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      ‘Gangnam Style’ Brought K-Pop to the World, but Haunted Its Creator

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      In 2012, the song took over the internet, and it helped pave the way for the global success of Korean pop. But Psy, the artist behind it, spent years trying and failing to replicate the phenomenon.SEOUL — He may not look it, in a spiffy double-breasted suit and a coiffure secured with enough hair gel to reflect the ceiling lights, but the 45-year-old music executive confides a secret as he rubs his temples: He’s hung over.But he doesn’t mind nursing this headache, at well past 2 p.m. on a Thursday in Seoul. Some of his best songwriting ideas come to him, he said, in the malaise that follows a night of hard drinking.The man doing the creative suffering is Psy, the onetime global internet sensation whose 2012 viral music video and earworm of a song, “Gangnam Style,” became the first-ever YouTube offering to surpass one billion views and had the world galloping along with him.The outlandish but irresistibly catchy song and accompanying video — which has Psy doing the tune’s signature horseback dance move in and around Gangnam, an upscale Seoul neighborhood — achieved the breakthrough, worldwide success that had mostly eluded Korean pop acts, or K-pop, before then.The video, which now has some 4.6 billion views, was so culturally pervasive in 2012 that Barack Obama was asked about it on Election Day. NASA astronauts recorded a parody, and a North Korean state propaganda site evoked the dance move to mock a South Korean politician. But for several years in the aftermath of all his viral fame, Psy said, the song’s success haunted him. Even as he was thrust overnight into a Hollywood existence, getting chased around New York City by paparazzi, signing with Justin Bieber’s manager and releasing a single with Snoop Dogg, internally he felt the pressure mounting for another hit.Psy performing “Gangnam Style” live on NBC’s “Today” show in New York, in 2012. At the time, the video for the song had more than 200 million YouTube views; it now has more than 4.6 billion.Jason Decrow/Invision, via Associated Press“Let’s make just one more,” he says he kept telling himself.He moved to Los Angeles in an effort to get a global career going in earnest, an ocean away from his native South Korea, where he was both a fixture of the music charts and a source of comic relief on silly television variety shows. But none of the attempts came close to replicating the formula that made “Gangnam Style” a global success.Psy wasn’t alone in trying to figure out how to reproduce the phenomenon. In South Korea, not only the music industry but government officials and economists, too, were studying just what it was about the tune, the lyrics, the video, the dancing or the man that had vaulted the song to such singular levels of ubiquity.And in the decade since the song and video first put South Korea’s pop music on the map for many around the world, K-pop has become a cultural juggernaut, expanding out from markets in East and Southeast Asia to permeate all corners of the world.Artists like BTS and Blackpink command devoted fans numbering in the tens of millions, and the bands wield an economic impact that rivals a small nation’s G.D.P. The fervor has spilled over beyond music into politics, education and even Broadway.Some say Psy deserves much of the credit.“Psy single-handedly placed K-pop on a different level,” said Kim Young-dae, a music critic who has written extensively about the industry. The song was a “game changer” for the Korean music scene and paved the way for the groundswell of interest and commercial success that the South Korean stars who came after him experienced, Mr. Kim said.Now, 10 years on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, is back home in South Korea, where he has started his own music label and management company and is trying to recreate the magic with the next generation of K-pop talent as one of the industry’s tastemakers.“Let’s make just one more,” Psy said he kept telling himself after “Gangnam Style” became a phenomenon.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“One of the things I love most about this job is that it’s unpredictable. We say among ourselves we’re in the ‘lid business’ — because you don’t know what you’ve got until you open it,” Psy said in an interview at the offices of his music label headquartered in — where else? — the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. “You don’t know which cloud will bring the rain.” With 10 artists under his wing, including a newly minted six-member boy band, TNX, Psy says he feels immensely more pressure shaping and stewarding other people’s careers compared to when he was responsible for his alone.And while he can give his budding stars advice based on decades of industry experience, what he can’t do is offer them surefire instructions on making a hit record.For all the years he has spent thinking and talking about “Gangnam Style,” he remains just as mystified as anyone by its success.