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      Review: A Tenor Claims His Place Among the Met Opera’s Stars

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      Allan Clayton brings pathos and terror, along with energy where it’s often missing, to a revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”Benjamin Britten’s first, masterly opera “Peter Grimes” thrives on ambiguity — about the nature of abusive behavior, the sources of compassion, the chicken-and-egg relationship between a tortured psyche and a small town’s small-mindedness.But one thing, at least, was clear when this work returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday afternoon: The company has a star on its hands in the tenor Allan Clayton.An established singer abroad, Clayton made his Met debut just this year, tireless and tormented in the title role of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Back several months later, he is by far the high point of the company’s “Grimes” revival. Nimble, with a repertory that includes Handel alongside Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” he is bound for a rich future at the house if it will have him.Clayton’s Grimes stands apart not only in his appearance — unkempt, with windswept hair and a wiry beard, where his fellow inhabitants of the Borough look uniformly tidy, as though following a dress code — but also in his actions. He whips his head around with widened, piercing eyes, never at peace and paranoid about how others perceive him. Audibly and visibly doomed, his tone conveys bitterness and pain within the same melodic line as his face betrays fits of rage and shock at his own behavior. By the climactic third act, his voice exemplifies the essence of opera as a theatrical extremity of expression: His mad scene, a patchwork monologue of chest-pounding and stylized ugliness, is a thing of terror and wonder.His performance, reminiscent of Jon Vickers’s fearless benchmark recording from the 1970s, is nearly enough to breathe sustainable life into a production that often lacks it. John Doyle’s staging, from 2008 — which unfolds on a unit set of towering, shabby wooden walls and windows — is showing its age as it creakily moves forward and backward throughout the opera’s two and a half hours.Doyle’s signature approach — what has been called minimalist, though he prefers “essentialist” — was born in modest black box spaces, and eventually scaled to Tony Award-winning takes on Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway. His “Grimes” is a relic of that time but not as successful in 2022. His stripped-down aesthetic can reveal the heart of a work, but it relies on the detailed, well-rehearsed performances you won’t get with the short turnaround of a Met revival. So cast members tend to sing with little nuance at the audience, rather than to one another, and mostly while standing in place as they would in concert.Still, Clayton wasn’t alone in transcending the production. Nicholas Carter, who also made his Met debut conducting “Hamlet,” here led “Grimes” with drive, precision and a painterliness that lends the work the cohesive shape of a tone poem. His interludes evoked dark, oceanic immensity; violent swerves and surges; and the emerging promise of a dawning sun. They were a source of theater where the staging came up short.Dynamic, too, was Nicole Car as the widowed schoolmistress with hopeless belief in Grimes’s salvation. Car’s soprano, with lyrical grace at the top of her range and grave urgency at the bottom, was on Sunday a wellspring of calm and pathos. In the Prologue, her tone blended with Clayton’s gruff beauty for a duet of unsettling harmony.And, despite moving as a unit, then remaining static for long stretches, the Met’s chorus was compelling as the chattering, destructive residents of the Borough. Its members gave horrifying voice to mob mentality, complementing Clayton’s unraveling in Act III with a chilling climax of their own. Occasionally emerging from the crowd were other standouts: Justin Austin’s lively Ned Keene; Patrick Carfizzi’s authoritative Swallow; Michaela Martens’s wickedly comical Mrs. Sedley.Less persuasive were the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Auntie, in a performance more straightforwardly musical than characterful; and the bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as Balstrode, a major, complicated role that didn’t make much of an impression on Sunday. His voice beautiful but consistently bland, Plachetka gave his fateful directions to Grimes at the end of Act III — to take his boat out to sea and sink it — with a woodenness that threatened to flatten the moment.That is, if it weren’t for Clayton’s response. Silent, he simply accepted his sentence with one last look back over his shoulder: an aching final aria performed with only his eyes.Peter GrimesThrough Nov. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      BTS to Enlist in South Korea’s Military

