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      Review: SZA’s ‘SOS’ Revels in Mixed Emotions

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      On her second album, the singer with an unpredictable and emotionally charged flow expands her sound as she ponders all her conflicting impulses.“I just want what’s mine,” SZA announces in “SOS,” the title song and opener of her second studio album. She spends the rest of the album wrestling with exactly what that means. Does she want casual sex or lasting love, relationships or independence, revenge or forgiveness, self-questioning or self-respect, familiar problems or a new start, power or trust? SZA’s music melts down styles — singing, rapping, rock, R&B, pop, folk, indie-rock, electronica — to ponder and interrogate her conflicting impulses. And she juggles them all against the backdrop of her career and the demands of celebrity and of social media, where she regularly galvanizes her fans with teasers and snippets.Solána Rowe, who records as SZA, has only two official studio albums in a decade-long career. “SOS” was preceded by “Ctrl,” which she originally released in 2017 but expanded by seven new songs in June 2022. Yet albums are only part of SZA’s sprawling output; she has been releasing singles and EPs since 2012 and racked up guest spots with, among many others, Kendrick Lamar, Summer Walker, Lorde, Megan Thee Stallion and Maroon 5. Even in collaborations, SZA’s voice always leaps out: pungent and plaintive, sometimes brazen and sometimes forlorn, easily demanding attention.Along the way, SZA, 33, has moved from the left-field electronic experiments of her early EPs to savvy but still probing pop, as the mainstream bends toward her ideas. “Ctrl” has been certified multiplatinum; “All the Stars,” her duet with Lamar on the “Black Panther” soundtrack, was nominated for an Academy Award, and she won a Grammy singing with Doja Cat on “Kiss Me More.”SZA’s gift is her unpredictable and emotionally charged flow, the complex craftsmanship she puts behind songs that sound like spontaneous confessions. Her vocal lines flaunt quirks and asymmetries that are simultaneously conversational and strategic. SZA can race through syllables like a rapper, then land on a melodic phrase that soon turns into a hook. Her melodies are casually acrobatic, like the syncopated, ever-widening leaps she tosses off in “Notice Me.”With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. It’s not a narrative concept album, but the songs are connected by recurring threads: a roundelay of infidelities and reunions, betrayals and connections, self-doubt and self-affirmation.The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona. She presents herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more mistakes. “Now that I ruined everything I’m so [expletive] free,” SZA exults in “Seek & Destroy,” even as the slow, minor-key track tries to drag her down.“SOS” draws on multiple producers and collaborators, invoking old styles and seizing recent ones. In “Kill Bill,” SZA fantasizes about killing her ex and his new girlfriend, sounding both lighthearted and dangerous as the production spoofs a plush R&B ballad. In “F2F,” she starts with earnest folk-pop and blasts into rock as she insists that she’s only cheating with someone “because I miss you.”In “Gone Girl,” she warns a partner about getting too clingy — “I need your touch, not your scrutiny,” she sings, “Squeezing too tight, boy you’re losing me” — on the way to a chorus that echoes “She’s Gone” by Hall & Oates. And in the delicate ballad “Special,” she chides herself for letting someone destroy her self-esteem using melodic hints of “Creep” by Radiohead and “The Scientist” by Coldplay. She sounds natural, even unguarded, in every setting.“SOS” leans into every shade of SZA’s mixed feelings. Slow-grind ballads like “I Hate U,” “Used,” “Love Language,” “Open Arms” and “Blind” detail her anger at boyfriends’ bad behavior, yet admit she’s still drawn to them. But in the quietly resolute “Far,” she insists she’s “done being used, done playing stupid,” and in “Conceited,” she bounces assertive vocal lines off hooting keyboard chords and crisp programmed drum sounds as she declares, “I been burnin’ bridges, I’d do it over again/’Cause I’m bettin’ on me, me, me.” And she should. There’s bravery and beauty in admitting to uncertainty.SZA“SOS”(TDE/RCA) More

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      Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ Returns to No. 1

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      The singer’s holiday anthem, first released in 1994, ends Taylor Swift’s six-week run atop the Hot 100 singles chart.Back in 1994, Mariah Carey released the album “Merry Christmas,” with an anchor track, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” that mixed the R&B production style of the era with nostalgic touches reminiscent of Phil Spector. The song did well at radio, and the album reached No. 3 on Billboard’s chart, behind LPs from Kenny G and Boyz II Men.Flash forward a couple of decades and Carey’s song had become a modern classic, but chart domination had long eluded it. After a yearslong promotional push that included a concert residency at the Beacon Theater in New York, an animated film and a new music video — as well as the song’s annual ubiquity on streaming playlists — “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2019, and