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      For Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a Detour From Classical Is Business as Usual

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      Jean-Yves Thibaudet is playing Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” this week. But before, he debuted a night of jazz standards with Michael Feinstein.PALM DESERT, Calif. — “Jean-Yves, when did you start playing the piano?” Michael Feinstein asked from the stage of the McCallum Theater here on a recent Friday night.“I started when I was 5 years old,” said the star pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, whose instrument was interlocked with Feinstein’s for their cabaret-style show, “Two Pianos: Who Could Ask for Anything More?”“Oh, me too,” Feinstein responded.“We both took a different path with our approach to the piano,” Thibaudet continued, reading from an iPad on his music stand. “I studied classical music——”“And I,” Feinstein said, facing the audience, “studied nothing.”There was laughter throughout the auditorium, while onstage, Thibaudet looked tickled. Speaking during a concert, beyond introducing an encore, was new for him. But he was warming up to it quickly.Even if he was dipping into the unfamiliar on that first of many “Two Pianos” performances to come (including next season at Carnegie Hall), that’s business as usual for Thibaudet, 61, an artist who has, unusually for a classical musician, made a career of doing whatever he wants.Feinstein, left, and Thibaudet preparing for the debut of “Two Pianos” in California. The show will travel to Carnegie Hall in December.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesBrazenly himself — openly gay before many of his colleagues, abandoning traditional concert attire for couture — he has long been an eminent interpreter of classical music, but also a prolific collaborator and a soloist on movie soundtracks like Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch.” Through it all his tastes have been eclectic; he’s as likely to take on lieder as he is the Great American Songbook and the jazz of Bill Evans. Characteristically, he is following “Two Pianos” with something like its opposite: Messiaen’s thorny, monumental “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” with the New York Philharmonic, beginning on Friday.“There are soloists who only play one or two concertos a season,” Thibaudet said during one of three interviews. “I couldn’t do that. I would stop practicing. I always want to try things.”THIBAUDET WAS BORN in Lyon, France, in an environment he described as “fortunate.” His parents were music lovers who supported him through the conservatory system — including studies at the storied Conservatoire de Paris — and didn’t make much of his coming out.At school, he learned a Mozart sonata, but would also experiment with something else if it interested him. That open-mindedness is reflected in his 2021 album “Carte Blanche,” which starts with a new suite from the “Pride and Prejudice” soundtrack and continues with works from the Baroque period through the 20th century. The recording’s program, Thibaudet said, was “like going to a restaurant and having all your favorite dishes in one meal — with a lot of desserts.”Such a broad scope, and a willingness to give almost anything a chance, is essential to Thibaudet’s artistry. “Obviously if I don’t like it I won’t do it again, but I at least tried it,” he said. “My life has been so enriched by all that. Your brain is like a computer — you’re constantly feeding it. So if I play some jazz and then some Chopin, the jazz gives the Chopin a certain freedom and relaxation.”Relaxation, yes, but Thibaudet is also a proud Virgo whose lack of tension in performance would be impossible without a perfectionist’s rigor. “He is an exquisitely gifted technician,” Feinstein said. “And yet it is always the overarching intelligence behind an interpretation that makes his playing for me so special. He understands how to make any kind of music living and breathing, and never clinical.”Thibaudet won competitions as a teenager, and early in his 20s signed a recording contract with Decca. Young artists often face pressure from varied competing interests: managers, administrators, label executives. Even then, though, Thibaudet insisted on making critical decisions himself.“Two Pianos” consists largely of new arrangements, by Tedd Firth, of music by Gershwin and his contemporaries.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesDuring rehearsals, both Feinstein, left, and Thibaudet have been nudged out of their comfort zones.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesEarlier in his career, Thibaudet faced criticism for his unconventional fashion choices on the concert stage.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesHe didn’t want his first concerto recording with Decca to be of French music — “It’s not your passport that makes your repertoire,” he said — so, he programmed Liszt. He traveled with his partner at the time, and declined dinner invitations abroad, no matter how prominent the company, if he couldn’t bring him. “I was thinking,” Thibaudet recalled, “if I had a wife, of course they would invite her.”Hiccups like that, though, were rare, and overall, Thibaudet said, being open about his sexuality has made him a happy, open person. Perhaps more remarked upon, back then, was Thibaudet’s fashion. “I decided more than 35 years ago that I was not going to wear tails,” he said. “That was a battle.”Thibaudet’s clothing collection — rivaled only by those of his fine wines and Champagnes — is rich with museum-quality pieces. He had a fruitful relationship with Gianni Versace, and an especially prolific one with Vivienne Westwood before her recent death. For many years, though, writers often couldn’t resist a disapproving comment about his outfits.That cooled over time. There was one critic — Thibaudet wouldn’t name names, saying only that the newspaper was from a major city — who, after reviewing his concerts for more than two decades, wrote something along the lines of: At the end of the day, if you’re playing so well, you can wear whatever you want. “And I was like, there you go,” Thibaudet said. “It took you 25 years. Finally.”ANOTHER PILLAR of Thibaudet’s career has been collaboration. In film, one partner has been Dario Marianelli, who featured him on his Academy Award-winning soundtrack for Joe Wright’s “Atonement” in 2007. More famous is their work together on Wright’s adaptation, two years earlier, of “Pride and Prejudice,” which opens with an elegant piano solo redolent of the Classical era, “Dawn.”“All over the world people know that score,” Thibaudet said. “Then they go to hear Chopin or Debussy, and they tell me, ‘This is my first classical concert.’ I could play ‘Turangalîla,’ but they still come. It’s great.”Some of Thibaudet’s most treasured partnerships have been with singers. “The human voice produces something that you cannot do with any instrument,” he said. “It touches your soul.”He has recorded with Renée Fleming, the superstar soprano, with whom he became fast friends in the 1990s. She recalled that when she bought an apartment in Paris, he offered to take her to Ikea to help her furnish it; what she didn’t know until he pulled up was that he drove a Maserati with no trunk.