“The songs are written by the same person, the dance moves are by the same person and they’re performed by the same person. Everything’s the same, but what was so special about that one song?” Psy said. “I still don’t know, to this day.”Psy performing on the grounds of Korea University in Seoul in May.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn global terms, Psy and his “Gangnam Style” are the epitome of a one-hit wonder. But in South Korea, he had been well-known as a rapper and musician for a decade before, carving out a path that differed from many of his fellow performers, in that he didn’t count on a boost from his physical appearance or shy away from courting controversy.He never had the chiseled look sought after in South Korea’s pop music industry, and from the release of his first album in 2001, he became notorious for his blunt, profane and at times ribald lyrics. “I Love Sex” was one of the tracks on his debut album, “Psy from the Psycho World!” which was slapped with a ban on sale to minors at the urging of the country’s Christian Ethics Movement.Despite — or perhaps because of — his unapologetic, iconoclastic ways, over the past two decades at home in South Korea, the college dropout has consistently logged chart toppers, best-selling albums and sold-out concerts.“It’s kinda sorta ironic he became so iconic — he went from being occasionally censored to widely celebrated,” said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based creative services agency that offers marketing and distribution solutions to Korean music artists and their labels. “He irreverently winked his way from being the bad boy of K-pop to the golden boy of K-pop.”For a pop song, “Gangnam Style” also unleashed an avalanche of deep think pieces and analyses on the various aspects of South Korea and Seoul it was said to be lampooning: the hypocrisy of the nouveau riche, the superficiality of its social standards and the inequality exemplified by the opulent Gangnam neighborhood.Psy insists the song never intended to deliver any profound social commentary — he was just looking to give people a few minutes of mindless hilarity and a reprieve from reality.If anything, he said, he was poking fun at himself, because he doesn’t aesthetically fit the bill of a posh Gangnam local.A decade on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy has started a music label and talent management company. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“It’s funny because someone who doesn’t look like he’s ‘Gangnam style’ says he is,” he said.Initially targeted for development in the 1970s to expand Seoul south of the Han River, Gangnam has became a coveted address where many of the capital’s wealthy congregate and the best schools are concentrated, an educational disparity likely to ensure that the inequalities symbolized by the neighborhood continue into the next generation.In the years since Psy made Gangnam a globally recognized, if oft-mispronounced, proper noun (“Gang” sounds closest to the latter half of Hong Kong; “nam” like Vietnam), the neighborhood has gotten ever more unattainable for the average South Korean. Nowhere have runaway real estate prices risen as steeply as in the Gangnam area.“If you say you live in Gangnam, people look at you differently,” said Jin Hee-seon, a former vice mayor of Seoul and professor of urban planning at Yonsei University. “It’s an object of desire and envy.”Psy, raised in the greater Gangnam area in a family running a semiconductor business, now lives north of the river with his wife and twin daughters and says he spends little time thinking about the place.A bronze sculpture in Gangnam by the artist Hwang Man-seok, modeled after the signature “Gangnam Style” horse-riding hand motion.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat he has recently returned to is his signature live performances.His concerts are legendary in South Korea for raucous good fun. His music — loud and energetic — is often accompanied by dance moves just as outrageous, requiring him to jump, kick and wave his arms wildly in the air. During his six-city tour this year, his first since the pandemic, he said he was surprised to find his joints and limbs as nimble as ever in middle age.In his latest album released this April, his ninth, he collaborated with the rapper Suga of BTS on a single titled “That That.” In the music video, Suga comically duels — and kills — the blue tuxedo-wearing Psy of the 2012 video. (That video has accrued 369 million views.)As for the chase of global fame that once drove him nearly mad, he says he’s made his peace with its absence.“If another good song comes along and if that thing happens again, great. If not, so be it,” he said. “For now, I’ll do what I do in my rightful place.” More