repeated the feat in 2020 and 2021.Now Carey’s seasonal blockbuster has returned to No. 1 yet again, ending the six-week reign of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” Buoyed by streaming, “All I Want” leads a new Top 10 dominated by decades-old holiday hits, including Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (1958) at No. 2, Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957) at No. 3 and Burl Ives’s “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1964) at No. 4.On the album chart, “Heroes & Villains,” the new LP by the rap super-producer Metro Boomin, opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 185,000 sales in the United States, including 233 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Metro Boomin, whose real name is Leland Wayne, has produced hits for artists like Migos, Future, Gucci Mane and Post Malone, but “Heroes & Villains” is his third time at No. 1 with an album of his own.The release features a deep bench of guest stars, like the Weeknd, 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Future and Takeoff from Migos, who was shot and killed six weeks ago. The 85-year-old actor Morgan Freeman also contributed his familiar voice-of-God narration to a promotional short film and parts of the album, as he did on a joint LP by Metro Boomin and 21 Savage two years ago.Swift’s LP “Midnights” falls to second place in its seventh week out, five of those at No. 1. Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” is No. 3, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in fourth place and Michael Bublé’s 11-year-old holiday favorite “Christmas” falls one spot to No. 5.Carey’s “Merry Christmas,” from 1994, lands at No. 10 on the album list. More

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      Samara Joy’s Voice (and Social Media) Is Helping Jazz Find Fresh Ears

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      The 23-year-old singer had something rare in the genre — a viral moment — and will compete for best new artist at the Grammys in February.Samara Joy was kicking off an encore engagement at New York’s storied Blue Note club in November, just days before her 23rd birthday, when sparks began to fly.“It was my first set, and I was in the middle of telling a story,” she recounted a few weeks later. “I was building up this whole scenario that was going to get me into the song, and then I closed my eyes — and when I opened them, five seconds later, there was all this smoke coming up.” (A woman seated by the stage got a bit too close to a flickering candle; the fire was swiftly extinguished.)“Nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” Joy said, giggling softly. Just a week later, she had another, more traditional first, picking up two Grammy nominations for “Linger Awhile,” her second album and Verve Records debut. The album teams her with noted musicians — the guitarist Pasquale Grasso, the pianist Ben Paterson, the bassist David Wong and the drummer Kenny Washington — on standards including Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” and Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.”Joy, a Bronx native who’s currently based in Washington Heights, goes by her first and middle name (her surname is McLendon). She will compete in February for best jazz vocal album and best new artist — a field in which recent winners have included ubiquitous stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion and Billie Eilish.When she got the news, Joy was on a train heading home after a gig in Washington, D.C. “I felt like screaming,” she said, “but I was in the quiet car, so I couldn’t freak out.”Joy has grown accustomed to reaping honors. In 2019, as a student at the State University of New York at Purchase, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition; she became an Ella Fitzgerald Memorial Scholar the following year. Joy’s singing, with its precocious depth, creamy tone and fluttery vibrato, continued to inspire comparisons to both of those legends after the release of several videos that went viral, something of a rarity in jazz — in one, she performed Duke Ellington’s “Take Love Easy,” a song recorded by Fitzgerald in the 1970s — and a self-titled album in 2021.While Joy said she wasn’t especially active on social media at first, it has grown into a natural tool for expression. Jamie Krents, the president of Verve Records, said Joy’s presence there “was one of the things that attracted us to her — seeing how genuine and intriguing she was, and how that could shine through on those channels. She’s a normal 23-year-old person who happens to be a world-class singer.”Regina King, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan and Don Cheadle have also expressed admiration. The celebrated bassist and composer Christian McBride, who judged Joy in the Sarah Vaughan competition, finds her vocals “full of wisdom.”