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      For This Experimental Festival, Bring Your Swimsuit and Dancing Shoes

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      The Borealis experimental music festival in Norway has become a space for lively exploration in a famously self-serious field.BERGEN, Norway — Little could be predicted about a premiere by the young experimental Norwegian-Tamil composer Mira Thiruchelvam. But it was held at a fjord-facing heated pool, so the presenter had a suggestion: Bring a swimsuit.It was par for the course at Borealis, the experimental festival here that has achieved renown as a launchpad for eclectic projects by musicians from Norway and beyond. If in recent decades, the Nordic countries — facilitated by enviable government funding for the arts — have proved a hotbed of musical activity, punching above their weight in the classical world, Borealis has become the region’s warmhearted fringe festival, showcasing a blossoming experimental classical scene.A sound installation in the traditional Sami construction, Borealis’s coziest concert hall.Elina Waage Mikalsen, Borealis’s artist in residence, had a sound installation in the hut.Led by Peter Meanwell (artistic director) and Rachel Louis (the managing director), Borealis, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in a five-day festival that ended Saturday, has created a rare space for lively exploration in a notoriously self-serious field. It is the festival that’s “nothing to be afraid of,” as the local paper Bergens Tidende called it in a headline during the week, right down to its “eksperimentell”-themed tube socks.Part of what gives Borealis its accessible feel is its use of Bergen’s tightly grouped cultural centers, separated by cobblestone alleys, short and often wet — a given in Europe’s rainiest city. On opening night, the United Sardine Factory, a repurposed cannery, hosted short commissions by composers across the festival’s history to honor its anniversary. Listeners could then meander over to a 13th-century royal banquet hall, whose medieval splendor was the backdrop for the Indonesian ensemble Gamelan Salukat, performing works by the experimental composer Dewa Alit.The singer Juliet Fraser in “Plans for Future Operas.”Borealis found its coziest space in a small wooden structure on the mountain of Floyen, built in the style of the Sami, the Indigenous people of the Sapmi region (encompassing parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Accessible via a short funicular trip and winding hike, the structure was home to a sound installation by the Borealis artist-in-residence, the Norwegian-Sami Elina Waage Mikalsen — the work’s thrumming bass seemingly keeping pace with the churning flames in the building’s wood-burning stove. Given the Norwegian government’s recent acknowledgment of continuing human rights violations on Sami lands, Mikalsen’s exploration of Sami experimentalism — the subject of her talk later in the week, featuring performances by the Sami musicians Viktor Bomstad and Katarina Barruk — felt especially potent.This year’s festival also saw a number of works investigating the nature of instruments, probing their materials and extending their boundaries. The quietly intense Norwegian violin and contrabass duo Vilde&Inga, collaborating with the composer Jo David Meyer Lysne, presented “NiTi,” a dialogue between the duo and Lysne’s metal and wood kinetic sculptures that moved silently back and forth throughout the performance — a poetic distillation of the action of playing a string instrument.a performance of “Glia,” by the American composer Maryanne AmacherAt first, the musicians produced subtle flickering textures using their own instruments, then gradually integrated the fixtures beside them, including a violin harnessed to a contraption that tickled its strings. Much like Vilde&Inga’s forest-inspired collaboration with the composer Lo Kristenson a few days later, though, the work felt inconclusive, less a finished product than a fantastical impulse that the collaborators would do well to keep pursuing.More successful in this vein was “I N T E R V A L L,” created and performed by the Norwegian percussion trio Pinquins with the artist Kjersti Alm Eriksen. Around a hollow wooden cube, with instruments and industrial and household appliances hung on ropes from its ceiling, the four performers began a sort of haywire scavenger hunt, hurling objects through the frame, blowing petulantly into plastic tubes attached to the cube, even grabbing long poles to bang on the theater itself, for an inexhaustible probe of the setting’s sound-making potential.A drawing by Oyvind Torvund’s for “Plans for Future Operas.”A young DJ at a family workshop at Borealis.A similar playfulness pervaded the Norwegian composer Oyvind Torvund’s imaginative “Plans for Future Operas,” performed by the soprano Juliet Fraser and the pianist Mark Knoop. Part of a continuing series in which ensembles perform the sounds of hypothetical performance situations, “Plans” is accompanied by a slide show of Torvund’s scribbled doodles. As various visions flashed on the screen — a “car horn” opera, for which Fraser issued honks; a “telepathic opera,” during which she kept silent, appearing to communicate songs by mind alone as Knoop played — the duo conveyed, with gusto and evident amusement, Torvund’s freewheeling musical language.Notable throughout the festival was its care for participants of all ages and backgrounds. A performance of the Torvund presented outside the concert hall was geared toward audience members with accessibility needs. In workshops, children created miniature versions of the “I N T E R V A L L” cube using carrots, beads and wire, and recorded shrieks to be played back on tape loops. On one night, four enthusiastic participants in Borealis’s Young Composer program, whose applicants needn’t be young or trained as composers, presented heartfelt premieres.After-hours dancing.After-hours audiences found delightfully earsplitting sets by the White Mountain Apache violinist Laura Ortman and the electronics and vocal duo Ziur and Elvin Brandhi; as the evening wore on, a group of young people began an impromptu residency on the dance floor. The next morning, bathers at — and in — the heated pool witnessed Thiruchelvam’s rollicking commission “External Factor” performed with the dancer Thanusha Chandrasselan — part of a series inspired by the Borealis office’s Sunday tradition of fjord swimming. Listeners bobbed to Thiruchelvam’s thumping electronics, interspersed with her improvisations on Carnatic flute and electric guitar, and cheered for Chandrasselan’s jerky choreography, her boots managing impressive friction against the pool’s wet ledge.One of the festival’s oldest works was among its most forward thinking: the pioneering American experimental composer Maryanne Amacher’s “GLIA” (2005), whose title refers to the nervous system cells that support communication across synapses, performed by the composer Bill Dietz, a former Amacher collaborator, and Ensemble Contrechamps. As Dietz explained in a preconcert discussion, Amacher would not likely have approved of the piece’s posthumous performance, viewing her works not as fixed sets of sounds, but rather as part and parcel with the circumstances in which they were originally produced. Yet ‌I could not help but be grateful to be wandering around the illuminated pyramid of players in the black box theater, letting the voluminous layers of sound course through my ears.Tourists and Borealis audience members enjoy the view above Borgen; nearby this perch, reached by funicular, is the Sami construction.Closing night began promisingly with the Norwegian sound artist Maia Urstad’s enigmatic “IONOS” — an atmospheric dialogue among three radio amateurs that resulted, at one point, in contact with another user somewhere out there. Much to its credit, Borealis is a place where artists can take risks, even if things will occasionally fall short of the mark — as in the final piece, the British composer (and former Borealis director) Alwynne Pritchard’s “Counting Backward,” for the Bergen chamber ensemble BIT20, conducted by Jack Sheen. “Counting Backward” was a bloated collage of predictable ambient ensemble writing and hokey prerecorded observations on time and nature, echoed by volunteers planted throughout the audience. As BIT20 played, four performers in the center of the theater tied a knot from thick ropes so they could repeatedly hoist a tree stump from the floor, an act that underscored the degree to which the work’s own threads were disconnected.The mind strayed toward what would have been a more satisfying conclusion to the week: the Pinquins show two nights before in the same space. At the climax of that work, the performers yanked open the wooden cube’s canopy, spilling a supply of sunflower seeds to the ground. The drizzle of seeds continued, and continued — a hypnotic, seemingly unending invocation of what a festival like Borealis can make possible. More

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      Virginia Zeani, Versatile and Durable Soprano, Dies at 97