“Jean-Yves is an ideal collaborator,” Fleming said. “He has tremendous personality and charm, both on and offstage, that he brings to the music, but he’s also extremely flexible and sensitive.”Sensitive, but unwilling, she added, to “put something before the public unless it is prepared to the very highest standard.” That much has been evident in his project with Feinstein, the reigning, de facto keeper of the Great American Songbook. Thibaudet and Feinstein already knew each other’s work when they met a couple of decades ago as neighbors in Los Angeles. What started as dinner-party fun — Richard Rodgers waltzes at the piano, and some improvisation — became a formal program inspired by their mutual love for Gershwin and his contemporaries.“Two Pianos” started as dinner-party fun before Thibaudet and Feinstein assembled a formal program inspired by their mutual love for Gershwin and his contemporariesRoger Kisby for The New York TimesFeinstein already knew Thibaudet’s work when the two met a couple of decades ago as neighbors in Los Angeles.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesAs a model they also looked to Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli’s classical-meets-jazz collaborations, Feinstein said, in which Menuhin’s parts were precisely notated while Grappelli’s left room for improvisation. To pull off something similar with two pianos, Feinstein turned to his music director, Tedd Firth, who wrote most of the arrangements.“I really wanted to focus on what they do best,” Firth said, adding, “I didn’t want to make Jean-Yves into a jazz player or Michael into a classical player, or water down either to create a neutral territory.”The result is a fantasia-like program of Lisztian virtuosity. Firth’s arrangements have orchestral heft, with the melodies of each piece flowing freely between the two pianos. Sometimes Feinstein sings; sometimes Thibaudet plays alone; always, the music has the energy and showiness of an encore.They rehearsed in Los Angeles before the McCallum Theater shows, putting in the hours of a full-time job in the days leading up to the premiere. During one of those sessions, Thibaudet behaved for a moment like a fan: He just wanted to hear Feinstein sing “Pure Imagination,” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” When the two fell out of sync during a Gershwin medley, Thibaudet said to follow the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” because at roughly 120 beats per minute, it was nearly the same tempo. (“My whole life is in that piece,” he added.)By the sound check on opening night, both artists had been visibly nudged out of their comfort zones. But once the show started and the audience heard a familiar melody from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the auditorium resounded with applause. “That was the greatest gift that either of us could have,” Feinstein said. “It showed how excited they were to hear this music.” Feeling the energy of the house, Thibaudet said, he became “dangerously comfortable” with speaking onstage — even more so at the more assured performance the following night.“Two Pianos” seemingly has a long life ahead of it, with dates still being booked at least two seasons ahead. An orchestrated version will play this summer with the Boston Pops at Tanglewood, the Cleveland Orchestra at its Blossom Music Festival and elsewhere. But before that, its two stars will continue with their separate careers. Feinstein has a Judy Garland celebration at Zankel Hall in New York later this month. And Thibaudet, of course, has “Turangalîla.”“Maybe I need a week to readjust, but this is me,” Thibaudet said, adding with a giggle, “It’s perfectly normal for me.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Outtake, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear songs from Alison Goldfrapp, 100 gecs, Luke Combs and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Starting next week, Lindsay Zoladz will be writing a new newsletter devoted to music discovery. Sign up below!Taylor Swift, ‘All of the Girls You Loved Before’Here’s Taylor Swift at her most forgiving. Of course her guy has a past, and so does she, but she’s willing to consider that a learning experience. “Every woman you know brought you here,” she reasons. “All the Girls You Loved Before” — no relation to a similarly titled Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias hit — have just “made you the one I’ve fallen for.” The previously unreleased track from her “Lover” era is one of four songs, the rest re-recordings, Swift put out on Friday ahead of the start of her Eras Tour. Its easy-rolling beat and doo-wop chord progression underline the eternal cycle of falling in and out of love before finding The One. JON PARELESFeist, ‘Borrowed Trouble’Leslie Feist makes boisterous, joyful noise on “Borrow Trouble,” the latest single from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Atop a bed of echoing, droning strings that recall, unexpectedly, the John Cale era of the Velvet Underground, the Canadian singer-songwriter bemoans the entrenched anxiety that follows from day to day: “Even before your eyes are open,” she sings, “the plot has thickened ’round your fear.” In the song’s final minute she finds potent catharsis, flinging her cares to the wind as she lets loose some primal screams: “Trouble!” LINDSAY ZOLADZAlison Goldfrapp, ‘So Hard So Hot’On May 12, Alison Goldfrapp — the longtime voice of the beloved electro-pop duo Goldfrapp — will release her first solo album, “The Love Invention.” Its debut single, “So Hard So Hot,” is a blissed-out dance floor reverie, as shimmery synths and Goldfrapp’s breathy vocals drift over a thumping beat. “Don’t know why, don’t know why, don’t know why we love this way,” she sings, before deciding the best course is not to ask too many questions but simply lose herself in the rapture of the groove. ZOLADZTiwa Savage, Ayra Starr and Young Jonn, ‘Stamina’Here’s a friendly challenge to men: “You gonna need more stamina,” the Nigerian songwriters Tiwa Savage and Ayra Starr declare. In the programmed, crisply percussive track, shared with the male voice of Young Jonn, they sing about ecstasy enabled by permission: deeply carnal but ethical. PARELES100 gecs, ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’“10,000 gecs,” the long-awaited major-label debut from the hyperpop hellions 100 gecs, opens with a pretty hilarious sonic joke: a sample of the nostalgic and evocative THX Deep Note, as if to say, 100 gecs: Now in Glistening Hi-Fi. Even with a bigger budget, though, a scrappy, anarchic spirit and the duo’s unpredictable sense of humor course throughout the exhilarating album, which features a dark, snaking ditty sung from the perspective of a serial killer and a song that sounds like Less Than Jake covering Crazy Frog. The crunching, Godzilla-sized riffs and absurdist one-liners (“put emojis on my grave”) of the first track, “Dumbest Girl Alive,” set the scene for the album’s loving embrace of alternative rock while slyly shooting a confetti cannon at the haters: “I’m smarter than I look,” Laura Les sings, in a cadence that’s almost cartoonishly melodic. “I’m the dumbest girl alive.” ZOLADZMatthew Herbert featuring Theon Cross, ‘The Horse Has a Voice’The composer and producer Matthew Herbert often constructs his music around a set of found sounds — industrial, animal, human, urban. His album due in May, “The Horse,” uses instruments made from a horse’s skeleton and hair, along with the London Contemporary Orchestra, jazz musicians and sampled horse sounds. “The Horse Has a Voice” features Herbert playing a flute made from a thigh bone, the orchestra and the tuba player Theon Cross. It’s a fast (around 151 beats per minute), steady-thumping stomp, with