Music

He was known for his laid-back style and for his influence on, among others, Miles Davis, who once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Mass. He was 92.The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter, Sumayah Jamal, said.In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Mr. Jamal made his mark with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music. That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Mr. Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Mr. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.The critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”A young Mr. Jamal at the piano, circa 1942. He was only 14 when he joined the musicians’ union.Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art, via Getty ImagesIn his early years, Mr. Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but also to classical music of the non-American variety. “We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”Mr. Jamal’s laid-back, accessible style, with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and above all its judicious use of silence, led to more than his share of dismissive reviews in the jazz press early in his career; Martin Williams’s canonical history “The Jazz Tradition” described his music as “chic and shallow.”But it soon became an integral part of the jazz landscape. Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett are among the prominent jazz pianists who looked to Mr. Jamal as an exemplar.Probably the best-known musician to cite Mr. Jamal as an influence was not a pianist but a trumpeter and bandleader: Miles Davis, who became close friends with Mr. Jamal, recorded his compositions and arrangements and would bring his sidemen to see Mr. Jamal perform. He once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. Fritz, as he was called, began playing piano at age 3 and began studying with Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, a few years later. By the time he joined the musicians’ union at age 14, the celebrated jazz piano virtuoso Art Tatum had hailed him as “a coming great,” and he began touring with George Hudson’s big band after graduating from high school.In 1950 he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and assembled a piano-guitar-bass trio known as the Three Strings. During an extended stay at the Manhattan nightclub the Embers in 1951, the trio came to the attention of the noted record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who signed them to the Okeh label.Mr. Jamal performing in San Francisco in 1976. He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1955 Mr. Jamal recorded his first full-length album, “Ahmad Jamal Plays,” with the guitarist Ray Crawford and the bassist Israel Crosby, for the small Parrot label. Tellingly, when the album was acquired and rereleased the next year by Argo, a subsidiary of the seminal blues label Chess, it was retitled “Chamber Music of the New Jazz.”Mr. Jamal received his first major national exposure with the Argo album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” recorded at a Chicago nightclub in 1958 with Mr. Crosby and the drummer Vernel Fournier. It spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart, an all but unheard-of stretch for a jazz album.The success of “At the Pershing” stemmed in part from Mr. Jamal’s ambling yet propulsive interpretation of the standard “Poinciana,” still his best-known recording. But he received some criticism for not including any original compositions on the album, which he later said spurred him to focus on writing his own music.Mr. Jamal’s output was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical: He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and more than 60 in his career. He also founded a handful of record labels, a management company and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant called the Alhambra, although that venture lasted less than a year. In keeping with his religious beliefs, the Alhambra did not serve alcohol, which presumably hastened its demise.The Alhambra’s financial difficulties marked the beginning of a dark period of Mr. Jamal’s life, in which he walked away from performing for almost three years. The club closed in December 1961; three months later, he filed for divorce from Maryam Jamal, formerly named Virginia Wilkins, whom he had married when he was 17. Five years of court action followed, during which Mr. Jamal was arrested and charged with nonpayment of child support for their daughter. (He was later cleared.) He was hospitalized in 1963 after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Not until 1964 did he begin touring and recording again.He married first as a teenager, and that marriage ended in divorce. He married Sharifah Frazier, the mother of Sumayah, in the early 1960s, and they divorced in 1982. He married Laura Hess-Hay, his manager, the same year, and they divorced in 1984, though she continued to represent him until his death. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.Live recordings often captured Mr. Jamal at his nimblest, and many jazz connoisseurs rank such albums as “Freeflight” (1971), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and “Chicago Revisited: Live at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase” (1993) among his best. In 2011, Mosaic Records released a nine-CD boxed set consisting of the 12 albums he recorded for Argo between 1956 and 1962. His album “Blue Moon,” a well-received collection of originals and standards, was released in 2012 and nominated for a Grammy Award. His album “Marseille” was released in 2017 and “Ballades” in 2019.Last year Mr. Jamal released two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “(1965-66),” consisting of previously unreleased live recordings made in Seattle. A third set, “(1966-68),” is planned. Mr. Jamal in 2011 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Rob Verhorst/RedfernsThe reverence with which Mr. Jamal was held stretched well beyond the jazz world. Clint Eastwood used two tracks from “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack of his film of “The Bridges of Madison County.” But the more extensive tributes have come from the world of hip-hop. Tracks like De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” and Nas’s “The World Is Yours,” along with dozens of other rap songs, have sampled Mr. Jamal’s piano riffs.As infectious as those riffs were, it was ballads that held the strongest appeal to Mr. Jamal. Like many other interpreters of the standard repertoire, he made a point of learning the lyrics to the songs he played. He spoke approvingly to The Times in 2001 about a conversation he once had with a great jazz saxophonist who was also known for his way with a ballad.“I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad,” he said. “All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, ‘Why did you stop, Ben?’ He said, ‘I forgot the lyrics.’”Alex Traub More

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project threw itself a sparsely attended 25th-anniversary party at Carnegie Hall. Those who didn’t go risk FOMO.Reviews of classical music concerts generally serve two purposes: Those who went can compare their observations with those of critics, and those who didn’t can see whether they missed out on anything special.Only a small group could possibly benefit from this review in that first sense, because the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Carnegie Hall debut on Saturday night attracted less than half a full house. To the rest: You missed out on some of the finest orchestral playing heard in the city this year.Staffed by freelancers, this orchestra — known as BMOP, and led by Gil Rose — has consistently earned rave reviews, and honors including Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year award. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the group threw itself a party at Carnegie, with a program of music that showed off these players’ chops across a varied landscape of cutting-edge music.Each piece was having its New York premiere: a concerto for orchestra by Lisa Bielawa (mellifluous and tart, by twists and turns); a half-hour work from Lei Liang (pensive in textural moments, dramatic at climaxes); and “Play,” the award-winner that put Andrew Norman on the map (unbelievably manic yet still emotionally involving).

