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      Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.

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      The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived.The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life.For decades, the Mapleson Cylinders, as they’re called by archivists and audiologists, have been a valuable but fragile resource. Wax cylinders were not made for long-term use — the earliest models wore out after a few dozen plays — and are especially vulnerable to poor storage conditions. But with the innovation of the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, a custom-built piece of equipment made specifically for safely transferring audio from the cylinders, the library is embarking on an ambitious preservation project: to digitize not just the Mapleson Cylinders, but roughly 2,500 others in the library’s possession.Mapleson’s diaries studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe machine will also allow the library to play a handful of broken Mapleson cylinders that nobody alive has ever heard. “I have no idea what they’re going to sound like, but the fact that they were shattered a long time ago saved them from being played too often,” said Jessica Wood, the library’s assistant curator for music and recorded sound. “It’s possible that the sound quality of those will let us hear something totally new from the earliest moments in recording history.”Some of the Mapleson Cylinders had already been in the library’s collection, but another batch was recently provided by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by another valuable resource: a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. One entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.“The consistent keeping of this diary is much more important than just for music,” said Bob Kosovsky, a librarian in the New York Public Library’s music division. “It’s such an amazing insight into life in New York and England, since he went back every summer to the family.”The library acquired the Endpoint machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring, as NPR reported then. “The Western music at that time was being recorded in the studios, so it’s very unique to have someone that was documenting what was actually going on there at the theater,” said Bergh, who developed the machine as part of his work in audio preservation.Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAlfred Mapleson soon reached out to the library about the diaries, and the collection of his great-grandfather’s cylinders that had, for years, awaited rediscovery in his mother’s Long Island basement. In November, they were packed into coolers and transported by climate-controlled truck to the library, where they’re now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes meant to mitigate the risk of future degradation. (On Long Island, they’d been kept in Tuborg Gold beer caddies.)These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”The wax cylinders comprise just one aspect of the library’s ongoing audiovisual archival projects. Its archives of magnetic tape were recently digitized thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And curators are in talks with Bergh about a new machine he’s developing that can play back wire recording, a midcentury format that captured audio on a thin steel wire. Wood estimated that about 32,000 lacquer discs — a predecessor to the vinyl record — at “very high risk of deterioration” are also in the digitization queue. These discs contain all types of audio, including radio excerpts, early jazz music and recordings made at amusement parks.The Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Libraries, in general, are very focused on books and paper formats,” Wood said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ve had to argue less hard for the importance of sound recordings, and that’s allowing us to get some more traction to invest resources in digitizing these.”Alfred Mapleson said he was simply happy to put his family inheritance to good use. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders had sat untouched in his mother’s basement ever since.“There’s an important obligation to history that needs to be maintained,” he said. “We don’t want them sitting in our possession, where they could get lost or damaged.” He waved off the possibility of selling them to a private collector, where they might find no public utility: “That’s not something that would sit well with my family.”His great-grandfather’s archives had offered him plenty to reflect on. His wife had gone through the diaries, he said, and pointed out the behavioral similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice — the one wishing a Merry Christmas — resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in repossessing the materials once the library had finished digitizing everything.“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.” More

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      Anita Pointer, Frequent Lead Singer of Famed Sister Act, Dies at 74

