen, the chart-dominating country star, is postponing six weeks of shows on his current tour, saying in a statement on Tuesday that he had injured his vocal cords and that the pause was recommended by his doctors.“I performed three shows last weekend in Florida and by the third one I felt terrible,” Wallen said in a video posted on social media. “So I went in and got scoped yesterday, and they told me that I reinjured my vocal cords and that I have vocal fold trauma. Their advice is that I go on vocal rest for six weeks, so that’s what I’m going to do.”He also announced that he would not perform as scheduled at the Academy of Country Music Awards show this Thursday, where he is up for entertainer of the year.A spokeswoman for Wallen said that 14 shows would be postponed, starting with a planned date in Hershey, Penn., on May 18, and including two shows at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. The tour is set to resume on June 22 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.Rescheduled dates will be announced.Last month, Wallen canceled a stadium show at the University of Mississippi shortly before he was to take the stage, saying that he had lost his voice. Even so, angry fans took to social media to complain.Wallen has held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart for the last nine weeks with his 36-track new album, “One Thing at a Time,” which has now been streamed about 2.3 billion times in the United States alone. His last LP, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” was No. 1 for 10 weeks two years ago, even amid an industry rebuke — including his temporary removal from country radio playlists — after he was caught on video using a racist slur.In his statement on Tuesday, Wallen said: “They told me that if I do this the right way, I’ll get back to 100 percent, and they also said that if I don’t listen and I keep singing, then I’ll permanently damage my voice.”“So for the longevity of my career,” he added, “this is just a choice I had to make.” More

Michelle Wu, a lifelong pianist, has played to prepare for mayoral debates. Last weekend, she joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra onstage.BOSTON — There are things that a big-city mayor just has to do. Cut a ribbon here. Plant a tree there. Throw out the first pitch. Play Mozart with the local symphony orchestra.Hang on a second.Plenty of politicians might say that they support the arts, but Michelle Wu, a Democrat who became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected mayor of Boston, in November 2021, is one of the few who will court embarrassment to prove it.At the free “Concert for the City” on Sunday afternoon, put on by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its sister ensemble, the Boston Pops, Wu took the stage before a nearly full house at Symphony Hall here to perform as the soloist in the dreamy slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. She may not quite be ready for a world tour, but with the Symphony and its music director, Andris Nelsons, in support, she captured more of the composer’s characteristic elegance than an amateur might. And she barely missed a note.“I think Michelle did it so wonderfully,” Nelsons said during a news conference after the performance.While political figures, including Edward M. Kennedy, the former Massachusetts senator, and Thomas M. Menino, the former Boston mayor, have from time to time stood on the podium while the Pops has played such staples as “Sleigh Ride” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the Symphony’s archivist said that Wu, 38, was almost certainly the first officeholder in the orchestra’s more than 140-year history to take the far greater risk of stepping into the spotlight as a soloist.Some players in the ensemble — which had rehearsed with her on Saturday, before giving a ferociously intense reading that night of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 to end its subscription season — stayed onstage to watch, even though they had no music to play.Wu played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with the orchestra as part of Boston’s “Concert for the City.”Robert Torres“I have been playing piano since long, long before I ever thought about politics, and my parents are probably more than skeptical still about the politics thing,” Wu said at the news conference, adding with a laugh, “This is probably the proudest that they’ve ever been of me, and it took getting elected to mayor to be able to do this.”For the Boston Symphony, the performance was a chance to showcase its quickly strengthening commitment to community engagement. For Wu, it was a platform to promote her policies as the city’s arts institutions steadily right themselves after the pandemic, including her insistence that every child in a Boston public school should have access to an instrument. But it was also an occasion to reflect on the deeper connections that she — as a pianist who trained from age 4 and, as The Boston Globe reported, keeps an upright in her City Hall office — sees between music and politics broadly.Classical artists often talk in platitudes about music being a universal language that can transcend borders, but for Wu, who grew up in Chicago as the first child of immigrants from Taiwan and who also learned the violin, the commonplaces were a reality.“I remember very vaguely when I was young, we would go drive really far so my mom would sing in a community chorus concert,” Wu said in an interview. “My mom has a gorgeous voice, so much of my function learning piano growing up was to be her accompanist.”Music offered Wu’s parents continuity amid change, as they learned English and adapted to a new culture. She remembered seeing that her mother had transliterated the words in her score for Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” into Chinese, so that she could pronounce them correctly.