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      A noted Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” she had an equally noted second act as a singing teacher when her performing career ended.Virginia Zeani, a Romanian soprano with a brilliant, powerful voice and striking looks who overcame childhood poverty and the perils of war to become a fixture on the opera stage, died on Monday in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 97.Her son and only immediate survivor, Alessandro Rossi-Lemeni, said she died in a nursing home “after an extended cardiac respiratory illness.”Leading tenors relished performing alongside Ms. Zeani. “A woman blessed with beauty both physical and vocal, she was in addition a very gifted actress,” Plácido Domingo once wrote. The conductor Richard Bonynge ranked her among the top four sopranos of the 20th century. And according to Ms. Zeani, Maria Callas’s husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, confided to her that she was “one of the very few sopranos that my wife is frightened of.”Yet Ms. Zeani (pronounced zay-AH-nee) failed to gain the mass following and adulation of Callas and other contemporary divas, like Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé, during her 34 years of opera appearances, and she was almost forgotten in retirement despite an illustrious second career as a voice teacher.Her insistence on remaining close to her family in Rome kept her from venturing more often beyond Europe, limiting her career in the United States. She once even turned down a contract from the Metropolitan Opera.Ms. Zeani conceded she had done little to make recordings that would have brought her to a wider audience. “The rise of the publicist and the work that record companies do in selling their artists is how stars are made today,” she said in “Virginia Zeani: My Memories of an Operatic Golden Age” (2004), written with Roger Beaumont and Witi Ihimaera. “In my time very few singers apart from Callas, Sutherland and Caballé had such support behind them,” she said. Only in recent years have recordings of her performances become widely available.Ms. Zeani displayed memorabilia, including a portrait of herself, at her home in West Palm Beach, Fla.Madeline Gray/The Palm Beach Post, via Zuma PressMs. Zeani was known for her versatility. While she practically owned the role of Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” performing it 648 times, she also ranged far beyond Verdi, singing 69 roles in operas by Rossini, Donizetti, Puccini and Wagner, among many others. Contemporary composers sought her out for premieres of their operas.She was disciplined in adopting new roles suitable to her voice as it changed from coloratura in her 20s to lyric soprano in her 30s, and then to lirico-spinto after 40, combining qualities of lighter lyric roles and weightier dramatic aspects with an ability to reach dramatic climaxes on high notes without strain. “When one door closes, another opens,” she said of her vocal evolution.Virginia Zehan was born on Oct. 21, 1925, in Solovastru, a Transylvanian village in central Romania. She changed her surname in her early 20s when she emigrated to Milan after being told that “Zeani” would be easier for Italians to pronounce. Her parents, Dumitru and Vesselina Zehan, owned a hardscrabble farm and moved to Bucharest, the Romanian capital, in search of better incomes when Virginia was 8.Music was among her earliest memories. She remembered singing as a toddler in Solovastru while going with her mother to fetch water from a stream for cooking. “Every Sunday, Gypsy people would gather in our village to play their music, and the villagers would begin dancing,” she said in her memoir.When she was 9, she was invited by a cousin to her first opera: Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” in Bucharest. She was so smitten that she vowed to her parents that she would become an opera singer. She enrolled in her school choir and, with the help of a benefactor, took voice lessons as a teenager with Lucia Anghel, a former mezzo-soprano who told Virginia that she was also a mezzo.During World War II, Bucharest suffered bombardment and occupation by the Nazis, who imprisoned and executed some of Virginia’s close friends and their relatives. She herself narrowly escaped potential rape and murder by jumping from a back window when soldiers invaded her family’s home.One stroke of luck during the war was being accepted as a student by Lydia Lipkowska, a famed Ukrainian soprano, who was stranded in Bucharest. Ms. Lipkowska convinced Virginia that she was a soprano. “I had no high notes at all at that point in my life,” Ms. Zeani recalled, “but after she accepted me and I worked with her for three months I had an incredible range.”She went to Italy in 1947 and continued her vocal studies in Milan, where she joined a bumper crop of future opera stars, including Renata Tebaldi, Giuseppe di Stefano and Franco Corelli.On May 16, 1948, at the age of 22, Ms. Zeani made her debut at Bologna’s Teatro Duse as Violetta in “La Traviata” when Margherita Carosio, the scheduled soprano, fell ill. To get the role, Ms. Zeani lied to the local opera impresario, asserting that she had sung Violetta before. She then fashioned her own gown for the part out of curtain fabric bought at a street market.Critics were impressed by Ms. Zeani’s ability to convey her character’s losing struggle with tuberculosis while hitting all of Verdi’s notes. She herself had earlier dealt with a chronic lung ailment, and she used that experience to aid her performance. “Ironically, my bronchitis helped me to work out a breathing system for the forte moments in the opera, consistent with Violetta’s medical condition,” she explained.She added Vincenzo Bellini to her repertoire when she replaced Maria Callas in the role of Elvira in “I Puritani” in Florence in 1952.It was during that performance that she met her future husband, the Italian bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who sang the role of Elvira’s uncle, Giorgio Valton. They married in 1957 and had one child, Alessandro. Mr. Rossi-Lemeni died in 1991.One of Ms. Zeani’s career highlights was singing the lead role of Blanche in the première of Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” at La Scala in 1957. Mr. Poulenc chose Ms. Zeani after hearing her sing in “La Traviata” in Paris the previous year.“Poulenc convinced me to do the part of Blanche, score unseen,” she recalled. “I was not at first enthusiastic.” The work would be recognized as one of the great 20th-century operas.Ms. Zeani at her home in Florida in 2013.Madeline Gray/The Palm Beach Post, via Zuma PressAnother of Ms. Zeani’s hallmarks was her durability. “In my career I only canceled two performances,” she said in a 2015 interview with the opera website Gramilano on the occasion of her 90th birthday.In 1966, at 41, Ms. Zeani made her belated debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Violetta, and gave one more performance a few days later. Those were her only performances in a Met production.Even when her performances fell short, critics found reasons to praise her. On June 25, 1968, at the Metropolitan Opera, she played Desdemona in a production of Rossini’s “Otello” — a far lesser-known work than the Verdi masterpiece composed 70 years later — put on by the Rome Opera.In reviewing Ms. Zeani’s performance in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg suggested that she would have been better suited for the latter-day “Otello”: “Much more a Verdi than a Rossini singer, she had some trouble with the fioritura, simplified as it was, but of her basic vocal endowments there can be no doubt.”Her performances, especially in Italy, were warmly received. Her acting in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” in a 1969 Rome Opera performance was singled out for praise by Opera magazine: “Zeani, a most musical and feminine interpreter of Manon, brought out all the part’s desperate passion throughout the opera with much lyrical ardor and touching expressiveness.”Ms. Zeani’s last opera performance was as Mother Marie in “Dialogues of the Carmelites” on Nov. 3, 1982, at the San Francisco Opera. Two years earlier, she and her husband had accepted teaching posts at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.Ms. Zeani continued to teach there until 2004, when she retired to West Palm Beach. She was considered one of the leading singing teachers in the country, and a partial list of her more notable former students included the sopranos Angela Brown, Elina Garanca, Sylvia McNair and Marilyn Mims.Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Shucked’: A Broadway Musical That Doubles Down on the Corn

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      Shane McAnally’s boffo songwriting career got off to a slow start, but by 2013 he and his frequent writing partner Brandy Clark were finally having success. The Band Perry’s “Better Dig Two” and Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart,” both co-written by McAnally and Clark, reached No. 1 and No. 2 on the Billboard country chart.The songs were hits, sure, but they were also unique, especially in the vivid imagery of their lyrics, which found new ways to describe jealousy and heartache. People in Nashville took notice, including the singer Jake Owen, who offered his opinion of “Better Dig Two” and “Mama’s Broken Heart.”“He said to me, ‘Those sound like songs from musicals,’” McAnally recalled recently, sitting in a second-floor room of the Nederlander Theater in Manhattan. He viewed the comment as a backhanded compliment, and remembered thinking, “I wouldn’t even know how to write songs for a musical.”Fast forward 10 years, and McAnally and Clark are days away from the April 4 opening of their new Broadway musical at the Nederlander. The show, “Shucked,” is about a plucky small-town woman who leaves home in search of someone who can figure out why all the corn in the county keeps dying. She meets a big-city con man who’s pretending to be a podiatrist — “Corn doctor,” the sign outside his office says — who then concocts a plan to swindle the desperate farmers.The musicians Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, center row, with the director Jack O’Brien, top row, and the book writer Robert Horn. “They have the same sense of humor that I do,” Horn said of McAnally and Clark.Adam Powell for The New York TimesMcAnally and Clark, who composed the show’s music and wrote the lyrics, are two of Nashville’s most successful musicians. He’s co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, and she has 11 Grammy nominations. The New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica called them “two of the most in-demand and disruptive songwriters” in Nashville and “convention-tweakers in a town in thrall to its conventions.”They began writing songs about a decade ago for a different iteration of the musical, which the book writer Robert Horn had been working on since 2011. Horn, who won a Tony Award in 2019 for writing the stage adaptation of “Tootsie,” unabashedly filled “Shucked” with corn puns — the leading lady is named Maizy, she hails from Cob County, and that’s just the start of it. The show is both about corn, and corny in an audacious way.