“It’s spooky; she sounds and tells a story like an elder,” he said in a phone interview. “But I think what I love most about her — and I pray that the challenges in life don’t change this — is she’s always positive. She’s got such a fun, positive spirit.”That spirit was palpable during a conversation at a food court in her neighborhood, where Joy admitted her fast success has left her head spinning a bit. “Sometimes I honestly don’t believe this is happening,” she said. “I see pictures of this glammed-up girl, but I’m just me” — on that afternoon, a young woman wearing sensible glasses and no perceptible makeup, clad in sneakers and a down jacket she picked up at Marshalls.The singer, who is currently touring with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in “Big Band Holidays” — the show will arrive at the Rose Theater Wednesday through Sunday — has spent little time at home over the past six or seven months, juggling dates throughout the United States and Europe. “When there are people my age in the crowd, it’s mostly students,” she said. “Or you have younger audience members who have seen me on Instagram or TikTok” — Joy has more than 200,000 followers on the video platform — and tend to be less familiar with jazz.Joy can empathize: She sang with a jazz band in high school that tended toward “a lot of contemporary, fusion-y stuff,” and was largely unfamiliar with the repertoire until arriving at Purchase. And while she’s the paternal granddaughter of the noted gospel singers and preachers Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, who performed with the Savettes of Philadelphia, that genre also held little appeal initially.Joy will compete for two Grammys in February, including one in an all-genre category: best new artist.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesInstead, Joy listened to the old-school R&B beloved by both her parents, “Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and Stevie and Chaka,” she said, and sang in middle and high school musicals, making her theatrical debut as Erzulie (the goddess of love) in a sixth-grade production of “Once on This Island.” “I was scared about the acting part, because I was very shy — I still get that way sometimes,” she said. “But I wanted to sing, so I was like, ‘We’re going to learn these lines and try as best we can to get inside this character.’”Eventually, Joy did begin singing in church, where her father also performed frequently. (Antonio McLendon is a singer, songwriter and bassist who has toured with the gospel star Andraé Crouch.) “I started in the choir when I was 16, and then I started to sing lead, which was nerve-racking,” she said. “The church live-streamed the services, and I had all these eyes on me.” She nonetheless became “more serious about it, because I was there all the time. We had rehearsal, we had Bible study, we had services on Saturday and Sunday. That was my priority — whereas jazz band was just an after school thing, a couple of songs here and there.”When Joy won the Sarah Vaughan competition, “My grandfather was disappointed, I think” — Ruth McLendon had died in 2014 — “because he thought singing belonged in the church, that it should serve as worship to God,” she explained. “I don’t think he would ever come into a jazz club, because of his beliefs, which I respect and understand. I know that he still loves me, regardless of how he feels about the career decisions I’m making.”Joy’s ambitions include writing; she penned rhapsodic lyrics for “Nostalgia (The Day I Knew),” a sweetly breezy number on “Linger Awhile.” “Now I’m paying more attention to the melodies and harmonics of all these songs I’m singing,” she said. “I’m telling this composer’s story and this lyricist’s story, and it’s beautiful, but I hope I can be influenced enough to write content for myself.”Studying giants like Vaughan and Fitzgerald — Carmen McRae and Betty Carter are also favorites — has also made Joy eager to explore a range of styles: “Sarah Vaughan could sing anything; she could go incredibly deep and then she could sing operatically, and neither seemed like a struggle. I look at her, and at some opera singers, and I want that ease.”When Joy speaks specifically of jazz, of course, there is a particular sense of devotion. “I look at all these influences — like Charlie Parker, like Duke Ellington, like Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan — and I think, these people were here,” she said, a measure of awe creeping into her quiet voice. “This is a young music, and they did so much in their lives to draw people to this type of music; it deserves to be talked about and shared. And as long as I’m passionate about it, that’s my goal — to share it.” More

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      Review: Klaus Mäkelä, Rising Star of Conducting, Arrives in New York

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      Klaus Mäkelä, a young yet already accomplished maestro, made his New York Philharmonic debut with a performance that prioritized clarity.Now New Yorkers know what the hype is all about.The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.Chances are, he will not go to the New York Philharmonic, where he made his debut on Thursday. (For those keeping track, Leonard Bernstein was just a year younger when he got his unexpected big break.) This orchestra — whose music director, Jaap van Zweden, will depart at the end of next season — needs a new conductor much sooner than Mäkelä is available. But perhaps he has a future as a frequent guest; his first outing with the Philharmonic was a promising one, under an even bigger spotlight than planned, with a program of only symphonic works after the concerto soloist, Truls Mork, withdrew because of an injury.The Philharmonic, at its most exasperating, can be a brash and unbalanced ensemble. Under Mäkelä’s baton on Friday morning, however, it was largely measured