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      Nicola Benedetti Prepares Her Next Star Turn: Festival Leader

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      EDINBURGH — Not long into an interview with the violinist Nicola Benedetti, there was a knock at the door.“Ohhh, chips!” she whispered excitedly as a takeaway carton of haggis and fries entered the room. “I’ve been in meetings since 8 o’clock this morning. Do you mind?” A pattern quickly emerged: a question, a tidal wave of thoughts on the profundity of art, a pause for breath and then, eventually, a chip.“I think I’m in a good position to be saying, ‘Here’s why chips taste fantastic’ to somebody who hasn’t tasted them,” said Benedetti, who, in addition to her work as an acclaimed instrumentalist and educator, recently began her tenure as the director of the Edinburgh International Festival. She was describing her approach to the age-old question of attracting new audiences.That process “involves the disarming of prejudice,” she said, “but doing so in a way that still absolutely has integrity, that maintains and preserves the integrity of the art forms that we have presented and the tradition we’ve upheld for 75 years, and by not apologizing for what we do, not trying to change what we do.”Benedetti, 35, is the first Scot and the first woman to lead the festival since it began in 1947. For many, the appointment came as a surprise. “I always thought that she was keen to expand in that direction,” said Richard Morrison, the chief culture writer for The Times of London, adding, “that did rather shock me, that she’d be prepared to devote quite so much of her time and energy to that huge project.”Although Benedetti has had to be more selective in her future repertoire, and is more interested in consolidating existing musical partnerships than she is in finding new ones, she has been reluctant to press pause on her performing altogether. “Taking on this role meant I really had to double down on my commitment to continually improving as a musician,” she said.She premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall, and is touring Szymanowski’s second concerto with orchestras in Berlin, Manchester and Boston this month. She has even restarted sporadic lessons, with the violinist Andrea Gajic, to help regain confidence after a wrist injury that forced her to pull out of a residency last summer at the Aldeburgh Festival in England.Benedetti premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.Light Press Media and Design Her brain, she admitted, goes “in 20 different directions at once.” But her aim for the Edinburgh festival is focused: “to provide the deepest possible experience for people. We’re unapologetic and uncompromising on the weight, depth and profundity of the art that the festival presents, to the maximum number of people and the broadest possible audience.”Morrison said that her vision is not elitist, but that it also does not sacrifice excellence, “which, in a way, is slightly contrary to what the politicians and the bureaucrats are pushing towards in both England and Scotland.”Benedetti’s goal of bringing in broader audiences is one that was shared by her predecessor, Fergus Linehan, who incorporated pop music into the festival for the first time, in 2015. Though her background suggests she’ll lean more toward the fine arts, Benedetti confirmed that pop will still be programmed.“The diversity of music that we hear is going to remain,” she said. She wouldn’t be drawn on specifics of programming, but expect a bigger emphasis on Scottish voices and, because of sustainability targets, “deep dives” into a more select group of international orchestras. “When you’re flying 90 people from anywhere in the world to Edinburgh, I would like audiences to really understand why we chose them,” she said. “What’s special about their sound, their identity?”There will even be an attempt to break down traditional genre boundaries, and “recategorize through intensity of experience, and type of experience,” Benedetti said. How does she plan on selling the festival’s more traditional audience on all of that? “I have a lot of trust in people,” she said. “And I expect a lot from them.”Benedetti enters this role at a time when British arts organizations are struggling. Last fall, the Edinburgh Film Festival went into administration, which is similar to bankruptcy in the United States. In November, Arts Council England announced upheaval-inducing funding reallocations. That was followed in December by reductions in the Scottish government’s own budget for 2023-24, including a £7 million ($8.46 million) cut to Creative Scotland, the country’s national arts organization.The Edinburgh International Festival’s core funding is expected to remain at the same level for 2023-24, but, with rising costs and inflation, a standstill budget amounts to a cut. Will putting an international Scottish soloist with a national voice in this leadership position help attract private donors? “The great unknown is how much, in a really tricky climate, the Benedetti factor will end up benefiting the festival,” said Brian Ferguson, an arts correspondent for The Scotsman.Benedetti said that she doesn’t expect resistance from Edinburgh International Festival regulars: “I have a lot of trust in people. And I expect a lot from them.”Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesWhat happened to the Edinburgh Film Festival, Benedetti said, “heightens the acuteness of everybody’s vulnerability, and the need even more to be bold, clear and ambitious.“And not just get a marketing company to write statements about why you’re relatable to people,” she added. “The uncomfortable but necessary position of the festival is one where natural tensions lie.”IF BENEDETTI IS AMBITIOUS, that stems from her father, Gio. An Italian émigré who left school in Scotland at age 15, he would later embark on a series of financially successful, idiosyncratic business ventures in dry cleaning, cling-film dispensers and first-aid kits.“He had a real spirit for change, for making stuff happen, and was very, very ambitious about owning something, and about making money,” Benedetti said, adding, “he’d be the first one to say that, he’s not bashful at all about that.”She’s inherited her father’s uninhibitedness. When asked what kind of house she grew up in, she replied, “a big one.” After first picking up the violin at 4, Benedetti swapped the picturesque Ayrshire village of West Kilbride in Scotland for the “extreme environment” of the Yehudi Menuhin music school in Surrey, England, five years later.“If your priority in life is not to play your instrument to the highest possible level, I would not encourage people to go into that environment,” Benedetti said, but then defended the school’s specific commitment to excellence. “What do we want from the world? Do we all really have to be the same? Does everything have to follow one exact format?”After winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, her public profile raced ahead of the security she felt in her own playing. “I didn’t win the Tchaikovsky Violin Competition, I didn’t win the Joachim Competition — that’s not what I won,” she said. “So in terms of my violinistic chops, I had a long way to go, in full view of the public.”To make matters worse, she added, “I was sometimes in a total fight-or-flight mode on‌stage, and I wasn’t playing at all how I could play.” Today, it’s a different story. She delivered an assured performance of the Szymanowski concerto with the conductor Karina Canellakis in Berlin, finding a meaty yet tender sustained sound.But for Benedetti, the more significant change has been psychological: feeling grounded enough in her technique to free up and really explore, even in the fastest, most intricately patterned corners of her repertoire, like Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto, written for her in 2015 and reprised by Benedetti on many occasions. “I feel like I’ve become a lot more confident over time as a violinist,” she said.Teddy Jamieson, senior features writer for The Herald in Scotland, said of Benedetti, “She’s always been very serious about what she does, and really interested in the place music has in society — its role, its worth.” That, coupled with her undimmed energy as a self-starter, resulted in the Benedetti Foundation, a music education project she started in 2019, which provides large-group opportunities for string players of all abilities.“Too many times in my life I’ve seen, ‘Let’s have the whole nation playing the violin in two years,’ and people saying, ‘Our world will be fixed if that happens,’” Benedetti said of the organization’s constructive role within the wider education ecosystem. Within minutes, she flipped from arch idealist to blunt realist: “I’m in a position which is constantly doing this,” she said, putting her index fingers together, and wiggling them like a seismometer needle.Benedetti quickly shuts down questions about her personal life, and about the large ring on her finger. Otherwise, there’s a friendly gregariousness to her that belies her solitary violin work. “There’s a lonely quality to the soloist world, and especially because I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I left school at 15 and between the ages of 15 to 23, where you form some of those really strong bonds, I was basically on my own out there. That made an already quite lonely profession a bit more lonely.”A summer day in Berlin last year offered an alternative to that; Benedetti found herself shielding from “too much community,” focusing on her concert there rather than on a city full of friends. And the best friend she’s made around the world? “This person,” she said, pointing to the ring.“And family,” she quickly added. Benedetti used to live in London but is now based in Surrey, which she said has strengthened her support system: “I get excited about going home, and I can’t say that I ever really felt that when I lived in London.”The move places her close to relatives for the first time since she was a child; she’s a 15-minute drive from her sister (and fellow violinist) Stephanie Benedetti, along with her 1-year-old nephew Nico and 3-year-old niece Sienna, who received her first miniature violin for Christmas.There is a sense that personal connections come first for Nicola Benedetti. “I’ve refound in the last six or seven years,” she said, “such a community developed through the teaching and educating world, different parts of the industry that you wouldn’t necessarily access through being a touring concert soloist.” More