“My parents were in a very modest situation,” Wu said. “We were initially receiving benefits and as my dad’s career moved up, kind of moved more firmly into the middle class. But piano lessons were, I’m sure, at that time just a luxury splurge for them. But it was important because my parents were both musical, and again, it was their way to feel like the barriers maybe weren’t so high in this country.”As a high schooler, Wu played the solo part in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and she became a subscriber to the Boston Symphony while she was studying at Harvard University. Although she practiced hard for Sunday’s performance, she said, she had made a tradition of playing for herself the night before mayoral debates.“My go-to to really calm myself is Liszt’s ‘Un Sospiro,’” Wu said. “With the flowing of it, you can really lose yourself quickly. And then if it was that kind of day, it’d be a little Rachmaninoff.”Wu’s Boston Symphony appearance came about after she and her children attended a family and youth concert last year, and she played a few bars of Liszt backstage for that program’s conductor, Thomas Wilkins. The orchestra approached her about Sunday’s concert of short, mostly Boston-related works about a month and a half ago, offering her three Mozart pieces to choose from. She took a few weeks to think about it, she admitted.“Just as I try to be honest about the challenges that can come with being a working parent,” Wu said at the news conference, “in the hopes that that means we change our systems faster and encourage other people to believe that it’s possible to live their lives and give their fullest in every way, I hope that people will see that we can come to our positions — if you might be so fortunate to have a position of leadership or whatever platform you have — to bring your whole self to that.”Wu talks about the role that the arts can play in society with a conviction that many musical institutions are still working to acquire, describing them as, among other things, “a vehicle to talk about and address our biggest challenges in new and interesting ways,” such as climate change and race. These are beliefs that, she said, she might not hold with the same intensity if she had not played the piano.“I would imagine that even as someone who would not necessarily play but be a passionate audience member, there’s something about the feeling and the connection that you can’t put words to when all of it comes together,” Wu said in the interview. “The power of how people felt connected in Symphony Hall today, hanging on every note, delighted at each individual piece and the surprises and twists of every composition — that’s a model for how we want our community to be, day in and day out, in this city.” More

The company’s 2023-24 lineup includes works by Michael R. Jackson, Anna K. Jacobs, David Adjmi and Will Butler of Arcade Fire.Playwrights Horizons will present three large-scale productions and three solo works as part of its eclectic lineup for its 2023-24 season, with a range of genres and price points, the company announced on Tuesday.“These last few years are still asking us to pivot and be creative in ways we didn’t know we’d be asked to be,” said Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, who added that the company has had to scale back on producing new and commissioned works because of budgetary constraints.“Our job is to put as much new writing as possible in front of people,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to do more with less.”“Teeth,” based on the horror comedy film about an evangelical teenage girl with toothed genitalia — which the critic Stephen Holden called a “twisted sex-education film,” “quasi-feminist fable” and an “outrageous stunt” — will make its stage premiere in February.The musical production, which has been in the works since before the pandemic, and which Greenfield called “an examination of ancient misogyny,” is written by Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”) and Anna K. Jacobs, and will be choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and directed by Sarah Benson, who will soon be leaving her leadership role at Soho Rep.“It’s bigger than any room that can try to contain it,” Greenfield said. “It’s incredibly fun and incredibly irreverent and brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant.”The season will kick off in October with the world premiere of David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” with original music by the Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, about a band whose members keep clashing while creating a new album. Set over two recording sessions, with fragments of the in-progress songs teased throughout, the show is “a valentine and a cautionary tale to the act of creation itself,” Greenfield said.The 2023-24 season will also feature three solo works written and performed by the playwrights. Milo Cramer’s “School Pictures,” which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in November, is a musical journal of song-poems that present a portrait of the New York City education system. Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which recently ran at the Abrons Art Center, is a clown cabaret about a young woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu will perform his stand-up act, “Amusements,” a mix of storytelling, music and multimedia, which will also make an appearance at Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer.Presented in repertory, the solo performances will begin previews in November; tickets will be offered at a discounted rate.Rounding out the season is Abe Koogler’s “Staff Meal,” a comedic play, directed by Morgan Green, about a wait staff working to keep service running smoothly at a mysterious New York City restaurant while the world falls apart. Previews begin next April.Playwrights Horizons will also present a slate of programming with the Movement Theater Company, a troupe dedicated to developing and producing new work by artists of color. The residency begins in May 2024.“I think people are craving variety,” Greenfield said. “This new season speaks to that cultural shift.” More