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      She was the lead vocalist on all three of the Pointer Sisters’ Top 40 hits in the group’s early years, and she helped define its pop sound in the 1980s.Anita Pointer, the sweet and occasionally sultry lead vocalist on many hits of her family band the Pointer Sisters in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Saturday at home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 74.The cause was cancer, her publicist, Roger Neal, said.The Pointer Sisters occupied a middle point in pop history between the doo-wop innocence of the Ronettes and the stilettoed girl power of Destiny’s Child.Anita’s voice had a lot to do with that. She sang with the speed and flavor of molasses. Though she commanded the virtuosity to trill prettily, she tended to sing too softly to sound overpowering. In “Slow Hand,” a love song with a soft-focus music video that reached No. 2 on the pop charts in 1981, Anita cooed.When she sang lead vocals, on that song and others, her sisters provided a melodic line on backup, and the women frequently harmonized, structuring their groovy ’70s sound along similar lines to a barbershop quartet.The group started with four Pointer Sisters — Anita, Ruth, Bonnie and June — and became a trio when Bonnie left to pursue a solo career in 1977. Anita sang lead on all three of the group’s Top 40 hits in its original incarnation, including the breakout hit, “Yes We Can Can,” from its debut album, “The Pointer Sisters” (1973). It reached No. 11 on the charts that year.The Pointer Sisters performing in 1973. From left, they are Ruth, Anita, Bonnie and June. Associated PressPerforming the song live, Anita sang through a toothy smile, with an earnest, imploring tone that might have been learned from hearing her father, a minister, preach.Some of the Pointer Sisters’ early music, such as “How Long (Betcha’ Got A Chick On The Side)” (1975), could be fast-paced and funky, but the antique aspect of the group’s sound was deliberate. The Pointer women performed wearing secondhand clothes that could have been worn to church in the 1940s — and they sometimes even sourced their wardrobe from their mother’s church friends.They won their first Grammy, unusually for a Black group of the time, in the best country vocal performance by a duo or group category, for the 1974 song “Fairytale,” written by Anita and Bonnie.Working outside her family band in 1986, Anita achieved a rare crossover hit in a duet with the country singer Earl Thomas Conley, “Too Many Times.” The two performed the song at an improbable venue for Mr. Conley: the R&B television show “Soul Train.”The Pointer Sisters charted a new course when Bonnie left the group. Its 1978 rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Fire,” which reached No. 2 on the charts, was transitional: old-fashioned honky-tonk piano lines, but with Anita as lead vocalist leaning into a huskier, sexier side of her low voice.By 1982, the group had arrived at a largely new style with “I’m So Excited.” On lead vocals, Anita sounded joyous belting out come-hither lyrics about “those pleasures in the night,” and the group came out with a racy music video to match. The song spent 40 weeks on the Hot 100 chart.Anita sang backup on other Pointer Sisters hits, with June in lead for “Jump (For My Love),” which won the duo or group pop performance Grammy in 1985, and Ruth led on “Automatic,” which won the vocal arrangement for two or more voices award at that year’s ceremony.“That’s something I would always hate to see — somebody trying to out-sing the other person,” Anita said in a discussion of her career posted on YouTube in 2015. “Everybody did their best. I never felt like we were competing onstage.”Anita Marie Pointer was born on Jan. 23, 1948, in Oakland, Calif. Her father, the Rev. Elton Pointer, and her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Silas Pointer, both ministered to a small congregation. The six Pointer children sang in choir throughout their childhoods, gaining vocal training that would help the girls harmonize when they formed their own group.Elton and Sarah came from Arkansas, and Anita fell in love with her grandparents’ home in the town of Prescott, where she attended fifth, seventh and 10th grades. She attended a racially segregated school, was forced to sit in the balcony of the movie theater and once picked cotton for money.She graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1965 and was hired as a legal secretary. In 1968, she saw Bonnie and June sing to a crowd in San Francisco. “I just lost it,” she told Collector’s Weekly in 2015. “I sat in that audience, and I cried, and I sang along. The next day, I quit my job. I said, ‘I’ve got to sing!’”The sisters soon became a backup group for musicians in the San Francisco area like Taj Mahal. Once, they were warned about upstaging a musical act they were supposed to be supporting. They began recording their own music.In addition to music, Anita amassed a notable collection of objects charting Black American history, including artifacts of slavery, segregation and racist caricature.“This reminds me that everybody don’t love you and that you have to prove them wrong,” Ms. Pointer told Collector’s Weekly. “You’re not a buffoon. The artists tried to depict Black people in an insulting way, but I think big lips and big booties are beautiful.”Ms. Pointer’s two marriages ended in divorce. Her daughter, Jada, from her first marriage, died of cancer in 2003. June died in 2006, and Bonnie died in 2020. Ms. Pointer is survived by her sister Ruth; her brothers, Aaron and Fritz; and a granddaughter.As she aged, Ms. Pointer never fell out of love with her old music, blasting it in her car and singing along. The band kept performing well into the 21st century.“It’s not a vulgar show, so you can bring your grandma and you can bring the kids,” Ms. Pointer told the French outlet Metro News in 2007. “They’re not going to get a corset in their face.” More

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      Review: The Met Opera Found an Audience for ‘Fedora.’ For Now.