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      With Different Singers, One Opera Classic Can Seem Like Two

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      Alongside a winning “L’Elisir d’Amore,” our critic returned to four works at the Met in the middle of their runs to hear new rotations of artists.As the first act of Verdi’s “La Traviata” ends, Violetta, a high-end prostitute, is suffering the symptoms of tuberculosis. A well-to-do young man’s declaration of love shakes her seen-it-all cynicism; should she put an end to her life of pleasure and accept him?Screw it, she decides: As champagne fizzes of coloratura rise and rise, she declares that she is “forever free” and brings the curtain down in defiance.At the Metropolitan Opera in November, the soprano Nadine Sierra sang that moment with luxuriant ease and confidence, a woman certain that she still had all the time in the world. On Sunday at the Met, though, Ermonela Jaho — her tone far less plush than Sierra’s and the aria less easy for her — made it a kind of mad scene. Violetta’s fragility, her sleep-when-I’m-dead mania, were scarily center stage.Same words, same notes, an entirely different effect: This is one of the best parts of my job. In addition to attending first nights at the Met with other critics — as on Tuesday, when a delightful revival of “L’Elisir d’Amore” opened with the power to make you giggle one minute and choke up the next — I spent the last few weeks returning to four classic titles in the middle of their runs to see them with new rotations of singers.Especially in the standard repertory, the Met often cycles through multiple casts in a single season — and then does it again, year after year, Violetta after Violetta after Violetta. Ticket sales in this not-quite-post-pandemic period have blinked red lights at this practice. Houses are full for new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer certain draws.The tenor Javier Camarena, center, emanates sincerity and modesty in “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThere is not the audience there once was to hear “La Traviata” twice over a couple of months. There is not even the audience there once was to hear it twice over a couple of years.Which is something to mourn. Being a lover of the performing arts is about the thirst for the new play and concerto. But it’s also about relishing the Hamlet of cool distance next to the one of slovenly aggression; about how Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be noble or ferocious in the hands of different orchestras and conductors; about how each new soprano increases our sense of what is possible in a work, and suggests how capacious we are, too.Not that every contrast is quite as extreme as in the Met’s “Traviata” this season. In November I had been impressed by Sierra, who in her mid-30s is coming into her own vocally. But, as in her sumptuously sung “Lucia di Lammermoor” last year, she has not yet solved one of opera’s fundamental challenges: making rich, ample tone convey desperation, illness and frailty.Desperation, illness and frailty happen to be Ermonela Jaho’s stock in trade. We often hear about opera singers being larger than life onstage; Jaho manages to be smaller, to give the sense of death incarnate, a walking, singing corpse.About 15 years Sierra’s senior, she has a slender, meticulous sound that she doesn’t push to be bigger than it is. Her “Ah, fors’è lui” and “Dite alla giovine” were murmured reveries, ghosts of tone; you got the sensation of thousands of people in the audience leaning in to overhear private musings. I can’t remember experiencing such prolonged passages of extremely soft yet palpable singing in the Met’s huge theater, which artists often think they need to scream to fill.Jaho can be shamelessly old-school; this was probably the most coughing I’d ever heard from a Violetta, and her “Addio, del passato” in the final act milked every wide-eyed tremble and gasp for air. She didn’t summon the fullness of voice that an ideal Violetta requires, at least at certain moments. But Jaho unsettlingly lives this unsettling opera, providing a sensitive, unique vision of a classic.The tenor Ismael Jordi, making his Met debut as Alfredo this season, was on Sunday a gawky more than dashing presence, who spread mellow legato lines like schmears of cream cheese. The baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat is also making a company debut — this one rather more impressive — as Alfredo’s father, the elder Germont, with his burnished-mahogany “Di Provenza il mar” providing the most deeply satisfying singing of anyone onstage.In another Verdi work, “Rigoletto,” the shift of personnel marked a less dramatic change but resulted in a keen performance. On Dec. 17, the soprano Lisette Oropesa sang Gilda with a tone a few shades brighter and more finely vibrating than the softer-grain Rosa Feola had earlier in the fall.Lisette Oropesa, left, and Luca Salsi in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaThe baritone Luca Salsi, in the title role, sounded firmer and less haunted than had Quinn Kelsey, with his echoey, indelibly wounded voice. The tenor Stephen Costello sang with blithe, poised arrogance — and his characteristic physical stiffness, his stock gestures, somehow worked. He became something of an automaton of power.When “Aida” — yet more Verdi — opened in the beginning of December, it was one of the season’s shakier efforts, with Latonia Moore struggling in the title role. Michelle Bradley had always been scheduled to take on the part in the new year, but her entrance was accelerated when Moore dropped out after the first performance.I returned on Dec. 27, and found Bradley in pleasant form: a demure, even reticent Aida. The tenor Brian Jagde was more nuanced, if also less steady, than he had been in his unrelenting first performance a few weeks earlier.The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova, who stayed on in the run when Anita Rachvelishvili, who was supposed to replace her, canceled after a single evening, also seemed more settled in. The most salutary change was Kelsey, who turned from Rigoletto to Amonasro, and who gave his trademark smoky tone and aura of threat to a role that, earlier in the month, George Gagnidze had rendered merely tight and querulous.In the machine that is the Met’s abridged holiday presentation of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the baritone Benjamin Taylor, the second-cast Papageno, was the highlight on Dec. 28, his voice compact yet resonant, his charisma easygoing without being cloying. But for charm, even he couldn’t beat this “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Donizetti’s comedy is one of my favorite operas, but it can easily go awry. While laugh-out-loud funny, it is not a farce. Bartlett Sher’s quaint production interpolates a bit too much physical violence, presumably to raise the emotional stakes, but understands that the piece is at heart a small, sweet romance, drawing both smiles and tears.Thankfully, a cast led by the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz, and the spirited conductor Michele Gamba, in his Met debut, trust “Elisir” to reach the corners of the vast Met without overstatement or caricature.Camarena, as always, emanates sincerity and modesty; his Nemorino is a simple guy, but not a buffoon. After the slightest bit of burr to his top notes early on, they were pure and ringing by the end, and his “Una furtiva lagrima” began conversationally before breaking into golden rhapsody.Schultz’s tone had the gentle, silky glow of moonlight, but with a glisten that penetrated, and she gave a sense of both Adina’s independence and her vulnerability. The baritone Davide Luciano was suave as the conceited army sergeant Belcore; as the quack doctor Dulcamara, who provides the cheap wine that Nemorino takes as a love potion, the baritone Ambrogio Maestri was robust without being over-the-top.This was as lovely as opera gets. And it’s not over yet. After five more performances with this cast through January, “Elisir” comes back in April with Aleksandra Kurzak; the newcomers Xabier Anduaga and Jonah Hoskins; Joshua Hopkins; and Alex Esposito.Before that, in March, the soprano Angel Blue will star when “La Traviata” returns yet again. What will she add to Sierra’s and Jaho’s angles on the doomed, desperate Violetta? I know I’ll be there in the audience, ready to find yet more facets in these diamonds of the repertory. More

