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      A Paris Opera House’s History and the Phantom

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      The architecture and location of the Palais Garnier are intertwined with the history of France and Paris (and a famous phantom).Showcasing more than 400 performances of opera, dance and music each year, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, inaugurated in 1875, is a true cathedral of culture. A promenade through its rooms is a theatrical experience itself, revealing ornate marble columns, bronze statues, crystal chandeliers, and paintings and frescoes. But the Palais Garnier, as the building is known, also holds secrets, from design quirks to haunting tales. Here are some facts about the building.Charles Garnier, the architect, was the last one shortlisted for the project.  Emperor Napoleon III started a competition for an “Imperial Academy of Music and Dance” in December 1860. Five finalists were chosen from more than 170 proposals. They were ranked, and Garnier came in last. With little to lose, he changed his plans, creating a monumental structure layered with imposing arcades, colonnades and flanking pavilions, crowned with a dome and a pedimented tower. “He was using a classical language, but in an eclectic, much freer, and much more expressive way,” Christopher Mead, author of “Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism,” said in an interview. Garnier’s win shocked the establishment, Mr. Mead said, but worked with the emperor’s effort to cast himself as a reformer.Charles Garnier, second from right, circa 1865 with his partners during construction of the opera house, which became known as the Palais Garnier.adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty ImagesThere is a “lake” under the opera house.When digging the foundations, workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of “The Phantom of the Opera,” who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. Mr. Mead was mesmerized by a visit. “You can see why it inspired Leroux,” he said. “You could invent a whole world there.”The falling chandelier in “The Phantom of the Opera” was based on a real event.In 1896, during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera “Hellé,” a short-circuit caused a counterweight from the chandelier to fall, killing a woman in the audience and injuring several more people. Reporting on the event was Leroux, then a journalist with a Paris newspaper. In “The Phantom of the Opera,” it is the Phantom who dislodges the chandelier from the ceiling. The current ceiling of the Palais Garnier, painted by Marc Chagall. The house’s chandelier, which was involved in a deadly accident in 1896, inspired a plot point in “The Phantom of the Opera.”Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSo was the Phantom (sort of).Leroux first published his novel as a serial in 1909 and 1910. In an interview, Isabelle Rachelle Casta, author of “The Work of ‘Obscure Clarity’ in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ by Gaston Leroux,” said its characters and story were invented but drew from real-life elements in addition to the lake and the falling chandelier. The Phantom himself was inspired by a pianist who was disfigured after an 1873 fire at the Palais Garnier’s precursor, the Salle Le Peletier, and from an assistant to Garnier who disappeared during construction. “Leroux took all of these stories and he created one of the most important stories of the 20th century,” Ms. Casta said. An attack partly inspired the construction. In 1858, Napoleon III and his wife, Empress Eugènie, went to the Salle Le Peletier for a concert. As they arrived, three bomb blasts threw their carriage onto its side, hurled spectators into the street and blew out windows in the opera house and surrounding buildings. Eight people died, but the emperor and empress survived. The mastermind of the plot was Felice Orsini, an Italian revolutionary who had been critical of Napoleon III for not supporting his pro-republican cause. The emperor, already hoping to replace the Salle Le Peletier, decided to build a new opera house in a more open area with a secure entrance. But he never saw it completed: He died in 1873.Garnier requested that no trees be planted on the main road to the building.Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw Napoleon III’s transformation of Paris, lined all his Grands Boulevards with trees, except for one: the Avenue de l’Opéra, a half-mile stretch from the Louvre to the opera house. Garnier asked for this to maximize his building’s sense of monumentality and to not block views of it. “He wanted a building that announced itself to the public,” Mr. Mead said. “This was a building for them.” More

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      SZA Matches Adele With Six Straight Weeks at No. 1

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      “SOS,” the latest album by the R&B singer, once again tops the Billboard album chart, matching the streak of Adele’s “30.”For the sixth consecutive week, “SOS,” the second album by the frank-talking R&B singer-songwriter SZA, tops the Billboard album chart, matching the streak of Adele’s latest release, “30,” in late 2021 and early 2022.Holding nearly steady in listener activity for the last three weeks — down only four percent week over week — “SOS” had the equivalent of 119,000 sales in the United States, including 160 million streams for its songs, according to the tracking service Luminate. Those numbers put the album just shy of one million in equivalent sales, which combine purchases and streams, in its first six weeks of release.The last album to achieve at least six straight weeks atop the Billboard 200 chart was the soundtrack to Disney’s “Encanto,” which notched eight in early 2022. But, according to Billboard, the only female artists to achieve at least six consecutive weeks at No. 1 in the last decade-plus are Adele and Taylor Swift, placing SZA, 33, in elite company. (The country singer Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” scored 10 straight weeks at No. 1 in 2021.)The reign of “SOS” also marks the longest run atop the album chart for an R&B release since Usher’s “Confessions” in 2004; Janet Jackson’s “Janet.” was the last R&B album by a woman to spend its first six weeks at No. 1, back in 1993, Billboard reported.“Midnights” by Swift holds at No. 2 this week with 73,000 equivalents, followed by Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” (No. 3 with 56,000); Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” (No. 4 with 47,000); and “The Highlights,” a compilation by the Weeknd, at No. 5 with 44,000.On the Hot 100 singles chart, a new song by Miley Cyrus titled “Flowers” could make its debut at No. 1, challenging Swift’s “Anti-Hero” (which has spent eight weeks on top), SZA’s “Kill Bill” and Bizarrap and Shakira’s “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53.”Spotify said “Flowers” became the most-streamed song in a single week in the service’s history, though Billboard would not announce its final Hot 100 chart until Tuesday, “due to data processing delays.” More

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      A Car Accident Couldn’t Halt the Saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin’s Rise