Andrew Norman: Play by Boston Modern Orchestra ProjectHas your FOMO set in yet? If so, don’t feel bad: BMOP is rare among orchestras in that the ensemble records much of what it performs. Everything at Carnegie can be heard on different albums devoted to each composer. Still, there’s something thrilling about hearing these dedicated players in a space like Carnegie.That was clear from the opening seconds of the Bielawa. Titled “In medias res,” it opens with close-harmony dissonance in the horns, a reflection of Bielawa’s taste for both modernism as well as conventional sonic beauty, an edgy opening salvo from an instrument famous for mellow coloring.If the piece occasionally loses rhythmic dynamism, there is frequently a sumptuous element of orchestration on offer. And in the final moments of the second movement, you might hear a slight influence of Philip Glass’s furiously churning symphonic music. This might be a conscious tip of the cap — Bielawa has long been a vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble — or it might reflect her protean engagement with orchestral traditions writ large.

Lisa Bielawa: In medias res by Boston Modern Orchestra ProjectEither way, this nearly half-hour work achieved a sustained richness that is too seldom heard in concerts by the so-called major American orchestras. When those organizations commission new music, it’s usually shorter. But with BMOP, contemporaneity is the whole point, so composers can take the time they need.Wide-canvas potential worked to Liang’s advantage as well. In his piece, “A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams” — inspired by the landscape paintings of Huang Binhong — the composer often alternates between wisps of percussion and full-blast density. But the climaxes, satisfying and riotous as they may be, are not the final destination; even after the climactic-seeming tutti riffs in “The Shedding of Landscapes” comes a restive percussive section. A piece like this needs real space on a program, as it had on Saturday.After intermission, BMOP took on “Play,” its most famous contribution to the orchestral literature. In liner notes for the album version, Norman wrote, “I wish you all could see ‘Play’ performed live.” That’s because the piece has a meta level: It’s not just about the beautifully active sounds that he conceives, but also about how sections of the ensemble interact.That is especially true of the second movement, which can seem somewhat airy on the recorded version. Live, you get a sense of how percussionists in the orchestra are able to switch various other sections “on” or “off,” thanks to dramatic woodblock claps. There’s an aleatoric conception at work here, too: The choices of the percussionists can augment what parts are played by the rest of the orchestra. On Saturday, music for prepared-sounding piano took on a prominent role.In the outer sections, though, “Play” seemed galvanic in a way that was familiar from BMOP’s celebrated recording. Rose launched into the vicious opening movement at a tempo a touch more frenetic than on the album, but it was still marvelously controlled.The title of Saturday’s concert, “Play It Again,” was in part a reference to the Norman. But it was also a reminder that, unlike traditional orchestras — which often commission a new piece, play it once and then stuff the score in an archive — BMOP actually revisits the work it solicits and champions.In 2016, Rose told The New York Times, “I don’t like to put a lot of money into marketing.” Instead, the funds go into the playing. The artistic fruits of that approach were gratifyingly confirmed during the poorly attended show on Saturday. But what if BMOP, instead of renting Carnegie for one night, were made Perspective artist for a full season there? Then audiences in New York might enjoy a season of sparkling contemporary music from artists who really know how to play it.Boston Modern Orchestra ProjectPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; bmop.org. More

Taking a cue from Mozart, András Schiff appeared with the New York Philharmonic as both piano soloist and conductor.There was a time, during darker days of the pandemic, when orchestral concerts departed from their usual formats — worn-down cookie cutters of a curtain-raiser, concerto and symphony — and turned into something more unpredictable, and open-minded.Out of an abundance of caution, ensembles avoided repertoire like the immense works of Mahler and instead turned to smaller-scale music, sometimes rarities and often from the Classical and Baroque eras. String quartets shared billing with Lieder and chamber symphonies. Concerts began to look more like variety shows.But as masks requirements loosened and vaccine records stopped doubling as passports, classical music started to look more like its old self, and not for the best. Once again, any concert with more than three works stands out as a treat — such as the New York Philharmonic’s performance with the pianist András Schiff acting as both soloist and conductor, at David Geffen Hall on Friday.Like a concert from the era of pandemic livestreams, it consisted of two Classical piano concertos and two orchestral works, with a changing ensemble size that, at its largest, was still small. Schiff’s appearance was part of his residency with the orchestra, a series that began with a solo recital on Tuesday and continues this week with a comparatively traditional program in which he will play Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, and a chamber music afternoon at the 92nd Street Y next Sunday.Schiff approached Friday’s program more as he would one of his recitals, which these days are long but often rewarding, essayistic assemblages announced from the stage rather than advertised in advance. He contrasted concertos in D major and minor, and made explicit the connections between two Mozart works — arguments that were more persuasive from the keyboard than from his perch as conductor.Leading from the piano is a throwback to Mozart’s time, and can be fascinating to witness. When Mitsuko Uchida does it, for example, she treats the orchestra as an extension of her instrument — a mode of expression somewhat perversely, but beautifully, in service of her interpretation. Onstage at Geffen Hall, Schiff had more the appearance of a fan beating along to a recording, gesturing with the music instead of truly guiding it.Because of that, the purely orchestral sections of the program were the weakest. Schiff, as in his touch at a keyboard, relished the extremes of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony — the opening truly pianissimo, the forzando notes truly explosive. But without much else in the way of an overarching vision, the piece grew indistinct by the second movement, which, in taking its time, also lost its sense of shape and direction, an andante con moto without its moto. After intermission, the Overture from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” music that punishes any performance that falls short of precise, was more of the same: hellfire-frightening chords at the start, then an insistent emphasis on articulation, patient to the point of slackness, over broader phrasing.It was nevertheless a gift to hear this repertoire — beloved, if overprogrammed — in the renovated Geffen Hall for the first time. So far, as the Philharmonic adjusts to its new home and the auditorium undergoes further tuning, smaller-scale works have benefited most from the more generous acoustics. The last time I came across Schubert’s “Unfinished” there, under Alan Gilbert’s baton in 