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      75 Years Ago, Latin Jazz Was Born. Its Offspring Are Going Strong.

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      A concert at Town Hall this week that will be led by Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra celebrates the legacies of Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Chico O’Farrill.In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, the trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauzá, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz. Bauzá suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba.It was a wildly fortuitous introduction: Dizzy and Chano’s team-up would mark a watershed moment in jazz history, what many refer to the birth of Latin jazz. Although neither musician could communicate in the other’s language, they shared a cultural connection, and suddenly bebop, Gillespie’s rebellious jazz experiment, became Cubop.Arturo O’Farrill, leader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which he formed in 2001 for Jazz at Lincoln Center, has long contemplated that meeting. It was a collaboration that united African diasporas, north and south, reconstructing ties broken by the slave trade. “There’s a saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it,” he said in a recent video interview, “where Dizzy says, ‘I don’t speak Spanish and Chano doesn’t speak English, but we both speak African.’”This Saturday at Town Hall, O’Farrill will commemorate that moment, just over 75 years ago, when Dizzy and Chano bonded over their ancestral past and took the music into the future, as well as the role his father, Chico, played in that evolution. The concert, which pays tribute to “The Original Influencers,” celebrates a Town Hall show similar to the Carnegie performance that took place in December 1947, and will feature O’Farrill’s 18-piece orchestra, as well as special guests Pedrito Martínez on percussion, Jon Faddis on trumpet, Donald Harrison on saxophone, the singers Daymé Arocena and Melvis Santa, and O’Farrill’s two sons, Adam and Zack, on trumpet and drums.The Cuban-born Chico O’Farrill was the son of Irish and German immigrants to the island and was so taken with the fusions previously explored by Bauzá as musical director of Machito and His Afro-Cubans, that he convinced the impresario Norman Granz to commission and record his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” featuring Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Flip Phillips, in 1950.“My father was fully European, living in an African country — because, you know, Cuba’s basically an African country — and also falling in love with jazz,” O’Farrill said. “He was the perfect person to be in all three worlds.”The elder O’Farrill joined up with Gillespie in the following years and became one of Latin jazz’s chief arrangers and orchestra leaders. Gillespie became Faddis’s mentor soon after he arrived in New York as an 18-year-old aspiring trumpeter. On Saturday, he will perform the “Manteca Suite,” Chico’s elaborate rearrangement of the Gillespie-Pozo classic written with Gil Fuller, “Manteca.” Faddis’s close association with Gillespie made him privy to Chico’s relationship with Pozo, who was tragically murdered in Harlem in 1948.“Mario Bauzá would take Dizzy up to Spanish Harlem to hear bands like Alberto Socarrás’s, and sit in,” Faddis said in an interview. “The collaboration with Chano was really important — I know there are many things that Chano taught him and the musicians in his band.”Pozo clued in Gillespie’s band to the dense polyrhythmic patterns that permeate the Afro-Cuban music that he learned as a street drummer in the Black Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana. In his autobiography “To Be, or Not … to Bop,” Gillespie expressed a desire to recapture lost elements of African tradition, writing that he “always had that Latin feeling” but that his musical ancestors remained “monorhythmic,” because drums were not tolerated by U.S. slave masters, while the Afro-Cubans “remained polyrhythmic.”Gillespie and Pozo shared other cultural bonds, too. “I think when you hear Dizzy and Chano play the Afro Cuban Suite, you hear the pattern of call and response,” Faddis added. “One of the main connectors between that Afro-Cuban lineage and American jazz is what you hear in the work songs, the prison songs and even the spirituals — the call and response in the church.”Gillespie and Pozo’s reunion of different diasporic African traditions through jazz had many antecedents, particularly in New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when King Oliver and Lorenzo Tio visited Havana with a military band and absorbed Cuban influences. The ragtime pianist Jellyroll Morton famously referenced “tinges of Spanish” in his playing, and in New York, Bauzá had been steadily absorbing jazz techniques and sharing Cuban rhythmic tradition as musical director of the Chick Webb orchestra in the 1930s.Both Gillespie and Bauzá had yearned to escape the predictability of danceable Latin ballroom and big band music, and in 1947, just as Gillespie was perfecting his notion of bebop, Pozo’s intervention helped jazz became an international genre. It would put Gillespie on a path that defined the rest of his musical career. By 1988, Dizzy founded the United Nations Orchestra, which over the years featured Latin jazz stars like Paquito D’Rivera, Giovanni Hidalgo, Arturo Sandoval, David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón among many others.Pedrito Martínez, who will be performing two songs from his 2013 self-titled debut at the Town Hall concert, is evidence of Cubop’s internationalist legacy. He was inspired by Pozo, and even grew up in the same neighborhood in Havana. “I learned to play rumba in the street, like Chano did,” Martínez said in an interview. “He was someone from the marginal world who didn’t speak English, but he opened up doors for all of us.”Martínez had collaborated with Faddis in Steve Turre’s “Sanctified Shells” band, and had Faddis guest on his most recent album, “Acertijos.” He sees the connection between Afro-Cuban and jazz music as a kind of mystical fusion of spirit worlds. “I’ve seen a lot of Thelonious Monk videos, and he looked like a rumbero,” Martínez said, referring to the way Monk would sometimes perform a spinning dance that suggested Yoruban dance and spirit possession. “He stood up to dance and played the piano with one hand and then the other. Jazz has a very spiritual connection to Afro-Cuban music, because it’s a way of feeling, of giving reverence to the ancestors.”The rediscovery of common spiritual roots between African Americans and the Afro-Latin American diaspora is what keeps the Afro-Cuban jazz concept grounded and coherent. While there have been many debates about whether American jazz’s melodic and harmonic traditions and Afro-Caribbean rhythmic techniques dominate, it’s always been a back-and-forth conversation, an inter-hemispheric musical negotiation. It’s no surprise that Pérez Prado and Tito Puente’s mambo rose quickly in the wake of Gillespie and Pozo’s Cubop, and that it’s possible to hear Prado mambo elements in the early work of the Afro-futurist pioneer Sun Ra.What’s clear is that there’s no going back. “There are a lot of purists who want to keep jazz, jazz as jazz, they don’t want to mess with it,” O’Farrill said. “But I’ve been fighting this battle for 30 years, and I’m like, no, no, no. Jazz and Latin are the same trunk of the same tree. But it looks like we can never resolve this discussion. It can only go on and be explored to the end of time.”“Dizzy, Chano and Chico: The Original Influencers, 75 Years Later at Town Hall,” featuring Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, runs at Town Hall on Saturday at 8 p.m.; thetownhall.org. More

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      BAM Artistic Director David Binder to Step Down in July