‘A show about outliers’Maybe every Broadway show takes a Mr. Magoo path to opening night, but the back story to “Shucked” features more flat tires and head-on collisions than most.It began with a brand extension. Executives at the Opry Entertainment Group, which owns the rights to “Hee Haw,” thought that the TV show’s mix of music and cornpone comedy might adapt well to the stage. The person first tasked with creating the adaptation was Horn, who’d written and produced lots of television shows, as well as the book (with Dan Elish) for the Broadway musical “13.”After making progress with the story, Horn traveled to Nashville in 2013 to meet the city’s top songwriters, including McAnally and Clark. He’d prepared a lengthy outline, but they didn’t even read it. “We want to do this,” he recalled them saying.Clark, who moved to Nashville in 1997, was just starting a sterling career as a highly acclaimed solo artist. Growing up in Washington State, she was in a community production of “The Music Man,” another show about a slick con man trying to bilk small towners. (“We have some Harold Hill going on,” she acknowledged with a laugh.)“Writing a musical was always on my bucket list,” she explained. “But I thought you had to have a music pedigree to be a Broadway composer.”And McAnally had recently become a musical theater convert after seeing his first Broadway show, “The Book of Mormon.” “It blew my mind,” he said. “I said to my husband, ‘I want to do that. But I don’t know what it is or how you do it.’”When Horn met McAnally and Clark, “it was love at first sight,” Horn said in a phone interview. “They have the same sense of humor that I do. The fact that they were proud, gay, out country artists was appealing to me, because I knew I wanted this to be a show about outliers.”Mary Johnston Rutherford, the show’s wardrobe supervisor, working on Alex Newell’s costume during a fitting. Newell’s song “Independently Owned” has been getting standing ovations during preview performances.Adam Powell for The New York TimesHorn, who gets credit (or blame) for the randy puns and dad jokes in “Shucked,” comes to his comedy honestly. His mother was Ed Sullivan’s secretary, and his grandfather, a Bell Telephone engineer who in his off hours was a vaudeville dancer, introduced him to borscht belt comedy.When Horn was a baby, his father skipped town. His mother struggled with depression, and at the age of 9, he was sent to an orphanage, where he found that making jokes sometimes kept him from being beaten up.The first version of the show was called “Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical,” and in 2015, it ventured to Dallas. A local critic called it “cartoonish,” and Variety predicted the musical-comedy would succeed only “far from the Great White Way.” “Moonshine” was foundering, “so we had to let it go,” Horn said.Rebuilding a showWhile making “Moonshine,” Horn had grown so close to the two songwriters that after his sister died, Clark called him and said, “I’m your sister now.” None of them were ready to give up on the idea of the show, so Horn got the band back together.The Opry Entertainment Group had bowed out, so they threw away the title and all but three songs. And there was a new addition to the team: the director Jack O’Brien, who fell in love with country music in the 1980s thanks to his then boyfriend. Catching the show on the rebound, O’Brien, the only person to win Tonys for directing “Henry IV” and “Hairspray,” knew “Shucked” needed some weight. “It’s so campy it would float away,” he said.He urged the songwriters to throw out their opening number, which they loved. He proposed a new song that celebrates corn, one in which the word corn sounded “like a foghorn,” Clark recalled, and the songwriters were delighted when they realized the giddy, tone-setting result was better.When it came time to see what audiences thought, the show’s producers booked the National Theater in Washington, D.C., with a plan to open there in late 2020. But then the pandemic arrived. “It was an ill wind, in the classic sense, that brought us some good,” O’Brien said.While the creative team continued to hone the show, some of the actors, with Broadway mostly shut down, had nothing to do.“This show is what pulled me through the pandemic,” said the Broadway veteran Andrew Durand, who plays Beau, the dim and stubborn male lead, and coincidentally, spent the first 10 years of his life in Cobb County, Ga. “This is what I had to look forward to, any time I got down.”For the second attempt at an out-of-town run, the producers picked the Pioneer Theater Company in Salt Lake City, Utah, though Horn feared red-state residents would flinch at his jokes. One local reviewer said the show delivered laughs “at a staggering clip,” though another critic warned that the jokes were “a little smutty.” The Salt Lake City audiences “had some difficulty with it,” O’Brien admitted. “They pursed their lips, but I’ve never heard an audience laugh longer.”Behind the scenes at the Nederlander Theater.Adam Powell for The New York TimesThe show, in previews now, is scheduled to open April 4.Adam Powell for The New York Times“Shucked” would not be as good, he added, if not for the delay. “We have sat, as colleagues and friends, with nothing to do for three years while we turned these tender leaves over and over in our hands, thinking, ‘Maybe we can do better than that.’ We found values that it’s worthwhile to put out there.”‘Key to Humanity’The good songs and jokes in “Shucked” are so plentiful that secondary characters all have a spotlight or two. During rehearsals last month, no one got more laughs than Storyteller 2 (Grey Henson, a Tony nominee for “Mean Girls”) and Beau’s brother Peanut (Kevin Cahoon, the cast’s lone holdover from “Moonshine”), whose punch lines are nearly Dada-esque.And the showstopping number “Independently Owned” isn’t sung by one of the two lead characters, but by Maizy’s cousin Lulu (Alex Newell of “Once on This Island” and TV’s “Glee”), who shows off a remarkable range while nailing multiple tricky modulations in the song. “Alex got a standing ovation last night,” McAnally said the day after the first preview performance.It’s no spoiler to say that in Cob County, the women are smarter than the men. (“True to life, really,” Durand quipped.) Maizy (played by Caroline Innerbichler, who is making her Broadway debut) is gullible but determined and openhearted, while the worldlier Lulu is skeptical about the big-city grifter Gordy (John Behlmann of “Tootsie”) whose arrival unsettles the equilibrium in Cob County.The story line in “Shucked” is partly a corollary to the real-life relationship between Horn’s Yankee family and his husband’s Southern kinfolk. Since they learned to love one another, he says, maybe others can too.In February, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia proposed a “national divorce” between red and blue states, O’Brien told the cast: “There has never been a more important moment for this show.”During a later interview, he got specific about the musical’s worthwhile values. “Laughter is God’s miracle,” he said. “You sit in the dark with people you don’t know, and don’t want to know, and you all voluntarily expel the air out of your lungs at the exact same time. If that isn’t the key to humanity, I don’t know what is.“We don’t have a lot to laugh about right now. Sometimes I cannot look at the news anymore. It breaks my heart. So if there is surcease from sorrow, and my name is attached to it, thank God.”Broadway musicals rise or fall mostly on the strength of jokes, songs, performances and stagecraft. Apart from one good joke at the expense of Christopher Columbus, the show’s politics are not overt.“People may see it as a funny little fable, but I hope it’s more than that,” Horn said. “I’m watching laws go into effect for the gay and trans community, my brethren, and watching anti-Semitism grow in this country.”A big part of the show’s message is tolerance and love on both sides of a divide, though it’s not a #bothsides play. He hopes audiences recognize that the show has “a message of unity,” he said. “Unless you can open your heart to people who are different than you, you will never grow.”Behind the rat-a-tat pace of the jokes, “Shucked” is the work of outliers who worry that the victories for tolerance they’ve seen in their lifetimes are being reversed.The trick to songwriting in Nashville, Clark said once, was “to find your group of misfit toys.” Even through their success, she and McAnally felt as if they were censoring themselves by removing jokes and political themes to blend in on country radio.In New York, the two best friends joined an enclave where misfit toys are the rule, not the exception.“Our songwriter friends say, ‘You’re going to be Broadway rich!’ Well, I’m already Broadway rich,” McAnally said with a laugh. The payoff wasn’t the pay, but the freedom to write songs without restrictions. “Why would we go back to Nashville?” he asked. More

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      10 (or, Actually, 11) Songs That Explain Me