Listen to recent highlights from Foo Fighters, Avalon Emerson, Q and more.On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins,Leo Correa/Associated PressDear listeners,Avid Amplifier readers know that each Friday, the Times pop critics put together a selection of our favorite new songs in a feature called the Playlist, and now I am delivering a digest version right to your inbox. No more excuses that you don’t have time to keep up with new music anymore; I’ve got you covered.This mix is probably a combination of some names you know — Jessie Ware, Foo Fighters — and, ideally, a few that you don’t. It gets off to an upbeat start, drifts into some luminous ambience with a wordless, eight-minute Four Tet song, and then ends up somewhere right between those two extremes, with some soothing, synth-driven melodies from Avalon Emerson and Christine and the Queens.I field-tested this playlist while doing chores in my apartment and found it to run the exact length of time it took me to fold a load of wash and put on a fresh duvet cover. Its final moments were an adequate soundtrack for that blissful moment of relief and deep-seated pride when I turned the duvet cover inside out and realized that I had, indeed, put it on correctly. I am unstoppable.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Q: “SOW”I must tip my hat (that I am not wearing) to Jon Pareles for introducing me to this moody number from the profoundly difficult-to-Google R&B artist Q. The son of the Jamaican dance hall producer Stephen (Lenky) Marsden (who is responsible for the Diwali Riddim that was ubiquitous in the early-to-mid aughts), Q Marsden makes music that, in Pareles’s words, echoes “the introspective-verging-on-depressive sides of Phil Collins, Prince and Michael Jackson.” Similarly, on “SOW,” I hear the faintest tinge of Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (certified banger) updated for the age of the Weeknd. (Listen on YouTube)2. Jessie Ware: “Freak Me Now”It takes a special musician to suddenly kick things into a higher gear about a decade into her recording career, but on her 2020 neo-disco breakthrough “What’s Your Pleasure?” the British pop singer Jessie Ware proved to be one of those rare gems. That release was going to be a tough one to follow, let alone top — and then came “That! Feels Good!,” a record of such effervescent joy that even its punctuation makes me grin. This new album continues her streak of lovingly detailed, sumptuously atmospheric dance music, but it’s not just “What’s Your Pleasure? II.” Ware’s fifth album has a vampy sonic ’tude all its own (cut through with a hint of new-wave sass) as you can hear on the electric and immaculately titled dance floor anthem “Freak Me Now.” (Listen on YouTube)3. Foo Fighters: “Rescued”A good Foo Fighters song makes me want to give Dave Grohl a lozenge. Or maybe I shouldn’t, because there’s something distinctly powerful (… Grohlian?) about the way he can sound like he’s shredding his vocal cords beyond repair while still staying effortlessly in tune. I do not know how he does it, but it sounds very cool. On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins, and if the first single “Rescued” is any indication, some of these songs are going to be about processing that tragedy, and at least one of them is going to make me cry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Four Tet: “Three Drums”Kieran Hebden, the British electronic musician who records as Four Tet, has been a known quantity in the relatively niche world of underground dance music for the past two decades, but he’s recently been getting some mainstream attention thanks to his appearances D.J.ing with the somewhat strange bedfellows Fred again.. and Skrillex. (The Three Caballeros of EDM? The Haim of EDM? I’m still workshopping a nickname.) The meditative “Three Drums” is proof that he’s not going pop just yet, though: The song contrasts live-sounding percussion with glowing gradients of synth sounds that unfurl like a sunrise. It’s bliss. (Listen on YouTube)5. Avalon Emerson: “Entombed in Ice”Avalon Emerson is known primarily as a techno D.J., but you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the serene and glacial “Entombed in Ice,” from her new album “& the Charm.” In some sense, she’s reinventing herself as a dream-pop singer-songwriter, but even her D.J. mixes had a kind of smeary intimacy that carries over into this latest release. I like the way she layers her murmured vocals, giving off the impression that the listener is eavesdropping on a conversation she’s having with herself. (Listen on YouTube)6. Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake: “True Love”“True Love,” from the French singer-songwriter Christine and the Queens, is a skeletally arranged low-burner, but it suddenly bursts forth with melodramatic pathos as Chris shifts into a sublime hook. “Angel of light, take me higher,” he sings in a trembling voice. “You’re making me forget my mother.” Not to leave you with a cliffhanger, but that’s a decently foreshadowing hint about the theme of Friday’s playlist. Till then! (Listen on YouTube)I always feel like somebody’s watching me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“6 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Q, “SOW”Track 2: Jessie Ware, “Freak Me Now”Track 3: Foo Fighters, “Rescued”Track 4: Four Tet, “Three Drums”Track 5: Avalon Emerson, “Entombed in Ice”Track 6: Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, “True Love” More