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      Binder, who was a Broadway producer before joining the nonprofit in 2019, plans to return to theater’s commercial sector.David Binder, the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will step down in July, as the venerable institution faces ongoing turnover and the challenge of pandemic-era rebuilding after decades of stability in its leadership team.BAM, which began presenting work in 1861 and describes itself as the nation’s oldest performing arts center, long played a key role in New York’s cultural life, presenting adventurous theater, film, music and dance from artists around the world. But the institution was quieter than some at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and Binder’s departure will follow the 2021 exit of the institution’s president, Katy Clark, and the 2020 death of its board chairman, Adam Max.Binder joined BAM as artistic director in 2019, making his tenure significantly shorter than those of his two predecessors, Joseph V. Melillo, who spent 35 years at the institution, and Harvey Lichtenstein, who led BAM’s artistic work for 32 years.Similarly, on the institution’s executive side, Clark left BAM after five years in the post (keeping an apartment the institution helped her purchase); she had succeeded Karen Brooks Hopkins, who had spent 36 years at the institution, including 16 as president. BAM’s current president is Gina Duncan, who started just last year, after a year in which that position was vacant.Binder, who had been producing Broadway shows as well as arts festivals before joining the institution, said he was leaving voluntarily and is planning to return to commercial producing after leading the nonprofit’s artistic programming through the upheaval of the pandemic as well as the change in the organization’s executive staff.BAM said Binder would continue to consult for the organization until next January as it searches for a new artistic leader. Binder began working with Melillo when his appointment was announced in early 2018.“I feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do there, and I want to get back to making work and producing work,” Binder said in an interview. “I want to keep growing.”Duncan characterized the transition similarly, saying, “David decided to move on, and I appreciate him letting me know now.” She added, “We have a strong team in place, and I have time to do a search and find someone to be my artistic partner.”Binder’s departure comes as many performing arts institutions around the nation are seeing turnover at the top — New York’s theater leaders have tended to hang on longer than most, which is a source of criticism as well as stability, but there is wholesale change unfolding in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.Binder, who is 55, has drawn some buzzy work to BAM, which primarily presents shows developed by other companies.Last year’s pandemic-delayed production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which starred James McAvoy and transferred from London, was both a critical and a popular success, becoming the best-selling show in the history of the BAM Harvey Theater. And this month, BAM was the only institution with two shows on The New York Times’s list of things critics are looking forward to this year: the theater critic Jesse Green wrote about anticipating a production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan in the starring roles, and the dance critic Gia Kourlas wrote hopefully about BAM’s U.S. premiere of Pina Bausch’s “Água,” a piece created two decades ago in Brazil.Binder arrived at BAM saying he wanted to bring in new artists — his first Next Wave festival there, in 2019, featured only artists who had not previously performed there. Over the course of his tenure, Binder said he will have presented more than 50 debuts of artistic companies as well as solo performers.Ticket sales during his time have generally exceeded projections; BAM says it is attracting new audiences, and there have been multiple programming highlights: Simon Stone’s “Medea” adaptation, produced by BAM, starring Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale; a new spring music series, curated last year by Hanif Abdurraqib and this year by Solange; and an annual artist residency program.“Through the pandemic and through the leadership changes, I feel that the team and I at BAM have stayed focused on putting fantastic work on our stages, and when we couldn’t do it on our stages, we did it outdoors or site-specific or virtually. And the work we’ve done has been really successful,” he said. “We always tried to mix it up: We had the National Theater of Korea’s opera of ‘Trojan Women,’ and ‘Kiki and Herb Sleigh’; we had the Lithuanian opera ‘Sun & Sea,’ which won the Golden Lion at Venice; and we also hosted the world premiere of Madonna’s ‘Madame X’ tour.”In the commercial arena, Binder is best known as the lead producer of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival in 2014. Binder said that he would soon announce that “Hedwig” was “finally coming to the West End in a big way.”Beyond “Hedwig,” Binder is among a handful of commercial producers who have continued to focus on the production of plays, which tend to be riskier than musicals. He says he plans to resume work on his longtime effort to bring the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “An Enemy of the People” to Broadway. (Last fall, Binder brought Ostermeier’s “Hamlet” to BAM; that production was in German, but “An Enemy of the People” would be presented in English.)Binder said he was also working with the innovative British director Jamie Lloyd, who helmed the “Cyrano” revival at BAM, to develop a new play that he was not yet ready to describe.BAM, like other arts organizations, shrank during the height of the pandemic, but is now nearly back to where it was, according to a spokeswoman: Its current annual budget is $56 million, up from $55 million prepandemic; it has 222 full-time staff positions, down from 256; its most recent Next Wave festival had 13 shows, down from 16 prepandemic; and last spring, BAM presented 17 shows, up from 16 during the final prepandemic spring.“I think we’re doing as well as one can, given the circumstances of the world,” Duncan said. “We’ve had some success in audience growth, and our membership numbers are starting to increase again. Everything is heading in the right direction, and now it’s a matter of time.” More

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      SZA’s ‘SOS’ Holds Off Taylor Swift for a Fourth Week at No. 1

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      Both artists introduced new digital versions of their albums, bringing a tight race to a typically sleepy week on the Billboard charts.The R&B singer and songwriter SZA has edged out Taylor Swift to hold at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart for a fourth time, attaining a notable victory during what is usually the post-holiday sales doldrums.“SOS,” the long-awaited second LP by SZA, who was born Solána Rowe in St. Louis and raised in suburban New Jersey, had the equivalent of 125,000 sales in the United States last week. That total included 162 million streams and about 3,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.It is the first time an album by a woman has held at No. 1 four consecutive times since Adele’s “30,” which reigned for six weeks at the end of 2021, Billboard reported. (Swift’s “Midnights” notched five No. 1’s over a six-week stretch last fall.) “SOS” is also the first R&B title by a woman to rack up four weeks at the top since Alicia Keys’s “As I Am” (2007).“SOS,” a steady streaming hit that features guest spots by Travis Scott, Phoebe Bridgers and other artists, faced stiff competition last week from “Midnights.” Both SZA and Swift released special digital versions of their albums to lure fans. SZA sold two versions, containing extra tracks, while Swift’s website sold four editions, featuring variant artwork and bonus commentary cuts, for one day only.Swift’s promotion helped “Midnights” move the equivalent of 117,000 sales, up 10 percent from the week before, including 58,000 copies sold as a complete package. “Midnights” holds at No. 2 for a fifth week in a row.Also this week, a number of recent hits crawl back up the chart as holiday albums disappear like so many Christmas trees hauled to the curb. “Heroes & Villains” by the rap producer Metro Boomin rises one spot to No. 3, Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” is No. 4 and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in fifth place.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which dipped below the Top 10 for two weeks at the end of the year, jumps back five spots to No. 6. Since its release two years ago, “Dangerous” has notched a total of 101 weeks in the Top 10, dropping out only three times during the holiday-albums crushes in 2021 and 2022. More

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      At Praise Fest in New Orleans, Spreading the Gospel Through Song and Community