2015, the low strings were virtually inaudible in the mood-setting, crucial opening bars; on Friday they rumbled, immediate and under the skin.And the hall’s transparent sound rewarded the lean wit of Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in D, at the top of the program. Here, Schiff was more in his element: stately, with a kind of dry humor in the cadenzas, his touch often gentle but, when sharp, amplified by the bright sound of his Bösendorfer piano.He followed the “Don Giovanni” Overture, attacca, with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 — treating them as one, and emphasizing their shared dark-to-light journeys from D minor to major. Schiff’s entrance in the first movement may have been overly strong, turbulent where moody would do, but his solos in the Romanze were exquisitely arialike.Schiff’s most characterful work, though, was in the Rondo finale, in which he rendered the cadenza as a grander conclusion, interjecting the “Don Giovanni” chords, then layering the overture and the concerto in clever counterpoint. Playful and unexpected, it was reflective of an artist who, even if not thoroughly successful on one night, possesses an undeniably brilliant musical mind.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats on Sunday and Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

The songs of Ishay Ribo, who was raised in a settlement on the West Bank, are a staple of Israeli radio. He is part of a wave of singers from religious backgrounds who are also gaining a wider audience.The singer and his songs were highly religious. His concert venue, on a kibbutz developed by secular leftists, was definitely not. His audience of many hundreds? It was somewhere in between: some secular, some devout, an unusual blending of two sections of a divided Israeli society that rarely otherwise mix.Ishay Ribo, 34, is among a crop of young Israeli pop stars from religious backgrounds, some from Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, whose music is attracting more diverse listeners, and featuring prominently in the soundscape of contemporary Israeli life.This has surprised Mr. Ribo himself.“I never imagined I’d play to this kind of crowd,” he said, backstage after the show earlier this year at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, a town in northern Israel originally founded as a collective farm. A decade ago, he said, “This kind of crowd just didn’t really exist.”In addition to Mr. Ribo, other singers from a religious background — like Nathan Goshen, Hanan Ben-Ari, Akiva Turgeman and Narkis Reuven-Nagar — have also in recent years gained a wider audience. And their popularity reflects a changing Israeli society.Fans of Mr. Ribo at the Jerusalem Theater, where he performed in January. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThe religious right has expanded its influence on politics and society, escalating a clash between secular and sacred visions of the country that underlies the country’s ongoing judicial standoff. At the same time, religion has taken on a more prominent, and less contentious, role in the mainstream music scene.In less than two decades, religious singers have moved from the cultural fringe to widespread acclaim, “not only among their people, but in all Israel,” said Yoav Kutner, a leading Israeli music critic and radio presenter.“If you don’t listen to the words,” Mr. Kutner added, “they sound like Israeli pop.”Mr. Ribo is perhaps the clearest example of this shift. Forgoing the erotic and the profane, his wholesome songs are often prayers to God — but sung to pop and rock music played by his band of guitarists. “Cause of causes,” he addresses God in one of his biggest hits. “Only you should be thanked for all the days and nights.”In 2021, that track, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most played song on Israeli radio stations, religious and secular alike.“It’s part of my duty,” Mr. Ribo said in a recent interview. “To be a bridge between these two worlds.”Mr. Ribo’s journey toward that bridging role began in the early 2000s, on the bus to his religious school.His family had immigrated from France a few years before. They led an ultra-Orthodox and ascetic life on a settlement in the occupied West Bank, just outside Jerusalem.The family did not have a television, and Mr. Ribo attended an ultraconservative Jewish seminary. He listened to music on religious radio stations — often liturgical poems sung in synagogues. He typically heard secular music only on the bus to school, playing from the driver’s radio.“I had this musical ignorance,” Mr. Ribo said.At age 11 or so, he began recording simple songs on a portable cassette player. Then as now, his lyrics were infused with piety, Mr. Ribo said. But the tunes were inspired by the mainstream singer-songwriters he’d heard on the school bus.Some four years later, Mr. Ribo bought a guitar and formed a band with another seminary student. He began to practice and dress as a Modern Orthodox Jew, forgoing the dark coats and wide-brimmed hats of the ultra-Orthodox for jeans and sweaters.But his awareness of contemporary music and its customs was still patchy. At his band’s first gig, Mr. Ribo played with his back to the audience, unaware of the need to engage with the crowd.Unlike many Israelis from ultra-Orthodox Jewish backgrounds, he paused his religious studies at age 22 to serve for two years as a conscript in the army. After finishing service in 2013, he tried to build a hybrid musical career — playing religious music to both secular and devout audiences.Mr. Ribo and his father studying the Torah in Jerusalem.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesHe imagined his melodies might sound like Coldplay, the popular British rock band, but his lyrics, he added, “would be about God and faith.”The challenge was that there were few templates then for such a crossover career.Only a few religious artists, like the folk singer Shlomo Carlebach, had built a secular following. The most successful religious artists were often those, like Etti Ankri and Ehud Banai, who had started out secular, became more devout, and then took their original audiences along with them.Mr. Ribo’s problem, initially, was that the music industry “didn’t understand what I had to offer,” he said.When he sent his music to mainstream record labels, they all turned him down.Mr. Ribo forged ahead, self-releasing the first of five albums in 2014. He hired a secular manager, Or Davidson, who marketed him as if he was a secular client — booking him to play at mainstream venues and securing him airtime on nonreligious radio stations. Gradually, his secular fan base expanded.Mr. Ribo’s 2021 hit, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most played song on Israeli radio stations, religious and secular alike.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesIt was sometimes a fraught balancing act.Religious Jews criticized him for playing at secular concert halls. Secular Jews opposed his performances at religious venues where men and women sat separately. And when he played to both audiences at secular venues, the staff could not provide kosher food for his religious fans. Even his parents were too religiously observant to attend some of the venues.But the two-pronged approach ultimately worked. Four of his five albums were classified as gold or above — selling more than 15,000 copies in the small Israeli market. Secular pop legends, including Shlomo Artzi, began to perform duets with him, and he began to build an audience among diaspora Jews. Later this year, he is scheduled to headline Madison Square Garden, Mr. Davidson said.To an extent, Mr. Ribo’s appeal is rooted simply in the catchiness of his songs, his clean-cut demeanor and sincere performances.