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      Ending months of debate, the band’s label said that the seven members would serve their military conscriptions. They plan to reunite in a couple of years.The biggest question about the biggest K-pop band has been answered.The members of BTS will enlist in South Korea’s military as required by law, the band’s label said on Monday, ending months of public debate about whether the group qualified for an exemption to mandatory conscription.The announcement of the band’s decision — which came less than two days after it had performed its first concert in months — effectively confirms the hiatus that the members had first mentioned this summer. The seven members will reconvene “as a group again around 2025” after completing their service, the label, Big Hit Music, said in a statement posted on Twitter.Millions of dejected fans, who call themselves the Army, took to social media to express their support, grief and disbelief. The move is also likely to have wider ramifications, deprivingSouth Korea of the billions of dollars the band’s followers pump into its economy.South Korea requires all able-bodied men to enlist by the time they turn 30 and to serve for about two years. Exceptions can be granted, for example to athletes who win medals at international competitions like the Olympics and to some high-level classical musicians, but pop music artists do not qualify. The first member of BTS to enlist will be Kim Seok-jin, known as just Jin, who turns 30 in December.After the announcement, the stock price of Big Hit’s parent company, HYBE, fell 2.5 percent on Monday. The company has lost about half its market value since June, when BTS talked about a hiatus as the members pursued solo projects.Jin announced a solo project at the BTS concert on Saturday in Busan, South Korea, an event that was free of charge and drew about 50,000 fans. On Monday, the label had a message that seemed targeted to both fans and investors.“‘Yet to Come (The Most Beautiful Moment)’ is more than a track from their latest album, it is a promise,” the label said. “There’s much more yet to come in the years ahead from BTS.” More

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      Review: Iranian Female Composers Speak Indirectly to the Moment

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      Planned before anti-regime protests broke out in Iran, a concert centered on connectivity finds itself tied to the news of the day.From its founding in 2017, the Iranian Female Composers Association has found itself frequently tied to the news of the day.Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a composer and one of the association’s founders, wrote in liner notes for a recording of “Veiled,” her lyrical yet aggrieved 2019 work for the cellist Amanda Gookin, that, “personally as an Iranian woman, I carry a lot of anger with me.”That rage, Nourbakhsh specified when the recording was released in 2021, was informed by her own experiences, as well as the more general feeling of “growing up in a country that actively veils women’s presence through compulsory hijab or banning solo female singers from pursuing a professional career.”Still, when the musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the organization Composers Now drew up the program for an evening focused on the Iranian Female Composers Association at NYU Skirball on Saturday, few could have anticipated how specifically this concert would connect with the moment: Anti-regime protests in Iran were entering their fifth week, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been held in the custody of the morality police, accused of improperly wearing a required head scarf.The association has posted statements of solidarity with the protesters on social media, and some of its composers have spoken directly about the events in interviews. But nothing was said from the stage on Saturday; after all, the connection between the group’s mission and the events in Iran spoke for itself. So too did the concert’s title, “Peyvand,” the Persian word for connectivity, a reminder of the connections among the featured composers in this revealing and essential evening.Nourbakhsh’s three-movement “C Ce See”— a commemoration of the contemporary music advocate Cecille (Cece) Wasserman — closed the program. And it employed a conceit reminiscent of the Fluxus movement, courtesy of a kinetic sculpture, by the artist Roxanne Nesbitt, that circled six instrumentalists and sometimes made sounds with them; picture small conical objects rotating, in Rube Goldberg fashion, among string players and percussionists, with all those elements connected by a long, single thread manipulated by the percussionist Ross Karre.In the first and second movements, the result of that string-on-string interference was often a hazy yet interdependent din. But at the end of the second movement, when the conductor, Steven Schick, dramatically cut the wires snaking through the string instruments (and into the rotating mini-sculptures), there was a sense of release. The short third movement — featuring scalar, zigzagging, independent parts for flute, vibraphone and strings — heralded a brief but hard-won freedom.Nourbakhsh’s music is something of a known quantity, not least because she is one of National Sawdust’s recent Hildegard Competition winners. Less so is Nina Barzegar, whose world premiere “Inexorable Passage” was thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.Written for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the eight-minute “Inexorable Passage” felt packed, and moved along with momentum. The cello swerved in and out of mellifluous melody; each time its lines slid into heedless-sounding glissandos, you wondered if the center would hold. But Barzegar’s compositional command kept it together. (Trained