in delivering what has become, to mixed results, his trademark clarity. He brought a transparent, levelheaded approach to the emotional extremes of two Russian, B-minor symphonies premiered nearly a half-century apart — the Sixths of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich — as well as to a contemporary work, Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú Negro.”López Bellido is a favorite of Mäkelä’s among living composers. It’s easy to hear why; this is music that, on the surface, sounds like a successor to other works in Mäkelä’s repertoire that employ enormous orchestral forces, such as the Ballets Russes scores of Stravinsky that he will take to the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, or the post-Romantic symphonies of Mahler that he has toured.Unlike those, however, “Perú Negro” — premiered in 2013 as part of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s centennial and originally conducted by López Bellido’s friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya — thrills and entertains, but reveals itself all too readily.This piece has the hallmarks of López Bellido’s style, such as rich orchestration and maximal gesture, along with homages to the folk songs and rhythms of the Black Peruvian music that the title hints at. Although Mäkelä was up against the newly renovated David Geffen Hall’s bright acoustics in taming the Philharmonic’s sound, he led a lively account, which was met with a standing ovation.But the memory of it was quickly swept aside by the Shostakovich that followed — in particular the similarly grand, breakneck finale. There, you could hear what was lacking in “Perú Negro”: ambiguous exuberance, Janus-faced passages that misdirect and provoke, both inviting and impenetrable, forever irreconcilable. López Bellido could take a lesson from that, as someone who clearly knows how an orchestra can sound, but not necessarily what it can say.The Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky symphonies were studies in letting a score speak for itself. Whether that works is largely a matter of taste, and ensemble. I heard a similar touch in a Mahler Four that Mäkelä conducted last year in Munich; there, the cool performance didn’t deliver on the symphony’s heavenly climax. But his Mahler Six in Amsterdam this summer was a revelation of terror directly expressed.At the Philharmonic, Mäkelä kept some of the orchestra’s characteristic imbalances in check — such as the outsize sounds that rendered the winds section virtually invisible in the Beethoven Nine led by van Zweden in October — but hadn’t quite rewired the players. He did, though, manage to lend both symphonies a legible, compelling shape, if at a bit of a remove. The most evocative moments came not from the entire group but from soloists: Frank Huang’s violin fleetly galloping in the Shostakovich; Judith LeClair’s bassoon dolefully opening the Tchaikovsky; and Anthony McGill’s clarinet reprising that work’s second theme with rending sweetness.The third movement of the Tchaikovsky, a perennial audience favorite, especially benefited from Mäkelä’s lucid reading, whose transparency brought equal attention to the itinerant melodic line and the dense orchestrations surrounding it. There was a sense of what the composer might have been thinking when he wrote to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, that he was “happy in the knowledge that I have written a good piece.”I found myself, though, wanting to know more than how Tchaikovsky viewed his own music. Mäkelä’s conducting was so deferential to the score, it was tempting to shake him and ask, “But what do you really think?” Classics like this symphony warrant not just recitation, but also repeated examination.Then again, it’s helpful to remember that we are talking about a 26-year-old. Who hasn’t changed drastically throughout their 20s — in life, in work, in worldview? It will be interesting, and worthwhile, to see where that growth takes Mäkelä. He has proved that he can wrangle the war horses. Now it’s time to see what else he can do.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Hamish Kilgour, Whose New Zealand Cult Band Had Reach, Dies at 65

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      He was a powerful drummer and, most notably, a founding member of the Clean, which inspired indie bands like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk.Hamish Kilgour, a founding member of the New Zealand band the Clean, who was celebrated among fans of underground music for his propulsive drumming and his countercultural approach to life, has died. He was 65.He was found dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday, 10 days after being reported missing, the police there said. His death was referred to the coroner’s office.A central figure in the crop of freewheeling New Zealand musicians on the independent label Flying Nun that came to be called the “Dunedin sound,” Mr. Kilgour spent four decades as a musician, singing and playing percussion and later the guitar.He eventually played with more than 100 bands, including the Great Unwashed, the Sundae Painters and Monsterland, and lived for almost 30 years in New York, where he formed the band the Mad Scene.He also had a secondary passion for painting: He produced hundreds if not thousands of frank, idiosyncratic pictures, many of which were repurposed as album cover art.A deceptively