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      Worries about the company’s future were momentarily stilled at a festive gala premiere on New Year’s Eve.The mood was festive, the audience large and enthusiastic, for the gala premiere on New Year’s Eve of a rare new production of Umberto Giordano’s lovably preposterous potboiler “Fedora” at the Metropolitan Opera.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva and the tenor Piotr Beczala, playing aristocrats locked in a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals, passionately loved and raged; the conductor Marco Armiliato and the Met’s orchestra brought restrained silkiness out of the pit; David McVicar’s staging was bustling and handsome. A good time was had by all.But I couldn’t quiet a tiny voice of dread in me. Not about the celebratory scene on Saturday evening, but about what it will be like when the Met tries to get its money’s worth out of the new production and revives it, with far less marketing and press coverage and quite possibly a less starry cast. Who will be in the audience for that “Fedora” in a season or two or three?The question has extra urgency after the coal that arrived in the Met’s stocking the day after Christmas, when the company announced that weak ticket sales and recalcitrant donors as the pandemic drags on would force it to raid its endowment to the tune of $30 million — a full tenth of the fund’s value — and to cut 10 percent of its planned performances next season.As a silver lining, the Met said at the same time that it would immediately expand its presentations of contemporary operas, which have been outselling some of the classics.Yoncheva plays a Russian princess in the late 19th century who swears vengeance after her fiancé is killed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in truth, what has been selling at the house is what gets promotional resources and media exposure: new productions, be they of brand-new pieces or 125-year-old ones like “Fedora.” Without that kind of publicity, attendance was particularly dire this fall for revivals of masterpieces that are hardly obscure but not quite “Aida,” like Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes” and Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” This could very well be the fate of “Fedora,” too, when it’s brought back.There is a real audience for the Met, as sold-out runs of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have proved. Just not so much for a pillar of opera-going: hearing repertory pieces as they evolve, year in and year out, with different casts. It is, sad to say, an ever-smaller group of people who care to see “La Traviata” subtly but unmistakably transform with each new Violetta — or “Fedora” with each new Fedora.That is why the 10 percent trim in performances for next season is a portent of what’s to come. The Met’s long-term future may well consist of seasons with significantly fewer performances of significantly fewer titles, and a greater proportion of new stagings to returning productions.That model, which would edge the Met closer to an annual event like the Salzburg Festival from its repertory-house tradition, may yield some strong artistic results. But the transition to it will involve a tumultuous rethinking of the company’s costs, and therefore its labor contracts, as well as fewer dismally selling revivals like this season’s “Idomeneo,” “Peter Grimes” and “Don Carlo” — all of which were excellent and all of which are integral to the Met’s responsibility to its art form.Even if this “Fedora” is never revived, we will at least have had a sensitive, spirited run of a work that last came to the Met in the 1996-97 season, when it was a vehicle for the great diva Mirella Freni’s full-production farewell to the company.“Fedora” is about as opera as opera gets. The title character (Yoncheva) is a Russian princess in the late 19th century who swears vengeance after her fiancé is shot to death. The plot, of course, thickens. It turns out that the killer, Count Loris Ipanov (Beczala), did not commit the crime for political reasons, as everyone assumed. (The dark specter here, as in Dosteovsky’s “Demons” and the Coen brothers’s “The Big Lebowski,” is nihilists.) No, Fedora’s man was making it with Loris’s wife, setting off a jealous gunfight; once that is revealed, enmity between princess and count turns to lust.This being a tear-jerker, their brief idyll is smashed when her prematurely sent letter of accusation inadvertently results in the death of Loris’s brother and mother, leading to his ferocious condemnation of Fedora and her overhasty suicide by the poison she keeps in a cross around her neck. (Don’t you?)The play on which this dead-serious farrago is based was written by Victorien Sardou, the reigning French master of theatrical sensation, who was also the source for Puccini’s “Tosca” around the same time. Giordano, Puccini and other Italian composers who came of age in the 1880s and ’90s have become known to posterity under the catchall “verismo,” a term which came to suggest a style of sumptuous orchestral complexity and moment-by-moment emotional responsiveness, with arias and other numbers that emerge and recede organically rather than formally — at least compared to Italian opera as it had been before — but with a melodic lushness that set them apart from Wagner.The gawkier sibling to its better-known predecessor, Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” “Fedora” is not a perfect piece. The roles other than Fedora and Loris are thoroughly unrewarding. The high spirits with which Giordano opens the second and third acts, for all-too-obvious contrast with the intense drama to come, drag on too long. There is an aria about Veuve Clicquot champagne, and an aria about bicycles, both thin.But for all its absurdity, the pairing of Fedora and Loris can catch fire with committed singers. It goes without saying that this can be an opportunity for wild-eyed scenery chewing. As fun as that can be, it is to Yoncheva, Beczala, Armiliato and McVicar’s credit that a sense of classiness and dignity prevailed on Saturday.Sometimes too much. For some of the opera Yoncheva seemed a bit, well, collected