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      Introducing a new newsletter dedicated to music discovery, and your host, Lindsay Zoladz.Illustration by The New York Times; Bob Berg/Getty Images (Fiona Apple)Dear listeners,Welcome to the first installment of The Amplifier — a twice-weekly note about songs (new and old) worth hearing. I want The Amplifier to bring that mixtape-from-your-friend feeling back to musical discovery. Too often, in the streaming era, our choices are at the mercy of a shadowy, impersonal algorithm. The Amplifier will be a return to something more intimate and human.Of course, that requires you knowing at least a little bit about me and my particular musical perspective.But the easiest way to fill a music critic with crippling panic is to pose that seemingly simple question: “What’s your favorite song?” Most of us are likely to get defensive and philosophical, asking whether you mean “favorite” or “best,” and how you personally would define those terms — all as a stalling tactic while we spin through the bulging Rolodex of all the songs we’ve ever loved, trying and probably failing to arrive at a sufficiently revealing choice.So rather than make a monolithic list of My Favorite Songs of All Time — one that I’d immediately be adding tracks to in my head as soon as I hit send — I thought I’d opt for the more inviting language of a popular social media prompt: “10 Songs That Explain Me.”Except that I just. Could. Not. Do it. No matter how many times I tried, I always ended up with an extra song. So consider this to be a 10-song playlist with a bonus track — or perhaps an early indication that the knobs on this Amplifier go to 11.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Nina Simone: “Ain’t Got No — I Got Life”Only Nina Simone could transform two relatively kitschy numbers from the musical “Hair” into a song of self that rivals Walt Whitman. Simone is a lodestar to me: The excellence that she demanded from herself, the attention she demanded from her audiences and the classical virtuosity she brought to popular music all make her one of the greats. This rousing song can lift me out of just about any funk, and with such efficiency! Simone only needs less than three minutes to remind you exactly what it means to be alive. (Listen on YouTube)2. Fiona Apple: “Shameika”I grew up in suburban New Jersey and came of age in the late ’90s: a place and a time when conformity was currency. I wasn’t very good at fitting in, and like many an angsty youth, I found a kindred spirit in Fiona Apple. I first heard (and became obsessed with) her poetic and moody debut album, “Tidal,” when I was on the precipice of middle school, which is about the age Apple imagines herself to be in this elegantly unruly song from her 2020 album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” I see a lot of myself in it — both in the young, dissatisfied girl Apple remembers herself to be, and in the adult writer who made it out of that environment intact enough to tell the story. In my headphones, at least, Fiona said I had potential. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Dismemberment Plan: “Superpowers”When I was 18, I moved to Washington, D.C., for college and lived there until I was 25. My friend Drew put this song on a mix for me a few years into that stretch, and for a time it became my anthem: The Dismemberment Plan — an arty, verbose four-piece from D.C. that had broken up shortly before I got there — was a perfect bridge between the introspective emo I liked in high school and the more experimental strains of indie-rock I got into in college. Nothing brings me back to the ennui of early adulthood like the band’s 1999 classic “Emergency & I,” but my favorite of its records is the one that has “Superpowers” on it, “Change.” Luckily I got to catch a couple of amazing D-Plan reunion shows before I left town. (Listen on YouTube)4. Grimes: “Genesis”I have this theory that moving to New York knocks at least five years off your behavioral age. I made it here at 25, but for the first few years it felt like a second adolescence: catching shows every night at a bunch of now-defunct Williamsburg venues, making new friends, vying for the car stereo’s aux cord. Very often, the iPod was playing Grimes’s light and blissful album “Visions,” or sometimes just “Genesis” on repeat. It’s a song that can still make me feel, for a fleeting four minutes, like I’m the main character in my own video game and I’ve figured out the cheat code that makes me invincible. (Listen on YouTube)5. Frank Ocean: “Self Control”And here is the B-side of my roaring 20s: Frank Ocean’s tender voice was and remains a balm for whatever failure, loneliness and disappointment life decided to throw my way. (Consider “Self Control” a way to sneak another one of my favorite artists, and homes-away-from-home, onto this list, too, since the eclectic Philadelphia indie-rocker Alex G plays guitar on the track.) (Listen on YouTube)6. The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Wild Horses”Let’s continue wallowing while turning back the clock a bit to hear from another one of my all-time favorite singers, Gram Parsons. (I recently went on a Nashville vacation that was at least partially a spiritual pilgrimage to see his infamously sinful Nudie suit in the Country Music Hall of Fame.) A lot of the older music I love most has a kind of “near miss” quality about it — history’s beautiful losers, the artists who didn’t break through but deserved to, the ones who gesture toward all sorts of alternative presents and what-ifs. Maybe that’s why I prefer Parsons’s vocal take of “Wild Horses” to Mick Jagger’s more familiar one. (The Sundays’ version is great, too.) There’s a wobbly brokenness to it that I find incredibly moving, especially the way he emphasizes “a dull aching pain.” The origins of the song are notoriously disputed, but some insist that its titular line was inspired by something that Marianne Faithfull croaked when she came out of a six-day coma in 1969 — “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” — and that is one of those rock ’n’ roll stories that, even if it’s apocryphal, I have chosen to believe. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Star: “Daisy Glaze”Speaking of music history’s beautiful losers: Big Star, one of my favorite rock bands ever. Like many a teenage millennial, I first came to the band through one of the numerous covers of the acoustic ballad “Thirteen” (“one of my almost-good songs,” the ever-humble Alex Chilton once said). Once I’d immersed myself in the band’s back catalog, I became belatedly furious that it had never been as famous as Led Zeppelin. I will always be exhilarated by the moment in the middle of “Daisy Glaze” when Jody Stephens’s three kick-drum thumps initiate a sudden tempo change — a perfect encapsulation of the band’s thrilling brilliance. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Mountain Goats: “Up the Wolves”I got into the Mountain Goats toward the end of high school — my friend Matt and I would drive from Jersey diner to diner, listening to their seemingly limitless discography — and John Darnielle is probably my favorite contemporary lyricist. The album “The Sunset Tree,” and this song in particular, have gotten me through many a dark night of the soul. I have now seen the Mountain Goats live more times than I can count — I lost track in the low 20s — and I am not yet numb to the emotional power of these songs. They played “Up the Wolves” a few months ago at Webster Hall, and after all these years, it still made me cry like a big teenage baby. (Listen on YouTube)9. Buffy Sainte-Marie: “The Circle Game”This one’s a total cheat: a sneaky way to mention two artists I adore — Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell, who of course wrote “The Circle Game” — on a single track. Joni is probably my favorite living songwriter, and there are about 100 other songs of hers I could have chosen. But I like the story behind this cover, recorded when Joni was still a fledgling songwriter to whom the then-better-known Buffy was trying to bring some attention. Suffice to say, it worked. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Raincoats: “No Side to Fall In”I’ve identified as a feminist throughout many different cultural and personal phases: in seventh grade when the boys told me girls couldn’t skateboard; in college, when it was a somewhat unfashionable concern that meant I read a lot of literary theory; these days, when a more watered-down version of the word has been co-opted to sell things on Instagram. All throughout, music has given me the strength to keep fighting, dreaming and resisting psychic death. To me, the great post-punk group the Raincoats are emblematic of a kind of utopian feminist freedom: a sonic universe where women can sound like and do anything they want — yes, even skateboarding. (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison: “Ballerina”Oh, Van the (Facebook-hating) Man, my problematic fave. “Astral Weeks” is an album I love deeply, but I’ve always thought “Ballerina” should be the closing track. Since this is my playlist, with my rules, let’s try it out. I love this clip of a very young Leonard Cohen explaining to a confused interviewer on Canadian television what it feels like to be in “a state of grace.” It’s that “kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you.” I have found no better description of how I feel when I listen to this song. (Listen on YouTube)Thanks for listening,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“10 (or, Actually, 11) Songs That Explain Me” track listTrack 1: Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No — I Got Life”Track 2: Fiona Apple, “Shameika”Track 3: The Dismemberment Plan, “Superpowers”Track 4: Grimes, “Genesis”Track 5: Frank Ocean, “Self Control”Track 6: The Flying Burrito Brothers, “Wild Horses”Track 7: Big Star, “Daisy Glaze”Track 8: The Mountain Goats, “Up the Wolves”Track 9: Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Circle Game”Track 10: The Raincoats, “No Side to Fall In”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Ballerina”The song that explains youI’m really excited to go on this musical journey with you. I also want to make this newsletter a place for conversations about the songs and artists that mean something to you, so I’ll occasionally be asking for your thoughts on the topics we cover in this newsletter — and I’d love to hear from all of you.Today, I want to know: What’s a song that explains you? Tell me about it.If you’d like to participate you can fill out this form here. We may use your response in an upcoming edition of The Amplifier.Bonus tracksIf you want to read me going even deeper on my love of Fiona Apple, here’s an essay I wrote a few years back, as part of NPR’s “Turning the Tables” series on female artists. (My dear friend Jenn Pelly also tracked down the real-life Shameika and wrote a wonderful article about her.)And, if you’re a Van Fan, here’s me going incredibly long on “Astral Weeks,” for The Ringer, on the occasion of the album’s 50th anniversary.Finally, if you’re inclined to read my recent profile of the great Buffy Sainte-Marie (I was pinching myself just outside the Zoom frame!), might I suggest following it with this delightful clip of her showing Pete Seeger, on his short-lived TV show “Rainbow Quest,” how to play a mouth bow. More