powerful drummer, Mr. Kilgour might start a song in ramshackle fashion, then build to a thunderous conclusion. He had early on been inspired by Moe Tucker’s single snare on live recordings by the Velvet Underground. “I thought, that’s kind of magical and that’s possible — I could do that,” he said in 2012. Ms. Tucker’s minimalist, driving style and her enthusiasm for the power of the tambourine, later colored his own playing.Not every drummer, however talented, is immediately recognizable, said Mac McCaughan, the owner of the label Merge Records, which last year reissued the Clean’s first two releases. “But with Hamish — he had a voice on the drums,” he said in an interview. “He had his own style and his own character.”In 1981, Roger Shepherd, a local record store manager who was in the process of founding Flying Nun Records, saw the Clean perform at the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. “They were pretty obviously the best band in the world,” Mr. Shepherd recalled.Almost before the set had finished, he asked them to record with him. The first recording session produced “Tally Ho!,” a frenetic, surf-rock-adjacent single — made for 50 New Zealand dollars — that scraped into the Top 20 in New Zealand, buoyed by its popularity on student radio stations.Flying Nun’s fortunes had been transformed. The subsequent EP “Boodle Boodle Boodle,” recorded that year on a similar budget, spent 26 weeks on the New Zealand charts. American indie bands, including Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk, would cite it as an inspiration.For listeners outside New Zealand, the musicians on the Flying Nun label had a kind of legendary status, said the American filmmaker Michael Galinsky, who became a friend of Mr. Kilgour’s.“It just opened up all these worlds,” he said of “Tuatara,” a 1988 Flying Nun compilation on which Mr. Kilgour appeared. “It’s so far away — you don’t see pictures of these people, there’s no writing about them, there’s no internet. So they’re mythic, and incredible.”Inspired by the Enemy, a punk group started by friends of theirs, members of the Clean had begun rehearsing together in 1978 — Mr. Kilgour taught himself the drums, while his brother, David, played guitar and Peter Gutteridge played bass. (Mr. Gutteridge was later replaced by Robert Scott.)After its first flash of success, the members of the band made an early decision to split up just four years into their career. But as the Clean’s influence on do-it-yourself underground rock became more apparent, they reunited in 1988. Over the next 30 years, interrupted by long spells apart, the Clean continued to perform in the United States and elsewhere around the world, releasing several albums.As a member of the Mad Scene, Mr. Kilgour recorded multiple albums and EPs, as well as two solo albums, “All of It and Nothing” and “Finkelstein,” and made myriad other guest appearances on other artists’ records.Hamish Robert Kilgour was born in Christchurch on March 17, 1957, the older of two sons of MacGregor and Helen Stewart (Auld) Kilgour. He was reared mostly in Cheviot and Ranfurly, small communities in New Zealand’s rural South Island. In 1972, the family moved to the coastal city of Dunedin, also in the South Island, where Mr. Kilgour’s father took a job as a pub manager while his mother ran the establishment’s kitchen. Hamish received a bachelor’s degree in English and history from the University of Otago in Dunedin in 1977.After his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1982, his mother worked as a nurse to support the family. She later supported her sons’ band, helping to fund both a van and a P.A. system as they performed around the country with the Clean.Mr. Kilgour moved to New York in the late 1980s after the breakup of his first marriage, to Jenny Halliday. There he met Lisa Siegel, who would become his second wife and a bandmate when they formed the Mad Scene. The couple had a son, Taran.But life in New York, where he worked as an art handler, house painter and carpenter in between music gigs, was at times precarious, especially after he and Ms. Siegel broke up in 2013.He moved back to New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic and played music there whenever he could, while eking out an existence that strained his mental and physical health, people close to him said.He is survived by his brother and bandmate, David, and his son.For his contemporaries in New Zealand, Mr. Kilgour was a testament to the notion that being from a far-off country of a few million people with no established rock tradition did not preclude people from making great music.“Just because it comes from here, and not London or New York, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valid,” said Mr. Shepherd of Flying Nun. “That was a startling thing that we kind of knew was true anyway, but that hadn’t been articulated for us.”Richard Langston, a music journalist and longtime friend, said Mr. Kilgour had “changed the way you could record indie rock.”“He was that important,” he added, “and he lived a crazy, brave, solo life.” More

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      Amid Global Turmoil, Salzburg Festival Plans a Summer of Reflection