amid all the shattering revelations; nothing really seemed to faze her. And her high register tended to lack not volume but richness, so her climactic exclamations were less than harrowing.But she had far more vocal presence here than in her pale turn as Élisabeth in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” (in French) at the Met last season. Her dark-hued, resinous, trembling-vibrato soprano has an inherent morbidity, haunting in both Fedora’s longer lyrical lines and speech-like parlando. She is superbly articulate even in tiny moments: Near the end, she sees the tragedy that is unfolding and tells her friends, practically murmuring, “Andate, andate pure” (“Go, just go”).After audibly warming up through his brief aria “Amor ti vieta,” long beloved of tenors, Beczala sang with his usual stylish ardor. Among a sprawling cast, the robust baritone Lucas Meachem (as the diplomat De Siriex) and the bright soprano Rosa Feola (Countess Olga) did their best in bland supporting parts. Bryan Wagorn, a veteran of the Met’s music staff, had a turn as the Chopinesque pianist who plays at a party as Fedora and Loris confront one another.Armiliato’s conducting was notable for bringing out the score’s dynamic range; much of this orchestral performance was subtle and delicate, rather than the blaring blood-and-guts that is still the verismo stereotype.This is somehow McVicar’s 13th Met production since 2009, and its main concept is a straightforward logistical one: Each of the three acts — the plot moves from St. Petersburg to Paris to the Swiss Alps — expands the grand, airy set (by Charles Edwards) a chunk further upstage. As in McVicar’s staging of another verismo-era work, Francesco Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve four years ago, there is a suggestion of the blending of domestic and theatrical spaces. His most idiosyncratic interpolation here is the pale figure of Fedora’s murdered fiancé, who wanders around haunting her; whatever.The color scheme of the costumes (by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), largely black and white, unfortunately restricts what should be a smashing palette range for Fedora’s gowns, though Yoncheva looked splendid in the cinched-waist, heavy-bustle cuts.In the first act, she wears a dramatic raven-color dress, with a many-diamonded tiara. Diva entrances rarely get the old-fashioned reception at the Met these days, so to hear the audience erupt in applause as she first came on was delightful enough to momentarily still that tiny voice of dread in my head about the company’s future. At least for the couple of seconds it took for her to stride across the stage, cool and confident, basking in the ovation, it was New Year’s Eve, it was one of those works that warms any true opera lover’s heart, and all was right with the world.FedoraThrough Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Year-End Listener Mailbag: Your 2022 Questions, Part 2

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicEach year, oodles of questions pour in from the Popcast faithful, and each year, the pop music staff of The New York Times tackles them with gusto.In part one of our mailbag, we answered questions about Taylor Swift and female pop aspirants. On this Popcast, heated conversation about nontraditional country music breakthroughs and the inevitability of the Morgan Wallen comeback, the state of music video, a possible Ethel Cain-SZA connection and more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      New Year’s Eve D.J.s Haven’t Been This Busy Since 2019

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      For the first time in years, New Year’s Eve parties are back in full swing, despite a possible equipment shortage and a tripledemic.Since October, Rashad Hayes, a D.J. from Brooklyn who prides himself on spinning, in his words, “every genre,” has fielded 12 offers to work on New Year’s Eve in New York City — triple what he was offered in 2019. So he did what any other enterprising artist who is suddenly in demand after surviving two years of Covid slowdowns and cancellations (and willing to work on New Year’s Eve) might do: He packed three sets in, at three different venues in Manhattan.“I would say if you’re not D.J.ing on New Year’s Eve in New York City, you probably need to get another profession if you’re a D.J.,” Mr. Hayes said. “There’s so many parties.”Although the pandemic and inflation continue to make socializing in big groups impossible for many New Yorkers, several leaders in the nightlife industry have expressed optimism about the demand for New Year’s Eve parties — and what this could possibly mean for the rest of the winter. Venue owners and event management companies say ticket sales are at least meeting those from 2019, and agencies that book D.J.s say requests have skyrocketed.This weekend, Sameer Qureshi, who co-founded the hospitality company El Grupo SN, will finally get to throw the two-floor New Year’s Eve party at Somewhere Nowhere, the dreamy nightclub atop the Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel, that he had planned to throw last year — until Omicron, the fast-spreading variant that announced itself in time for the 2021 holidays, stymied his plans.Last week, he walked through the hotel’s 38th floor, an Eden-like setting that Prince would have approved of had the musician favored forest green — the color of the plush European couches in the room — over purple. There was a cluster of disco balls on the ceiling, along with a sparkling dove-like creature and fabricated clouds hanging throughout. Flowers spilled from the D.J. booth and floral scents wafted through the vents.It was the only floor he could use for New Year’s Eve 2021. At the time, 80 percent of his staff had come down with Covid, and he was wondering if holding an event even made sense at that point.But this New Year’s Eve, the party in the sparkly pleasure dome on the 38th floor will expand to include the 39th floor, which has another lounge area and a rooftop that features heated tents. From there, guests have a clear view of One World Trade Center and Times Square, a potential draw for tourists, who have also returned to the city.