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      Pablo Milanés, Troubadour of the Cuban Revolution, Dies at 79

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      His music blended traditional idioms with pop inflections and social themes, earning him comparisons with Bob Dylan.Pablo Milanés, a Cuban musician whose blend of folk idioms, pop influences and themes of love both personal and patriotic earned him a reputation as the Bob Dylan of Latin America, died on Tuesday in Madrid. He was 79.His son Fabien Pisani confirmed the death, in a hospital, and said the cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder.Mr. Milanés, known to fans as Pablito, was a founding member of nueva trova, a musical movement that emerged in the late 1960s and infused traditional Cuban arrangements with social and political themes.He wrote songs to accompany the dramatic changes sweeping across Cuba in the wake of the 1959 revolution, making him and the two other founders of nueva trova, Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola, its unofficial troubadours.“The success of Silvio and Pablo is the success of the revolution,” Fidel Castro said during a reception for Mr. Rodríguez and Mr. Milanés in 1984.Mr. Milanés, left, with his fellow nueva trova musician Silvio Rodríguez in 1983. “The success of Silvio and Pablo,” Fidel Castro once said, “is the success of the revolution.”Prensa Latina, via AP ImagesMr. Milanés’s influence spread beyond Cuba. As the revolutionary tides that swept over Latin America in the 1960s receded in the face of right-wing authoritarians in the 1970s, songs of his like “Yo No Te Pido” and “Cuba Va” became anthems of the continental left, sung in dissident meetings and among exile communities.“To millions of Latin Americans, Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés and their guitars are as much a symbol of Cuba and its revolution as Fidel Castro and his beard,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times in 1987.With his gentle guitar work and a voice poised on the edge between tenor and baritone, Mr. Milanés performed songs that were not, on their surface at least, about class struggle and revolution, but instead about love, longing and the beauty of the Cuban countryside.In 1970 he wrote one of his most famous songs, “Yolanda,” dedicated to his wife at the time, Yolanda Benet, after the birth of their daughter Lynn.“This can’t be more than a song/I would like it to be a declaration of love,” he sang. “If you miss me I will not die/If I have to die I want it to be with you.”Nevertheless, his close identification with the Cuban government made him a controversial figure among Cuban Americans. He recorded almost 60 albums, but until recently they were hard to find in American record stores; those that made it north were often smuggled. He was largely unwelcome in Cuban exile communities, especially in Miami, and radio stations that played his music reported receiving threats afterward.Mr. Milanés performing in 1974 for an informal gathering including the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, right, and the Cuban singer-songwriter Carlos Puebla, third from right.Jose A. Figueroa/Prensa Latina. via Associated PressHe toured the United States several times, coming and going with the fluctuations in U.S.-Cuban relations. At a 1987 appearance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a particularly passionate fan mounted the stage midsong, knelt before Mr. Milanés and placed a single red rose at his feet.“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” he told The New York Times after that show. “I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”By the 1980s he had established himself as an ambassador of Cuban music. He put the music of Cuban poet-patriots like José Martí and Nicolás Guillén to song. He oversaw the Varadero International Music Festival, which brought leading artists from around Latin America to Cuba. And he released a series of albums that revitalized neglected Cuban musicians and styles, especially those who, like him, were rooted in the country’s Afro-Caribbean culture.His love for the revolution was not always requited. In 1965 the Cuban military sent him to a forced labor camp; he was one of tens of thousands of artists, intellectuals, priests and gay people deemed potentially subversive by the government.In the 1990s he founded a nonprofit, the Pablo Milanés Foundation, to promote Cuban culture. It supported