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      In a city facing wide-ranging challenges, the gospel music you hear at Praise Fest can be a balm for the collective spirit.On the final day of the 13th annual Praise Fest, the free gospel music festival that started after Hurricane Katrina to bring locals back to New Orleans, the skies above Bayou St. John turned gray. Then, around 2 on an afternoon in October, an eerily familiar sight appeared: torrential rainfall.Pools of water pocked the bayou grass as festivalgoers scrambled to their cars. Attendance for Praise Fest, the first one held in person since the pandemic began, was modest (though organizers said it was about what they expected) — the conditions may not have helped. Bishop Ryan Warner, president and chief executive of Versatile Entertainment, which runs Praise Fest, clomped around the grounds in his rain boots, directing traffic. The rain would pass, he insisted, and the festival would continue. That was the New Orleans way.Anchored by the sound of organs, pianos, tambourines, drums and melodic voices preaching the word of God, gospel music is a fixture in Black Christian churches across the United States, especially in the South. In a city facing so many challenges — whether hurricanes or housing insecurity — it can be a necessary balm for the collective spirit.“There’s so much craziness happening in the world today,” said Cordell Chambliss, a local pianist and retired music teacher. It was about 24 hours before the storm, and Mr. Chambliss sat on a bench wearing black sunglasses and a backward hat with the strap emblazoned with “Aloha.” “Gospel music is the good news,” he said. “And we need to spread the good news.”This article is part of Our City, a series focused on how people around the United States use public and shared spaces to build community.Once the sky had cleared up, about an hour after the rain began, Bishop Warner, 47, a laid-back man with a smooth voice, climbed atop the stage and, with a microphone in hand, declared that the festivities would carry on. “I will never question the Lord,” he said. The two dozen or so who remained dragged their chairs away from the massive tents and up to the stage where, they believed, God’s presence was clear.“God has been good to me,” Angela Lindsey, 60, said the day before. Ms. Lindsey, a New Orleans native, sat on her lawn chair behind the vendors hawking discount jewelry along the slow-moving bayou water, where ducks and birds cooled off. She sang gospel in church with her sisters growing up and moved to Mississippi after Katrina.Ms. Lindsey makes frequent trips home to help take care of her son, who sustained a brain injury in a car accident, and to attend Praise Fest. Most of her family remains in New Orleans, which proved difficult when she came down with colon cancer. When one of her sisters died, Ms. Lindsey was unable to attend the funeral because of emergency surgery. Still, she remains grateful.“I never was alone,” Ms. Lindsey said, over the sound of soaring vocals. She found comfort during her sickness in memories of singing with her sisters, and something else: “God was always there.”Ms. Lindsey and the rest in attendance were treated to a variety of different acts, from traditional gospel choirs to gospel-influenced R&B and hip-hop.“New Orleans, this is truly a gospel gumbo,” said Josh Kagler, who performed alongside Tyrone Jefferson. “Gospel music in the city of New Orleans is foundation. It’s family,” he said.Here are clips from some of the most memorable performances from the festival.Joanna Hale-McGillJoanna Hale-McGill, 38, was the first to take the stage after the rain. At the start of her set, a rainbow painted the sky. Ms. Hale-McGill, who hails from Meraux, just outside New Orleans, is an independent artist who blends hip-hop and gospel. A highlight was her performance of the 2008 song “God in Me” by the gospel duo Mary Mary featuring Kierra “Kiki” Sheard. Ms. Hale-McGill danced around the stage and flailed her arms in the air as she sang.“You’re so fly, you’re so high,Everybody around you trying to figure out why.You’re so cool, you win all the time,Everywhere you go, man, you get a lot of shine.”“The lyrics to the song describe me perfectly. I’m known around town as the girl that sparkles everywhere she goes,” Ms. Hale-McGill said in an interview later.Tyrone JeffersonMr. Jefferson, 49, performed alongside his choir from the Abundant Life Tabernacle in New Orleans, as did Mr. Kagler, 36, the choir director. As Mr. Jefferson got the crowd going with his vocals, Mr. Kagler shook his head and stomped his feet and waved his arms until his bright pink Yankees hat fell of his head. Among Mr. Jefferson’s performances, his rendition of Ricky Dillard’s “Search Me Lord” was memorable.“Sometimes we can be so stubborn, if you will, as it relates to us thinking we know everything,” Mr. Jefferson said in a later interview. “The song simply says, ‘Lord, you search me. Lord, you know whether I’m right or wrong.’”Mr. Jefferson also performed an original song, “Trouble in My Way,” a rousing track meant to be a reminder of Jesus’ healing abilities.“The beat brings you to church. It brings you right to church on a Sunday morning. Hand-clapping, foot-stomping,” he said. “We on a thousand, as we say here in New Orleans.”Arthur Clayton IV and Anointed for PurposeArthur Clayton IV, 45, hails from Marrero, La., fewer than 10 miles outside New Orleans. Alongside his choir, Anointed for Purpose, Mr. Clayton took delight in performing his friend VaShawn Mitchell’s song “Big.” When his choir sang the words, “There’s nothing my God cannot do,” Mr. Clayton followed with, “He’s a keeper, yes, he is.”“That reminds me of how we all were kept during that moment of Covid,” Mr. Clayton said in an interview. “Even after Covid, here in New Orleans we went through a hurricane, and we were kept in that moment.”Eric Waddell and the Abundant Life SingersMr. Waddell, 49, came from Baltimore with his choir, the Abundant Life Singers. He attended Praise Fest despite the death of his father fewer than two weeks earlier at age 91. His father had been in a gospel group, and when Mr. Waddell was a child, his father “put me on the chair and said ‘sing!’” Mr. Waddell said performing at Praise Fest was a way to honor his father. “He would’ve said, ‘Boy, you go and sing,’” Mr. Waddell said.Mr. Waddell brought some attendees to their feet with his moving original track “He Won’t Change.” The lyrics to his song “Yes, I Know Jesus” also resonated with a city that has worked through its share of obstacles.“Yes, I know JesusYes, I know JesusYes, I know Jesus for myself.Woke me up this morning,I saw a brand-new dawning.Feeds me when I’m hungry,Comforts me when I’m lonely.”Zacardi CortezThe sky was black by the time Zacardi Cortez, 37, the festival’s closing act, took center stage. Mr. Cortez, whose 2012 album “The Introduction” placed No. 2 on the Billboard magazine top gospel albums chart, shone under the stage’s bright lights. One of the songs he performed, an original called “Praise You,” was a funk tune inspired by two of his idols, Prince and James Brown. His set took a turn on “You’ve Been Good to Me,” a slow, tender tribute to his faith.Mr. Cortez wrote the song not long after spending time in jail. “God just had to deal with me. He had to sit me down for a little while and show me some things. And a lot of great things were birthed out of that,” Mr. Cortez said. “I’m so glad that I got to a place where I’ll never have to go through those situations again, because God has changed some things, turned some things around.”Bishop Warner, the organizer, watched from the side as Mr. Cortez closed the festival. Praise Fest had been a success, he said, attracting about 2,000 people. The goal every year is to bring New Orleans a little hope, no matter how dire the circumstances. That’s the meaning of gospel music, and it’s a special ingredient that keeps spirits up.“Let’s say in a couple years, we’re going to have another event like this,” Bishop Warner said, referring to Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people. “Man, you got to live life to the fullest, or you’ll be caught in this, thinking you was going to try to get out, and you die in the process.“You got to keep moving.” More