as a pianist and composer at the University of Tehran, she’s now a doctoral candidate at University of California, Santa Cruz.)There isn’t much of Barzegar’s music on YouTube yet. But what’s there is promising — including a piano work “for slain protesters around the world,” and the spare (then galvanic) “Chronoception,” for the group Yarn/Wire.Also of note on Saturday were intimate, brief pieces by Nasim Khorassani and Golfam Khayam. A pair of untitled solo performances by Niloufar Shiri, on kamancheh (a small, bowed string instrument) were similarly transporting.If not everything else on the two-hour program achieved similar mastery, that was understandable; the artists here were on the younger side. But their music’s delivery, by the International Contemporary Ensemble, argued well for additional exposure, no matter the news cycle.PeyvandPerformed on Saturday at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. More

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      Dry Cleaning: It’s Spoken Rock ’n’ Roll, but We Like It

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      The British rock band’s distinctive sound comes from the vocalist Florence Shaw’s carefully delivered observations that float somewhere between stand-up, poetry and comedy.LOS ANGELES — At the Primavera Sound festival at Los Angeles State Historic Park, the British band Dry Cleaning played under the bright sunlight of a September afternoon. Festooned with tattoos, the guitarist Tom Dowse rocked out, grimacing and jutting out an impudent tongue now and then. A breeze wrapped the bassist Lewis Maynard’s long hair across his face, making him look like a headbanging plushie. The drummer Nick Buxton pummeled away as if in AC/DC’s engine room. But the vocalist Florence Shaw didn’t fit the picture at all.Instead of snarling or roaring like the music would seem to demand, she delivered a jumbled sequence of alternately humdrum and surreal observations in conversational tones that shifted subtly between dismay, disapproval and daydream. Wearing a long black lace skirt and a sparkly gold camisole, she curled her fingers around the mic stand like the stem of a wineglass and pulled distractedly at the hair at the top of her head, as if having a knotty heart-to-heart with a close friend.To twist a lyric from Dry Cleaning’s new album, “Stumpwork,” out Oct. 21, it’s a weird premise for a band — but I like it. So do a growing numbers of others. The London group recently embarked on a world tour that will take it through 17 countries. Its 2021 debut, “New Long Leg,” entered the U.K. album chart at No. 4. That feat reflected both the record’s originality and Dry Cleaning’s position at the forefront of the “speak-sing” movement: a trend that encompasses groups like Yard Act, Wet Leg and Black Country, New Road who have little in common besides vocalists who incant barbed social commentary rather than sing.Sitting at a garden table in Primavera’s artists-only enclosure, Shaw admitted that fronting a cult band was not on her bucket list. “It’s a very surreal turn of events,” she said, widening her eyes as if still surprised. “Totally unexpected. I like bands, but I never planned to be in one at all.”Until a few years ago, the 33-year-old earned her living as a visiting lecturer, teaching fashion drawing and illustration at art colleges. Then her friend Dowse suggested she contribute to a new band he’d pulled together with Buxton and Maynard. The three men had a long history of playing in various hardcore punk and noisy groups, mostly as a sideline to their primary occupations. But when Shaw came along to add her spoken-word collages to their tough, clangorous sound, something clicked.On paper, the formula looks like it ought to be irritating — pretentious, or simply awkward — but ultimately, it makes a magical sort of sense. While her bandmates weave riffs and textures drawn from across alternative rock history, Shaw doesn’t raise her voice, but commands attention through timing and phrasing, along with the shuffle-mode flow of her perceptions. Lines that could be from a transcript of a tetchy interpersonal skirmish will be followed by a pensive fragment plucked from some regretful or aggrieved interior monologue. Shaw has invented a strikingly original mode of nonmelodic songwriting that floats somewhere between stand-up, poetry and the fourth-wall-breaking soliloquies of a female comic auteur like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.“I’m not hugely well-informed about politics, really,” Shaw said. “But I’m quite sensitive to how things feel and I know they don’t feel good!” Max Miechowski for The New York Times“She’s brilliant, she really reminds me of myself!” said Jason Williamson, the vocalist in Sleaford Mods, widely regarded as the progenitor of the current wave of British speak-sing groups. “There’s this mixture of extremely realistic observations with absurdism. Things that are just really bizarre. It doesn’t make a lot of sense — but then it does. She conveys meanings with just one word.”Expertly deploying pauses and stretching out syllables, Shaw is a virtuoso of intonation. “I am very interested in small differences,” she said. “I really enjoy that game where you put the emphasis on a different place in a sentence — and it means something completely different. The same words can sound scared instead of proud.”When Dry Cleaning was recording part of the new album in a Bristol studio, Shaw went out on foraging missions, trawling the streets for overheard remarks, shop signs and unusual sights, which she’d jot down in her phone’s notepad. Another expedition involved visiting a “car boot sale,” a flea market particular to the U.K. in which ordinary folk park their cars in a field and sell bric-a-brac from the trunk. Shaw also likes to collect words. “Stumpwork,” the title of a song as well as the new album, is something she’s been aching to use for ages.