handclaps, a huffing thighbone-flute riff, gusts and flurries from the orchestra and leaping, scurrying tuba improvisations — frantic and relentless, high-tech and primitive. PARELESPieta Brown and JT Bates, ‘Thing or 2’“Thing or 2” drifts in and out of formlessness. Pieta Brown — the daughter of the longtime Iowan folk songwriter Greg Brown — sings about love and trust over the producer JT Bates’s edgeless electronic chords and sputtering 6/4 beats. “In my heart you sing clear and bright/It makes me feel like things will be all right,” she intones, convincing both herself and anyone listening. PARELESLuke Combs, ‘5 Leaf Clover’The country star Luke Combs perfects the humblebrag in “5 Leaf Clover.” It’s a sturdy waltz that exults in a good life: hometown, partner, friends, a truck in the driveway, healthy parents and “a fridge full of cold beer,” not to mention a tail-wagging dog. The track is grounded in country, complete with fiddle fills, but it’s also pointed toward a wide pop audience. PARELESEsther Rose featuring Hurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Safe to Run’“How does it feel to blow a kiss to the wind?” the singer-songwriter Esther Rose wonders on “Safe to Run,” a poignant country-folk song with a wandering spirit. Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff harmonizes with Rose on the chorus, on which the pair dispense some bittersweet wisdom: “You know there’s no place safe to run/Angels surround everyone.” ZOLADZ More

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      In ‘Songs of Surrender’, U2 Revisits Its Past

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      With “Songs of Surrender,” an album of 40 reimagined songs, and “A Sort of Homecoming,” a documentary on Disney+, the Irish band pauses to reflect.For decades, U2 refused to rest on its catalog. A rarity among bands for having kept the same lineup since its formation in 1976 — Bono on lead vocals, the Edge on guitar and keyboards, Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen Jr. on drums — U2 has headlined arenas since the early 1980s. It determinedly brought new songs to huge audiences as recently as 2018, when it mounted its Experience + Innocence Tour.The band did allow itself a 30th anniversary stadium tour to reprise its biggest release, the 1987 album “The Joshua Tree,” in 2017 and 2019. And now, in the pandemic era, U2 is looking back even further.Its new album, “Songs of Surrender,” remakes 40 U2 songs with largely acoustic arrangements. U2 has also booked a Las Vegas residency for the fall, when it will revisit its 1991 masterpiece, “Achtung Baby,” in a newly built arena, the MSG Sphere. In a startling change, the band will have a substitute drummer, Bram van den Berg, rather than Mullen, who has been dealing with injuries to his elbows, knees and neck.Bono, 62, published his memoir, “Surrender,” in fall of 2022, using 40 U2 songs as chapter headings. On St. Patrick’s Day, the (Irish) band is releasing a Disney+ documentary, “Bono & the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman,” alongside “Songs of Surrender.”U2’s career has been one of triumphs, misfires and moving on. In the 1980s, the group was earnest and expansive, creating a chiming, marching, larger-than-life rock sound that countless bands would emulate. In the 1990s, leery of its own pretensions, U2 remade itself with electronic beats and artifice until it came to a dead end with its 1997 album, “Pop.” In the 2000s, it circled back to rock beats and sincerity, but its music was pervasively infused with the latest technology.From the beginning, U2 has worked on the largest scale: sometimes to magnificent effect, like its 2002 Super Bowl halftime show that memorialized Sept. 11, and sometimes badly backfiring, like the giveaway of its 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence,” that forced the album into iTunes libraries worldwide, often unwanted. “Songs of Surrender” is an act of renunciation, drastically scaling down songs that once strove to shake entire stadiums.Remake albums are always fraught. They offer second thoughts rather than discoveries, revisions rather than inspirations. They also remind listeners, and no doubt performers, of time slipping away.In recent years, extraordinary songwriters like Paul Simon and Natalie Merchant have made albums that revisit their old songs with decidedly different arrangements; they’re thoughtful and musicianly, but wan. Even Taylor Swift’s ongoing series of “Taylor’s Version” remakes — reclaiming her old albums by making every effort to replicate them note for note — can’t quite match her more youthful voice or the precise overtones of every mix.Among U2’s three retrospective projects, Bono’s book is by far the most vivid. “Surrender” leapfrogs through Bono’s and U2’s improbable story in vignettes that zigzag between poetic and prosaic, devout and skeptical, privileged and conscientious, mystical and political.The book’s messages about faith, friendship and family are reprised — sometimes in near-literal quotes — in “A Sort of Homecoming.” It’s an awkward project that skims through U2’s career while David Letterman serves as both modest interlocutor and celebrity star-tripper.The documentary mixes biographical interviews and bits of Ireland’s history, and it stages two performances: a concert by Bono and the Edge with a choir and strings at Dublin’s Ambassador Theater, and a singalong at a pub that’s not exactly impromptu. It just happens to include U2-influenced Irish musicians like Glen Hansard, Imelda May and Dermot Kennedy. “A Sort of Homecoming” also digresses, pointlessly, with attempts at comedy recalling Letterman’s “Late Show” shticks. A new Bono-Edge song, dedicated to Letterman, isn’t exactly prime U2.“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. Some get different lyrics: changing present tense to past tense in “Red Hill Mining Town,” clarifying that “Bad” is about drug addiction, swapping in new verses in “Beautiful Day” and “Get Out of Your Own Way,” rewriting “Walk On” to allude to the war in Ukraine.The album sets out to recast U2’s arena anthems as private conversations. Bono croons as if he’s singing quietly into your ear, and most of the arrangements rely on acoustic guitar or piano — like MTV’s old “Unplugged” shows, but by no means devoid of studio enhancements.“Unplugged” was MTV’s tribute to the recording-business cliché that a great song only needs chords and a voice to reveal its quality, as if everything else is embellishment. Yes and no. Melody, harmony and lyrics say a lot, but production can be transformative. Songs engrave themselves in fans’ memories — and lives — not just for their words and music, but for their sheer sound. We can recognize a favorite oldie from an opening guitar tone or a drumbeat. And the more we’ve taken a song to heart, the more its sonic details resonate.U2 got together in the era when punk insisted that anyone, trained or not, could make vital music. But even during that movement, musicians and producers understood how much texture matters. Recording in the analog era was a costly, intentional effort, and low-budget, lo-fi recordings could still create high intensity.One of U2’s enduring strengths has been the way its songs ennoble yearning and turbulence. Bono sings about self-questioning and contradictions with a voice that might scratch or falter but pushes ahead, unabashedly working itself up to shouts and howls. And the band’s martial drums, chiming guitars and inexorable crescendos create arena-size superstructures filled with rhythmic — and emotional — crosscurrents.The remakes on “Songs of Surrender” often strip away too much. In the original 1983 “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a song about a terrorist bombing during Ireland’s “troubles,” the track evokes sirens and gunshots while Bono sounds both desperate and furious, right in the middle of the strife. The remake, with a lone acoustic guitar, recasts the song as something between a lullaby and lament, crooned as if it’s a learned memory.