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      In 2020, she released a lauded album exploring the Coltranes’ music. The next year, she broke her jaw in a crash and turned the harrowing experience into inspiration for a new LP, “Phoenix.”In mid-September 2021, the saxophonist and bandleader Lakecia Benjamin was driving home from a performance in Cleveland when her car slid off the highway, careened through a wooded area and flipped into a drainage ditch.“I woke up the first time to somebody pulling me out of the car, trying to break it open,” Benjamin, a bright light on the New York scene since the early 2010s, said through two masks on a recent Saturday morning at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. “Then I woke up in the hospital on a surgical table and them telling me, ‘You’re going to be OK.’ I didn’t know what happened or what was going on.”The accident left the Washington Heights native with three broken ribs, a fractured scapula, a perforated eardrum, a concussion, neurological damage and — worst of all — a broken jaw, a severe blow to any horn player, let alone one with her intensity. Undeterred, Benjamin went to Europe just three weeks later, somehow summoning the strength to play songs from her 2020 album, “Pursuance: The Coltranes,” a project dedicated to the astral jazz of the creative soul mates John and Alice.How did she get through it? “A little bit from the Heights,” she said, alluding to her toughness. “A little bit of clamping down and staying clamped on the mouthpiece. And I really think I was lucky that I was playing the Coltrane music. That energy, and that message; that was what I was supposed to be doing.”Though Benjamin has been a rising star in jazz for more than a decade, she reached a new gear in 2020 following the release of “Pursuance: The Coltranes,” an album lauded for its refreshing take on bebop and spiritual jazz. The car accident couldn’t dim her determination. Hustle and ingenuity have defined Benjamin’s career, and her strong will, warmth and down-to-earth persona come through in the music. Equally melodic and assertive, her sound feels rooted in tradition, yet broad enough to encompass R&B and Latin music; its pronounced funk suggests allegiances to hip-hop and dance.The trauma of Benjamin’s crash anchors her new album, “Phoenix,” out Friday, a vast, labyrinthine set of arrangements that opens with “Amerikkan Skin,” a propulsive song that features the wail of emergency vehicle sirens. “Instead of starting musically only, I’m trying to put the audience in a state of mind, of the type of frenzy and frantic, the hecticness I felt getting out of the car,” she explained.By incorporating sampled gunfire into the mix, the song also recollects wider tensions of recent years. “Black people are going through it,” Benjamin said. “Lower class people are going through it. Everyone is going through something.”Featuring the civil rights activist Angela Davis, the poet Sonia Sanchez, the pianist and R&B singer Patrice Rushen and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the album both examines the nuances of Blackness and emphasizes the contributions of women to American culture. “Revolutionary hope resides precisely among those women who have been abandoned by history,” Davis declares on “Amerikkan Skin.” “I truly believe, and men should applaud this, that this is the era of women.”Benjamin started her own journey in jazz, long a male-dominated form, when she told an art teacher at her elementary school that she wanted to play alto sax before she even knew what it was. Actually getting her hands on the instrument involved persuading a classmate to switch from sax to art. “I think I negotiated a couple Oreos or something,” Benjamin deadpanned.She attended the Harlem School of the Arts, then the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she studied saxophone under the multi-reedist Patience Higgins. Later, as a student at the New School, she went to concerts after class and saw players like Gary Bartz whenever they were in town. Benjamin said she talked Bartz into giving her “one little lesson,” which led to his teaching her how to play classical music. From there, she studied under other noted saxophonists — Vincent Herring, Bruce Williams, Jerome Richardson and Steve Wilson — and tried to absorb everything she could about the instrument: “I was calling Kenny Garrett, everybody, ‘Hey, can you teach me?’”The drummer Terri Lyne Carrington met Benjamin around 2010, when she was touring to support her album “The Mosaic Project,” and Benjamin joined to play a few shows. “She came in and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really electrifying,’” Carrington said in a telephone interview. “I could hear her spirit, her soul, everything was right there on the line.” She commended Benjamin for playing with emotion without losing the technical aspects of playing the blues.“We all have to heal from the pandemic,” Benjamin said. “We all have to rise from these ashes.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“We as jazz musicians can be musically intellectual and worried about playing hip and all those things,” Carrington said. “I was so happy to hear someone of her generation connect to the blues and to the origins of jazz in the way that she did.”Carrington produced Benjamin’s new album, tweaking compositions while adhering to the saxophonist’s own vision for the LP. “She wanted to involve people that she has called elders in some ways,” Carrington said. “I think that’s really an important element with young musicians to recognize or not recognize: to want to exchange. All of us have to, including her, pass on what we know to the people that are coming up behind us. That’s the only way the music survives.”The song “Basquiat” — a scorching arrangement dedicated to that artist — has a shape-shifting rhythm that pivots between calm and tranquillity. And the rapper, singer and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow appears on the title track, offering celestial coos for its spiritual-minded intro. The slow-rising arrangement purposefully depicts Benjamin’s resurgence in the wake of her accident.“I’ve seen her transform,” Muldrow said over the telephone. “The most beautiful thing about ’Kecia is that she is just more of herself. She’s more open with sharing the ideas that are within her. She’s become absolutely fearless in what it is — a compositional value, performance value, all these things. If you know ’Kecia, she ain’t gonna tell you nothing but the truth. She ain’t gonna give you nothing but what’s on her mind.”Benjamin said the perseverance she’s put into her career, and into recovering from her accident, are the backbone of “Phoenix,” which she hopes shows others “that anything is possible.”“I think I’m starting to see that I can accomplish more with the help of God than I thought I could,” she said. “I keep thinking this is the ceiling for me. And then I keep pressing it and pushing it. I’m growing; I feel like a phoenix. But I also feel we’re all out here the same way. We all have to heal from the pandemic. We all have to rise from these ashes.” More

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      He Quit Singing Because of Body Shaming. Now He’s Making a Comeback.