“I like the sound of it,” she said. “It’s a type of embroidery, like the braiding on military uniforms or American sportswear. Originally it was used to described the raised characters and padded people in tapestries.”Musically, “Stumpwork” is a conscious and concerted effort on the part of the band to show it’s more than post-punk. Leaving behind the first album’s gaunt sound and tense bass lines, the new LP shifts forward in time to the early ’90s and lo-fi “slacker” bands like Pavement. “I was thinking a lot about Stephen Malkmus when I was doing my guitar parts, that sort of wonkiness,” Dowse said, explaining that he played a Jazzmaster guitar because “it’s what all the ’90s groups like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. used.”Compared to “New Long Leg,” in some ways “Stumpwork” is an American album. The debut felt like a wet, wintry day, a mood mirrored lyrically in lines like “it was chucking it down” and “raincoat sweat.” In contrast, “Stumpwork” has the dazed, heat-hazy vibe of a drunken summer afternoon. Although Shaw still drops the odd glum line like “looks like strains and setbacks are on the way,” the ground-down despondency of “New Long Leg” has opened up to allow for moments of carefree joy and quiet contentment.If there’s gloom here, it stems less from personal life than from the political atmosphere. The track “Conservative Hell” expresses the outlook of the band and many of their generation. “Scandal after scandal, the levels of corruption and lying at the top of the government, and it feels like it’s almost completely unchallenged,” Dowse said. “I think it’s numbed everyone out.”While her bandmates weave riffs and textures drawn from across alternative rock history, Shaw commands attention through timing and phrasing.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesOn “Stumpwork,” Shaw gets explicitly polemical now and then. She’ll talk about seeing “male violence everywhere” or distill the U.K.’s dire deadlock into the three-line panorama “Nothing works/everything’s expensive/And opaque and privatized.” But her true forte is the micro-politics of ordinary life: petty humiliations and hassles, the way that advertising and media implant desires and anxieties in your head. “I’m not hugely well-informed about politics, really,” she said. “But I’m quite sensitive to how things feel and I know they don’t feel good!”That remark ended with a burst of laughter. Smiles and merriment are a constant in her conversation, in marked contrast with how Shaw comes across on record and onstage. The blanket description “deadpan” annoys her because it misses the subtle shades of gray she works with. Referencing a review that described her as sounding like “a bored fashion model reading from the pages of Grazia magazine,” Shaw noted that another time, “Someone said our gig was great but we spoiled it by smiling between the songs. Like we were breaking character. You can’t win!” Cue another burst of laughter.Williamson placed Dry Cleaning in a British lineage of groups who combined observational humor, gritty social realism and the vividness of everyday vernacular: “They’re a classic English band in the vein of the Jam, the Specials, Ian Dury and the Blockheads.”One way that Englishness manifests in Dry Cleaning is the gap between the music’s dramatic intensity and the mildness of Shaw’s emotional palette and low-key delivery. “There can be something very tender about that,” Shaw said. “Because in a way it’s sort of a failure to express oneself at the right moment.”“Missing the moment that you should get really angry and instead feeling it later — that’s a real hallmark of my life,” she added. “I think I’d much rather be a person who could emote functionally, at the right time. But it takes me a long time to process things and a lot of my performance is about exorcising those residual feelings. Maybe that’s a bit British.” More

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      New Music From Blink-182, the 1975 and Queen’s Unheard Song With Freddie Mercury

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      Hear tracks by Blink-182, Lil Baby featuring EST Gee, Sevdaliza and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Queen, ‘Face It Alone’Freddie Mercury packed drama into every syllable when he sang “Face It Alone,” a track Queen rediscovered in 1988 session archives while preparing a much-expanded reissue of its 1989 album, “The Miracle,” and has now rebuilt. It’s a dirge about inevitable, existential loneliness, set to slow, bare-bones arpeggios and funereal drum thuds, and Mercury’s voice expands it to arena scale as he moves between confidential croon and balcony-rattling rasp. JON PARELESThe 1975, ‘Oh Caroline’The 1975 regularly goes roving through rock and pop’s back catalog, trying on styles. “Oh Caroline” doesn’t go for the obvious musical reference — the incomparably vulnerable “Caroline, No” by the Beach Boys — but instead to the era when Michael McDonald led the Doobie Brothers, with electronic percussion, scrubbing guitars and burbling keyboard chords. “Caroline, I want to get it right this time,” Matty Healy sings, making abundant romantic promises, as he travels among eras with the freedom of the internet. PARELESNessa Barrett, ‘Tired of California’Nessa Barrett, 20, established herself on TikTok with songs about pain, self-doubt and thoughts of death. The comic relief on her new debut album, “Young Forever,” is “Tired of California,” a sweet-voiced summation of the attractions, superficiality and ennui of aspiring to stardom in Los Angeles. “I get sick of sunshine on my perfect skin,” she lilts, to a tune reminiscent of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega; then she contemplates death as a career move that would leave her “young forever”: “You get more famous when you die.” The production riffles through Los Angeles specialties: crunching EDM, orchestral bombast, hair-metal guitars and confessional piano chords. It’s supremely self-conscious. PARELESLil Baby featuring EST Gee, ‘Back and Forth’As Lil Baby eases into rap superstardom, he tends to lean on his melodic side, a combination of savvy and conciliation. But “Back and Forth,” from his new album “It’s Only Me,” is something slightly more pure — just a pair of icy verses from Lil Baby and the Kentucky firebrand EST Gee about all the various sorts of conquest. JON CARAMANICABlink-182, ‘Edging’The pop-punk-reunion Mount Rushmore is finally complete — the essential (but not original) lineup of Blink-182 has reunited (again). Tom DeLonge is rejoining Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker for a tour next year; the announcement came with a new song, “Edging,” which marks the first time this lineup has been in the studio together in a decade. It’s familiar but uncanny, Botoxed tight but with none of the puerile joy that marked the group’s breakout hits. Part of Blink’s charm was the sense that it might unravel at any moment; this suggests it is content to remain contained. CARAMANICASevdaliza, ‘Woman Life Freedom’Sevdaliza, who was born in Iran and grew up in the Netherlands, confronts the repression of women in “Woman Life Freedom,” a song that begins with stark intimacy — just vocals — and builds into a somberly devastating orchestral march. Sevdaliza sings, “I was taught compliance in the name of the sword/That stabbed every dream I could be.” The title is taken from the watchwords of current women’s protests in Iran, and the track mixes in spoken words calling for an end to Iran’s dictatorship. But the music’s impact and ambition are not only topical. PARELESLucrecia Dalt, ‘Atemporal’“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” the latest high-concept album by Lucrecia Dalt, a Colombian composer and songwriter who has lately moved into film (“The Seed”) and television (“The Baby”) scores. “Ay!” is about an alien entity, Preta, who first experiences linear time and physicality on a visit to Earth; for Dalt, it’s also about memories and warpages — sonic, spatial and durational — of the music she grew up on. “Atemporal” is more or less a bolero, disassembled and rebuilt in ways that can sound vintage or computer-tweaked, with plenty of clanky percussion; it’s wayward with a purpose. PARELES More

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      After Decades, the Philharmonic’s Hall Sounds and Feels More Intimate

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      Raise your hand if you ever thought you would go see the New York Philharmonic, America’s most venerable orchestra, by entering off Lincoln Center’s plaza through a wide-open garage door. No one?But yes: The main entrance of David Geffen Hall — the Philharmonic’s home, newly, completely and happily renovated after a wait of decades — is now a big glass wall that can swoop up in good weather. And the past week has been bright and mild in New York. So as audiences drifted in for some of the first concerts in the revamped hall, the lobby inside and the plaza outside merged, without any barrier.It’s a new degree of informality, matched once you get into the transformed auditorium. The vast, drab shoe box that the city knew as Avery Fisher Hall after 1973 — a few years before a major remodeling attempted to fix the acoustics that had been criticized since the building first opened as Philharmonic Hall, in 1962 — has been gutted.Five hundred seats have been eliminated, along with the proscenium. The stage has been pulled 25 feet forward, and seating has been stretched around it. The once-dingy interior is now acres of honey-colored wood, the seats upholstered in a floating-flower-petal motif. A theater in which it once felt like miles from the back row to the timpanis now verges on intimacy.There is intimacy in how it sounds, too. Any judgment on a hall’s acoustics is highly provisional after just a few visits. For the rest of October’s opening events — and the rest of this season — I will be listening to the Philharmonic play in the new Geffen, and hearing how the experience changes as I sit all over. The orchestra will be changing, too, adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.But a mighty improvement is already obvious. The acoustical problems of the hall post-1976 have perhaps been overstated. Especially as it aged, it sounded so