“Even though I’m secular, I came to watch him because he’s lovely,” said Adiva Liberman, 71, a retired teacher attending his concert at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.“Not everyone is paying attention to the lyrics,” she added. “They’re just attracted to the melody.”The scene after Mr. Ribo’s concert at the Jerusalem Theater. His music attracts a diverse crowd of secular and religious Israelis.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesMr. Ribo’s rise comes amid not only a political shift rightward in Israel, but demographic changes as well. Religious Israelis, who have more children than secular Israelis, are the fastest-growing part of the population, allowing them to exert greater cultural influence.Daniel Zamir, an Israeli jazz star who turned religious as an adult, said Mr. Ribo’s broad appeal is part of “a bigger process of Israeli society moving toward tradition.”Simultaneously, Mr. Ribo’s rise embodies a converse but complementary trend: greater willingness among some religious musicians to cater to and mix with mainstream audiences, and greater demand among religious audiences for music with a more contemporary sound.It’s “a dual process,” Mr. Zamir said. Mr. Ribo is emblematic of “this new generation that saw that you could be religious and also make great music,” Mr. Zamir added.For some secular consumers, the rise of “pop emuni” — “faith pop” in Hebrew — has been jarring. “I am not interested in hearing prayers on my radio,” wrote Gal Uchovsky, a television presenter, in a 2019 article about the proliferation of Mr. Ribo’s music. “I don’t want them to explain to me, even in songs that brighten my journey, how fun God is.”Mr. Ribo’s latest song, “I Belong to the People,” also caused discomfort among liberal Israelis. Released in early April, it is an attempt to unite Jews at a time of deep political division in Israel. But critics said it unwittingly sounded condescending to people from other faiths, implying they were idolatrous.Mr. Ribo has also caused discomfort within the religious world. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews, particularly their religious leaders, feel he has delved too far into secular society.Early in his career, Mr. Ribo personally felt so conflicted about this that he sought his rabbi’s approval for his work. To avoid alienating his religious base, there are still some lines he refuses to cross.“I’d love to write a classic love song — but I won’t,” Mr. Ribo said. “It’s not my job or duty.”Still, some feel he has already compromised too much. In a popular sketch performed by an ultra-Orthodox comedy duo, an ultra-Orthodox man is asked if he knows any secular singers.The man pauses, then replies: “Ishay Ribo!”“I’d love to write a classic love song — but I won’t,” Mr. Ribo said. “It’s not my job or duty.”Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesGabby Sobelman More

A listening tour of the musician’s wildly eclectic seven-decade career.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesDear listeners,For today’s playlist, I have a treat for you: a deep dive into the world of a musician I find endlessly fascinating — John Cale.Cale is best known as a founder of the Velvet Underground, where he played viola and very occasionally sang, but that association hardly does him justice. The Welsh musician was in the V.U. for just three years before creative differences with his perpetual frenemy Lou Reed came to a head; his wildly eclectic solo career has now lasted nearly six decades and is more than worth your time.Even as a longtime admirer of Cale’s music, immersing myself in his catalog earlier this year I discovered entire albums — even entire eras — I was unfamiliar with. A high percentage of them were totally awesome. I found myself saying things to friends like “You have to hear ‘Honi Soit,’ this wild post-punk album he made in 1981 …”I went to Los Angeles to interview Cale in January, and he shared so many fascinating insights and star-studded anecdotes — when he said “Andy,” he meant Warhol; when he said “David,” it was Bowie. I couldn’t fit them all in my story, so I’ve peppered some of them in here, along with notes from some of his illustrious admirers, including Patti Smith, Todd Haynes and James Murphy.Whether you’re a Cale devotee revisiting some classics or someone who still gets him confused with John Cage (as several people confessed to me after the piece was published), I hope this playlist makes you feel like you’re having tea with Graham Greene.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. John Cale: “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend” (1974)Cale’s incendiary fourth solo album, “Fear,” was the one that made Patti Smith recruit him to produce “Horses” — not only did she love its anarchic sound, but she found the stark, close-up shot of Cale’s face on the cover striking because it reminded her of her hero Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” (It was all in the cheekbones, she says.) I’m with Patti: This whole album ranks among Cale’s best, and the opening track is both an early example of punk rock’s spirit and an inviting portal into Cale’s musical universe. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Velvet Underground: “Venus in Furs” (1966)While Lou Reed brought a pop sensibility to the VU’s sound (he got his start as an in-house songwriter for the low-budget novelty label Pickwick Records), Cale brought avant-garde adventurousness, particularly a fascination with the hypnotic qualities of drone, which he honed in the Dream Syndicate with Tony Conrad and La Monte Young before he joined the Velvet Underground in 1965. “Venus in Furs,” from the Velvet Underground’s epochal debut album with Nico, would be an entirely different song without the low, molten drone of Cale’s electric viola. (Listen on YouTube)3. John Cale: “Paris 1919” (1973)“Paris 1919” was the first solo Cale song, and album, that I heard. He’s such a natural fit for the stately chamber-pop sensibility of this album — the perfect-postured piano-playing; the indelible Welsh accent — that I mistakenly assumed all his records sounded like this. A few years later, when I dug deeper into his catalog, I discovered its contained serenity makes the album something of an outlier, but it’s still probably his most popular release, and one of his best. (Listen on YouTube)4. John Cale: “Big White Cloud” (1970)Cale was still finding his distinct voice on his first solo album, “Vintage Violence,” but it certainly has its moments of sublimity — the best of which is the drifting, dreamy “Big White Cloud.” (Listen on YouTube)5. John Cale and Terry Riley: “Ides of March” (1971)Here’s something from the more avant-classical side of Cale: a long, gloriously cacophonous composition driven by piano and not one but two drummers, from “Church of Anthrax,” a collaborative and mostly improvised album he made with the experimental musician Terry Riley. “Ides of March” basically sounds like a bunch of stuff falling out of a closet for 11 minutes straight, in the most compelling way possible. I’m a huge fan of this album and was delighted to find in my reporting that Todd Haynes is, too — it’s one of the more obscure in Cale’s discography, but we enthusiasts are quite passionate about it. (Listen on YouTube)6. John Cale: “Honi Soit (La Première Leçon de Français)” (1981)As I was researching Cale, this