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      The tenor Limmie Pulliam, who made his debut at Carnegie Hall on Friday, hopes to break barriers for larger artists.As a rising young tenor in the 1990s, Limmie Pulliam dreamed of a career that would take him to the world’s top stages. But Pulliam, who has struggled with excessive weight for much of his life, quit singing in his early 20s because of concerns about body shaming in the music industry, finding work instead as a debt collector and a security guard.Now, after spending much of the past decade rebuilding his voice and career, Pulliam, 47, is finally realizing his dream. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall on Friday with the Oberlin Orchestra, singing the title role in R. Nathaniel Dett’s “The Ordering of Moses.” And last month, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida,” filling in for a tenor who had canceled his appearance — making Pulliam the first Black singer to perform that role in the Met’s history.His solemn performance received a warm ovation at Carnegie.“To hear Limmie succeed in this moment so beautifully, and at this point in his life, was personally satisfying for me,” said Timothy LeFebvre, the chair of the voice department at Oberlin. “We always cheer on our colleagues when they reach these notable achievements, but even more so when it is so hard fought.”In an interview, Pulliam reflected on his 12-year break from singing and the challenges facing larger artists, who once were common in the industry but have faced pressure in recent years to slim down. He also talked about how a chance to perform the national anthem while working as a field organizer in Missouri for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign allowed him to rediscover his voice. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.After you attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, you seemed destined for a career in opera. Then you quit. What happened?There was a lot of pressure on artists in terms of appearance. The industry cared about things that really had nothing to do with the voice, but with physicality, and that made it difficult for singers of size. It made it easy for me to walk away. I made myself a promise that if it ever stopped being fun, I would do something else. And so I did.What was it like at the time for singers struggling with concerns about their weight?People within the industry were able to make comments regarding someone’s physical look with impunity. In other industries, that would not be accepted, but it was almost widely accepted within the classical music world. It felt like it was OK to make fun of people of size and that we weren’t worthy of careers. It was a very difficult time, and it’s still a very difficult time.What would people say to you?I’ve had general directors send me email messages complimenting me on my voice and then saying, “Well, when you lose 50 pounds, get in touch with me again, and I’ll give you a live audition.”How did it feel to hear those comments?I began to look at rejection in a different way. I used to get a bit down when I received a note like that or just a flat-out refusal about an audition. But I began to use that as fuel to make me want to work even harder — to be an even better vocalist. I thought, “They may not want me right now, but they will need me at some point.”During your break from classical music, you worked a variety of jobs, eventually starting your own security firm. Did you sing at all, even for your own pleasure — at home, in the shower, at church?Not really. I was deliberately making the decision not to sing. I just didn’t have the desire. I wasn’t singing that much in church, and I rarely listened to the radio in the car. There wasn’t much going on musically for me during that time. I was just concentrating on this new life that I was trying to build and trying to move forward.And then, in 2007, when you were 31 and working as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Missouri, your home state, you got an unexpected chance to perform the national anthem.We had invited someone to sing the national anthem. And they got cold feet at the last minute and decided they didn’t want to do it. And it happened to be an event that I had invited my boss to attend. And he immediately said, “I remember seeing on your résumé that you used to be an opera singer. Why don’t you sing it?” And I said, “Well, you know, I haven’t sung for a number of years. And the national anthem is not an easy song to sing. I’m not sure I can pull it off.” It was terrifying; it was not something I had practiced or prepared. I did not know what was going to come out.But he convinced me to do it. And I sang at the event and ended up singing at several other events. And in doing so, I noticed some very interesting changes in my voice. It had taken on a more mature, burnished quality. And it had grown substantially in size. And it really piqued my interest as to the type of repertoire I could possibly sing with this new instrument.Your returned to the stage five years later, when you were 36, at the National Opera Association’s vocal competition. How did you prepare?I pulled out my old lesson tapes from the conservatory and began working with those lesson tapes and polishing things, just out of interest to see what the voice could do. And I eventually reached out to a voice teacher in Memphis, Tenn., and began working with her. We realized that we had something that was special — that there wasn’t anyone like me as an artist out there. We were working to rekindle the voice. That’s when I found the joy again in singing.Was it easy to get back into the business?It took a good three years or so before that first staged operatic engagement came, and it came because I was posting clips of my singing on YouTube and other platforms and just sharing wherever I could, and reaching out to friends who were still in the industry and letting them know I was back and basically trying to sing for anyone who would hear me.A friend saw a clip of me singing “Ch’ella mi creda libero e lontano” from Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” with my former high school choir director playing the piano. She shared it with her husband, who happened to be the music director of a small opera company in the Seattle area. They invited me to to sing the role of Canio in “Pagliacci.”You were the first Black singer to perform the role of Radamès at the Met. Do you feel that classical music is doing enough to address racial and ethnic disparities?As a Black man, I’m usually