bad at least in part because it looked and felt so bad.Now the sound, like the whole experience of being there, is far more immediate and warm. We hear with our eyes as well as our ears, and simply seeing your fellow audience members sitting above and around the stage makes Geffen sound more human.On Wednesday, the Philharmonic’s first subscription program in the space, the third movement of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” demonstrated that magical orchestral alchemy in a superb hall: the way dozens of musicians playing softly can feel huge. A low growl in the basses was palpable, not just audible. At quiet dynamics throughout the evening — like the brooding opening of the catacombs section of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and the ambiguous haze of Tania León’s “Stride” — the sound was glistening and lucid.Van Zweden and the orchestra on Wednesday; the sound was glistening and lucid in quiet passages.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIf, at its loudest and densest, the Philharmonic seemed strident and blurrily blaring rather than richly massed and blended, with the brasses and percussion overwhelming the woodwinds and strings, that may be less an inherent quality of the room than a remnant of the orchestra’s notoriously blunt and punchy style.That style — which has not always been discouraged by Jaap van Zweden, on the podium as music director for another two seasons — evolved partly because of the shortcomings of the old hall, the need to force the sound to reach its distant upper reaches. But what felt necessary merely to be heard in that former space could profitably be eased in this new one. The Philharmonic no longer has to blast to a faraway audience, but can play more like it is sharing the music with a bunch of friends gathered around the campfire.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.It’s been a long journey to that campfire. Most observers swiftly recognized that the 1976 renovation, which built a new theater in the shell of the 1962 building, had not solved the hall’s acoustical issues, and had introduced new aesthetic ones. But the will was not present — and relations between the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, its landlord, were too dysfunctional — to do much about it.Around the turn of the 21st century, a plan emerged to demolish the building entirely and start over, but the Philharmonic was so spooked by the scheme’s probable cost and duration that it tried to pick up and move to Carnegie Hall, its home before Lincoln Center was built. That escape failed miserably, leaving Avery Fisher Hall as the center’s problem child, ignored in a sweeping, six-year campuswide refurbishment that finished in 2012.In 2015, David Geffen restarted the hall project with a $100 million gift — minus the $15 million required to buy off Avery Fisher’s heirs, who were surprised to learn that Fisher’s name wouldn’t be permanently attached to the building. But the design that was developed in the wake of Geffen’s donation once again spiraled out of control in ambition and price tag.It wasn’t until two pragmatic chief executives, Deborah Borda at the New York Philharmonic and Henry Timms at Lincoln Center, arrived a few years ago that a workable project — which would, as in 1976, fill the existing shell with new contents — was finally agreed on. And when the pandemic shut down performances, construction was fast-tracked so that the opening has come two years earlier than planned, without exceeding the $500 million budget.The only part of the 1960s auditorium that remains is the zigzag ceiling, and it’s been painted black and hidden behind a billowing silvery sheath. In one crucial way, though, this is a restoration: At 2,200 seats (versus 2,700 starting in 1962), the hall finally has the capacity for which its acoustics were originally designed.Over the next weeks and months, the orchestra will be adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIn pulling the stage forward and surrounding it with seating, the new theater, designed by Gary McCluskie of Diamond Schmitt Architects, with Paul Scarbrough in charge of the acoustics, borrows the approach that was workshopped with a temporary structure for over a decade at Lincoln Center’s summertime Mostly Mozart festival. That setup was in turn influenced by the “vineyard” seating of the Philharmonie in Berlin and its most famous American descendant, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.If it lacks Disney’s flair, the Geffen auditorium, clean and straightforward, is more successful than the hall’s public spaces, which have been redesigned by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their main achievements are in decluttering. The box office has been moved to a corner, allowing the lobby to extend far deeper off the plaza, reducing crowding in a space now more appealing to linger in. Having lost its weird mudroom of an archival display, the grand promenade one floor up is much more expansive, too. The corner of 65th Street and Broadway has become a small performance space visible from the street.But the eclectic decorations — the vaguely tree-shaped lighting fixtures on the first tier balcony, for example, and the scattering of curvy couches in the lobby — have the brightly clashing patterns and generic whimsy of a Marriott, a college student center or the new Delta Sky Club at