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      Heinali Is Reconstructing Kyiv, One Synth Wave at a Time

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      “Kyiv Eternal,” by the composer and sound artist Heinali (real name Oleh Shpudeiko), submerges listeners in the sounds of the prewar Ukrainian capital.It’s disorienting: Again and again these past few weeks, I’ve been walking through New York and thinking I’m somewhere else. I’ll be strolling through Central Park, but the sounds I hear come from a park nine time zones away. In line at my local Whole Foods I’ll hear the cash registers of an Eastern European grocery store. Last week I was riding the subway to Harlem and the announcer called out the wrong line. “Next stop, Maidan Nezalezhnosti …”In my headphones, I’ve had an album on loop: “Kyiv Eternal,” a ravishing audioscape of the Ukrainian capital by the composer and electronic musician Heinali. Amid ambient washes of sound, Heinali, whose real name is Oleh Shpudeiko, integrates field recordings from across Kyiv: the horns of minibuses that ferry workers in from the suburbs, or the crowds in Landscape Alley, the open-air sculpture park overlooking the Dnipro River. Staticky street sounds from Shuliavka, a neighborhood that endured artillery strikes in the war’s first hours, commingle with quavering loops of electronic vibrations.The sounds are something of a time capsule. Shpudeiko captured them before Russia invaded; some of the recordings are more than a decade old. Intertwining those archival noises with electronic keyboards and instrumental lines, he has fabricated a citywide portrait of beautiful irresolution. “Kyiv Eternal” is no war diary. It’s an inward-looking musical conjuration of a city that’s partially vanished — to refugee outflows, to military curfews — and a city that is still, defiantly, standing.“I bought my first pocket Zoom sound recorder in 2011, I think, and the moment I bought it I started recording basically everything around me,” Shpudeiko told me when we caught up on a video call. With Alexey Shmurak, another sound artist, he attempted an “acoustic ecology of Kyiv”: collecting tones and noises that typified the capital’s audible life. They captured the unique phrasings of drivers of the capital’s private minibuses — which once constituted a hefty fraction of Kyiv transport, but began to fade in the era of Uber — hawking their destinations.“They would develop, with time, a very specific phrasing,” Shpudeiko said. “A melodic contour would suddenly appear. Like birds trying to capture the attention of a mate.” He incorporated those calls into the track “Rare Birds,” where soft electronic tremolos shimmer over drivers’ megaphones, as they announce their routes to Odesa or Vinnytsia.You hear more literal chirping on “Botanichnyi Sad” (“Botanical Garden”), whose stuttering synths intermingle with field recordings of birdsong from the A.V. Fomin Botanical Garden, which has stood in the center of the capital for nearly two centuries. Or there’s the exquisite track “Silpo,” named for a Ukrainian grocery store chain, whose jingling beat derives from the cash registers: a corporate carillon of high, sharp chimes, each ringing out over the composer’s muffled, crackling percussion line.“Kyiv Eternal” was released on Feb. 24, the one-year anniversary of the invasion. It inhabits a different sonic space from Heinali’s medieval-inspired synthesizer compositions, which he’s performed this year in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. (Ukrainian men require government permission to go abroad; Shpudeiko had approval for a residency in Cologne, Germany, where he recorded the new album.) Each track of “Kyiv Eternal” is largely stationary, without strong melodic variations. Some recall the ambient 1990s synth baths of Aphex Twin, others the recent synth-and-found-object compositions of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The effect is foggy, wistful, plangent, unresolved.Yet to a Kyivan listener, every track is studded with “ear-marks,” as Shpudeiko calls the aural signposts that orient you through the city as landmarks do for your eyes. The album is an ode to the capital, but not a mash note. “Kyiv isn’t the perfect city,” he said. “It’s full of ugliness and beauty as well. It’s a very interesting city, but it’s hard to love. But after leaving Ukraine, I felt it was a part of my identity, and I owe a lot to this city.”Since the war began, Heinali has performed in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. Oleksii KarpovychShpudeiko is a city boy, born in Kyiv in 1985. As a teenager he witnessed the 2004 Orange Revolution, which drew nonviolent protesters to the streets to protest a rigged election. Ten years later he took part in the Maidan Revolution, the massive democratic uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed president. Maidan didn’t just recast Ukraine’s political trajectory; it brought a cultural revolution too, especially in the capital.Before Maidan, Shpudeiko recalled, Kyiv had few promoters specializing in electronic, experimental music. “After 2014,” he said, “it was like an explosion.”Clubs sprang up in Podil, a low-lying bohemian neighborhood by the Dnipro River. There were digital radio stations like 20 Feet Radio, and electronic music labels rivaled only by Berlin’s. Kyiv became one of Europe’s prime party capitals — but the same venues that hosted club nights like Cxema also presented contemporary classical concerts, dance performances and art installations. “The audiences that would usually visit a rave would go to contemporary poetry readings,” Shpudeiko remembered.That post-Maidan class of DJs and sound artists — composers of art music and of club music, none too worried about the distinction — would become the first generation from post-independence Ukraine to win broad European esteem. But even as the city developed its reputation for cutting-edge nightlife, Shpudeiko started looking back: to medieval and early Renaissance music, whose strict, almost mathematical cadences reverberated with his own modular synthesizers.He fell particularly hard for Léonin and Pérotin, two of the first named composers, who in Paris in the late 12th and early 13th centuries pushed Western sacred music into polyphony. On his magnificent 2020 album “Madrigals,” Shpudeiko used custom synthesizer software to generate rich, independent yet intertwining melodies in the style of the Notre Dame school. Over that electronic polyphony, accompanists on period instruments, including the theorbo (a long-necked lute), improvised sometimes plangent, sometimes dissonant improvisations.He was at work on a second album of “generative polyphony” when the war came to Kyiv. (That album remains on hold, though a new composition, “Aves rubrae,” premiered on the website of the Museum of Modern Art last month.)“The thing is, I didn’t believe there would be a full-scale invasion,” he said. “All of my friends didn’t believe it either. But my girlfriend, she actually believed there would be war. I remember, on that night, we drank wine and we watched the last season of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ Four hours later we were woken up by explosions in Kyiv. And even at first, I thought that maybe it was some kind of mistake.”The couple’s first act was to evacuate their mothers. They were on the road for 50 hours straight, with Shpudeiko’s synthesizer between his legs. They tried and failed to cross the Polish border, unable to make it through the miles-long lines. Eventually they made it to the Hungarian border, where his relatives crossed safely. Shpudeiko took refuge in Lviv, in the relative safety of western Ukraine, where he and other displaced musicians played live-streamed concerts to raise money for the army and humanitarian aid.Last April — as Ukrainian forces retook the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, and discovered unspeakable atrocities exacted on civilians — Shpudeiko was in a bomb shelter, his synthesizer hooked up to Ethernet cables the length of a football field, playing his unfinished medieval album. Out of the basement, the beeps and honks of the synth danced around one another, just as the voices did in Paris some 900 years ago. The walls of the shelter, like those of the Gothic cathedral before it, reverberated with polyphonic music from a world beyond pain: not sacred, not quite, but certainly exalted.“What we did back then, it wasn’t just activism,” he says of those bomb-shelter concerts. “It was also about therapy. It was a way of preserving our artistic identity. When the full-scale invasion started, I think no one knew who they were anymore. I think everyone needed to perform some work to either reconstruct or preserve or change their identity.”Now the Ukrainian capital has another soundscape: the wailing bursts of the air raid siren that wakes you at night, the whir of the low-altitude cruise missile, the chain saw buzz of the slow-flying drone. The war haunts “Kyiv Eternal” nevertheless. The album opens with sounds of the Kyiv tramway, and, amid reverberant synths, we hear a loudspeaker calls out the stops: Zoolohichna Street, Lukianivska Square …. It’s line 14, and a gander at a Ukrainian transport app (for the trams still run on time in Kyiv) confirms that this streetcar is headed north, to Podil, where it will terminate at a grand square.On the album’s cover is a statue in that square, of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, a Cossack military commander now adopted as the patron saint of the Ukrainian army. In peacetime, pedestrians would look up to see Konashevych on horseback, saber raised to the sky. On the cover of “Kyiv Eternal” he appears as he does today: sandbagged up his neck, a black tarp shrouding his head.The general is, for Shpudeiko, an unexpected cover model. “I’m not a nationalist, and all my music was always personal or abstract; it didn’t have any obvious national identity,” he told me. “I wanted to have something that would capture this feeling of wanting to embrace the living city. And these monuments: They are embraced by these sandbags, protecting them from harm.”Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko)“Kyiv Eternal”(Injazero) More