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      “Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” the festival’s artistic director said.With the pandemic still lingering and the war in Ukraine raging on, the Salzburg Festival in Austria announced plans on Friday for a summer season that would seek to offer space for reflection.The festival, classical music’s most storied annual event, will stage two operas based on works by William Shakespeare: “Macbeth” and “Falstaff,” both by Verdi. There are also plans for more offbeat repertoire, including Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion,” which tells the story of a Greek village staging a Passion play, in a production led by the conductor Maxime Pascal.“Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview, quoting from “Hamlet.” “Therefore, we have constructed a festival giving artists the opportunity to address these issues directly and indirectly.”The festival will feature more than 200 events — a mix of operas, spoken drama, orchestra concerts and recitals — over six weeks beginning July 20.The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will perform several concerts, including “Ein Deutsches Requiem” (“A German Requiem”), an hourlong choral work by Brahms, under the conductor Christian Thielemann. Among other prominent orchestras making appearances are the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli will star in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice”; the conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead a concert performance of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens,” featuring his ensemble, the Monteverdi Choir; and the soprano Renée Fleming and the pianist Evgeny Kissin team up for a recital of works by Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Duparc.Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a Salzburg regular, will take the baton for “Macbeth,” which opens in July, in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. In August, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert featuring works by Ligeti and Richard Strauss.The festival will again prominently feature the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia. He will take the baton for a concert presentation of Henry Purcell’s opera “The Indian Queen” with his new ensemble, Utopia. Currentzis will also lead Utopia in performances of Mozart’s Mass in C minor.Currentzis announced the formation of Utopia, which is backed by European benefactors, in August, after he faced a wave of criticism for his longtime association with the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna, which is sponsored by VTB Bank, a state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. (Currentzis had been trying for several years to secure funding for Utopia.)While the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the performing arts, the Salzburg Festival, drawing on government subsidies and sponsorship deals, has managed to minimize the disruption.The festival never canceled a season during the pandemic. In 2020, it staged a robust program for limited audiences, before returning to relative normalcy in 2021.Even as turnout for many classical events around the world has been tepid since the return of live performance, the Salzburg Festival continues to attract an enthusiastic audience. Attendance was 96 percent last summer, the festival said. More

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      An Opera Company’s Precarious Future Has Some Worried About a Ripple Effect

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      For a month now, politicians, newspapers and classical music stars have been arguing over the future of English National Opera. A funding cut could have repercussions far beyond Britain.LONDON — When Leigh Melrose, a rising British opera star, looked at his calendar recently, much of the next three years were blocked out for one company: English National Opera. He was signed up to sing multiple roles there, starting with the lustful dwarf Alberich in the company’s new “Ring” cycle, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that was meant to head to New York.Melrose said that he’d had his wig fitting for that role, and that rehearsals for “The Rheingold,” the first installment in Wagner’s four-part epic, were scheduled to begin Dec. 28.But now, he said, all those plans seemed uncertain. Last month, Arts Council England, a body that distributes government arts funding here, announced it was shutting off a grant to English National Opera worth 12.4 million pounds a year, or about $15 million. The Arts Council instead gave the company a one-off grant to help it develop “a new business model,” including a potential move to Manchester, 178 miles north of its current home at the London Coliseum.On the same day, the Arts Council also slashed funding to other major opera companies including the Royal Opera House, by 10 percent, and Glyndebourne Productions, by over 30 percent.Melrose said those cuts came as a “total shock,” adding that the long-term future of the “Ring” in both London and New York did not look good. If the E.N.O., as English National Opera is known, had to move away from London, “How can it keep on doing the rest?” Melrose asked. “How can it carry on doing anything?”For the past month, the fate of the E.N.O. has made headlines here. Musicians, critics and politicians have been arguing over whether the decision to cut the company’s funding is a sensible response to a declining interest in opera, or an act of cultural vandalism. Concerns have spread beyond Britain, with companies in Europe and the United States warning that the global opera ecosystem may suffer, too.Protesters outside the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, a government ministry, in London, on Nov. 22.