artists, published books and produced a magazine, but the Cuban Ministry of Culture dissolved it after less than two years, without official explanation.He became more critical of the government in recent years, as occasional flare-ups in dissident activity were met with official repression. His stance drove a wedge between him and Mr. Rodríguez, his old ideological compatriot, who remained closely aligned with the government and even signed a letter in 2003 supporting the arrest of dozens of protesters.Mr. Milanés suffered several health setbacks over the last 20 years and moved to Spain in 2017 to receive medical treatment. He continued to tour Latin America but rarely returned to Cuba, though he did make one last appearance in Havana in June.Mr. Milanés had lived in Spain for some time and rarely returned to Cuba, but he did perform in Havana in June.Alexandre Meneghini/ReutersPablo Milanés Arias was born under auspicious signs for a future revolutionary: His birthday, Feb. 24, 1943, was the 48th anniversary of the Grito de Baire, the declaration of Cuban independence against the Spanish in 1895, while his birthplace, Bayamo, in southeastern Cuba, was a cauldron of Cuban revolutionary sentiment.His father, Angel Milanés Aguilera, was a saddler and leather craftsman for the Cuban army, and his mother, Caridad Arias Guerra, was a seamstress and dressmaker who traded one of her creations for Pablo’s first guitar.His mother supported him in other ways: When he was still young, she moved the family to Havana, where she entered him in musical contests and sent him to the city’s Municipal Conservatory of Music to study piano.When he was 12, he encountered a group of street musicians playing traditional Cuban music, and he persuaded his mother to let him leave school to start his career early.Mr. Milanés was married five times. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Pérez, and their children, Rosa Parks Milanés Perez and Pablo; his daughter Lynn Milanés Benet and son Liam, both with his second wife, Yolanda Benet; his children, Mauricio Blanco Álvarez, Fabien Pisani Álvarez and Haydée Milanés Álvarez, with his third wife, Zoe Álvarez; and his son Antonio, with his fourth wife, Sandra Perez. Another daughter with Ms. Benet, Suylén Milanés, died in January.In 1965 Mr. Milanés released “Mi 22 Años” (“My 22 Years”), the dewy-eyed lament of a young man who has already seen so much: “Long ago, I longed to find eternal bliss,” he sang. Threaded with Cuban folk and American jazz, it is considered the first nueva trova song.His international fame grew through the 1970s, alongside the promise and struggle of revolutionaries across the developing world who often looked to Cuba as their ideological lodestar. He sang to Cuban soldiers serving in Angola, and he toured the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.He won two Latin Grammys, both in 2006 — one for best singer-songwriter album, the other for best traditional tropical album.His turn away from the Cuban government coincided with Fidel Castro’s decision to step down that year, to be succeeded by his brother, Raúl, who promised significant reforms. When those promises went unfulfilled, Mr. Milanés spoke out.“When one thinks of the reforms, you think they’re going to come united with a series of freedoms, such as freedom of expression,” he said in an interview with El Nuevo Herald, a Miami newspaper, in 2011.But he remained a devotee of the revolutionary fervor of his youth, and he never lost his legions of fans on the left.When a reporter asked Michelle Bachelet, the left-leaning former president of Chile, in July about a proposed change to the Chilean Constitution, she said it reminded her of a line from one of Mr. Milanés’s songs.“It’s not perfect,” she said, “but it’s close to what I always dreamed of.” More

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      A Posthumous Solo Album Reveals a Jazz Star’s Melancholy

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      Esbjörn Svensson found fame in Europe with his group E.S.T. But a newly released solo album, discovered by his wife, unveils more intimate piano work.Following the death of Esbjörn Svensson, a pianist and one of Europe’s most influential jazz musicians, in a scuba diving accident in 2008, his wife, Eva, spent some time in the family basement, backing up all of his tapes. Among them, she and the sound engineer Åke Linton found a corrupted Logic file and a scratched CD, both named “Solo.”Svensson recorded 11 studio albums with his trio E.S.T. over a 15-year recording period, but never solo work. It’s a different experience to hear her husband’s music outside of the trio, Eva said in a recent video interview.