“It’s the first year it’s probably going to be normal, you know, after so long,” Mr. Qureshi said.Madison Back, the chief executive of 4AM, a talent management and events company, said she had three times as many booking requests this year, compared to before the pandemic.Although New Year’s Eve is not the biggest event on some planners’ calendars — that could be Halloween or Pride Month — the night is inarguably a massive moneymaker for those involved. Ticket prices for clubs and lounges are often marked up to at least $100.Martin Muñiz Jr., known as D.J. Marty Rock, has two gigs lined up for New Year’s weekend. OK McCausland for The New York TimesMartin Muñiz Jr., a Bronx native who performs as Marty Rock, locked in a gig 200 miles north of New York City in Saratoga Springs four months ago, the earliest he had ever been booked for New Year’s Eve.But then this fall, more requests poured in, Mr. Muñiz said. In the end, he was able to book an additional job for the holiday weekend; on New Year’s Day, he will rush back to Manhattan to do a set at Bounce Sporting Club in Chelsea. “There’s a lot of venues and a lot of G.M.s looking for a lot of people, last minute,” he said.Some believe that the last-minute demand stems from party organizers hedging their bets, especially after the suddenness with which Omicron’s surge ended the hopes of a near-normal Dec. 31 in 2021. This year, there is the tripledemic of Covid, R.S.V. and influenza to worry about; in December, Mayor Eric Adams recommended that New Yorkers use masks again. The New York State Department of Health warned people to stay vigilant, too: “With New Year’s Eve celebration gatherings around the corner, it is important New Yorkers take precautions to protect against the flu,” it said in a statement.Ms. Back, of 4AM, said that at least for this holiday season, there is room for New Yorkers who want to take the risk and for those who are not quite ready.“I think other people have completely moved on and they’re doubling down and saying, ‘People want to party, people want to go out, we are going to invest in making New Year’s amazing and really promote it and sell our venue out,’” she said. “I think for others, they maybe fall into more of that casual category, and there’s a little bit more uncertainty there. They might be taking a wait-and-see approach to see how this goes.”For those organizing parties, equipment is also in high demand, especially at the last minute. Mixers, speakers and controllers — which are to turntables as laptops are to desktops — from brands like Pioneer DJ have been on back order for months. (A representative for Pioneer DJ said in an email that the company, reeling from pandemic-related supply chain issues, might not catch up with those back orders until well into next year.)“I’ve seen like a shortage of new equipment,” Mr. Muniz said. “Like a mixer drops, sold out. There would be a shortage of that. But a shortage of all equipment? I’ve never seen that.”For now, the D.J.s who are just starting out or who are playing private parties are more likely to be the most affected by the shortage.Venue owners and event management companies say ticket sales for New Year’s Eve are at least meeting those from 2019, and agencies that book D.J.s say requests have skyrocketed.OK McCausland for The New York TimesPlanners for bigger events often start plotting out New Year’s Eve by late summer, which allows some leeway for production delays and gives them a better shot at securing equipment and booking top-flight D.J.s. For George Karavias, the chief executive of Dream Hospitality Group, which owns nightclubs and runs events for several others all over the city, the equipment shortage has not been an issue.“It’s all about planning ahead,” he said. “You know, if you’re a promoter that books an event a week before New Year’s Eve trying to book a D.J., yes, you’re going to have issues because every D.J. is booked. And, you know, big or small or whatever name it is, New Year’s Eve is New Year’s Eve.”The first weeks in January typically slow down for nightlife as tourists leave, the glow of the holiday season fades and the chill of winter spreads. While it is difficult to definitively call the New Year’s Eve turnout a forecaster of what’s to come for the party scene, some of the outside factors that pushed people to celebrate may continue to be a barometer in 2023.“I think it’s just going to be a function of how the economy holds up,” Mr. Qureshi said. “How people are feeling, if they’re still spending, if they’re still craving the experiences after being locked down for as long as they were. And we’ll see what happens.” More

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      Woman Accuses Steven Tyler of Sexually Assaulting Her in the 1970s

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      In a lawsuit filed under California’s Child Victims Act, the woman says she met the Aerosmith frontman when she was 16.Steven Tyler, the frontman of the rock band Aerosmith, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing a woman in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was in his mid-20s.In the lawsuit, the woman, Julia Misley, accuses Mr. Tyler of using his status and power as a famous rock star to “groom, manipulate, exploit” and “sexually assault” her over the course of three years. She has previously discussed her relationship with Mr. Tyler, writing online that she met him at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Ore., in 1973, shortly after her 16th birthday.The lawsuit, earlier reported by Rolling Stone, was filed this week under the California Child Victims Act, which temporarily lifted the statute of limitations so people who said they were sexually abused as children could file civil cases. The three-year period to file a complaint ends on Saturday.Mr. Tyler is referred to in the lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, as “Defendant Doe 1.” Lawyers and representatives who have worked for him did not respond to requests for comment.In Mr. Tyler’s memoir “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” he writes about a time he was so in love that he “almost took a teen bride,” describing sexual encounters with her in planes and elevators. He also describes an apartment fire that sent his unnamed lover to a hospital with smoke inhalation; Ms. Misley recounts a similar experience in her writings and her lawsuit.Ms. Misley, who is now 65 and previously went by the name Julia Holcomb, also appears in the book’s acknowledgments.She said in a statement on Friday that she was spurred to take legal action by the change in California law and that she was grateful for the new opportunity to be heard.