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockDozens of senior opera figures — including Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, and Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera — signed a recent letter to The Times of London, warning of a wider impact. “Everyone across the world has long looked to the United Kingdom as a center of artistic excellence,” the letter said. “We fear that this decision signals to the world that they — and we — must now look elsewhere.”Gelb said by phone that he had already pushed the Met’s run of the “Ring” cycle back a year, to the 2027/28 season, “for casting reasons.” But, he added, “if the E.N.O. doesn’t exist, we obviously can’t collaborate with it.”Christopher Koelsch, the chief executive of Los Angeles Opera, said that the E.N.O. had “historically been a crucible for creativity and experimentation,” noting that numerous stars including the conductor Edward Gardner, the composer Nico Muhly and the director Barrie Kosky had done early or important work at the company.Los Angeles Opera had been planning a new coproduction with the E.N.O. for its 2024/25 season, Koelsch said, though he declined to give further details and said he had not been in contact with the company since the funding cut was announced. “I think they’ve got other things to focus on,” he said.Newspaper coverage of opera in Britain is usually restricted to the arts pages, but the ferocity of debate here in recent weeks has propelled it to the front pages, and made it a major topic on social media.The company has been urging opera fans to pressure the government and the Arts Council to overturn the funding decision. More than 74,000 people have signed an online petition started by the singer Bryn Terfel.Performances at the London Coliseum have a relaxed atmosphere.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesGenerous policies that give free or discounted tickets to people under 35 have helped English National Opera draw in a younger crowd than the Royal Opera House.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesIn the last season, each ticket the company sold was propped up with about $168 of state funding.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesJohn Berry, who was the E.N.O.’s artistic director from 2005 to 2015, said that the company had coped with funding cuts before: In 2014, it lost a third of its government grant after failing to meet box office targets. But it would be “impossible,” he said, for the company to deal with a total loss of subsidy unless “a guardian angel” appeared. That was unlikely, given Britain lacked a culture of philanthropy, he added.Britain’s major opera companies have a unique funding model that is halfway between American companies’ reliance on philanthropy and European houses’ dependence on state funding. The E.N.O.’s Arts Council grant currently represents over a third of its income. In contrast, the Los Angeles Opera gets about 5 percent of its income from public grants; the Met, about 0.5 percent.English National Opera traces its history back to 1931, when Lilian Baylis, a theater owner, established the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company to bring the art form to popular audiences. That founding aim is still central to the company, which stages all its work in English. Those performances, at the London Coliseum, have a more relaxed atmosphere than the ones at the nearby Royal Opera House, with audience members often wearing jeans rather than tuxedos, and generous policies to give free or discounted tickets to people under 35.It made its global reputation in the 1980s when it became the first British opera company to tour the United States and debuted a host of major productions including Nicholas Hytner’s much-praised 1985 staging of Handel’s “Xerxes.” Under Berry’s leadership, the company also started to act as a test bed for productions heading to the Met, with productions of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” among others, premiering in London before being tweaked and sent to New York.A scene from “Porgy and Bess,” which premiered at English National Opera in 2018. The production came to the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, in 2019.Tristram KentonDespite those triumphs, John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said in an interview that the company had recently been lurching from crisis to crisis with a string of high-profile resignations, financial difficulties and a declining number of works presented.Fewer performances meant that the Arts Council was subsidizing each E.N.O. ticket sold to a greater extent, and the company was often criticized for providing poor value for public money.A spokeswoman for the company said in an email that 90,000 people went to the company’s 63 performances last season, a figure that means each ticket was propped up with £137, or about $168, of state funding. The spokeswoman added that attendance was lower than usual that season, because of the pandemic, and that the opera reached many more people through other means, including television broadcasts seen by 2.2 million viewers.The Arts Council has defended its decision. Claire