“It’s a new landscape to explore. And of course, a new landscape inside too,” she said, pointing to her heart.Both the intriguingly named CD and file were initially unusable, but in 2017, following Eva’s decision to revisit the tapes, Linton rescued the audio files, revealing nine near-pristine solo piano tracks, recorded a few weeks before Svensson’s death. The record, “Home.s.,” was released Nov. 18, and is just one of a recent series of projects exploring Svensson’s legacy as a genre-bridging artist.In 1993, Svensson and his childhood friend Magnus Öström, a drummer, met the bassist Dan Berglund, and formed the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. The group added the initials E.S.T. on its early albums, to shift the focus from Svensson and project a sense of equality among the three players.“It became a cooperative,” said the jazz journalist and author Stuart Nicholson in a telephone interview, adding “that is partly how the sound of the trio developed in such a distinctive manner.”From left, Magnus Öström, Esbjörn Svensson and Dan Berglund, of E.S.T.Tobias RegellThe trio was best known for its international breakthrough albums “From Gagarin’s Point of View” and “Good Morning Susie Soho,” which synthesized pop, rock and Nordic folk influences, and approached that blend “in the spirit of jazz” (the motto adopted by their label, ACT). Svensson may have wanted to share the spotlight, but E.S.T. gigs were high-production performances, combining tasteful light displays and smoke machines with accessible melodies to create an atmosphere closer to a rock gig.“You didn’t need to be a jazz lover to like their tunes,” said Linton, who was E.S.T.’s longtime sound engineer, in a recent video interview. The instrumental trio’s success meant jazz-based music became popular in the European mainstream. The 2005 record “Viaticum” charted on the German and French pop charts, and went platinum in Sweden, where it debuted at No. 5, just above U2 and John Legend.In 2006, the group’s first DownBeat Magazine cover bore the headline “Europe Invades!”, evidence of the slightly frosty reception the trio received from the jazz establishment in America, where it never had a high profile.No one around Svensson knew he was working on “Home.s.,” which was named by Eva. It was clear that tracks weren’t simply ideas destined for later exploration with the trio because of the files’ labeling, and the precise compositional structures. “He was a private person,” Linton said, adding that he “didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even his wife.”The album — which offers a handful of reference points from classical music and Nordic jazz, including Chopin and Shostakovich, as well as Jan Johansson’s popular 1963 album “Jazz På Svenska”— finds Svensson alone, in a melancholic musical space and has the distinct feeling of an artist delving into his private, interior language. “We’re almost privy to his innermost musical thoughts,” Nicholson said.But the sound of “Home.s.” was still familiar to those close to Svensson. Eva described the album’s music as “kind of the soundtrack to our daily lives.” After E.S.T. was done with a soundcheck, Svensson “would always stay playing stuff in the hall,” Linton said. “And now when I think of it, probably what was going on is that he was practicing this stuff without knowing it, but he would never talk about it.”Nicholson remembered spending time at an E.S.T. recording session in Stockholm, when Svensson warmed up with music by Shostakovich that demonstrated the full extent of his classical education, in a way he didn’t show with E.S.T. “When we met, I said, ‘How come you don’t reveal that part of you?’” Nicholson said. “He said, ‘That’s not me. I can do it, but that’s not how I feel things, and how I understand music.’”Despite the intimate feel of Svensson’s solo work, “when I found the album, I had this strong feeling that I wanted to share it,” Eva said.Esbjörn Svensson performing at a Spanish jazz festival in 2003. His trio E.S.T.’s popularity brought jazz-based music into the European mainstream.Rafa Rivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo premiere “Home.s.,” she wanted to create a shared experience, like an album listening party. It was first played in September at Stockholm’s Sven-Harry’s Museum, in surround-sound and accompanied by a new hanging sculpture by Jennie Stolpe, and later paired with visuals conceived by David Tarrodi (the director of the 2016 documentary, “A Portrait of Esbjörn Svensson”) and Anders Amrén (E.S.T.’s regular lighting designer) as part of an online event.The visuals arranged by Tarrodi and Amrén pick up on the melancholic tone of Svensson’s solo album. The pair’s 36-minute video piece began with small piles of sand, contorted kaleidoscopically through different lenses; then, sun-bleached footage of a family emerged; next, grainy footage