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      Review: A Contemporary Music Group’s Next Era Begins

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      George E. Lewis’s tenure with the International Contemporary Ensemble began with a tribute to the multitalented artist Douglas R. Ewart.Some artists earn the “multi-hyphenate” label by doing two or three things. But Douglas R. Ewart works on a whole other level.That much was clear when this composer, visual artist, poet, multi-instrumentalist and instrument-maker put on a true multimedia event at the Chelsea Factory on Friday night. He gave a thrilling tour of his varied creativity in the company of a violist, cellist, bassoonist and two percussionists from the International Contemporary Ensemble — whose new leader, George E. Lewis, organized the concert, making his curatorial debut with the group.In the lobby were three of Ewart’s sculptures (including one dedicated to the jazz musician Eric Dolphy), and inside the hall hung five of his paintings (including one titled “Rasta in Sun Ra”). Underneath those canvases, the concert featured some shimmering, percussive work from Ewart, 76, himself — on a tall wooden staff outfitted with a sequence of Bundt cake pans, which he called “The George Floyd Bunt Staff.” (More on the chiaroscuro effect of that Bundt/bunt ambiguity later.)From left, the International Contemporary Ensemble players Wendy Richman, Aliya Ultan and Rebekah Heller.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAlso on offer was Ewart’s piping, ecstatic approach to the sopranino saxophone, informed by bebop and the avant-garde alike. And there was plenty of meditative yet tuneful chamber music writing for the full ensemble, which the composer sometimes underlined with performances on a series of flutes.Elsewhere, Ewart gave somber, spoken-word testaments to Floyd’s memory, in addition to more slyly humorous commentaries on contemporary discussions of race. One such aperçu involved his interrogation of the phrase “unapologetically Black,” with him saying, “I am not unapologetically anything, because when I say that I have already apologized.”Other compositions offered space for Ewart to celebrate the practice of “sound sifting” — which he defined as a dedicated process of studying music’s mysteries — alongside playing from the ensemble members that emphatically endorsed his poetry’s quality of exultation.Clockwise, from top left: Ewart’s “Eye of Horus” (2017-18); “Sonic Stroller” (2006); his elaborately decorated performance outfit, which has bells stuffed in its pockets; and “Eric Dolphy Sonic Dread” (2017).It sounds like there’s a lot going on here. But while undeniably jam-packed and charged with grave themes, the evening progressed with a sense of unhurried equanimity. That was in large part thanks to the figure cut by Ewart; when he paced the stage to grab a new instrument, you could hear bells — tucked away in the pockets of his colorful, homemade concert suit — jangling peaceably.The International Contemporary Ensemble had commissioned the evening’s first through-composed piece, “Songs and Stories of Hopes, Dreams and Visions,” and throughout, the players were on Ewart’s same wavelength: intense yet generous. At the outset of the concert’s first half — a 40-minute set that included three works played without a break — the percussionists Nathan Davis (on vibraphone) and Clara Warnaar (on marimba) collaborated on dreamy, interlocking mallet-instrument patterns that recalled past Ewart projects that have involved choirs of similar instruments.Rebekah Heller, the ensemble’s bassoonist, responded to the upward-swooping graphic notation of “Red Hills” with a peppery excitement that rivaled earlier interpretations of it. (This piece was previously documented during a 1981 concert in Detroit, which has recently been reissued digitally on Bandcamp.)

      Beneath Detroit / Ewart . Barefield . Tabal Trio by Geodesic DisquesEwart, center, performed spoken-word portions of the show alongside musicians including Ultan, left, on cello, and Heller, on bassoon.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat members of the International Contemporary Ensemble could stack up so well against the recorded legacy of an artist like Ewart was no small thing. Credit also to Lewis, the ensemble’s new artistic director. This pathbreaking trombonist, composer and scholar literally wrote the book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the organization that provided schooling to Ewart in the 1960s, after he immigrated from Jamaica. (Ewart later served as chairman of that influential organization.)During the intermission on Friday, Lewis interviewed Ewart, a longtime collaborator, onstage. They amiably referred to moments in their history together, which includes a memorable 1979 duo recording on the Black Saint imprint.Given that relationship, Lewis was an ideal figure to extract more from Ewart about the ambiguities only hinted at in the performance’s staging and program notes. Such as: Why was the percussion instrument that Ewart employed during “Homage to George Floyd” billed as “The George Floyd Bunt Staff,” when it was clearly built from a series of Bundt pans? Channeling the serious-and-witty ingenuity of his music, Ewart responded with a sports analogy. He noted that Floyd’s death had catalyzed protests that had helped the national conversation to advance, like the sacrifice bunt in baseball.Nathan Davis, left, and Clara Warnaar on percussion. The performers played against a backdrop of visual artworks by Ewart.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSuch poetic abstraction risks sounding flip out of context, but the qualities of Ewart’s compositional practice made the gesture seem more like an authentic celebration of multiplicity and invention. The variety of tones he elicited from this instrument helped make the ambit of the tribute clear. When rapidly twirling it, and dragging the edges of a particular pan against a drumstick, he created a haunting, skittering effect — a restless signal of warning. When striking it directly, he could produce profoundly resonant gong-like sounds.This elegant shift from the grave to the exultant was heard again during the finale of the concert’s second half, which reached a climax with a fully notated piece for the ensemble players, “Truth is Power,” in which Ewart improvised on sopranino saxophone.It was a raucous, exciting conclusion to the show. And it was just a taste of what Lewis’s directorship of the International Contemporary Ensemble could bring. How many other artists like Ewart might benefit from having their larger works receive this kind of attention? The possibilities are extensive, and tantalizing.Douglas R. Ewart and the International Contemporary EnsemblePerformed on Friday at Chelsea Factory, Manhattan. More

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      The New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      Jaap van Zweden’s final season as the New York Philharmonic’s music director will feature belated debuts and premieres, and a grand farewell.In his final season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Jaap van Zweden will lead a host of premieres, performances of Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony, and a residency in China, the orchestra announced on Tuesday.Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s incoming president and chief executive, said that the season would showcase van Zweden’s devotion to new music and traditional works.“This is an opportunity,” Ginstling said in an interview, “to really celebrate all the elements that Jaap brought to the New York Philharmonic.”Van Zweden will make his first appearance on Sept. 27, with a gala featuring the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.The season will feature premieres by several composers, including Olga Neuwirth, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Melinda Wagner, as part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission new pieces from 19 women. And in summer 2024, the orchestra will return to China for the first time since 2019, for a residency in partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.New Yorkers hoping to hear a taste of the Philharmonic’s future will have to wait: There will be no appearances next season by Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was announced as van Zweden’s successor in February. Ginstling said scheduling conflicts were to blame.Here are nine highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Oct. 11-14For those keeping track of all the ways in which the Philharmonic has followed the lead of its West Coast counterpart, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — in its leadership, in its hall’s look, in its choice of music director — here’s another one: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the lively Lithuanian conductor who is being talked of as a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will be making her debut. Daniil Trifonov, a welcome fixture at David Geffen Hall, will join for a program of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, as well as selections from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite” and Raminta Šerkšnytė’s “De Profundis,” from 1998. JOSHUA BARONEMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will make her New York Philharmonic debut in October.