LaGuardia. The champagne-colored curtains surrounding the grand promenade, stitched with bits of light-catching gold, have the mass-market feel of those spaces, too — bathed in the permanent deep blue light of a catering hall cocktail hour.A week in, the sprawling spans of frosted glass around the promenade are already smudged, which is a little icky and a little charming: The new Geffen Hall already has a comfortable, lived-in feel. That seems to be the point. After all, Marriotts, student centers and airport lounges are designed to be antitheses of the intimidation often associated with classical music. But in eschewing intimidation, did the space have to reject glamour, too?Some of the ways the new hall intends to embrace a broader audience already feel persuasive. A concert hall’s quality in unamplified music is no indication it will work when amplified, too. (Carnegie Hall is a classic example.) But when its retractable fabric dampening panels are opened and line the walls, the new Geffen is as good with amplification as without.“San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” Etienne Charles’s multimedia excavation of the history of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center, which officially opened the hall on Saturday, begins with a small jazz ensemble playing alone for half an hour. The amplified sound was direct but resonant; even Charles’s slightest finger taps on a drum registered, just enough.And on Tuesday, the mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile convened a handful of guests for the first in his series of events this season modeled on bluegrass jam sessions. Merrill Garbus, the singer of the band Tune-Yards, came onstage in bright green socks, so Thile took his shoes off, too. The sound was crisp yet tender, the moody lighting classily done.It was astonishing and delightful to realize that Geffen Hall had become a place where artists could pad around the stage in their socks, or groove as quietly as they would in a tiny jazz club. On Tuesday there wasn’t that vaguely embarrassing feeling of an orchestra hall slumming it with pop. Geffen felt — and sounded — natural.Near the end of the show, Thile looked out into the darkness and smiled broadly. “Let’s do this lots more times,” he said. More

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      Review: Musicians of Color Reclaim Control in a White Space

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      In “Everything Rises,” the violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines recount their complicated relationships with classical music.Not long into “Everything Rises,” which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines confronts the audience with an uncomfortable declaration.“I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines, who is Black, sings with disdain. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”“Everything Rises” is a timely collaboration, created by the Korean American violinist Jennifer Koh and Tines, that interrogates what it means to be a classical musician of color — to have chosen to make a creative life and professional career in a medium and a milieu that are overwhelmingly white, and to have tucked away fundamental elements of their identities in the process. The result of those inquiries is a compact, affecting and meditative multimedia work made entirely by people of color, including the composer and librettist Ken Ueno, the director Alexander Gedeon and the dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm.Koh and Tines conceived this show several years ago. Its debut was originally scheduled for spring 2020, but because of the pandemic it instead premiered this April at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What happened across the United States between those two dates — particularly in terms of racial violence perpetrated against Black and Asian Americans — made the enterprise seem even more pressing.The work begins with Koh and Tines dressed in typical concert dress: she in a wine-colored gown, crowned with demure dark hair, and he in a tuxedo. But he is also wearing a black blindfold, which leaves him feeling his way across the expanse of the Fishman Space stage at BAM. Early on, the audience sees a video clip of Koh’s winning performance as a 17-year-old at the 1994 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, an early highlight of what could have been a traditional career.Soon enough, however, Koh reveals her true, hot pink hair. Tines puts his customary earrings on. The duo wear fitted black tank tops with voluminous black skirts — a coming into their full selves, and a recognition of the parallels of their individual paths.Musically and narratively, “Everything Rises” underlines the fact that Koh and Tines, as well as their creative partners, are constantly code switching, depending on where they are and whom they are with. Ueno imaginatively expresses those frequent alternations between ways of being, drawing texts from their experiences and sampling audio recordings of interviews with the matriarchs of their respective families: Koh’s mother, Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh, who fled the Korean War to the U.S., and Tines’s grandmother, Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, a descendant of enslaved people.Ueno weaves clips of these women recounting chilling, graphic stories. Alma