album, “Honi Soit” from 1981, was my most thrilling discovery. (Hey, the guy has released 17 solo albums; even a fan like me can’t always keep up!) Cale’s approach was so consistently ahead of its time that he was easily able to slot into various emerging genres as the decades went on. “Fear,” along with his production for Smith and the Stooges, heralded him as a godfather of punk, while “Honi Soit” proves he understood post-punk and new wave just as intuitively. The refrain in this pummeling track is “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” an old Anglo-Norman phrase that is still the motto of the British chivalric Order of the Gartner; it’s roughly translated as “shame on anyone who thinks evil of it.” Leave it to Cale to make something so esoteric sound immediately catchy. (Listen on YouTube)7. Lou Reed and John Cale: “Work” (1990)Reed and Cale met up again for the first time in years at Warhol’s funeral in 1987; their friend’s unexpected death hit them both hard and they wanted to find a way to pay tribute. Their offering was the 1989 album “Songs for Drella,” which they workshopped at various locations around New York City, like St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy (a John Cale superfan) told me that the album’s starkly minimalist production had an impact on him. “Up until then I didn’t know you could leave a song like that and be confident enough to say it was done,” he marveled. I, too, love the clean outlines of Cale’s antic piano and Reed’s insouciant guitar, all the better to hear them clash. (Listen on YouTube)8. John Cale: “Hallelujah (Fragments)” (1991)Before it was the woefully over-covered, culturally ubiquitous standard that it is today, “Hallelujah” was a semi-obscure Leonard Cohen track that hadn’t made much of an impact when it was first released in 1984. It was, however, the song that Cale chose to cover on a 1991 Cohen tribute album — which turned out to be the version that initially caught Jeff Buckley’s ear. The rest, for better or worse, is history. Cale and I discussed the song quite a bit, and we both bemoaned the way “Hallelujah” has transformed into a solemn, self-serious dirge. Cale’s expertly inhabited version certainly gets at the wry, Cohenian humor that most other interpreters miss, especially in his delivery of the line, “There was a time when you let me know what’s really going on below/But now you never show it to me, do ya?” Said Cale, correctly: “It’s cheeky, isn’t it?” (Listen on YouTube)9. Brian Eno and John Cale: “In the Backroom” (1990)Though their time in the studio together was contentious, Cale and fellow art-rocker Brian Eno created something compelling and unexpectedly accessible in “Wrong Way Up,” a collaborative album released in 1990. The album is best known for the songs that Eno sings — especially the bright, poppy “Spinning Away” — but I like this more laid-back, poetic number that Cale sings in a cool murmur. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Velvet Underground: “Lady Godiva’s Operation” (1968)And here’s one more Velvets classic for good measure, from the final VU album Cale appeared on, the caterwauling “White Light/White Heat.” With all due respect to Reed, I love the few moments when Cale sang lead with the Velvets. There’s something so deliciously creepy about his vocals here, but at the same time they’re always imbued with a signature elegance. (Listen on YouTube)I’m the bishop and I’ve come to claim you with my iron drum,LindsayBonus tracksI was sad to hear last week about the passing of former Luscious Jackson keyboardist Vivian Trimble, at the way-too-young age of 59. Luscious Jackson was a refreshing presence during that unfortunately brief moment in the mid-to-late ’90s when a whole bunch of interesting female musicians actually got played on rock radio, and I always dug the group’s singles, like the slinky “Under Your Skin” and the groovy “Ladyfingers.” In Trimble’s honor, I’ll recommend this 1997 performance of the band’s big hit “Naked Eye” on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” featuring Trimble on keys, gorgeous backing vocals and effortlessly cool dance moves.The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“10 Reasons to Rediscover John Cale” track listTrack 1: John Cale, “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend”Track 2: The Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs”Track 3: John Cale, “Paris 1919”Track 4: John Cale, “Big White Cloud”Track 5: John Cale and Terry Riley, “Ides of March”Track 6: John Cale, “Honi Soit (La Première Leçon de Français)”Track 7: Lou Reed and John Cale, “Work”Track 8: John Cale, “Hallelujah (Fragments)”Track 9: Brian Eno and John Cale, “In the Backroom”Track 10: The Velvet Underground, “Lady Godiva’s Operation” More

The singer-songwriter reveals herself in a memoir that captures her adventures with charming rogues, puzzled music executives and her own demons.NASHVILLE — “Bless your heart!”Lucinda Williams delivered the Southern benediction in her distinctive drawl. She has a memoir coming out soon, and Ms. Williams, the celebrated singer-songwriter who has been compared to Raymond Carver for the acuity of her work, was nonetheless not too sure about this particular literary endeavor. So when a visitor complimented the book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” she beamed. Like many a writer, she said she had a hard time letting go. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and turn it in when I’m done,’” she said. “Much to my dismay it doesn’t work that way.”She wanted more time, and she missed the editorial eye and encouragement of her father, the poet and literary scholar Miller Williams, who died in 2015. Like his daughter, he was known for the gritty realism of his work, and they often performed together. For years he had looked over her lyrics — he was the king of grammar, she said — until she sent him “Essence,” the title song from her 2001 album, and he told her, as she recalled: “‘Honey, this is as close to pure poetry as you’ve come.’ And I said, ‘Does this mean I’ve graduated?’”It has been 25 years since Ms. Williams’s breakthrough, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” That collection of anthems to love, loss and yearning made her an overnight success, as she said wryly, at age 45. Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge (she takes it slow these days) and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.About that voice. Emmylou Harris once said Ms. Williams could sing the chrome off a tailpipe. Bonnie Raitt, in a phone interview, called it “unique, truly American and drenched in raw grit and soul and vulnerability.”Steve Earle, Ms. Williams’s occasional collaborator and old friend, described it this way over Zoom: “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom? There’s a moment when the scent just permeates everything and there’s a viscosity to it and it’s substantial and that’s what her voice has always reminded me of. There’s an automatic atmosphere. Chet Baker was like that. Merle Haggard. The mood happens as soon as they open their mouths.”Ms. Williams, 70, and her husband, Tom Overby, who is also her manager and collaborator, live in a white clapboard bungalow with a peaked roof, gingerbread trim and a neat square of lawn. They moved to East Nashville from Los Angeles in February 2020, after which came a series of blows: the tornadoes that tore through the city in early March, flattening neighborhoods and shearing off part of their roof; the coronavirus pandemic, which shut things down a week later; the Covid death of her dear friend John Prine; and the stroke, which bludgeoned her in November.Ms. Williams onstage at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe house was sparsely furnished with a pair of velvety sofas; metal shelves and storage containers spilling over with books, CDs and vinyl albums; and lots of audio gear. On the kitchen island, a bright yellow vase was filled with yellow button flowers. The gray walls were bare, save for a white board that proclaimed, “Lu’s Schedule. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”“I have a bit of brain fog from the stroke,” Ms. Williams said, nodding at the board, “dates and days and such, but I think I always had that.”Mr. Overby, a loquacious man with bushy gray hair, rolled his eyes in assent. He’s the memory in the marriage, she added.In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” Ms. Williams writes of her decades playing for tips and spaghetti dinners and the perfidy of the record companies that didn’t know how to characterize her roots-inspired, renegade rocking style and her novelistic writing. “We don’t know what to do with this,” she said she was told over and over again. “It’s too country for rock and too rock for country.” It was somehow fitting that a British independent label, Rough Trade Records, signed her for her 1988 album, “Lucinda Williams.”She writes of the Hollywood director hired to make a video for “Right in Time,” the languid ballad about a woman’s desire from the “Car Wheels” album. As she recounts, he arrived for dinner at a restaurant thoroughly drunk before propositioning her, sloppily, while her boyfriend was in the bathroom. When she found his idea for the video corny, she sent him packing. She goes on to tell the story of the six-year odyssey to get the album made — the setbacks caused by vacillating record company executives and her dogged commitment to her own high standards. For her troubles, Ms. Williams was labeled a perfectionist, which, for a woman in a male-dominated industry, was not a compliment.“She just stood her ground and emerged a gleaming, burnished jewel,” Ms. Raitt said. “It doesn’t make you popular when you stand your ground, and that’s why she’s excellent.” A strong woman in the music industry is seen as “a control freak and a bitch,” she added, while a strong man is hailed as “an auteur and a genius.”Ms. Williams performing with Steve Earle at Town Hall in New York in 2007.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesMs. Williams turned to Mr. Earle to help her get the album finished. “He’d say, ‘It’s just a record, Lu,’” she said. “He was trying to help me get perspective. I was losing my perspective. He’d be like: ‘The vocal is great. You’re singing your Louisiana ass off. When are you going to trust somebody?’ I had hardly made any records before, compared to other artists, so the whole process of being in the studio was terrifying. It was my own neuroses. It’s not like I was brave or anything.”She has often been bedeviled by jitters. In 1994, when she won a Grammy thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit version of her song “Passionate Kisses,” she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. Rosanne Cash had sent her to a Nashville boutique for an outfit, but she bailed at the last minute.“The truth is I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes in the memoir. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life. It’s a riddle I believe many artists have been trying to solve for centuries. It takes enormous fortitude to create the work in the first place, but then once it’s time to put it out in the world, the confidence required to go public is unrelated to the audacity that created the work.”“It was my fear of the unknown,” Ms. Williams said. “Of being around people with money and nice clothes and nice teeth or whatever.”She managed to make it to the Grammy ceremony in 1999, when “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was honored as the year’s best folk album. But when her name was called, she found herself walking away from the stage. Mr. Earle, who was up for the same award, yelled out to her, as she told it: “‘Lulu! You’re going the wrong way!’ I was horrified. God. Thanks, Steve!”“Lucinda is one of the great geniuses of popular music, so how could she have struggled?” Ann Powers, a music critic for NPR, said. “A lot of it is personal and a lot of it is structural. The dynamic of how to corral a bunch of guys was complicated, it still is, but even more so then when women were relatively sparse in rock ’n’ roll circles.”It can be hard for bandleaders like Ms. Williams to be the only woman in the room. Ms. Raitt called it the problem of “women’s voices,” which “hits the mom button” for many men.Ms. Powers added, “In her music, she’s often questioning herself, expressing her vulnerability in profound ways.”“So it makes sense that she would have struggled to claim her authority,” she continued. “So often with artists the very thing we love about them is what poses a challenge for them in their life and work.”In any case, in addition to earning a Grammy, “Car Wheels” hit the Billboard charts, a first for Ms. Williams, and went gold. Critics reviewed it in ecstatic terms, and the record producer Joe Boyd called it “the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ of the 1990s,” referring to Bob Dylan’s canonical record.At home in Nashville.Kristine Potter for The New York TimesAs Ms. Williams’s fame grew, so did the dedication of her fans. She writes of the woman who began masturbating at a show in New Orleans and kept at it even as she was removed by security. (When Ms. Williams and her band heard the story after their set, they were fascinated, as she recalled: “Was she wearing pants? How did it work?”) There was the couple that sent her lingerie. The woman who delivered a crate of Vidalia onions because she’d heard Ms. Williams liked them. One fan, a drug counselor who credited his sobriety to Ms. Williams, had one of her songs tattooed in its entirety on his back. Then there are those who have sent her letters saying how much they appreciate “Sweet Old World,” her mournful lament for someone who died by suicide.Ms. Williams was born in Lake Charles, La., and grew up in New Orleans, Mexico and Chile, with stopovers in towns in Mississippi, Utah and Georgia. Her father, the son of a Methodist clergyman and early civil rights activist, sold encyclopedias and refrigerators before his mentor, Flannery O’Connor, recommended him for a poetry position at Loyola University in New Orleans. Hence the constant moving.“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Williams said when he first heard “Car Wheels,” which paints a picture of tense domesticity and a peripatetic family life. Her mother, Lucille, a thwarted pianist, was also the child of a minister — of the fire and brimstone variety — and she suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. Lucinda and her siblings were mostly raised by their father and stepmother, his former student and the family’s babysitter. (Awkward at first, as Ms. Williams notes in the book.)Theirs was a Bohemian academic household, imprinted by the politics of the era. Mr. Williams was the host of a bibulous literary salon that included Charles Bukowski, the hard-living poet. As a teenager, Lucinda handed out “Boycott grapes” leaflets in front of a grocery store and played protest songs at demonstrations. When she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her New Orleans high school, her father said, “Don’t worry honey, we’ll get you an A.C.L.U. lawyer.” And when she was finally thrown out, after joining a civil rights march, he was unfazed.