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLigeti’s Centennial, Oct. 19-21The Philharmonic is celebrating the centennial of Gyorgi Ligeti’s birth with multiple concerts. (Look out for pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Études on Nov. 7.) This program, one of the most eclectic on the Philharmonic’s calendar, brings two pieces of Ligeti’s into dialogue with Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 and a piano concerto by the living modernist Elena Firsova. The Ligeti works are from relatively early in his career. (And one, “Mifiso la sodo,” is a U.S. premiere!) Evaluating their place alongside the Brahms and the Firsova, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist, should make for a bracing ride with David Robertson at the podium. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Israel in Egypt,’ Oct. 25-26A recent performance of “Solomon” at Carnegie Hall was a reminder of the sumptuous power of Handel’s English oratorios, his genre of concert-format, loosely plotted, often biblically inspired works that made choruses the stars. The Philharmonic rarely programs these pieces — with the obvious exception of the perennial “Messiah,” conducted this year in mid-December by Fabio Biondi — so “Israel in Egypt” will be a treat. On the podium, Jeannette Sorrell makes her subscription debut with the orchestra, leading the choir of Apollo’s Fire, her Cleveland-based ensemble. ZACHARY WOOLFESound On, Oct. 27Past concerts in this chamber-focused series have delved deeply into contemporary music — and have also been relegated to smaller spaces inside Lincoln Center. But on this date, when the Ensemble Signal conductor Brad Lubman joins Philharmonic players and a wide range of guest soloists, the music will be presented in Geffen Hall proper. That bodes well for Unsuk Chin’s transporting aesthetic, which is represented here by her Double Concerto for Piano and Percussion. And there’s similar potential for a new (as yet untitled) collaborative work by Kinan Azmeh and Layale Chaker. Both are leading player-composers who also happen to improvise, and they’ll both be onstage here. SETH COLTER WALLSDessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Nov. 30-Dec. 2Bryce Dessner, one-fifth of the rock band the National, wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos for the tight, persuasive duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, who bring it to Geffen for its New York premiere. Dessner’s taste for lush transparency, evident in his orchestrations for Taylor Swift’s album “Folklore,” shows in the way he cushions the piece’s unabashedly pretty piano parts without overwhelming them. OUSSAMA ZAHR‘Vertigo,’ Jan. 23-26Playing film scores live alongside screenings has become a booming business for orchestras struggling with attendance, but the fare is usually blockbusters: the “Harry Potter” series, “Jurassic Park,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Not when the Philharmonic performs Bernard Herrmann’s lush, ominous music for Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” as audiences watch that strange, hypnotizing study in erotic obsession. (Next season also brings “West Side Story” (Sept. 12-17) — Spielberg’s 2021 version, which featured the Philharmonic on its soundtrack — and “Black Panther” (Dec. 20-23). ZACHARY WOOLFEJames Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which will be screened with a live soundtrack.Universal Studios Home EntertainmentKarina Canellakis, April 4-6I’m not entirely joking when I say this, but now that the Philharmonic has lined up its next music director, it can start thinking about who Gustavo Dudamel’s eventual successor might be. Karina Canellakis, who coincidentally occupies Jaap van Zweden’s former post as the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, might well be on its shortlist when the time comes. This native New Yorker’s belated Philharmonic debut offers a taste of her thoughtful programming: Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung,” Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase” and Ravel’s Piano Concerto, with the soloist Alice Sara Ott. DAVID ALLENOlga Neuwirth, April 18-20Olga Neuwirth’s contribution to Project 19 in 2020 went — well, the way of many things early in the pandemic. Nearly four years after its scheduled premiere, it is finally coming to Geffen Hall, having been first unveiled instead with the Berlin Philharmonic, which streamed the unruly and delightful work for countertenor, children’s choir and orchestra on its Digital Concert Hall platform. Andrew Watts takes up the solo vocal part, making his New York Philharmonic debut alongside the conductor Thomas Sondergard, on a program that also includes Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. JOSHUA BARONEMahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, June 6-8Those with a taste for dry humor might ask themselves what exactly it is that Jaap van Zweden plans to resurrect with these final Geffen Hall concerts as the Philharmonic’s music director, but Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at least offers him a grand farewell. He will be joined by the New York Philharmonic Chorus, the soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller and the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova. ALLEN More

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      Following a Folk Tale Through the Himalayas

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      In a high hamlet, a two-hour trek up a verdant slope beneath ice-clad Himalayan peaks, an argument erupted over a folk tale. Two brothers, Pralad Singh Dariyal, 60, and Hira Singh Dariyal, 77, heatedly debated which nearby village in the Johar Valley was once the home of the story’s heroine. Eventually agreeing on a few possible locations, Hira said that the story, which is sung as a ballad and which he remembered from childhood, was virtually unknown today among the area’s young people. “They’re the YouTube generation,” he explained with a shrug.“No one even knows how to sing it anymore,” Pralad added.The voice of Pralad’s wife, Sundari Devi, rang out from the kitchen into the courtyard, where I sat with the brothers and a couple of other people in front of clothing drying on a line and pieces of a butchered sheep drying on a neighbor’s stone-shingled roof. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she shouted. “Some people do remember how to sing it. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not important.”In the Kumaon region of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, where sky-scraping summits soar over a maze of sublime hills in a corner of the country that abuts Nepal and Tibet, the story known as “Rajula Malushahi” has been passed down orally for hundreds of years. A sprawling epic of adventure and true love that unfurls across a broad swath of the landscape, it’s long been recognized as Kumaon’s pre-eminent folk tale. Short versions were sung by parents to their children, while renditions lasting up to 10 hours were performed by hurkiyas, or traditional bards, who chanted and drummed alongside a handful of backup vocalists for local audiences, often as a way to pass cold winter nights, before televisions — and now smartphones — became ubiquitous.When I first learned about “Rajula Malushahi” on a previous visit to Kumaon, I was immediately intrigued. After reading as much of the literature about it as I could find, I decided on a recent trip to use it as a guide to traveling through the area, letting it take me places I might not otherwise think to go.While creating an itinerary, I realized that there was no definitive route to follow, since there is no definitive narrative. Before it was first written down in the 1930s, numerous versions were sung. Though they tend to share the same overarching plotline, there are many variations among them, including where certain episodes are said to have occurred. It seemed fitting that planning a trip around a centuries-old folk tale was more an act of creative interpretation than a strict adherence to a single text.A traditional Kumaoni house, built of stone.Morning mists rise from fields in the Gomati Basin.I headed first for the Johar Valley, which is where the story (according to most versions) begins. There, a girl named Rajula, who was so beautiful that the sun paled before her, was born into the Shauka tribe — one of the subgroups of shepherds generally known as Bhotias. Her father, Sunapati Shauk, was the richest trader in the region, shuttling goods over the Himalayas between India and Tibet on the backs of sheep and goats, the best animals for navigating the treacherous terrain. Historically, this once-lucrative route thrived for about a thousand years before collapsing in 1962 with the outbreak of a war between India and China and the closure of the border.In the story, Rajula grows into a clever and confident young woman. She meets Malushahi, the young monarch of the Katyuri Kingdom, which ruled Kumaon from around the seventh to the 11th centuries, and they fall in love. They are quickly separated, however, as her hand has already been promised by Sunapati to the