recalls the lynching of one of her relatives — “they killed him and hung him, cut his head off and they kicked his head down the streets” — while Soonja remembers, “I saw people being tortured and people on the trees, bodies hanging on the trees.”There are also moments of melancholic tenderness in “Everything Rises,” such as in the lullaby-like “Fluttering Heart,” and testaments to enduring resilience. Over the course of the show, Tines and Koh hold each other up literally and figuratively: hearing, acknowledging and amplifying each other’s stories.Ueno’s score nods to 19th-century Western idioms, traditional Korean music and shimmering contemporary electronica. The effect is not a pastiche, but a sonic code switching. He also allows Tines and Koh — exemplary technicians and artists of profound intensity — to explore their full tonal and textural ranges. Moments of racial violence are evoked by Koh playing growling, guttural scratch tones, often on her open G string, while Tines cycles from his rich basso profundo to an ethereal falsetto. (The day before “Everything Rises” opened, BAM named Tines as its next artist in residence, beginning in January.)The piece ends with a hopeful original song, “Better Angels,” which is preceded by a particularly haunting sequence. Ueno writes a new setting of “Strange Fruit,” the powerful song, made famous by Billie Holiday, that portrays violence against Black Americans and that, in part, led to Holiday’s prosecution by the U.S. government. It’s impossible not to imagine Holiday’s ancestral shadow as part of this work: Alongside Alma and Soonja, she becomes its third matriarch.Everything RisesThrough Oct. 15 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      On ‘ForeverAndEverNoMore,’ Brian Eno Sings for the End of the World

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      The musician and producer’s new songs meditate on folly and annihilation, playing like a far more fatalistic sequel to “Another Day on Earth” from 2005.When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance. That’s what Brian Eno has done on “ForeverAndEverNoMore”: a mournful, contemplative album that stares down humanity’s self-immolation in what he calls “the climate emergency.”“These billion years will end/They end in me,” he intones in “Garden of Stars,” as electronic tones go whizzing by and distortion flickers and crests around him like a cosmic radiation storm. It’s a song that marvels at the mathematical improbability of human life — “How then could it be that we appear at all?/In all this rock and fire, in all this gas and dust,” he sings — while envisioning its cessation.Although much of Eno’s solo catalog is instrumental — soundtracks, ambient albums, video and multimedia projects — he is no stranger to songs. He embraced pop structures, and riddled them with noise, on his early solo albums after he left Roxy Music in 1973, tossing off flippantly highbrow lyrics like “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics/You will find that their minds rarely move in a line” (“Backwater,” on the 1977 “Before and After Science”). Eno also produced hits, and sometimes sang, with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and others, and he has extolled the individual and collective benefits of group harmony singing.“ForeverAndEverNoMore” is decades and decisions removed from Eno’s 1970s song albums. At 74, Eno has taken on the stoic reserve of a sage. The new album plays like a far more fatalistic sequel to Eno’s most recent song-centered album, “Another Day on Earth” back in 2005, when he was already concerned with the state of the planet.On “ForeverAndEverNoMore,” Eno has traded percussiveness for sustain. Long drones underlie most of the tracks, echoing ancient traditions of mystical music; most of the instrumental sounds seem to arrive from great echoey distances. Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.The songs deliver indictments of human folly with measured calm. Slow, deep breathing sets the rhythm of “We Let It In,” as Eno sings, “We open to the blinding sky” to the soothing notes of a major chord; his daughter Darla Eno quietly repeats the words “deep sun.” In its reverberating solidity, the song makes global warming sound encompassing and inevitable.“There Were Bells” has bleaker lyrics, with birdsong and blue skies giving way to war and annihilation: “In the end they all went the same way,” it concludes. Singing a doleful melody over a tolling, inexorably descending bass line, Eno’s voice takes on a deepening melancholy as the music darkens, thickens and eventually thunders around him; all he can do is bear witness before going silent.There’s little comfort on “ForeverAndEverNoMore.” In “These Small Noises,” set to operatic keyboard arpeggios from Jon Hopkins, Eno imagines a useful afterlife by becoming compost — “Make us into land/Land of soil we owe our fathers” — but ends with a curse: “Go to hell/in hell to burn.” The album’s two instrumentals, “Making Gardens Out of Silence” (based on music from his sound installation at the Serpentine Galleries’ exhibition “Back to Earth”) and “Inclusion” return to Eno’s ambient side, placing elongated, breath-defying melodies in an electronic ether. On this album, they sound like they’re anticipating a post-human eternity.Perhaps the planet’s surviving species will appreciate the music.Brian Eno“ForeverAndEverNoMore”(Verve/UMC) More