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      Matt Shultz, Cage the Elephant Singer, Arrested on Weapons Charges

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      Mr. Shultz, 39, was seen pulling a gun out of his pocket in a public restroom at a Manhattan hotel, the authorities said.Matt Shultz, the lead singer of the indie rock band Cage the Elephant, was arrested at a Manhattan hotel on Thursday on weapons charges, law enforcement officials said.Mr. Shultz, 39, was arrested on Thursday morning after a Bowery Hotel employee had seen him pull a gun from his pants pocket in one of the hotel’s public restrooms, according to a criminal complaint.Mr. Shultz, of Nashville, appeared intoxicated, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.Police officers responded to a 911 call, obtained a search warrant and found two loaded firearms — a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol and a .45-caliber Sig Sauer pistol — in a bag in Mr. Shultz’s hotel room, according to court records and the prosecutor’s office.Officers also found 11 Polaroid photos of the guns, some showing a hand pointing to the firearms, and six handwritten notes, the prosecutor’s office said. A message on one of the notes read, in substance, “I will defend myself if I am attacked,” according to the prosecutor’s office.Mr. Shultz faces multiple counts of weapons possession charges, according to court records. He is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday. His lawyer, Sanford Talkin, declined to comment on Sunday. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Shultz had been released on bail, which was set at $30,000.Cage the Elephant, which was formed in 2006 in Bowling Green, Ky., is known for its psychedelic sound, distinct echoes of past rock eras and Mr. Shultz’s warbling, sometimes abrasive voice.The band released its first album in 2008, and has won the Grammy Award for best rock album twice, most recently in 2020 for “Social Cues.” It won its first Grammy in 2015 for its album “Tell Me I’m Pretty.”The band’s 2011 album, “Thank You Happy Birthday,” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and the album’s lead single, “Shake Me Down,” was No. 1 on Billboard’s Rock Songs and Alternative Songs charts, according to the Grammy Awards.Before the band was established, Mr. Shultz had worked as a plumber and in a sandwich bar, according to the Grammy Awards. More

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      Movie Trailers Keep Tweaking Well-Known Songs. The Tactic Is Working.