“I want this action to expose an industry that protects celebrity offenders, to cleanse and hold accountable an industry that both exploited and allowed me to be exploited for years,” she wrote, citing Mr. Tyler by name.Her lawsuit alleges that in 1973 a “leading member of a world-famous rock band” who was 25 years old took Ms. Misley to his hotel room after a concert in Portland and “performed various acts of criminal sexual conduct.” According to the lawsuit, the singer then bought Ms. Misley a plane ticket for a concert in Seattle because she was a minor and could not travel with him across state lines.The lawsuit says the musician eventually persuaded her mother to let him become her legal guardian, so that, among other things, he could enroll her in school and provide her with better medical care. It then alleges that he “did not meaningfully follow through on these promises and instead continued to travel with, assault and provide alcohol and drugs” to Ms. Misley.In his memoir, Mr. Tyler says he gained custody of the person who nearly became his “teen bride.” “Her parents fell in love with me, signed papers over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state,” he writes. “I took her on tour.”According to the suit, Ms. Misley eventually became pregnant by the singer and was coerced by him to have an abortion.In her public writings, Ms. Misley described a turbulent upbringing before she was ensnared by a world of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll under Mr. Tyler’s stewardship. She later left him and married, becoming a mother of seven children.Alain Delaquérière More

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      These Young Musicians Made an Album. Now It’s Nominated for a Grammy.

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      The debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, featuring some players who were in middle school, is up against recordings by some of the world’s top orchestras.When the Grammy nominations for best orchestral performance were announced last month, several of the usual suspects made the cut. There was the august Berlin Philharmonic, for an album conducted by the composer John Williams, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of its maestro, Gustavo Dudamel.But a newcomer also got a nod: the debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, a prestigious musical program for musicians between the ages of 12 and 22.The news that the ensemble’s album had earned a Grammy nomination astonished some of its young players.“I jumped in the air and I screamed, like I have never screamed before,” said Isabella Marquez, 18, who played violin on the album and watched a livestream of the Grammy nominations announcement in the kitchen of her Manhattan apartment with her mother and grandmother.“I never thought that I would be on an album, much less a Grammy-nominated album,” said Marquez.Clockwise from top left: Kennedy Plains, 22, a bassoonist, Joshua Choi, 18, a clarinetist and Iris Sung, 17, a violinist, who all played on the album, and Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who played with the ensemble last month at a concert at Carnegie Hall.The recording might never have happened had it not been for the pandemic. When live performance was halted in 2020, and a Carnegie Hall concert was canceled, the ensemble decided to try to make an album instead.After the police murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests that spread throughout the nation that summer, the orchestra decided to rehearse and record works by Black composers, and selected pieces by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery and Valerie Coleman. “We need to promote music that deals with these issues,” the orchestra’s music director, Michael Repper, said in an interview.The album, which is untitled, came together after six weeks of remote instruction followed by in person socially distant rehearsals and four days of recording sessions in which the musicians recorded the sections of the orchestra separately — all without a single Covid-19 infection, Repper noted. It was produced by Judith Sherman, a 13-time Grammy winner, who is nominated as classical producer of the year.Many of the young players were proud to have simply recorded an album during the pandemic. They were stunned when it was recognized by the Grammys, amid such illustrious competition — orchestras many of them have long revered.Joshua Choi, an 18-year-old principal clarinetist in the youth program, said he listened to the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Andreas Ottensamer, whenever he needed motivation.After learning of the Grammy nomination, he couldn’t find the words to tell his parents, and stared in shock at his roommate, who plays oboe in the youth symphony, Choi said.“That’s pretty mind blowing,” Choi said. “I still can’t process that.”Michael Repper, the orchestra’s music director, during a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall.Todd Midler for The New York TimesIris Sung, the orchestra’s 17-year-old concertmaster, said she was in class at Tenafly High School in New Jersey when the nomination was announced. After her mother broke the news on her way home from school, she shared the nomination on Instagram, and as her phone flooded with congratulatory messages she thought back to recording it “in such a strange time.”