“Out of Control,” which in 1979 had jabbing, buttonholing electric guitar and bass lines, has become a cozy, cheerfully strummed self-affirmation, very much in control. And the surging, cathartic peaks of songs like “With or Without You,” “Vertigo,” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” are far too muted in the remakes.“Songs of Surrender” does have a few clever second thoughts about U2’s catalog. A brass band lends historical gravity to “Red Hill Mining Town,” while “Two Hearts Beat as One” — with lyrics that insist, “Can’t stop to dance” — gets a wry disco makeover. The album’s subdued arrangements and upfront vocals offer a chance to focus on lyrics that were obscured in the onrush of U2’s original versions.But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness. And U2, like most artists, is better off looking ahead than looking back. More

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      American Directors Bring Fresh Visions to Europe’s Opera Stages

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      Young music theater makers are benefiting from the continent’s huge operatic resources while developing their own distinctive voices.Last summer, American directors headlined three of Europe’s most prestigious opera festivals.In Aix-en-Provence, France, you could see the New York-born Ted Huffman’s take on “L’Incoronazione di Poppea”; the Connecticut native Lydia Steier’s spin on “Die Zauberflöte” at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria; or “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival, in Germany, staged by Yuval Sharon, the visionary leader of the Detroit Opera, who hails from a suburb of Chicago.This would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. Until recently, there were few recognizable American directors working on Europe’s major stages. It was a short list that included the avant-garde directors Robert Wilson, 81, and Peter Sellars, 65, and the Alden brothers, David and Christopher, both 73.Now, a new crop of American directors, most under the age of 50, is gaining an unlikely foothold on the continent and leaving its mark on the opera scene.Germany is a launchpad for many. “More young artists from all over the world are coming here,” said Amy Stebbins, a Berlin-based opera director and librettist from New Hampshire. That’s hardly surprising, she said, given the numerous opportunities there for training and employment. Not only does Germany have more than 80 full-time opera companies; the country’s free education system — including music education — and the availability of paid internships make breaking into opera comparatively democratic and egalitarian.In Germany, even provincial opera companies have the wherewithal to put together full and challenging seasons. Ambitious artistic directors are eager to discover new musical and dramatic points of view.“They’re always on the lookout for kind of new voices and different voices,” said Louisa Proske, the associate artistic director of the Halle Opera, in eastern Germany. Proske, a native Berliner and a co-founder of Heartbeat Opera in New York, said many German directors take “a very intellectual approach” and that “what can be attractive is this kind of propensity to storytelling that I think is more in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.”One house that has been particularly instrumental in luring American directors across the pond is the Frankfurt Opera. Both Huffman and another New Yorker, R.B. Schlather, worked at the company’s alternative venue (where Sharon also directed the German premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s “Lost Highway”) before graduating to the main stage.“Both of them, I feel, come out of the tradition of Bob Wilson,” said Bernd Loebe, the Frankfurt Opera’s artistic director, adding that he sees them as directors who “want to escape this superficial approach to opera” that is often found in the United States.Loebe said he wasn’t interested in “the cliché of old-fashioned opera: beautiful sets, beautiful costumes.”“I want to see a link between music and drama,” he added. “I want directors who are interested in the music.”Here’s a closer look at three American opera directors who are leaving their mark in Europe.Jacquelyn Stucker and Jake Arditti in “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Aix-en Provence Festival in France last summer.Ruth WalzTed HuffmanTed Huffman may well be the only American to graduate from singing in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” as a child to directing a new production of the work at one of Europe’s major opera houses.Huffman’s love of music was nurtured by singing Bach and Handel in a church choir. As a child growing up in the suburbs of New York City, he also auditioned for, and landed some, children’s roles in Broadway shows and at the Metropolitan Opera.“I spent a lot of time as a kid being exposed to all of this,” the 46-year-old director said. “And I think, you know, it got in my system, in a good way. It didn’t let go.”In his early 20s, he and a friend founded the Greenwich Music Festival, an innovative music event in Connecticut that ran between 2004 and 2012, where he directed several productions, including Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.”Yet despite the festival’s success, he didn’t feel that there was much room for him to realize his directing ambitions on a larger scale.“I quite consciously didn’t go the more traditional American route of assisting in big houses and kind of learning that way, because I felt like that was a kind of trap for directors to learn a system of making work on existing sets with existing costumes,” he said.After taking part in the Merola Opera Program, in San Francisco, in 2010, he shipped to Europe on a career grant from that institute and picked up his first assignments in London, including an acclaimed staging of Maxwell Davies’s “The Lighthouse” in 2012 for English Touring Opera.In the decade since, Huffman has become one of Europe’s most in-demand young opera directors, praised for his ability to coax psychologically complex performances from his actors in visually distinctive and uncluttered stagings. He has staged “Die Zauberflöte” in Frankfurt, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Berlin and “Madama Butterfly” in Zurich.Writing in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe named Huffman’s “Poppea” at Aix one of last year’s musical highlights, calling it “a vivid, spare staging” and praising the director for guiding “his youthful cast in scenes that were genuinely sexy.”Along with reimagining the classics, Huffman champions new opera, most significantly as a director and librettist for the British composer Philip Venables. To date, they have worked together on “4.48 Psychosis” (2016) and “Denis & Katya” (2019), both of which have been staged in Europe and America. Their latest collaboration, set to premiere at Aix in July, is co-produced by the Skirball Center at N.Y.U.