the only one who looks like me in a rehearsal setting. So there always is a sense of isolation, of not fitting in. You have to learn to work through that and do your job to the best of your ability.We always seem to have had celebrated Black female voices in the industry, like Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Grace Bumbry and Shirley Verrett. But the list of Black men has always been quite short. There are some in the industry who have difficulty in seeing Black males in romantic leads. We’ve made progress, and we just have to keep pushing forward and breaking down some of these walls.How did it feel to make your debut at Carnegie Hall?It was very difficult for me to enjoy it fully. It has been a challenging year for me personally. On May 8, my father passed away. And the following week, after the funeral, I left to get on a plane to prepare for my debut with the Cleveland Orchestra singing the role of Otello. I arrived in New York on Nov. 10 to begin my cover contract with the Met for “Aida.” On Nov. 14, my eldest sister passed away.It has been an emotional roller coaster for me. One never knows how grief will manifest itself. And grief is a very sneaky thing. And it pops up on you at very odd times, and you never know what’s going to trigger it. I was able to make it through because of the strength of my faith and knowing that my loved ones were in complete support of me and my career and would have wanted me to be where I was.What did your family say to you after the performance?My mother walked up to me and gave me a hug and a kiss and said: “God bless you. I’m extremely proud of you.” My oldest brother, whenever I go to perform, he always reminds me to make the family proud. And his response on Friday night was, “That’s how you make us proud.” More

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      Ginny Redington Dawes, Composer of Memorable Ad Jingles, Dies at 77

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      She collaborated on the melodies for signature commercials that sang the praises of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other brands.Ginny Redington Dawes, a songwriter whose compositions included memorable advertising jingles like the chipper McDonald’s declaration “You, You’re the One” and Coca-Cola’s boast that “Coke Is It,” died on Dec. 31 in Manhattan. She was 77.Her companion and only immediate survivor, James McCullar, said the cause was complications of hepatic cirrhosis.Ms. Dawes never became well known herself, but she helped maintain or boost the popularity of the products she promoted. And she insinuated infectious tunes into the nation’s repertoire that Americans whistled and hummed as much as the songs played on Top 40 radio.She hooked listeners with melodically and rhythmically catchy jingles that accompanied slogans for everything from Tide detergent to Hartz’s tick and flea-fighting pet collars, Kit Kat candy bars and Johnson’s baby powder.“When I’ve got a really great lyric,” she told Charles Osgood of CBS in a 1977 television interview, “I put a very simple melody to it.”Ms. Dawes started writing the music and lyrics for commercials in 1975 after the firm of Sidney E. Woloshin — who composed the original McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” jingle in 1971 — was commissioned to do one for the chain’s new “You, You’re the One” advertising campaign.Mr. Woloshin invited about 20 jingle writers to submit proposals. Ms. Dawes produced the winning tune. Adopted by the ad agency Needham, Harper & Steers, it was suddenly everywhere.In 1979, she married a jingle-writing competitor, Thomas W. Dawes, whose credits included Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” and “7Up, the Uncola.”They later collaborated on the music for, among other campaigns, American Airlines’ “Something Special in the Air” and the familiar “Coke Is It.” Mr. Dawes died in 2007.The jingle that underscored Coke’s claim to be “It,” introduced in 1982, was described as a “piece of dynamite” by John F. Bergin, the worldwide director of the Coke account at the McCann-Erickson agency.While David Ogilvy, a founder of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, was credited with the credo “If you don’t have anything to say, sing it,” Mr. Bergin argued that the musical accompaniment to the Coke commercial was anything but an afterthought. If soda drinkers paused to parse the ambiguity of what “It” was, the tune was intended to define the term and embellish it.“It’s like a football fight song,” Mr. Bergin told The New York Times. “Usually you get a languid ballad. We were looking for a big, bold sound, and a big, bold statement. This isn’t an ipsy-pipsy drink, and the music says that loud and clear.”The song, composed by Ms. Dawes and arranged by her husband, was one of 18 jingles and 36 proposed slogans presented to Coca-Cola executives to succeed “Have a Coke and a Smile.”The music and copy were tested separately in consumer focus groups and individual interviews until the agency and company reached a consensus that “Coke is it” was, indeed, it.Ms. Dawes also wrote pop songs, including “Hurtin’ Song,” recorded by Eddy Arnold, and “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (written with Rose Marie McCoy), recorded by Sarah Vaughan.She began her musical career as a singer, to glowing reviews.When she appeared in 1975 at the Coriander, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, John S. Wilson of The Times called her a “startling performer” who sang “in a deep, strong, beautifully controlled voice that is filled with vivid colors, as she moves from low, sexy passages to an open, lusty shout.”Virginia Mary Redington was born on May 13, 1945, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bay Ridge section of the borough. Her father, Joseph, was a naval architect. Her mother, May (O’Brien) Redington, was a teacher.Virginia attended Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn and graduated from St. Josephs College, also in Brooklyn, with a degree in English in 1966.She and Mr. Dawes — a founder of the folk-pop group the Cyrkle, best known for its 1966 hit single “Red Rubber Ball,” written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of the Seekers — married in 1979 and, merging their talents, formed TwinStar Music to produce jinglesThe couple also wrote the book, music and lyrics for “The Talk of the Town,” a show about the fabled literary round table at the Algonquin Hotel, whose members included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman. First produced in 2004, it ran nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater before it moved as a cabaret show to the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room.Reviewing the show for Bloomberg News, John Simon wrote that its music and wit matched “the infectious energy and sophistication of the real-life luminaries it is based on.”Ms. Dawes was also a collector of antique jewelry and the author, with her husband (who took the photographs) and others, of several books on the subject, including “The Bakelite Jewelry Book” (1988), with Corinne Davidov, and “Georgian Jewellery 1714-1830” (2007), with Ms. Dawes’s fellow collector Olivia Collings. More