of America, all soundtracked by the album. The sound was melancholic, the visuals muted, but the combination never descriptive or poetic.Andrew Mellor, the author of “The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture,” described melancholy in the region “as a discipline. It’s also a kind of pastime in Scandinavia.”One way to survive the “brutal” winter is through art, he added: “There’s literature from Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, films by Lars von Trier, and there’s music by Bent Sørensen.”On “Home.s.,” the melancholy twists inward. “It says ‘this is about me looking into myself, more than it is about me telling you a story,’” Mellor said.When Eva first heard the album, she thought “‘wow, this is his voice,’” she said. “It couldn’t be anybody else’s.” More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Taste of Holiday Bounty

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      Stéphane Denève leads a program of extravagantly colorful French works, with the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson as the soloist in a Ravel concerto.Thanksgiving came a day early at the New York Philharmonic this year: the calories, the juicy fat, the whipped cream, the fun, the sense of endless bounty. The orchestra’s program at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday was an immersion in richness and in flashing, warming colors, and it left you like a good holiday dinner does: a little dazed, even happily drowsy, stumbling toward the subway truly full.Conducted by Stéphane Denève, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, the concert was très French — down to the tender Rameau encore played by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto in G. (The program repeats on Friday and Saturday.)At the center of that concerto is a time-suspending Adagio. But in Ólafsson’s performance, the dreaminess — the slight blur, the delicacy — bled into the two outer movements, too. Some pianists lean on the factory-machine regularity, the bright lucidity, of those parts to hammer home a contrast with the slow movement. But, as he also showed in a very different repertory at his Carnegie Hall debut in February, Ólafsson resists vivid contrasts.It’s not that his touch is diffuse; it’s as clean as marble. And it’s not that the tempos he and Denève chose for the framing movements were slower than normal. But the effect Ólafsson got throughout, of a kind of virtuosic reticence, could be described in the same words I used for his performance in February: a “silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.”“Céléphaïs” (2017), a nine-minute section from Guillaume Connesson’s symphonic poem inspired by the fantastical writings of H.P. Lovecraft, opened the concert with an extravagance that offers proof of the survival of the orchestrational panache of the French tradition: its lurid lushness and sly squiggles, brassy explosions and sensual strings.Connesson’s precursors in that tradition got a hearing after intermission. The audience even got a second helping: The big, sweet slice of cake that is the Suite No. 2 drawn from Albert Roussel’s 1930 ballet “Bacchus et Ariane” was followed by another slice, the Suite No. 2 from another mythological ballet of the early 20th century, Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé.”On paper this seemed like overindulgence; it kind of was, but who doesn’t like their potatoes two ways every now and again? And while there’s a familial similarity between these works, Roussel’s style is ever so slightly more angular, with an underlying feeling of logic distinct from Ravel’s billowy scene painting.The Philharmonic played well throughout, riding the many waves and swerves of intensity and pigment, from dewy dawns to mellow dusks. There were some particularly notable contributions to the potluck: Ryan Roberts, just a few years into his tenure as the orchestra’s English hornist but already a pillar of the ensemble, matched Ólafsson’s eloquent introspection in the Ravel concerto’s slow movement.The principal flute, Robert Langevin, unspooled his instrument’s classic glistening solo in “Daphnis et Chloé” with conversational ease. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, had a russet-color turn in the Roussel, and Roger Nye, unusually seated in the first bassoon chair for that work, played with honeyed serenity.Unlike at most Thanksgiving dinners, by the end the fullness didn’t feel like bloat. The clear, cool acoustics of the new Geffen Hall work against textures getting too heavy; they favor breezy sleekness, which is perfect for Denève, whose music-making exudes relaxation without losing forward motion. A couple of hours later, I would have been more than ready to eat — I mean hear — some more.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Soaring Legacy of Pablo Milanés