“To hell with it,” he told her. “You weren’t learning anything there anyway.” She spent a semester at the University of Arkansas, where her father was then teaching, but she dropped out to play music for tips at a club in New Orleans.Ms. Williams took the title for her memoir from the chorus of “Metal Firecracker,” a song from the “Car Wheels” album, one of her many compositions about “the poets on motorcycles” who are her preferred type.These men fill the pages of her memoir. There was the gentle crew member who turned violent after he moved in with her and made away with her third Grammy — for best female rock vocal performance in 2002 — and a good bit of her collection of folk art. And the erudite charmer who was her first long-term boyfriend and who died of cirrhosis of the liver in his 40s. The haunting “Lake Charles” is an elegy for him.Ms. Williams and Tom Overby, her husband and collaborator, at the Americana Music Association Honors and Awards Show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.Terry Wyatt/Getty ImagesThe man in “Metal Firecracker” was a charismatic bass player who doggedly pursued her while they were touring for her 1992 album, “Sweet Old World.” (“Metal firecracker” was his nickname for the tour bus.) Against the advice of bandmates, Ms. Williams succumbed, which meant breaking up with her boyfriend at the time, who reacted by busting up the furniture in their hotel room. The new suitor had a few irons in the fire, as she learned later, and when the tour was over, he vanished. He told her, in a wince-inducing phone call, “I love you but this relationship doesn’t fit my agenda right now.” At any rate, as she writes, she got a song out of it. Three, as it happens.Ms. Williams and Mr. Overby, a former music executive who is not a rogue but a bit of a poet, married onstage in Minneapolis in 2009. (When they were dating, she writes, his male colleagues warned him off: “Be careful. Our reps on her label tell us she’s literally insane.” He ignored them.) Her father wrote their vows and performed the ceremony. When they both declared, “Loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know,” the audience roared with laughter.There is some dispute about who proposed to whom. Ms. Williams claimed it was Mr. Overby. In her recollection, he turned to her during a tour and asked if she wanted to go shopping for diamonds.Mr. Overby shook his head. “We were on the bus and out of nowhere you go, ‘So when are you taking me shopping for diamonds?’”Ms. Williams: “I did?”Mr. Overby: “You did!”Ms. Williams: “But you liked it.”Ms. Williams suffered a stroke in 2020, but her voice is intact. Her next album comes out in June.Kristine PotterMr. Overby organized a trip to a jewelry store owned by friends in Omaha, lining it up with a performance, but Ms. Williams was so nervous she couldn’t get off the bus until just before the store closed. When she saw the array of rings, she panicked. Mission aborted. They tried again the following year, and again she was flummoxed. Years later, they bought a pair of rings in Los Angeles — and Ms. Williams promptly lost them, her husband said.“Misplaced them,” she said, correcting him.The couple may not be the best jewelry collaborators, but lately they have worked nicely in the studio on Ms. Williams’s new album, “Stories From a Rock ’n’ Roll Heart,” out in June. As they did in their homage to John Prine, which they wrote after he died of Covid. Ms. Williams performed it last year at a tribute to him. It tells the story of a night long ago when Ms. Williams and Mr. Prine thought they might write a song together. They spent many jolly hours careering from bar to studio but never quite got down to the task.John and me were going to get togetherAnd write a song one timeGot about as far as the midtown barAnd ordered up a bottle of wineWhat could go wrong, working on a song?Then we got to talking, not looking at the timeTelling stories about folks we knowHad another bottle of wineWe were having funWhat could go wrong? More

René Hurtado was able to snag front-row seats to the second night of Taylor Swift’s tour — and it was there that she married Max Bochman.Ask René Maria Avalos and Maxwell P Bochman why they chose to get married on March 18, and their answer is simple: “Taylor chose for us.”In November 2022, when tickets (rather infamously) went on sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the bride, a self-described “die-hard Swiftie” who goes by René Hurtado, got lucky, snagging four front row seats (for about $1,000 each) for the second show on March 18 in Glendale, Ariz. — about 20 miles from Tempe, Ariz., where the couple lives. Moments later, the Ticketmaster site crashed. (A Senate hearing and lawsuits followed.)Tickets in-hand, the couple thought they might elope during the day and then attend the concert as a kind of reception. A friend upped the ante: “She said, ‘Why don’t you just get married at the show?’” said Ms. Hurtado, 30. “I thought it was crazy at first, but then I thought, why not?”The couple first met in the summer of 2014. Ms. Hurtado was selling Ghirardelli chocolate chip cookies in the stands at the Stockton Ports baseball stadium (now known as Banner Island Ballpark) in Stockton, Calif., while earning her bachelor’s degree in geology at the University of the Pacific. Mr. Bochman, who goes by Max, was working in stadium operations, his first job after graduating from the University of Massachusetts Amherst earlier that year.“I remember when I first saw her working there — I talked to one of my co-workers and I was like, ‘I need to meet her,’” Mr. Bochman, 32, said.They hit it off over drinks with co-workers, and two days later, had their first official date at an Italian restaurant. “We knew immediately that we were very important to each other,” she said. Within three weeks, he was meeting her mother. Four months later, she flew to Taunton, Mass., to spend Christmas with his family.[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]Rene HurtadoBoth love sports and rap music, and share a similar sense of humor. They also agreed that Northern California didn’t feel right to them, so in 2018, they moved together to Arizona. On the drive down, Mr. Bochman received a job offer as an account manager at Barton Associates, a medical staffing and recruiting company based in Massachusetts, where he still works today.On Sept. 6, 2021, after seven years together, Mr. Bochman proposed at sunset to Ms. Hurtado, who is a workplace operations manager at Flare, a client-attorney software start-up based in San Diego, on South Mountain in Phoenix.On March 17, the opening night of the Eras Tour and the eve of their wedding, Ms. Hurtado wrote down all the songs Ms. Swift played in preparation for the next night. “Right after ‘All Too Well,’ she goes to costume change,” Ms. Hurtado said. “So we knew that was the best moment.”When the next evening arrived, the couple was joined by two friends, Alicia Witmer and her fiancé, Josh Wineriter. Ms. Witmer, who was ordained for the occasion by the American Marriage Ministries, served as officiant and maid of honor.The groom wore a black tuxedo, and the bride wore a midi-length white satin dress and a mid-length veil. They both topped their outfits with a crucial accessory: an Eras Tour V.I.P. pass on a lanyard, which was included in the steep ticket price. (The V.I.P. package includes early entrance and separate merchandise stands.)When Ms. Swift disappeared from view mid-show for the costume change, as well as a set change from the “Red” era to the “Folklore” era. Ms. Witmer started reading the vows from her phone, and the couple exchanged rings and a kiss. The whole ceremony took about three minutes.“At first, none of the fans around us really knew what was going on, but after our first kiss, everyone burst into cheers,” Ms. Hurtado said. “They really did create that moment for us by their support.”Ms. Swift didn’t seem to know what had happened, but a couple of songs later, someone from the stage team came up and handed them one of the singer’s guitar picks. The next day, Ms. Swift liked an audience member’s TikTok video of the wedding. A “Good Morning America” appearance followed, and the bride’s own TikTok post has gone viral.The couple is planning a larger wedding for 2024, one you don’t need an impossible-to-get ticket to attend, with a soundtrack full of their favorite Taylor Swift tunes.Mr. Bochman said he has never considered himself a Swiftie, even though “it’s the music that is always playing in my house.” Is he a fan now? “Yes, I think I have to be after she sang at my wedding.” More