Mera-Nelson, the agency’s director of music, said in a blog post that she had seen “almost no growth in demand” for large-scale opera over the past five years, and had decided to prioritize funding for the art form “at different scales, reimagined in new ways” such as staging productions in parking lots, or pubs. Darren Henley, the Arts Council’s chief executive, wrote in The Guardian that “new ideas may seem heretic to traditionalists,” but that opera needed to reinvent itself to “remain exciting and meaningful to future generations.”On Thursday, Henley told British politicians he was having discussions with the E.N.O. over how it could keep showing work in London, as well as elsewhere in England, but added, “We can’t fund them in London.” (The Arts Council declined an interview request for this article.)While English National Opera’s future is hanging on officials’ whims, its audience seems hopeful that it will remain in London, somehow. At the Coliseum last week, before a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Yeomen of the Guard,” the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. Audience members in winter coats and bobble hats arrived on foot, rather than in sleek cars, and headed into the theater, where a merchandise stall was selling T-shirts with the slogans “Choose Opera” and “#loveENO.”Nick McConagh, 72, said he had been coming to the E.N.O. since the 1970s because its tickets were affordable. “It disproves the belief that opera is for the rich,” he said.Nearby, Hatti Simpson, 30, with pink hair and tattoos, said she fell in love with opera after taking advantage of the company’s cheap ticketing for young people. Cutting the E.N.O.’s funding and forcing it to move out of London would be “an absolute travesty,” she said.Two hours later, when the lights went down at the end of the show, the audience of nearly 2,000 applauded and cheered. After the cast had taken several bows, Neal Davies, a Welsh baritone, stepped forward and quietened the crowd for one final number. “I’m here to sing the praises of English National Op-er-a, who strive to make the medium both radical and pop-ul-ar,” he sang, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,”If the company did not exist “your life would be a dull-er one,” he added. That prospect, Davies bellowed, “was almost as unthinkable as Gilbert without Sul-liv-an.”The audience cheered loudly. But it was unclear if anyone outside the building was listening. More

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      Met Opera, Reeling From Cyberattack, Will Sell Tickets on New Site

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      The company’s computer systems have been down for more than three days. It will now use a Lincoln Center website to offer $50 general admission seats to some performances.Three days after a cyberattack first paralyzed its website and box office, the Metropolitan Opera on Friday announced that it would sell $50 tickets to some performances on a site run by Lincoln Center.The Met, in a brief note posted on social media, said it would offer the general admission tickets as it worked to fully restore its computer systems, which have been down since Tuesday morning. The company has proceeded with all of its performances, including of “Aida” and “The Hours,” but the Met has been unable to sell any new tickets, including in its last-minute rush ticket program.“We appreciate your patience through this difficult time as we work to resolve the issue and resume full operations,” the note said.The attack has wreaked havoc as the Met prepares for a string of holiday productions. At this time of year, the company’s ticketing systems typically handle about $200,000 in sales each day.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said it could be several more days before the Met’s ticketing site is fully restored. The attack has also sidelined the company’s internal networks, including its payroll system.“It takes time, because when you have been hacked, you have to be sure that whatever functions are going back online are not going to be compromised,” he said.Gelb said the Met was still investigating who had carried out the attack and assessing the damage.Separately, the Musikverein, a concert hall in Vienna, posted a message this week saying its website was unavailable. “We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to be able to provide our usual service as soon as possible,” the Musikverein said.The cyberattack comes at a difficult time for the Met, which is still working to recover from the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic and lure back audiences. Attendance is well below prepandemic levels.“At a time when you’re trying to get more people interested in opera and attending your performances, it’s incredibly frustrating,” Gelb said. “We all want the same thing, which is to make it easier for people to attend performances, not more difficult.”The Met will offer $50 tickets for three upcoming performances of Verdi operas: “Rigoletto” on Sunday and Wednesday, and “Aida” on Tuesday. Since the Met cannot connect to its ticketing system to see which seats have already been sold, the $50 seats will be general admission. Customers who buy the tickets will be given empty seats in the orchestra section on a first-come, first-served basis immediately before curtain.Tickets are being sold on www.lincolncenter.org/metopera. More