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      Composers are increasingly in demand for trailerization — reworking existing tracks by artists including Kate Bush, Nirvana and Kendrick Lamar to maximize their impact in film and TV previews.David James Rosen’s work has been streamed on YouTube hundreds of millions of times. He’s played a crucial role in some of pop culture’s biggest recent moments. But few people outside of the space where the entertainment and marketing industries overlap know his name.As a composer, Rosen is at the forefront of the trailerization movement: He’s in demand for his ability to rework existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows.He married vocals and motifs from Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to a thunderous version of the “Stranger Things” theme in the lead-up to the second volume of the show’s fourth season. He intertwined the Nigerian singer Tems’s cover of “No Woman No Cry” with Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” in the teaser for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” symbolizing the meeting of the franchise’s future and its legacy. He put a sinister singe on Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” for the diabolical doll thriller “M3GAN.” He added cosmic drama to Elton John’s classic rock staple “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” for the upcoming “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”As potential viewers are inundated with an ever-growing number of options, studios have limited chances to build anticipation for their projects. At the same time, technological advances have made it easier than ever for products to stand out. “People want their film to have its own identity,” Rosen said in an interview at a Los Angeles coffee shop. “The genie’s out of the bottle as far as the limitless ability to customize something for your film. Clients, studios, agencies, whatever, they all know that and like to take advantage of it.”Rosen spent his 20s playing guitar in the New Jersey band the Parlor Mob. After moving to L.A. in 2014, he got a job as the in-house composer at a trailer house — the specialized production companies behind these promos. Three years later, he co-founded Totem, a music library that creates custom tracks for trailers. Much of Rosen’s output is original compositions, but the ones that get the most attention are his overhauls.“Almost never does a song just drop into a trailer and work,” he said. “Maybe it needs to feel more epic or more emotional, or maybe it needs to feel subtler with things pulled away.”“I view it as a new life for a lot of these artists’ songs,” Rosen said of his custom work for trailers.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesTrailerization is a relatively new term and the distinctions within it are malleable. There are reimaginations, which are usually instrumental covers by composers. There are overlays, where elements are added to a song in varying degrees. Then there are remixes, where the source material is distinctly altered, often to shift the context.Some distinguish between remixes and overlays by what the composer has to play with. If there’s a full set of stems — the separated digital parts that comprise a song — it’s a remix. If stems aren’t available, it’s an overlay.Occasionally composers will be asked to create “invisible overlays,” where they make adjustments that are imperceptible to most listeners but nudge a song toward a more wide-screen sound.The trailerization process is now so common that even when a trailer uses the film’s original score, it too will be adjusted. “Trailers are a mini version of the movie,” said Cato, the one-named composer whose credits include performing a system update on Vangelis for the “Blade Runner 2049” trailer and giving Guns N’ Roses an anguished-turned-pulverizing remix for Jason Momoa’s Netflix revenge film “Sweet Girl.”“You have to suck people into the theater and tell a story in two-and-a-half minutes,” Cato added. “That is so intense and builds so quickly that most music written for the actual movie will be way too long and drawn out.”IN THE PAST, trailers often relied on the scores of previously released films, but that practice has basically become verboten. Starting in the late 1970s, the composer John Beal pioneered original scores for trailers, but that required a recording studio full of musicians, making it a costly, resource-heavy endeavor. Today, with developments in software, it’s easier than ever to simulate those sounds.“I could sit at my computer at home and you wouldn’t know that there wasn’t a 100-piece orchestra there,” Rosen said. “You couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”Many point to the trailer for “The Social Network,” from 2010 — which featured a Belgian women’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep” — as the origin of what became the trailerization trend. Its success incited a deluge of trailers using slow and sad covers of well-known songs, usually featuring female vocalists. Recent examples include Liza Anne’s version of “Dreams” by the Cranberries for “Aftersun” and Bellsaint’s interpretation of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” for the second season of the “Chucky” TV series.Sanaz Lavaedian, the senior vice president of music for the trailer house Mocean, said that when she entered the industry in 2011, there was still a lot of resistance from artists who didn’t want their music used for commercial purposes. Covers provided a workaround. Now, as more musicians are struggling to make a living, they’re often more open to trailers not just using their music but modifying it.