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      While helping pioneer nueva trova — which combined Cuban son and guaracha with soul, jazz and folk rock — he alternated embrace and rejection of the government that once disciplined him.Pablo Milanés, who died in Madrid this week at 79, left behind a body of work that was deeply personal even as he navigated one of the 20th century’s most tumultuous political experiments, the Cuban Revolution. His career was an open dialogue with the revolutionary government that had once disciplined him, then propped him up as one of its most powerful ideological icons. More recently Milanés, who moved to Spain several years ago to seek cancer treatment, resumed his critical stance toward the Cuban government. But he never renounced his artistic labor, that of the singer with a story to tell about loves lost and won, a towering voice with a guitar and a sense of poetry and swing.While some may define Milanés’s career as a product of a Cuban reality, long estranged from the United States, his art and its appeal had broad international repercussions. Having begun his career in his hometown, Bayamo, singing boleros and Mexican rancheras, he eventually collaborated with Latin American legends like the recently departed Gal Costa, as well as Milton Nascimento, Lucecita Benítez and Fito Páez. As one of the originators of the post-revolutionary genre nueva trova, he combined elements of Cuban son and guaracha with soul, jazz and folk rock.His “Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico” from 1978 immediately changed the way I thought about the Caribbean’s sea-disrupted continuity, and the still-unfolding story of two former Spanish colonies. With its opening lyric — based on a poem by the early 20th-century Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió — proclaiming that the two islands were “two wings of the same bird,” the song was an emotional reverie about divergent destinies and a desire for a shared future. “I invite you on my flight,” he crooned, “and we’ll search together for the same sky.”Milanés’s first successful recording, “Mis 22 Años” (“My 22 Years”), released in 1965, was emblematic of the role he played in the evolution of trova in Cuba. The original trovadores were migrant troubadours who also dabbled in bolero and bufo, a kind of satirical musical theater, gradually incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythms. By the late 1940s, an update of trova called filin (a Spanish spelling of “feeling”) emerged, influenced by American jazz singers like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. “Mis 22 Años” is grounded in filin, yet some consider it the first nueva trova song.The nueva trova movement was supposed to represent a break from older traditions of socially conscious music in Cuba and help to define the “New Man” promoted by its leaders. It was a genre cobbled together from the voices of children of the revolution, some singing its praises, others challenging what they saw as restrictions. Milanés was deemed to be rebellious and, according to a 2015 interview he gave to El País, he spent time in UMAP, a forced labor camp where dissidents and homosexuals were sent.Milanés onstage in Spain in 2021. His striking tenor was all the more powerful when it wavered in emotion.Miguel Paquet/EPA, via ShutterstockIn the 1970s nueva trova became a major force in Cuban music, with Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez, who openly borrowed from American folk-rock artists like Bob Dylan, its leading figures. While Milanés and Rodríguez often worked together and supported each other, in some ways they symbolized Cuba’s racial complexity. Milanés set poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén to music and collaborated with the Afro-Cuban filin singers Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo, while the lighter-skinned Rodríguez was famously connected with the folk singer Pete Seeger.Milanés was most effective when he reached into those deeper recesses where Black singers find soul, like Al Green at his most yearning. His striking tenor was all the more powerful when it wavered in emotion — a slight trill paints the chorus of songs like “Yolanda,” dedicated to his former wife. In “La Vida no Vale Nada,” which insists that life has no value as long as there are victims of violence and the rest of us remain silent, Milanés is perhaps at his heart-aching best, sharply poignant, wounded yet determined.Milanés’s syncopated swing and filin-flavored nueva trova translates a little more easily to the Puerto Rican wing of his mythical Caribbean bird. In 1994, a new salsa version of “Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico” was recorded