“One of the most exciting things about Europe is that for a longer time there’s been a mandate to produce new work,” Huffman said. “I think that there’s a huge sea change happening in America now,” he added, referencing the Metropolitan Opera’s recent commitment to staging more operas by living composers. It’s one of the reasons, he said, that he’ll continue to divide his career between the United States and Europe for the foreseeable future.A scene from “Die Zauberflöte,” directed by Lydia Steier at the Salzburg Festival, last year.Sandra ThenLydia SteierLydia Steier wanted to direct opera ever since she saw Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning movie “Amadeus” as a child growing up in Hartford, Conn.Her mother encouraged her interest by taking her to the Connecticut Opera, but the stiffly traditional productions there left Steier unfulfilled. “I was always just confused by how the emotional brutality of this kind of music was actually sort of nullified by seeing it onstage,” Steier said.Now, of the American directors of the younger generation, Steier, 44, is arguably the most firmly entrenched in the European opera scene.In recent seasons, she has staged two new productions of “Die Zauberflöte” at Austria’s prestigious Salzburg Festival, “La fanciulla del West” at the Berlin State Opera and “Les Troyens” at the Semper Opera in Dresden.“Lydia is unbelievably honest about what she has to say about human behavior,” said Laura Berman, the American-born artistic director of the Hanover State Opera, where, in 2019, Steier directed an acclaimed production of the religious potboiler “La Juive” that played with antisemitic stereotypes in ways rarely seen on German stages.“I suppose it’s sometimes quite cynical, but it’s very funny at the same time. And she exposes racism and narcissistic behavior in society,” Berman added.Steier never set out to work in Europe. In 2002, a Fulbright fellowship brought her to Berlin to conduct research about the city’s three opera houses. Afterward, she interned at the Komische Oper there, which led to her taking an assistant position at the house, accompanying productions by innovative directors, including Calixto Bieito and Barrie Kosky.In 2009, she assisted Achim Freyer on his production of “Das Rheingold,” the first part of the “Ring” cycle in Los Angeles. (Freyer’s assistants on the tetralogy also included Yuval Sharon.) A year later, also in Los Angeles, she directed a production of “Lohengrin” that remains her most significant American production to date.That same year, her directing career took off in Europe with an acclaimed double bill of “Pagliacci” and Busoni’s rarely seen one-act “Turandot” (which predates Puccini’s more famous setting) in Weimar, Germany. She became a fixture at opera houses across the German-speaking world, including the Komische, where she had shows in back-to-back seasons, and at Theater Basel, in Switzerland, where her 2016 production of Stockhausen’s demanding “Donnerstag aus Licht” was voted the year’s best performance by the German magazine Opernwelt.Around the same time, Markus Hinterhäuser, the incoming artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, saw and was impressed by Steier’s intimate production of Handel’s oratorio “Jephtha” in Vienna. He offered her “Die Zauberflöte,” one of the festival’s key works. Her 2018 production, and the considerably revised staging she presented at last summer’s festival, took a cue from the 1980s cult film “The Princess Bride.”“Millennials and Gen X are known for having an openness and a preference for ironic and edgy humor,” Berman said. “I think that somebody like Lydia has maybe a more unabashed approach to European culture than a European might have.”Berman, who was in charge of opera at Theater Basel when Steier directed “Licht” there, said that audiences tend to respond to Steier’s inclusion of pop cultural references “in a very kind of brazen way.”Despite her accomplishments on the continent, however, Steier said that work in the United States has been elusive. “It has always been the ambition of mine,” she said, “because I think there’s a lot of what I’ve done that would actually sort of shine a new light on what to do with the standard repertoire in the U.S.”Heather Engebretson, left, and Vincenzo Costanzo as Butterfly and Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly” at the Frankfurt Opera.Barbara AumüllerR.B. SchlatherUnlike Huffman and Steier, R.B. Schlather, 37, is a rare American opera director whose innovative stateside work has attracted international attention.In five years, Schlather went from directing experimental productions at a gallery space on New York’s Lower East Side to working at one of Germany’s leading opera houses.Schlather’s performance-art re-imaginings of Handel’s “Alcina” and “Orlando,” staged in Lower Manhattan in 2014 and 2015, led to an invitation from Loebe, the artistic director at the Frankfurt Opera, to put on another work by the German composer, “Tamerlano,” at the company’s alternative venue, the Bockenheimer Depot, in 2019.“My manager at the time told me that Bernd Loebe was really interested in me and how they have this old warehouse-like space and that he was looking for directors who were thinking more about site-specific work,” Schlather said, “and I said, ‘Fantastic, absolutely. Sign me up.’”That confidence paid off when his stark production, set in a prison camp, was a critical and popular hit.Two years later, Schlather debuted on Frankfurt’s main stage with Domenico Cimarosa’s “L’italiana in Londra,” a 1778 work that lies far outside of the standard repertoire. Once again, it triumphed. A critic in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper called it “the rebirth of the Frankfurt Opera out of the spirit of comedy.”When Schlather returned to Frankfurt last year, it was not with a rarity, but with “Madama Butterfly” in a daringly stripped-down staging that left much to the viewer’s imagination.“There was no cliché of ‘Madame Butterfly,’ like these terrible romantic productions we have seen,” Loebe said, comparing aspects of it to classical Japanese theater. “It was very clean and clear.”The production was so successful that it will return for eight performances between May and July. And Loebe has invited Schlather back to work at the house during the 2024-25 season. (Like Huffman, Schlather is keeping one foot in the States: In October, he will direct a Handel opera in Hudson, N.Y.).“I love working in a place like Frankfurt, where there’s such a diversity of repertoire and you can see the most obscure thing and the most popular thing always in an interesting point of view,” Schlather said, adding that the house has given him opportunities that he would be unlikely to get in the United States.“He took a big leap of faith on me,” Schlather said of Loebe. “So I think I really lucked out by being what he was looking for, or what he was open to.” More

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      Lewis Spratlan, 82, Dies; Took Winding Route to Music Pulitzer