With radical adaptations of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” Heartbeat Opera shows why it’s so vital to New York’s music scene.Heartbeat Opera, a small, nimble company that has received its share of plaudits over the years, is on the cusp of a milestone birthday: its 10th. But there was a time recently when it didn’t know whether it could go on, its artistic director, Jacob Ashworth, said.Speaking from the stage after opening night of Heartbeat’s two-part spring festival on Tuesday, Ashworth said that the departure of the company’s founding artistic directors during the pandemic put its future in doubt.On the evidence of the new, radical reconceptualizations of Puccini’s “Tosca” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” — Heartbeat’s first mainstage shows since 2019, which opened this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center — the company hasn’t skipped a beat.Taken together, the operas demonstrate the strengths that make Heartbeat so vital to New York’s opera scene. “Lady M,” an utterly original recreation of Verdi’s opera that places Lady Macbeth’s doubts and moral quandaries at its center, is an astonishing display of the company’s musical imagination, theatrical instincts and intellectual firepower. “Tosca,” more ambitious but less successful, shows how Heartbeat, agile and daring, can quickly align with an issue as urgent as the women’s rights movement in Iran, where uprisings in the fall captured international attention.A scene from “Lady M,” with Algozzini and Kenneth Stavert as Macbeth.Russ Rowland“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. The production’s director, Emma Jaster; its music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg; and its original adapters, Ashworth and Ethan Heard, have reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. Macduff, the chorus, Macbeth’s big Act IV aria — all scrapped.In typical stagings, Lady Macbeth comes across as an unsubtle, unrepentant harridan whose abrupt crisis of conscience in the opera’s final act stretches credulity. The soprano role offers a string of marvelous set pieces — a hell-raising letter scene, a chaotic drinking song, a spellbinding sleepwalking scene — but they rarely form a coherent arc.Heartbeat starts with Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as the essential truth of her character and then molds the narrative to fit it. The show begins with Lady Macbeth in bed, sobbing uncontrollably, full of remorse for all the blood she has helped to shed. Her crying is so relentless that Macbeth, irritated and unmoved, gets up to go sleep on the couch. Then, the action flashes back to the score’s beginning, in which Macbeth — often treated as a weak-willed hero buffeted by supernatural forces and a monstrous wife — appears as a cool, calculating, sociopathic yuppie handing out his business card to members of the audience. The witches prophecy that he will climb the corporate ladder.In Heartbeat’s telling, Lady Macbeth, no longer the scapegoat for her husband’s foul behavior, is the one who is led astray by an avaricious spouse. The Macbeths’ desire for public glory finds an outlet in the hollow vanities of social media, represented throughout the show by a ring light, its bright cast a reminder of manipulated reality rather than truth.As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it. Algozzini simplified the cabaletta in the letter scene and skipped the high D flat in the sleepwalking scene, but her performance was still filled with gripping details. Kenneth Stavert, as Macbeth, showed a bright, open baritone sound that had depths of strength and propulsion.Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). Samuel George’s trombone playing was jauntily demonic and, in its brief imitations of a French horn, somehow noble. Paul Wonjin Cho’s wild, soused clarinet solo in the drinking song injected instability into a predictable aria form. At one point, the percussionist Mika Godbole bowed a vibraphone to make it sound like a glass harmonica. They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.Anush Avetisyan and Chad Kranak in “Tosca,” set in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms.Russ RowlandThe orchestrations for “Tosca” never quite rose to that level. Schlosberg started with an unassailable idea to feature three cellos and a double bass — a nod, probably, to the famous cello quartet in Act III — but despite the handsome string playing, the instrumentation was too bare to deliver the score’s romance.“Tosca” had one of those Heartbeat concepts that lends itself to a zeitgeist-y epithet, along the lines of its Black Lives Matter “Fidelio” in 2018 and a #MeToo “La Susanna” in 2019. But the depth and ingenuity of the company’s engagement consistently erases any suspicion of topical opportunism.Staged by the Iranian American director Shadi G. and adapted by her in collaboration with Ashworth, “Tosca” had a show-within-a-show structure. They set Puccini’s opera — a melodrama roiled by sex, murder and the abuse of power — in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms. Even the ushers and musicians wore head scarves. We see a cast of singers staging a traditional production of “Tosca,” set in Rome, under the watchful eye of security forces and morality police, who stalk the edges of the stage and take note of the performers’ violations of the country’s moral code.Shadi’s framing introduced a fresh sense of danger. At one point, the police drag the actor portraying Cavaradossi (the tenor Chad Kranak) offstage and beat him. He desperately lunges back onto the stage only to be clawed back into the wings. It was harrowing to watch.Still, the staging could feel forced and, at times, risible, as security forces popped up, Whac-a-Mole style, in unexpected places. The singers — including Anush Avetisyan (a Tosca with a dark-hued voice), Gustavo Feulien (an elegantly underplayed Scarpia) and Joseph Lodato (a vocal standout as Angelotti) — brought a sense of scale and subtlety to their assignments that suited Baruch’s black box theater.In a way, “Lady M” expresses a more compelling sense of displacement. In its final minutes, Lady Macbeth and the witches sang the refugee chorus. As a choice it felt unusual, then somehow inevitable. Here was a woman mourning a homeland that wasn’t gone but still unavailable to her, because she had lost her way — proof, if any were needed, that Heartbeat certainly hasn’t. More