“Just knowing that all that had paid off, I think was just something so special to me,” Sung said.The album features music by Price, including “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” and her Piano Concerto in One Movement, featuring the pianist Michelle Cann; “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” by Coleman; and “Soul Force,” by Montgomery.Montgomery, 40, a composer whose works have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra, and who is now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence, played violin with the New York Youth Symphony as a teenager.“It was the first time I had ever played youth symphonies, really, and it was a really important moment in my education,” Montgomery said. “That was my gateway into orchestral music.”For this recording, she held a video call with the young players, where she answered their questions on articulation and dynamics.When she was young, Montgomery said, orchestras rarely played music by Black composers. She said it was comforting to see that change.When the orchestra was unable to play one of its regular concerts at Carnegie Hall during the pandemic, it decided to make a recording. Todd Midler for The New York Times“Young people in the world right now are coming up in music at a time where Black art is centralized, and I think that is a very positive thing from the perspective of a young person,” Montgomery said.Kennedy Plains, a 22-year-old bassoonist and former member of the Youth Symphony, said that she was glad that ensembles were playing music by a more diverse roster of composers, and that she had appreciated the chance to work with Montgomery on a video call.“I hadn’t really got to play works by a lot of composers of color before,” Plains said, who learned to play the bassoon in middle school.Jessica Jeon, 14, a violinist, said that after learning of Price through the youth program, she gave a presentation about her to her seventh grade civil and human rights class.Price, who became the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra in 1933 when the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E Minor, has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, along with other composers of color.“They didn’t have the chance to become super well known such as Mozart or Beethoven because of their race or their gender or their sexuality,” said Jeon, who was 12 when the album was recorded. “Because of that, I felt inspired to try to introduce more people to them.”When the youth symphony returned to Carnegie Hall last month, it played with Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who had fled after the Russian invasion.Repper, who will pass his music director role to Andrew Jinhong Kim in the 2023-2024 season, said that he hopes the album inspires more orchestras to play and record music by Black composers.“Orchestras don’t deserve any extra credit at this point for performing works by Black composers,” he said. “They don’t deserve any extra credit for performing works by women. It’s something that should have been done for decades.”The Grammy Awards will be presented on Feb. 5 in Los Angeles. More

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      The History Behind the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert

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      A global event today, the orchestra’s annual New Year’s Concert took shape during dark days in Austrian history.If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.In the 19th century, the repertoire of today’s New Year’s Concert was part of a diverse concert business in the many entertainment venues that existed in almost every district of Vienna, including open-air stages. On weekends, this mixture of Viennese popular music, including swinging waltzes, wild polkas and military marches, enthused thousands of visitors, often as many as 10,000.Gerald Heidegger, the editor in chief of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s online services, rightly said in the series “Straussmania” on Topos, produced with the Vienna Institute of Contemporary and Cultural History: “Our image of the Biedermeier era is slightly distorted. It is not completely true that the era of the authoritarian state of Chancellor Metternich only led us to retreat into a private sphere, when one considers the music played in public.”This kind of popular music was revolutionary in terms of its exuberance and the physical proximity encouraged by new forms of dance, and it accompanied Vienna’s booming development into one of the world’s largest cities in the rapid globalization during the years leading up to World War I. Today, in another era of fast-moving developments in technology and politics, the music has not lost any of its emotional impact; people still seem to seek joyful distractions.The ostensible lightness of the countless waltzes, polkas and marches, however, hides a technique that challenges the musicians. Crucial to pulling it off is a nonverbal rapport between the orchestra and the conductor — another characteristic quality of the New Year’s Concert. And the selection of the repertoire requires an exciting dramaturgy in the combination of familiar and unknown pieces. This year, Welser-Möst has dedicated some 70 percent of the program to new works.In the 19th century, the Strauss bands were very much competitors of the Philharmonic, which as the Vienna State Opera orchestra thrilled audiences in the Court Opera Theater while having to play for additional income as the private company known as the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor Ernst Theis has researched the early interactions between these orchestras and noted that Eduard Strauss gave a New Year’s concert with a 60-person orchestra as early as Jan. 1, 1871, playing not only waltzes and polkas, but also lieder and opera excerpts.A report from 1872 shows, however, that many members of the Philharmonic thought the Strauss clan and their music “harmed the reputation of the Philharmonic concerts.” Still, in 1894, the Philharmonic played at the celebrations marking Johann Strauss II’s 50 years in the business, and a few months before his death in 1899, he conducted the Court Opera orchestra during the performance of his “Die Fledermaus” for the first and last time, the final success of a remarkable career.The conductor Clemens Krauss used relationships with Nazi leaders to further his career in Germany before returning to Austria, where he led