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      His opera sat unproduced for decades. Then a piece of it garnered one of the field’s top prizes. Then it sat some more.Lewis Spratlan won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music for a chunk of an opera that he had completed in 1978 and that no one had ever staged.Then he waited another decade before someone actually put the full opera in front of an audience.“It was awful, not hearing this piece,” he told The New York Times in 2010, when his long wait was about to come to an end. “It’s like a woman being pregnant forever.”The opera, “Life Is a Dream,” with a libretto by James Maraniss, was finally staged by the Santa Fe Opera in July 2010, 35 years after Mr. Spratlan and Mr. Maraniss had begun writing it.Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the premiere in The Times, called it “an important opera, the rare philosophical work that holds the stage and gives singing actors real characters to grapple with.”Mr. Spratlan, whose long road to the Pulitzer and the premiere also included his self-financing the concert that led to the prize, died on Feb. 9 at a hospice center in Mount Laurel, N.J. He was 82. His wife, Melinda (Kessler) Spratlan, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Spratlan, who taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for 36 years, composed works for large ensembles and small ones, as well as solo pieces. He even invented an instrument, which he called the terpsiptomaton and which incorporated metal coils and rods, piano strings and ball bearings.“When a key is depressed, the ball bearings are released and fall, hitting the rods and the piano strings,” The Boston Globe explained in 1980. Amherst magazine described it as “a cross between a harpsichord and a pinball machine.”Both the instrument and a piece he composed for it, “Coils,” were given their world premiere in a concert in Amherst in 1980. The instrument seems not to have caught on, but the effort showed Mr. Spratlan’s penchant for whimsy in his works.In the chamber piece “When Crows Gather” (1986), which was inspired in part by the arrival of a throng of crows outside his studio window in Massachusetts, he had the musicians approximate wintry winds and end with, as Mr. Tommasini put it in The Times, “what could be called the ‘Crow Squawk Toccata.’” In 2002, Allan Kozinn of The Times described another chamber piece, “Zoom,” this way:“He begins by having the players alternate sharp, loud chordal bursts with all manner of breathy vocalizations, including sighs, heavy breathing, gasping and panting. Eventually the musical content sweeps away the sound effects, only to career between slidey modernist textures and fleeting hints of big-band jazz. A touch of what seems to be the influence of Frank Zappa streams through the last two movements as well, and from there it’s a short step to cartoonish sound effects.”Michael Theodore, a composer who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied under Mr. Spratlan at Amherst. “Composing music was always an adventure for Lew,” he said by email, “and he was restlessly and relentlessly inventive.“His compositions have a remarkable range,” he added, “filled with humor in one moment and heartbreaking tenderness in the next. Lew’s musical voice was entirely his own but often contained clever, subtle nods to the music of the past.”The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Mr. Spratlan’s “Life is a Dream.”Ken Howard, via Santa Fe OperaMeriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1940, in Miami. His father was a salesman, and his mother, Wilma (Howell) Spratlan, taught piano.Mr. Spratlan was still a student at Coral Gables High School in Florida when his oboe playing on a piece by Handel at a 1955 recital caught the ear of Doris Reno of The Miami Herald.“Lewis Spratlan, teenaged oboist, distinguished himself in the Handel work,” she wrote, “which he performed with his teacher, Dominique deLerma, first oboe, and his mother, Wilma Spratlan, piano.”Mr. Spratlan earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition and theory at Yale in 1962 and a master’s in composition there in 1965. Before arriving at Amherst in 1970, he taught at Pennsylvania State University and conducted ensembles there, at Tanglewood and elsewhere.“Life Is a Dream” is based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince banished at birth by his father. The play was brought to his attention by Herta Glaz, a retired mezzo-soprano who was director of the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut. In 1975, that company commissioned him to write the opera, and he recruited Mr. Maraniss, a colleague at Amherst who died last year, as librettist. But by the time they finished the opera, the New Haven company had gone out of business, leaving Mr. Spratlan and his music publisher to shop it to opera companies in the United States and abroad, without success.“We blanket-bombed them,” Mr. Spratlan told The Albuquerque Journal in 2010. “I didn’t have a single response.”So he set it aside for some two decades. But then he scraped together $75,000 to have the second of its three acts performed, in Amherst and then at Harvard — and recorded. It was that recording that he submitted to the Pulitzer board. It is not uncommon for composers to nominate themselves for the music prize, but Mr. Spratlan didn’t have high expectations.“I couldn’t imagine awarding the prize to a fragment of an opera,” he told the Albuquerque newspaper. “So I was startled.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, Mr. Spratlan is survived by two sons, Jacob Young Man Spratlan and Daniel Meriwether Spratlan; a daughter, Lydia Ji Yung DeBona; and two granddaughters.“Lew Spratlan was an American original, a hands-on musician, and an inspiring teacher,” an Amherst colleague and fellow composer, Eric Sawyer, said by email. “His creativity only increased with age, with some of his finest work coming in the past few years.”Professor Theodore said that just last year Mr. Spratlan composed a piano and chamber ensemble work, “Invasion,” in response to the invasion of Ukraine. He recalled unusual Spratlan teaching moments from years before.“We’d be hiking through the woods in Amherst while talking about musical ideas, and Lew would begin improvising with his voice to demonstrate a particular concept,” Professor Theodore said. “Brilliant, intricate, and soulful music would come pouring out. Then he’d finish it off with a silly little flourish because he also had a playful, mischievous sense of humor and loved making people laugh.” More

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      The Return of Morgan Wallen (Who Never Went Away)

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe third album by the country music superstar Morgan Wallen, the 36-song “One Thing at a Time,” just debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart, with the equivalent of 501,000 units. It is the fifth biggest streaming debut, behind only releases by Taylor Swift and Drake. Its success is an extension of the dominance of his earlier work, especially the 2021 release “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which has been the emblematic and most popular country album of the 2020s.Wallen’s success still comes under the cloud of the 2021 incident in which he was caught on tape using a racial slur. Though he was briefly removed from country radio at the time, he has since been restored, and he remains a touring force.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the nature of Wallen’s fame and the scope of his punishment; the ways in which he — perhaps inadvertently — weaponizes culture war; and the outsized meaning behind his light experimentation with genre.Guest:Kelefa Sanneh, a staff writer at The New YorkerConnect 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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      A Tenor’s Secrets to ‘Lohengrin’: Golf and a Blunt Spouse