“There were so many bands that didn’t think licensing was cool, so they never let us do it,” Lavaedian said. “Now they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re going to make half a million dollars on this? Nevermind.’”Many high profile trailerizations are applied to songs that are decades old: Remixes and overlays allow the trailers to tap into the nostalgia evoked by the original. “If we were able to remix an Elton John song or a Beatles song, these are iconic artists,” Lavaedian said. “The second you hear their voice, you know who it is, and there’s a lot of weight in that. More weight than if it were a cover.”The composer Bryce Miller’s big breakthrough came in 2019 with the “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” trailer, which featured his custom orchestral rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” atop images of kaiju carnage. His subsequent credits include a modernization of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” for “House of Gucci,” an orchestral blend of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the “Addams Family Theme” for “Wednesday” and a haunting overlay for Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” in “The Batman” trailer.“As soon as I can get rid of dated-sounding guitars and drums, I can build a more contemporary production that is pulling from more pop music sounds,” Miller said. “Older recordings sonically are a little thin and lack the heft that so many contemporary songs have.”Unique remixes began appearing in trailers going back to the mid-2010s, but it wasn’t until the one for Jordan Peele’s 2019 film “Us” that studios and audiences began to really take notice. In the fresh interpretation, with its piercing strings and moody atmospherics, a celebratory weed rap by the Oakland duo Luniz became deeply unsettling.“Every once in a while we get one of those game-changer trailers,” Lavaedian said. The “Us” trailer “is taking a song and deconstructing it down to its bones and then constructing it again to do what that film needed it to do. It was kind of groundbreaking.”MARK WOOLLEN, THE founder of the trailer house Mark Woollen & Associates, specializes in award-season films and was responsible for that transformative “Social Network” trailer. New York magazine once called him “the uncontested auteur of the trailer era.”In a phone interview, Woollen noted that in contemporary trailers, omniscient narration has largely disappeared (that means no more hackneyed “In a world …” setups) and there’s less dialogue from the film. Trailers “can be more impressionistic and elliptical in their storytelling,” he said. “It’s more about creating a feeling in a lot of the work.”As a result, the trailer’s soundtrack has become increasingly crucial. “Music is sometimes 80 to 90 percent of the process to us,” Woollen said. “It’s trying to cast that right piece of music that’s going to inspire and dictate rhythm and set tone and inform character and story, and hopefully make an impression.”For Amazon’s recent love triangle “My Policeman,” Woollen used Cat Power’s “Sea of Love,” which has become a romantic favorite among aging millennials. Though Cat Power’s original interpretation was stripped down to just the singer Chan Marshall’s voice and strums on an autoharp, Woollen had a composer overlay swelling strings as the drama became more fraught.Rosen with two of his semi-modular analog synths. “Almost never does a song just drop into a trailer and work,” he said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesBeyond providing the vibes, a song is often selected for a trailer because the lyrics convey the film’s narrative themes. Woollen didn’t just select “Sea of Love” because it is mysterious and seductive. He was equally guided by the refrain “I want to tell you how much I love you” and the ambiguousness of who that “you” might be.In Marvel’s “The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” trailer, as the heroes realize the size of the predicament they’ve gotten themselves into, the sound design emphasizes Elton John singing, “I should have stayed on the farm/I should have listened to my old man.”Deciding which song a trailer uses and how it’s employed can involve studio marketing executives, the filmmakers, the team at the trailer house and the composer. A trailer’s creation can take years and is often covered by restrictive nondisclosure agreements, preventing the people behind it from discussing the details of making it, even after it has been released.Because the material is so protected, the musicians rarely see the images that will be included in the trailer. Instead they have to rely on a music supervisor or creative director at a trailer house to guide them through inception and multiple rounds of revisions. “We’re literally dealing with billions of dollars in unreleased assets,” Lavaedian said of the footage from the films. “There’s no way we can send that to a composer.”UNLESS YOU KNOW where to look on the internet, the pieces made by trailer composers are largely uncredited, and sometimes contractually so. Trailerizations are created “to live exclusively in the trailer,” Rosen said. “They serve as a piece of marketing.”But that may be changing.When the agency Trailer Park approached Miller about doing a trailerization for the first volume of the fourth season of “Stranger Things,” he was told the general plot and tone of the episodes. He’d long wanted to do something with Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and it turned out the song was on the agency’s shortlist as well.After spending months on his ominous remix, it made it to the final stages of the approval process where the original musicians had to sign off. Steve Perry, the song’s singer, loved it and came to Miller’s studio to help construct an extended remix. Then he got Netflix to release both versions on the official soundtrack, with Miller’s name attached.Miller called Perry inspiring and a joy to work with. “He’s also like a runaway train. As soon as we finished ‘Stranger Things,’ he’s like, ‘What are we doing next?’” The pair collaborated again on a trailerization of Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” for the Hulu series “Welcome to Chippendales.”Where will trailerization at large head next? Recently, there’s been an interest in 1990s alternative rock hits, with remixes of Spacehog and the Toadies appearing in trailers for “Guardian of the Galaxy Volume 3” and “The Midnight Club.” In the promo for “Babylon,” the team of composers known as Superhuman created a Jazz Age-influenced interpretation of David Bowie’s “Fame” that’s almost as nutty as the film itself.With decades of material to work with, Rosen hopes the trend continues. “There’s more opportunity for creativity from me and other people,” he said. “I view it as a new life for a lot of these artists’ songs.” More