the Vienna Philharmonic in an annual “Johann Strauss concert.”Imagno/Getty ImagesThis ambivalence toward the Strauss family would change after World War I. From 1927 onward, the conductor Clemens Krauss in particular repeatedly chose to perform pieces from the Strauss repertoire, including at the Salzburg Festival. It was only in 1934, when he succumbed to the temptations of the Nazi regime and abruptly left Vienna for Berlin, that the Philharmonic’s infatuation with Strauss ended.After the Anschluss in 1938, Krauss returned to Austria and revived the tradition of “Johann Strauss concerts” (a reference to both father and son). The musician Clemens Hellsberg, writing in 1992, and the historian Fritz Trümpi, in 2011, have emphasized Krauss’s role as the initiator of the “Johann Strauss concert” — then termed an “Extraordinary Concert” — as the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940. The proceeds went to the National Socialist wartime winter relief fund.Krauss soon developed the next important pillar of the New Year’s Concert on its way to becoming a global music event: radio broadcasts throughout the German Reich. In November 1940, a contract with the Reich Radio Corporation established that there would be “four Philharmonic Academies in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna played for Greater German Radio” — on Dec. 13, 1940, and Jan. 1 (a “Johann Strauss concert”), Jan. 25 and March 15, 1941 — conducted by Krauss.Without any intervention by Nazi potentates, the refreshing and emotionally uplifting “waltzing bliss” was a perfect fit with National Socialist propaganda, in particular its broadcasting policy — as were Mozart and Lehár. The program notes for the first of these series performed in Vienna not only stressed the intended mass impact of the contribution to “German music,” but also included ideological emphasis on the early history of waltz compositions in “suburban inns” as an “expression of the East Bavarian tribe that stood here on advance border watch,” which was, of course, a complete distortion and misinterpretation of the cultural developments in Vienna during the Biedermeier period.Joseph Goebbels, third from left, with the opera singer Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, left, the actor Paul Hartmann; the singer Jan Kiepura; the actor Gustaf Gründgens; the Nazi official Walther Funk; and Mr. Krauss, right, at a party in 1935.Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesThe politicization of the music of the Strauss family and their milieu was taken to extremes when the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels even had the composer’s partly Jewish descent covered up by falsifying the baptismal registers in Vienna. Incidentally, this act was accompanied by a diary entry in which Goebbels revealed the sheer absurdity of his antisemitic beliefs:Some clever so-and-so has discovered that Joh. Strauss is an eighth Jewish. I forbid this from being made public. For firstly, it isn’t proven, and secondly, I do not want to have German cultural heritage in its entirety gradually undermined in this manner. In the end we will be left with only Widukind, Heinrich the Lion and Rosenberg. That’s not a lot. Mussolini goes about things much more cleverly here. He occupies the entire history of Rome from the earliest days of Antiquity for himself. We are just parvenus in comparison. I’m doing what I can about it. That is also the Führer’s will.The selling point the New Year’s Concert enjoys today as a global event applied neither during World War II nor in the years that followed; it remained limited to Germany and, after the war, Austria. The former Johann Strauss concert was firmly a tradition, and Josef Krips, who conducted the Jan. 1, 1946, concert — the first to be billed as a New Year’s Concert — noted succinctly: “I began 1946 with the first New Year’s Concert in peacetime.”Krips, stigmatized by the Nazis as a half-Jewish conductor, clearly had no problem with the continuation of the concert, whose last performance had taken place when the mood was apocalyptic. The New Year’s Concert lived on as solely Austrian cultural heritage — with Krauss as conductor until 1954, followed by Willi Boskovsky, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, until 1979.The violinist Willi Boskovsky conducting the New Year’s Concert in 1977.KPA/United Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1959, the New Year’s Concert began to develop into an international event with its first television broadcast. The first color broadcast took place a decade later; the first overseas one, in 1972. And since 1980, the New Year’s Concert has been led by alternating, international conductors — a move that reflected its global interest.But the formative phase of the New Year’s Concert — the Nazi era — went unexamined in Austria and abroad until the past decade. Today, those years are extensively documented on the Philharmonic’s website. International music history in particular can make an important contribution to a critical assessment of Austria’s role in National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.In 2013, for instance, after much preliminary work, Clemens Hellsberg, then the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, initiated a critical documentary on the orchestra and commissioned a comprehensive study by a team of historians — including me — on members of the orchestra who were persecuted, murdered or forced into exile. This was followed in 2014 by the international conference “The Arts of Vienna: A Proud History, A Painful Past.”Those artists whose lives were sidelined by the Third Reich will be memorialized with stones, placed at the sites where they last lived, that Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, will present to the public on March 23. In 2023, then, the orchestra aims to broadcast not just a rich tradition, but also a message of peace.Oliver Rathkolb is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna in Austria, and the chairman of the Vienna Institute for Cultural and Contemporary History and the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels.Lydia Rathkolb contributed research. More