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      Piotr Beczala, known as a charismatic singer of Italian operas, is challenging notions of what a Wagner voice should sound like.Piotr Beczala, tan from a recent trip to Mexico and hungry for a roast beef sandwich, walked offstage after the first act of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday night and bounded for his dressing room.It was intermission, and Beczala, the tenor in the title role, was preparing for one of the evening’s biggest challenges: maintaining his voice and energy during his character’s 90-minute break between the first and second acts.“You have to keep the attitude; you have to keep the tension,” he said. “You have to do something, or else you will lose it all.”Standing by a piano in his dressing room, he sang bits from other operas, including Puccini’s “Turandot,” which he will perform in Zurich this summer. He practiced passages from “Lohengrin,” working through some of its lowest notes. In between, he took time to clear his mind, playing golf on his iPad (a course in St. Andrews, Scotland) and showing off photos of the dinner he had cooked a few hours earlier (Parmesan-crusted chicken with a side of Russian salad).During a 90-minute break between Beczala’s appearances in the opera’s first and second acts, he passes the time by practicing and playing golf on an iPad.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOn Saturday, “Lohengrin” will be broadcast to movie theaters around the world as part of the Met’s Live in HD series. Inside Beczala’s dressing room on Tuesday, a makeup artist expressed concern that his tan would give him a reddish glow onscreen. Beczala replied that he planned to watch a recording of Tuesday’s performance with the former opera singer Katarzyna Bak-Beczala, his wife, to get feedback.“Routine is deadly,” he said as he flipped through the “Lohengrin” score. “Each performance has to feel completely new.”Beczala, 56, a charismatic singer from Poland with a boyish personality, has long been known for the Italian repertory, making his name in roles like Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and Edgardo in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”But in recent years, he has worked to establish himself as a skilled Wagnerian, too, starting with Lohengrin, an otherworldly knight who comes to the rescue of a virtuous duchess in medieval Brabant. With a lyrical voice trained in bel canto style, he is challenging notions of what a Wagner voice should sound like.François Girard, who directs the Met’s production, said that Beczala brought fresh energy to the role.“I’ve seen singers in their dressing rooms after Wagner performances and you want to call the ambulance,” he said. “Piotr is fresh like a rose, and you feel he’s ready for a double.”His Wagner performances have won accolades, so much so that his calendar is now packed with “Lohengrin” engagements. After his 10-show run at the Met, which concludes in early April, he will sing the role a dozen more times this year in Vienna and Paris.There is already talk of bringing him back to the Met for a Wagnerian feat: performing “Parsifal,” the composer’s last opera, alongside “Lohengrin” (Girard has staged both works at the Met, treating his production of “Lohengrin” as a sequel to his “Parsifal”).Beczala has mixed feelings, intrigued by the challenge of Wagner but also nervous about losing touch with favorites like “Il Trovatore” and “Aida.”Beczala’s performance in “Lohengrin” has been praised, including in The New York Times for its “uncanny serenity and dignity.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m still fighting against the idea of singing more Wagner because it’s dangerous,” he said. “I worry I will sing only Wagner. And I want to sing other music as well. Balance is very important.”Born in Czechowice-Dziedzice, Poland, about 70 miles west of Krakow, Beczala did not receive musical training as a child; he sang only in church. His father worked in the fabric industry, and his mother was a tailor. When he was a teenager, however, a teacher suggested that he take voice lessons.While attending a music academy in Vienna, he worked shifts as a construction worker, digging holes and tearing down walls. One day, while he was laying floors at a discothèque, he saw a man singing on the street for money. Sensing an opportunity, he positioned himself on a corner near the Vienna State Opera and belted staples like “La donna è mobile,” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”“I drank a beer, cleaned the dust from my throat and started singing,” he said. He used his earnings to buy standing-room tickets at the opera.He met his wife while singing in a chorus. She later gave up her career to focus on promoting and coaching him. She attends most of his performances, sitting in a variety of seats and taking detailed notes.“I not only help Piotr from the musical side, but also provide psychological support,” she said in a 2020 interview with a Polish news outlet. “Artists are very sensitive people. I know that because I’m an artist, too.”Earlier in his career, Beczala performed as a company member at the Zurich Opera, and won acclaim for performances as Alfredo in “La Traviata” and Tamino in “The Magic Flute.” His international career quickly took off, and in 2006, he made his Met debut as the Duke of Mantua in “Rigoletto.”The idea of trying Wagner came in 2012, when the conductor Christian Thielemann suggested he consider singing “Lohengrin.” They met the following year at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where Thielemann was conducting, to see how Beczala sounded from the stage. Beczala then debuted the role in 2016, alongside the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and under Thielemann’s baton at the Semperoper Dresden, where he is the chief conductor.The relationship between Beczala and Netrebko, once his friend and frequent collaborator, has become strained since Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Netrebko was originally set to star alongside Beczala in the Met’s “Lohengrin.” But she withdrew from the production and, since the war began, has been canceled at the Met and faced other professional setbacks because of her association with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Beczala, an early critic of the war who has canceled his Russian engagements, said he had not spoken with Netrebko since the invasion. He said that she did not do enough to oppose it and distance herself from Putin. “I like Anna really as an artist and a colleague,” he said, “but she made mistakes.”In the future, Beczala could take on the feat of performing Lohengrin alongside another Wagner hero, Parsifal.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBeczala has been in New York since December, when he opened a new production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora,” singing the role of the murderous Count Loris. He was a week late to rehearsals for “Lohengrin” because of “Fedora,” which closed in January, but his colleagues said he seemed at ease with the role.“He came in, and it was just a breath of fresh air,” said the soprano Tamara Wilson, who plays Elsa, the role originally planned for Netrebko. “He’s the most calm, relaxed person ever.”Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times praised his “uncanny serenity and dignity,” writing, “Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance.”Beczala said that he has tried to emphasize the character’s identity as an outsider.“Normally you think you can make this character more interesting by making him more human,” he said. “But it doesn’t help. You have to be, as Lohengrin, outside of this community. You have to be almost like a god, a strange being.”After his long break on Tuesday, Beczala was in the wings at the Met, preparing to go onstage. He jumped up and down, rubbed his palms together and cupped his hands over his mouth, and breathed in and out.As the chorus sang, he smiled. “This is such great music,” he said.Then, after adjusting the sleeves of his white shirt and the ring on his finger, he headed onstage. More