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      Review: Dalia Stasevska Returns to the New York Philharmonic

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      Dalia Stasevska returned to the orchestra’s podium with a world premiere and subtly linked works by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius.The opening of the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Friday took a step toward solving one problem while exposing another.Wang Lu’s “Surge,” given its world premiere at the top of the show, is the product of an initiative by the League of American Orchestras to commission new works from six composers — all women — that will be guaranteed performances from ensembles across the country.So far, so good. Too often, premieres have short rehearsal periods; then, unless future performances are lined up, or unless soloists champion concertos written for them, the music can easily disappear. The League’s project at least gives contemporary work a fighting chance at longevity.I hope, however, that the other premieres to come out of this initiative don’t have the running time of “Surge.” At a mere six minutes, it was shorter than all but one movement in the classics that followed at David Geffen Hall on Friday: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Sibelius’s Second Symphony.Larger commissions are certainly possible. A week ago, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” took up the first 20 minutes of the Philharmonic’s program; last season in Los Angeles, an entire evening was given over to Thomas Adès’s 100-minute “Dante.” Imagine the League’s group of orchestras nurturing music on the scale of symphony. Then they might tackle what is perhaps the problem of world premieres: that, as brief curtain-raisers unrelated to the rest of a concert, they tend to just read as perfunctory exercises in box-ticking.That said, Wang’s piece has the elements of an enormous score skillfully accordioned into the shape of a much smaller one. From the flourish of its first measure, “Surge” is a restless succession of swinging gestures, martial flashes and exercises in disparate, assertive voices coming in and out of focus, then occasionally finding common ground in a tutti mass. It all had the feel of a TikTok binge: an endless and entrancing stream of much of the same in short, slightly different bursts. The music ended before it became exhausting — but, like TikTok, left you wanting more.At the podium was Dalia Stasevska, in her second appearance with the Philharmonic. Her debut last season proved her bona fides in contemporary music, with a whirlwind trio of works by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams. Friday’s premiere was equally impressive; Stasevska led the Wang with verve, commitment and, above all, clarity (despite distractingly wide-armed conducting mannerisms that could qualify as a cardio workout).The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, a longtime outspoken critic of Russia, performed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in a gown design to resemble the Ukrainian flag.Chris LeeThe rest of the program was another kind of test: standard repertory. For the Tchaikovsky, she was joined by the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in characteristically elegant and modestly electrifying form, with a focused, penetrating sound. In this piece, the orchestra mostly plays a supporting role to the singingly Romantic solo part. But ensemble moments were nevertheless distinct; the introduction alone seemed to inhale and exhale its phrases, and the cellos’ freely beating fifths in the finale set the tone for the rubato and joyously dancing liveliness that Batiashvili has previously brought to folk-inflected music by the likes of Szymanowski.It was the kind of performance that, without trying to, had audience members roaring with applause after the first movement, then, at the end, immediately rising for a standing ovation — one of the most passionate I’ve heard at Geffen Hall this season. They had a similar response to the Sibelius, which here was anxiously brisk and occasionally furious.The symphony can come off as an exercise in motivic obsession on the level of Beethoven’s Fifth, and even has that work’s style of a soaringly ecstatic finale. But Stasevska’s heavily opinionated interpretation was unusual from the start; the slurred tenuto phrases of the strings, rather than gentle waves approaching a shore, were a ride along a bumpy road. With a liberal treatment of tempo markings, passages were pushed and pulled, some relished and others simply rushed. The last movement was an uncertain triumph, with a suggestion of continuing struggle, until Stasevska savored the radiance of the closing measures’ chords.Throughout, it was difficult to avoid seeing this idiosyncratic account as a personal one. Stasevska lives in Finland but was born in Ukraine, which she has been fervently supporting — through fund-raising, through driving trucks packed with supplies across its border — since Russia’s invasion nearly a year ago. Batiashvili, too, has long been outspoken against Russia and the classical musicians who have benefited from its leadership, especially the conductor Valery Gergiev. On Friday, she performed wearing a gown in the stark blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was written in the glory days of Imperial Russia — an empire that included Finland as a grand duchy subjected, by the time Sibelius’s Second Symphony premiered in 1902, to severe policies of Russification. Sibelius denied as much, but listeners heard in this work an outcry for national pride and independence. To them, the music could never be met with a neutral response. And it’s just as impossible to have one to Stasevska, neither to her life nor to her passionately argued performance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Beatbox House to Travel Abroad for the State Dept. 