Yunchan Lim’s victory at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year made him a sensation. He says the attention makes him uneasy.After six hours of sleep and a breakfast of milk and curry rice, Yunchan Lim, the South Korean pianist, was in a rehearsal studio at Lincoln Center on Tuesday morning working through a treacherous passage of Rachmaninoff.“A little bit faster,” Lim, in a black sweatshirt and sneakers, said casually to the conductor, James Gaffigan, as they prepared for Lim’s New York Philharmonic debut this week. Gaffigan laughed.“Usually pianists want the opposite!” the conductor said.Lim — shy, soft-spoken and bookish — stunned the music world last year when, at 18, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. His victory made him an immediate sensation; a video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the finals has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube. (He will play that piece with the Philharmonic this week, under Gaffigan’s baton.)Still a college sophomore, Lim has inspired a devout following in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has become a symbol of pride in South Korea, where he has been described as classical music’s answer to K-pop. Like a pop star, his face has been printed on T-shirts.Lim at the Van Cliburn competition, playing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.Richard Rodriguez/The Cliburn, via Associated Press“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. It’s really quite something.”But Lim is uneasy with the attention. He does not believe he has any musical talent, he says, and would be content to spend his life alone in the mountains playing piano all day. (He limits his use of social media, he says, because he believes it is corrosive to creativity and because he wants to live as much as possible as his favorite composers did.)“A famous performer and an earnest performer — a true artist — are two different things,” he said in an interview this week at the Steinway factory in Queens, where he was shopping for a piano.Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy. He was drawn to the piano, he said, because he had grown up hearing Chopin and Liszt on recordings that his mother had purchased when she was pregnant. He was also taken by the majesty of the instrument.Lim was taken by the majesty of the instrument when he was young. “The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“Technically, he’s phenomenal,” Alsop said of Lim, “and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal.”Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.At 13, he enrolled in a prep school at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. His teacher, the pianist Minsoo Sohn, was impressed by the sensitivity of his interpretations.“At first he was a little bit cautious, but I immediately noticed that he was a huge talent,” he said. “He’s very humble, a student of the score and he isn’t over expressive.”Sohn initially steered his student away from competitions, worried about the pressure. But when the pandemic delayed the Cliburn competition, which is held every four years, making it possible for Lim to qualify, Sohn suggested he give it a try, telling him to treat it as a performance, not a competition.“I thought the world needed to listen to what Yunchan could play in his teenage years,” Sohn said.When Lim arrived in Fort Worth for the competition, which took place over 17 days, he said he felt the spirit of Van Cliburn, the eminent pianist for whom the contest is named.Lim sometimes practiced as much as 20 hours a day, he said, sending recordings to Sohn, who was in South Korea, for guidance. He existed on a diet of Korean noodles and stews prepared by his mother, who had accompanied him, as well as midnight snacks of toasted English muffins with butter and strawberry jam made by his host family.“I knew it was like Russian roulette,” he said of the competition. “It could turn out well, or you could end up shooting yourself in the head. It was a lot of stress.”As he prepared to walk onstage to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, he said he thought of Carl Sagan’s idea of Earth as just a “pale blue dot” in the universe.“When the stage doors open and the audience applauds, when I nervously sit down at the piano and press the first key, that moment is like the Big Bang for me,” he said. “I’m nervous, but the image of the pale blue dot gives me courage. I just think of the moment as something occurring in that small little speck.”His Rachmaninoff won ovations, but he was dissatisfied with the performance, believing that he achieved only about 30 percent of what he had hoped to accomplish. Since the competition, he said he had been able to watch just the first three minutes of the YouTube video before growing dispirited.When he returned to South Korea after the Cliburn, he said he was unchanged. “I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” he said at a news conference with his teacher.“I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” Lim said at a news conference with his teacher.Ayesha Malik for The New York TimesLim, who is still enrolled at Korean National University of Arts, plans to transfer this fall to the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where Sohn now teaches.As a student, his international career has taken off, with a recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January and an appearance with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in February. This summer, he will reunite with Alsop to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next year, he will make his Carnegie Hall debut with an all-Chopin program.The New York Philharmonic booked him soon after Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, saw YouTube videos of his performances at the Cliburn — a Beethoven concerto as well as the Rachmaninoff.“I was blown away by how fluent he was in both styles,” Borda said. “He was just brilliant.”Ahead of his debut in New York, Lim has been fine-tuning his interpretation of the Rachmaninoff. In preparing the concerto’s somber opening notes, he said, he imagines the “angel of death” or cloaked figures singing a Gregorian chant, following his teacher’s advice.This performance is especially meaningful, he said. On his commute to and from middle school, he often played a 1978 recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the Philharmonic. He said he had listened to the recording at least 1,000 times.Lim said he felt nervous to follow in the footsteps of Horowitz, one of his idols, and that he would always consider himself a student, no matter how successful his career might be. He said artists should not be judged by the number of YouTube views they received, but by the authenticity of their work.“It’s a bit hard to define myself as an artist,” he said. “I’m like the universe before the Big Bang. I’m still in the learning phase.”“I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he added, “just like the universe.”Jin Yu Young contributed research from Seoul. More