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      Review: In ‘The Harder They Come,’ Innocence Lost to a Reggae Beat

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      A stage adaptation of the 1972 movie about a Jamaican singer turned outlaw hero sounds great but falls hard at the Public Theater.It looks like such a bright, sunshiny day as the lights rise on “The Harder They Come,” the reggae musical that opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater. The patchwork vibrancy of Kingston, Jamaica, where the story takes place, is efficiently and joyfully sketched in a tin-sided, palm-fronded, louvered and latticed streetscape, lit in happy yellows and purples and bursting with people wearing island florals. And when we meet our hero, the “country boy” Ivan, who has come to the city to seek his fortune as a singer, he is bubbly and hopeful, with a bubbly and hopeful opening number to match: “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”But can you?Alas, over the next two hours or so, the answer will prove to be no, not just for Ivan but also for the audience. Like the chaotic 1972 movie it’s based on, which helped introduce reggae to audiences beyond Jamaica through the songs and charisma of Jimmy Cliff, the musical, adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks, is yanked apart by irreconcilable aims. The uplift of the infectiously danceable tunes keeps obscuring what turns out to be a deeply unsunny story.Not that the movie, directed and co-written by Perry Henzell, was very clear to begin with. Though considered a landmark by many, and certainly a point of national pride for Jamaica, it cannot count narrative logic as one of its strong suits. Its fascination is more like that of a fable, tracing the quick, jagged course of Ivan’s descent. Barely off the bus to visit his mother, he’s robbed of his meager belongings; soon thereafter he’s robbed of his soul, forced to sell his first song for just $20.Conflicts with the church (he falls for Elsa, a preacher’s ward), the police (he’s punished with lashings for defending himself) and even the ganja trade (what do you know, it’s corrupt!) gradually turn his disillusion into derangement. By the time this Candide becomes a semi-psychotic outlaw idol, like the characters in spaghetti westerns, it’s hard to keep track of the chain of injustice or even just the genre.If it’s easy to see why Parks might have wanted to work with this rich material — the movie’s soundtrack is deservedly a classic — it’s also clear that it needed rethinking for the stage. Yet her adaptation is full of choices that, however sensible they seem at first, ultimately make the problems worse.To give the story larger and more legible implications, she pushes the loosely drawn characters of the movie toward greater extremes of badness and goodness. The preacher is not just a hypocrite but a full-blown Judge Turpin, all but slavering over Elsa. The payola-scheming music executive and the police officer who controls the drug cartel are not just grifters but sharky megalomaniacs.Jones as Ivan and Meecah as Elsa, lovers in the movie whose courtship in the musical takes a more conventional turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, Ivan (Natey Jones) is radically softened, as if the muddled moral middle ground were a dangerous place to locate a musical. His braggadocio is sanded down to mere optimism, his crimes minimized and justified to emphasize his essential innocence. This takes a bizarrely conventional turn in his courtship of Elsa, whom he doesn’t merely shack up with but marries.Evidently the idea is to downplay the characters’ complexity and culpability in favor of an overtly political interpretation of the story that the movie, in its laid-back way, was mostly content to suggest without comment. Parks’s script, and the staging by Tony Taccone and Sergio Trujillo, heavily underline the larger forces — colonialism, capitalism, racism — that help explain or even require Ivan’s bad choices.Though that’s perfectly valid in theory, the heavy-handedness is quite a surprise coming from Parks, whose greatest plays float at the midpoint between archetype and individual. “Father Comes Home From the Wars” superimposes Homer’s “Odyssey” on the tale of a Black man who buys his freedom by fighting for the Confederacy. “Topdog/Underdog,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently revived on Broadway, pulls off a similar balancing act in telling the story of hustling Black brothers named Lincoln and Booth.That balance has been thrown off in “The Harder They Come.” One reason is that the original was a movie with songs, and the songs were all diegetic: They arose from situations in which characters were actually singing, in a church or nightclub or recording studio. But because Parks was writing a musical, the songs had to do and be much more. The movie’s short tunestack — really just four or five main numbers — would have to be expanded.Still, it was another reasonable idea that backfired to expand it quite this much: There are 33 numbers listed in the program. About a dozen are by Cliff, from the movie or elsewhere; several are by other songwriters of the period; and three quite good ones are by Parks herself. (In her non-playwriting life, Parks fronts a “Modern Soul, Black-Country, Psychedelic-Afro-Righteous” band.) They’re deftly arranged for eight musicians by Kenny Seymour.But to accommodate so many, most are reduced to mere atmospheric snippets, curtailing their effectiveness. Even when they are pushed toward more prominence, they tend to evaporate on contact, as they’re forced, like the songs in jukebox musicals, into uses for which they weren’t designed. The rhythmic groove that makes reggae so intoxicating prevents the kind of development that edges a character forward, just as the repeated chorus structure, usually with repeated lyrics to match, stalls when deployed as drama.J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least the songs are sung well: Jones is as beamish as his music sounds; you can see and hear how his Ivan might be the star the show says he is. Meecah, as Elsa, and Jeannette Bayardelle, as Ivan’s mother — both roles greatly expanded to counteract the episodic nature of the underlying material — take full advantage of their brief vocal moments to shine. As the preacher, J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” a terrific gospel shout. The rest of the ensemble backs them up appealingly, and dances Edgar Godineaux’s choreography even more so.Still, the promise of the show, like the promise of its opening imagery — sets by Clint Ramos and Diggle, lighting by Japhy Weideman, costumes by Emilio Sosa — goes largely unfulfilled. Neither its satire of criminal celebrity nor its tragedy of sullied innocence nor even the sonic pleasure of its catchy score escapes the distorting gravity of its oversized intentions. Instead, “The Harder They Come” falls right into the trap of the rest of that title lyric: “the harder they fall.”The Harder They ComeThrough April 2 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More