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      The trip will mark the first time that the government officially recognizes the genre in its American Music Abroad program.Members of the Beatbox House, a group of five vocal percussive artists from Brooklyn, will follow in the footsteps of American music legends Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong when they travel abroad later this month to serve as cultural ambassadors for the United States.Chris Celiz, Gene Shinozaki, Amit Bhowmick, Kenny Urban, and Neil Meadows (better known as NaPoM), all beatboxing champions, will visit Indonesia and Singapore with the State Department for three weeks of beatbox competitions, workshops and collaborations with local musicians as part of American Music Abroad, an outreach program sponsored by the department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.The Beatbox House, a group that has tens of thousands of fans, creates drum and instrument sounds with accented speech, distorted singing and lip oscillations. The music covers many genres, including hip-hop, EDM, grime, trap and rock. The group is also known for its popular cover of the Rednex song “Cotton Eye Joe.”Members of the Beatbox House have won competitions individually, in pairs and as a group, and they are active in music education efforts around New York City. In the group’s workshops, students are introduced to basic beatbox sounds, as well as to the endless possibilities that the human voice offers for musical expression. Now, the group has the chance to share the same lessons abroad.Known for holding inclusive, community-oriented competitions — known as battles — around the city, the Beatbox House has an itinerary that will include visits to plenty of community centers abroad. Alison Bassi, a cultural affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Singapore, hopes that the locations beyond bars and concert halls will make the music “accessible to lots of different people and a slightly different audience,” not just beatbox devotees.Dancers recently performed in a collaboration with members of the Beatbox House at the Guggenheim Museum.Jordan Macy for The New York TimesOriginally one of the five pillars of hip-hop, beatbox made its way to Europe in the late 1980s by way of American soldiers. Since then, the appetite for the art form in Europe and Asia has grown. The international beatbox community now numbers in the millions, with Asia representing many of the recent gains in support and participation. For the State Department, sending the Beatbox House musicians abroad — the first time it will recognize the musical genre in the cultural program — presents an opportunity to share an art form that is both specifically American and quite popular overseas.“We depend upon our American artists to join in our country’s diplomacy,” Lee Satterfield, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, wrote in an email. In recent years, this mission has led American Music Abroad to partner with fewer chart-topping artists and more mission-driven performers like the Beatbox House, a shift that reflects what Mr. Satterfield said was the department’s goal to “expand the reach of music diplomacy.”Of course, security issues, on a smaller and more intimate scale, might crop up in Indonesia, where the group is already popular. “They love us out there,” Mr. Shinozaki said. Last time some of its members performed in the country, he said, they had to be escorted out of the venue.Mr. Shinozaki, Mr. Celiz and Mr. Bhowmick are all first-generation Americans whose families came from Japan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, respectively. For the five band members, performing an American style of music, in a diverse group, sums up the spirit of hip-hop, the spirit of democracy and the best of what this country has to offer.“My parents wanted the American dream,” Mr. Celiz said. “I feel like I’m getting to live it. But we’re also redefining what that means. This is our version of it.”Mike Quinlan, the spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia, wrote in an email that the Beatbox House was the Embassy’s “top choice” for the visiting artists program.“They have a good amount of people who are very excited about them being here,” Mr. Quinlan said, adding that “the Beatbox House is a living example” of the diversity of the United States, and of its music.Mr. Shinozaki, left, and Chris Celiz in their show, “The Missing Element.”Jordan Macy for The New York TimesSome Beatbox House members have experience in the region already, like Mr. Shinozaki in Indonesia. And four years ago, Mr. Bhowmick, Mr. Meadows and Mr. Shinozaki performed in Bangladesh, enjoying a warm reception, especially Mr. Bhowmick.“They look up to me,” he said of his fans in Bangladesh. “I’m a Bengali kid who changed his parents’ minds and broke the conventional path. So when we went there, the crowd was just amazing.” The trip with American Music Abroad, he said, “is going to be very similar in that way, if not even crazier.”Ms. Bassi pointed out that the biggest beatbox battle in Singapore is typically held in December. But when the organizers of the competition learned that the members of the Beatbox House would be in the country in February, they delayed the competition until then “to bring a bigger audience,” she said.After visiting Singapore, the group will continue its tour in the Philippines and Japan, doing the same community building, on their own time, that they are doing with the government program, simply because it matters to them. This will be the first trip to Asia that will involve all five members of the group, so they want to make it last as long as possible.Mr. Urban summed up the mood on behalf of the group, saying he was “just excited to be with my squad” and to “tour the world.”In addition to performing, the Beatbox House is dedicated to community outreach. Jordan Macy for The New York Times More

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      David Crosby, Folk-Rock Voice of the 1960s, Dies at 81

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      He was an original member of the Byrds and a founder of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But he was almost as well known for his troubled personal life as for his music.David Crosby, the outspoken and often troubled singer, songwriter and guitarist who helped create two of the most influential and beloved American bands of the classic-rock era of the 1960s and ’70s, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has died. He was 81.Patricia Dance, a sister of Mr. Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance, said in a text message on Thursday evening that Mr. Crosby died “last night.” She provided no other details.Mr. Crosby was inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a founding member of the Byrds and as a founder of CSN&Y. He brought jazz influences to both groups, in the process broadening the possibilities of vocally driven folk-rock. And his reach extended to later generations: His alternate tunings became an inspiration for the innovative “freak folk” movement of the early 21st century while influencing scores of other musicians eager to give acoustic music a progressive spin.If Mr. Crosby’s music expanded boundaries, his persona fixed him in a specific era — and proudly so. In 1968, he wrote “Triad,” an ode to free love, recorded in distinct versions by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His song “Almost Cut My Hair,” which he recorded with CSN&Y for their acclaimed 1970 album, “Déjà Vu,” was a virtual loyalty oath to the counterculture.Mr. Crosby’s image as the twinkle-eyed stoner and sardonic hedonist of the cosmic age was said to have been a model for the obstinate free spirit played by Dennis Hopper in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”His impish indulgences turned potentially lethal many times. He became nearly as well known for his drug offenses, weapons charges and prison stints as for his music. By the mid-1970s, he was addicted to both cocaine and heroin.“You don’t sit down and say, ‘Gee, I think I’ll become a junkie,’” Mr. Crosby told People magazine in 1990. “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was fun. It was the ’60s, and we thought we were expanding our consciousnesses.”But later, he continued, “drugs became more for blurring pain.” He added: “You don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are. And I had the money to get more and more addicted.”Mr. Crosby’s drug abuse may have exacerbated his medical problems, including a long battle with hepatitis C, which necessitated a liver transplant in 1994. He also suffered from type 2 diabetes and, in 2014, had to cancel a tour to endure a cardiac catheterization and angiogram.Despite his health issues, his voice remained robust enough in those years for him to tour. And in his best moments while performing with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, he could recreate some of the most famous harmonies of the rock era. His voice remained strong as well when touring with his solo band in later years.A Prominent LineageDavid Van Cortlandt Crosby was born on Aug. 14, 1941, in Los Angeles into families with deep roots in American history dating back to Dutch rule in New York in the 17th century. His mother, who was born Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, descended from the prominent Van Cortlandt family. His father, Floyd Crosby, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer whose credits included the classic western “High Noon,” was a member of the Van Rensselaer clan.David attended Crane Country Day School in Montecito, Calif., where he starred in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “H.M.S. Pinafore” and other musical productions, but he flunked out. He completed his high school studies by correspondence at the Cate School in nearby Carpinteria. He studied drama at Santa Barbara City College, but he dropped out before graduating to pursue a music career.He was 16 when he received his first guitar, from his older brother, Ethan, who had begun playing years earlier. David started out, like so many others in the early ’60s, performing folk music.“I would learn two chords and go back and forth between them,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Mojo. “What took it to the next level was, my brother started listening to 1950s jazz: Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, people like that. Listening to jazz really widens your world.”Mr. Crosby also absorbed the music of the Everly Brothers, which taught him how to layer harmonies into diaphanous patterns. He first performed with his brother, but he soon went solo and drifted through coffee houses around the country until landing in New York, in the epicenter of the 1960s folk movement, Greenwich Village. In 1963, he cut his first demos, produced by Jim Dickson, who would later manage the Byrds.Mr. Crosby, front row left, as a member of the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in the early 1960s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby, who briefly played with the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in Los Angeles, got to know Jim McGuinn (who later changed his name to Roger) and Gene Clark while they were performing as a duo at the Troubadour. He soon began adding his harmonies to theirs onstage, fitting in so smoothly that they became a trio, known as the Jet Set.Mr. Crosby brought in Mr. Dickson to become the group’s manager. Mr. Dickson encouraged them to advance the new sound they had already been exploring, which combined their earlier folk influences with the electrified sound of the British Invasion bands, particularly the Beatles. To that end the band added a drummer, the inexperienced but handsome Michael Clarke, and Mr. Crosby took up the electric guitar. Together, the revolutionary style they honed became known as folk-rock.That hybrid found its first recorded expression after Mr. Dickson acquired an acetate of a new Bob Dylan song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” in August 1964. The band’s own demo of the piece, with the new recruit Chris Hillman on bass, helped land them a contract with Columbia Records that November. Two weeks later, the Jet Set changed its name to the Byrds.Writing Songs, and HitsColumbia, however, felt that the group hadn’t yet jelled musically, so only Mr. McGuinn was allowed to play an instrument on the single, which came out in April 1965, with studio musicians accompanying him. Mr. Crosby and Mr. Clark did provide impeccable harmonies on the song, which helped it reach No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart. The song was the title track of their debut album, released in June 1965, and the full band played on the rest of the tracks.The Byrds performed at Yankee Stadium in 1966 on an all-star bill that also included Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys and others. From left: Mike Clarke (partly hidden), Chris Hillman, Mr. Crosby and Roger (then known as Jim) McGuinn.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby didn’t contribute compositions to the Byrds’ first two albums. But on their third, “Fifth Dimension” (1966), he and Mr. Hillman helped fill a writing void left by the departure of the band’s most prolific songwriter, Mr. Clark. Mr. Crosby contributed to the composition of several songs on the album and wrote one himself, “What’s Happening?!?!” Its lyric introduced a Crosbyesque motif: posing questions that had no answer. More famously, Mr. Crosby wrote the band’s smash hit “Eight Miles High” with Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Clark.For the Byrds’ next album, “Younger Than Yesterday,” Mr. Crosby contributed “Everybody’s Been Burned,” which idealized the key strategy of his emerging style: to contrast a dreamy melody with dazed lyrics.A more daring number helped seal Mr. Crosby’s fate with the band. He had written “Triad” for the fifth Byrds album, and the band recorded it. But the other members were reluctant to release it, preferring instead “Goin’ Back,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Mr. Crosby vigorously argued against using outside writers for a band that already had three, and tension in the band grew. There was anger, too, over political speeches he had made between songs when the band played the Monterey Pop Festival the summer before. All of it led to his firing.Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Hillman delivered the crushing news. They “said I was impossible to work with, and I wasn’t very good anyway, and they’d do better without me,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Uncut. “It hurt like hell. I didn’t try to reason with them. I just said, ‘It’s a shameful waste. … Goodbye.’”By this time Mr. Crosby had already started casually jamming with Mr. Stills, the guitarist and singer whose group Buffalo Springfield had recently disbanded. Mr. Crosby wrote his first song with Mr. Stills (along with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane) while sailing on a 74-foot boat he had acquired a year earlier. The song, “Wooden Ships,” also recorded by the Airplane, tested out the vocal blend that would become Crosby, Stills & Nash’s signature.Mr. Crosby and Mr. Stills connected with Mr. Nash in July 1968 at a party at Joni Mitchell’s house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Mr. Nash was eager to leave his slick British pop act, the Hollies, to join the hot folk-rock scene. The three began meeting on their own to perfect their sound, and when Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, heard their elegant three-way vocal braiding, he signed them to his label.A Grammy, Then a DeathThe group’s debut album, titled simply “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” was released in May 1969 and shot into the Top 10. It earned them a Grammy as best new artist. Besides “Wooden Ships,” the album included two other songs by Mr. Crosby, the shimmering “Guinevere” and the elegiac “Long Time Gone,” which he wrote after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.From left, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Mr. Crosby in a photo taken at the shoot for the cover of the album “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” their first as a group. Henry DiltzThat same year, his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a car accident while running a routine errand. Mr. Crosby later saw this as the tipping point that sent him into depression and serious drug use.“I was unable to handle it,” he told People magazine. “I was very much in love with her and she just never came back. That was when I got more into hard drugs.”His increasing recreational drug use made it harder for him to create music, he said, but he nevertheless managed to write two classic songs for the band’s follow-up album, “Déjà Vu,” released in 1970, which officially expanded the group’s lineup to include Neil Young: “Almost Cut My Hair” and the title track, a rhythmically daring number with complex harmonies.Fueled by drugs and egos, the group quickly began to fracture. Over the next year, all four members released solo albums. Mr. Crosby’s, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” released in 1971, sold well, but it was the least well received in its day. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it a “disgraceful performance.” Mr. Crosby would not record another solo album for 18 years. But in later years it received a critical overhaul; in his 1994 book, “All Time Top 1,000 Albums,” Colin Larkin called it “miraculous.”Starting in 1972, Mr. Crosby released a series of successful albums with Mr. Nash, his closest ally in the band. All three of their first joint albums went gold, buoyed by Mr. Nash’s more commercial tunes.In 1973, Mr. Crosby reunited with the four other original Byrds for one album, but it was poorly received. For much of the ’70s, he also worked as a session singer, backing up star friends like Jackson Browne and James Taylor. In the ’80s and ’90s, he did similar work with Phil Collins.Mr. Crosby, Mr. Stills and Mr. Nash, and sometimes Mr. Young, reunited from time to time. But by the 1980s Mr. Crosby was increasingly running afoul of the law.Mr. Crosby was arrested by Dallas police in April 1982 and charged with drug and gun possession. He spent nine months in prison.Bureau of Prisons/Getty ImagesHe spent nine months in a Texas prison in 1982 on drug and weapons charges. In 1985, he was arrested on charges of drunken driving, hit and run, and possession of a concealed pistol and imprisoned for a year. By his account he quit hard drugs in 1986. But in March 2004, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, as well as illegal possession of a hunting knife, ammunition and marijuana. He pleaded guilty and got off with a fine.Mr. Crosby detailed his travails in two harrowing autobiographies, “Long Time Gone” (1988) and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It” (2006), both written with Carl Gottlieb.Surging Late in LifeHe earned less fraught tabloid headlines in 2000, when he was revealed to be the biological father, via sperm donation, of the two children of the singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner at the time, Julie Cypher.Mr. Crosby had first become a father in 1962, with Celia Crawford Ferguson, but as young parents they put their son up for adoption. He had three other children: Erika, by his former girlfriend Jackie Gutherie; Donovan, by another partner, Debbie Donovan; and Django, with Ms. Dance, his wife of 35 years. His brother killed himself in the late 1990s. His survivors include his wife and four children.In 1997, Mr. Crosby reunited with the son he had put up for adoption, James Raymond, who had grown up to become an accomplished pianist. With the session guitarist Jeff Pevar, they formed a jazz-rock band, which they cheekily called CPR.Mr. Crosby in concert in Los Angeles in 2012. Two years later he released his first solo album in 21 years, ushering in one of the most prolific periods in his career.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersIn 2014, Mr. Crosby released his first solo album in 21 years, “Croz,” which debuted in the Billboard Top 40. It ushered in one of the most prolific periods in his career, in which he released five solo albums, most recently “For Free” in 2021.Mr. Crosby told The Orange County Register in 2019 that his late-in-life resurgence was sparked by his realization that “at this stage, you don’t know if you’ve got two weeks or 10 years,” adding, “Really what matters is what you do with whatever time you have.”Mr. Crosby announced in 2022 that although he planned to continue making records, he would no longer tour. “I’m too old to do it anymore,” he said. “I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength.” (He recently said that he had reconsidered.)In 2019 he was the subject of an uncommonly frank documentary, “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” directed by A.J. Eaton and produced by Cameron Crowe. In the film, the famously cantankerous Mr. Crosby talks about how he had alienated nearly all of his old musical associates, even his longtime ally Mr. Nash. “All the guys I made music with won’t even talk to me,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to undo it.”Adapting a more appreciative tone, Mr. Crosby looked back at his life with wonder in his second memoir. “I was tremendously lucky, surviving injury, illness and stupidity,” he wrote. “As for the music, I was blessed early and often, from the Byrds to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, singing with Graham, meeting my son and creating CPR” and experiencing “the wonderful, exploratory forward motion of new music.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More