son of a Tibetan king, an important trading partner. Rajula, rebelling, escapes from this undesirable arrangement, then travels through Kumaon to find Malushahi again, overcoming numerous obstacles with her courage and quick wits. After many dramatic twists, including deceptions, murder and sorcery, the lovers are finally reunited — either happily or in death, depending on the version.After initially arriving in Delhi at the end of last September, I traveled for a few days — first by rail, and then by road — to the Johar Valley’s main town, Munsiyari. My friend, the writer Shikha Tripathi, who is herself Kumaoni, happened to be there working on a story about climate change. Together, by S.U.V. and on foot, we traveled for most of a morning to the village of Paton, where we talked in the courtyard with the Dariyal brothers, as Shikha translated.Our conversation concluded when a village-wide feast began. A woman who had married a man with family in Paton was making her first visit — 13 years after their wedding. Everyone came out to welcome her, including people who now lived elsewhere and had returned for the celebration. Vats of rice, mutton and dal had been prepared, and we ate on flat rooftops with views of the valley walls slanting sharply into the clouds.When the feast wrapped up, Shikha and I went back to Pralad’s place to get our bags and shift to the house where we’d been offered accommodations for the night. I stepped into the kitchen to bid Sundari goodbye and found three other women sitting on the floor with her. Before I could say “thank you,” two of them began to sing, filling the low-ceilinged space with the resonant tones of the first verses of “Rajula Malushahi.”Nanda Devi Dariyal, in red, and Duri Devi Sailal, in blue, sing Rajula Malushahi in the kitchen of Sundari Devi Dariyal, who sits behind them.They sang for about five minutes, which was more than long enough to transform the dimly lit room into a musical time machine, transporting us beyond the temporal world into the wonder of the moment. It was Sundari’s gift to us — and was her way of conclusively proving the point she had made to her husband.The next day, Shikha and I hiked, drove and hiked (uphill again) to a village where Hira had told us that some of Rajula’s community had scattered after being cursed at the end of her story. Upon reaching Jimia, we learned that a celebration of the Hindu festival Dussehra was about to begin.Led by drummers and men carrying saplings adorned with flags and tufts of yak hair, a joyous procession descended from the homes at the core of the village to a small temple at its edge. Two sheep were sacrificed to the local goddess, Bharari Devi, a form of Durga, a major Hindu deity. The drumming surged with fevered intensity and the jagar — a ceremony in which the goddess enters into the body, or bodies, of one or more of those in attendance — began around a smoldering bonfire.A possessed woman staggered around like a zombie. A man named Gajendra Singh Quiriyal — the village’s grand pradhan, or leader — fell to the ground and convulsed on the fire’s edge, caking himself with ashes and embers. The goddess then settled into Rudra Singh Quiriyal, Gajendra’s brother. Blankly staring at something no one else could see, he flung rice over himself and into the crowd. Villagers shouted questions one atop the other, like a scrum of reporters at a chaotic news conference, seeking help with their problems. Most persistent was a middle-aged man desperate for his wife to have their first child. Bharari Devi promised to grant his wish.Led by Tulsi Devi Nuriram, at center, women sing and dance during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.Ukha Devi Quiriyal, wearing traditional Shauka clothing, dances during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.When the jagar was over, the pradhan, who’d brushed himself off, asked me to snap a picture of him with his wife and daughters and insisted that Shikha and I stay with them that night. Rice and meat from the sacrificed sheep was served to all. On a grassy terrace just above the temple, women danced in a circle while singing songs to welcome back to the village their sisters and daughters who had moved away after marrying men from other places. Some of the dancers wore traditional Shauka dress — including embroidered headscarves, black blouses, and black skirts.When we spoke to the women as they sat together following an hour or so of dancing, the elders among them said that they had all heard the tale of “Rajula Malushahi,” but only one remembered how to sing it. Encouraged by the others, Tulsi Devi Nuriram performed a few verses, surprising me with a completely different melody and rhythm than I’d heard the previous day.Everyone I would meet who knew the story line of “Rajula Malushahi” — the youngest of whom appeared to be in their 60s — spoke of it as though it was based on actual events, while well aware that it is a folk tale. It occupies a liminal space in the collective imagination, somewhere between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality — which was not unlike how I internalized my experience of that day.The following night, which Shikha and I spent at a homestay in the village of Darkot, a center of Shauka weaving, we met with a folk theater performer who was well-versed in much of the scholarship about the tale. After launching into a long, impassioned analysis of which elements of particular versions were most likely to be true, Lakshman Singh Pangtey concluded by saying, “There is no guarantee about anything I’ve said. After all, it’s a 500-year-old story.”Women at Bageshwar’s Bagnath Temple gather to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long lives for their husbands.The Hindu ritual of arti is performed near the confluence of the Saryu and Gomati Rivers, in Bageshwar. A funeral pyre burns in the background.Shikha stayed in Munsiyari, and I continued on alone. I first went to Bageshwar, where Rajula once stopped to pray. The god Bagnath, a form of Shiva, was so overcome by her beauty that he attempted to extort her affections with threats and promises — a deal she angrily refused. When I visited the same site at the confluence of the Sarayu and Gomati rivers, where a 15th-century Chand-era temple stands, women had gathered to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long life for their husbands. In the bustling, friendly town, scenes of life and death, commerce and worship, played out on the streets and riverbanks on a scale large enough to fascinate yet small enough to be absorbed without overwhelming.In the hills and villages of the Gomati Valley, women harvested winter fodder for their livestock, men turned fields with plows pulled by oxen, and everyone I met was happy to see a stranger and chitchat in Hindi. I was charmed by the town of Dwarahat, where Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens, near where Rajula was captured, beaten and left for dead in the forest. And I visited the riverside temple of Agniyari Devi in Chaukhutia, where Malushahi first laid eyes on Rajula, and she laughed at him for mistaking her for the goddess herself.Along the way, I happened to meet a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew one of the last great hurkiyas of Kumaon. Before long, Nain Nath Rawal invited me to his home, in Sirola village, to hear him sing. I went with my friend, Shriyani Datta, who was staying near Almora, some two hours away.In the town of Dwarahat, Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens.Plowing a field along a tributary of the Gomati River.Rawal’s two-story stone house was set along a ridge atop cascading terraced fields with eye-popping views of the high peaks. He invited us into a room on the upper floor, with shelves of awards for his contributions to Kumaoni culture, and pictures of gods and goddesses encircled by flower garlands hanging on bright yellow walls. An 81-year-old farmer, he was taught to sing by his mother, who gave him lessons when he was young.When, among many questions translated by Shriyani, I asked why audiences root for Rajula when they wouldn’t approve of a young woman from their own community overtly disobeying her father, breaking a marriage contract and running away to find her beloved, he acknowledged that “today, her family would probably send the police after her.” But, he explained, Rajula and Malushahi were destined to be together, which meant that Rajula was doing the right thing. “If that happened now,” he added, “you couldn’t prove that fate was involved.” The story’s theme, he said, is “turning divine intention into reality through love.”Rawal sang while playing an hourglass-shaped drum, called a hurka, for over 20 minutes, accompanied by Baji Nath Rawal, who tapped on a stainless steel plate, while two vocalists, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal, sang backup. Though he had made more than 120 recordings during his career, this was the first time he had recorded “Rajula Malushahi.”Nain Nath Rawal, left, sings the entirety of “Rajula Malushahi” while playing the hurka. Accompanying him, left to right, are Baji Nath Rawal, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal.Rawal remarked that he used to perform the ballad around Kumaon at all-night festivals, but that they were rare events these days. “My generation is trying to keep our local culture alive, as much as we can,” he said, “but times have changed.”For now, at least for those who recall it, the story is still woven into the landscape, which conjures memories of a young woman who, ages ago, defied convention to follow her heart.“I hope this song survives,” Rawal said, as we headed downstairs.Michael Benanav is a writer and photographer whose most recent book, Himalaya Bound: One Family’s Quest to Save Their Animals and an Ancient Way of Life, was published in 2018.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. 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