by the Afro-Cuban singer Issac Delgado on “Con Ganas,” which was distributed by the U.S. label Qbadisc; it introduced him to American listeners and remains popular in Puerto Rico. In the improvisational section, Delgado name-checks the Puerto Rican favorites Rafael Hernández, Tite Curet, Cheo Feliciano and Ismael Rivera, and the rhetorical feel of the original becomes more of a dance party.In the mid-1980s, Milanés wrote a song called “Yo Me Quedo” (“I’m Staying”), which resonated deeply with Puerto Ricans because it expressed a desire not to leave the Caribbean island that birthed him, seemingly intended to discourage out-migration. He even performed it in Puerto Rico, riding on its wave of loyalty and patriotism as he marched through reasons — the fragrant humidity, the “small, silent things” — that made it impossible to leave. A few years later, the Puerto Rican salsero Tony Vega covered it, indulging in all the materialist trappings of 1980s “salsa sensual,” yet still resonating with locals, losing nothing in the cross-Caribbean translation.With Milanés’s passing, the contradictions of his life, and the juxtaposition of Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s fates come into sharper focus. While the islands feature vastly different political systems, both struggle with electrical blackouts, economic austerity and often harsh living conditions that increasingly generate street protest.Yet even as Milanés continued to speak out against the Cuban government, he was still allowed to return as recently as 2019 to perform massively popular concerts in Havana, performing classics like “Amo Esta Isla” (“I Love This Island”), a song he wrote around the same time he recorded “Yo Me Quedo.” It was a moment when ideology took a back seat to Milanés’s unparalleled talent as a troubadour of love, compelling everyone to reach for the sky. More

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      Review: Renée Fleming Stars in ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

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      Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s new opera, conceived as a vehicle for the star soprano Renée Fleming, has its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.“The Hours” — a new opera based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired — features a redoubtable trio of prima donnas. And it was conceived as a vehicle for one of them, the soprano Renée Fleming, who is using it as her return to the Metropolitan Opera after five years.But on Tuesday, when the Met gave “The Hours” its staged premiere, only one of this trio of stars really shone: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, sounding as confident and fresh, as sonorous and subtle, as she ever has in this theater.In this achingly — almost painfully — pretty, relentlessly stirring opera, with a score by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Greg Pierce, DiDonato plays Virginia Woolf, battling depression as she writes her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.The two other main characters illustrate the impact of that book through the decades. In 1949, Laura Brown (the Broadway veteran Kelli O’Hara), a pregnant Los Angeles homemaker, is reading it as she suffers Woolfian waves of despair. Fifty years after that, the sophisticated Manhattanite book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Fleming), who shares a first name with Woolf’s protagonist, is, like Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party — this one for her onetime lover and longtime best friend, a renowned poet dying of AIDS.Michael Cunningham’s novel, Stephen Daldry’s film and the new opera all take us through one modest yet momentous day in the lives of these three women. Cunningham’s deft construction, with its precious pseudo-Woolf prose, discreetly highlights the threads of connection — flashes of the color yellow, degrees of same-sex desire — weaving the stories together.The film — which starred Meryl Streep as Clarissa, Julianne Moore as Laura, and, in a putty-nosed, Academy Award-winning turn, Nicole Kidman as Virginia — upped the portentousness, not least through Philip Glass’s soundtrack. Gravely impassioned and endlessly undulating, Glass’s score is so closely associated with this material that writing new “Hours” music is, as Puts said in a recent interview in The New York Times, something like writing a “Star Wars” opera without anything by John Williams.In Tom Pye’s scenic design, the three stories are presented on realistic islands that float around a bare stage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere are streaks of Minimalism in Puts’s watery rippling, as there are throughout his body of work. But though he repeats rhythmic and melodic motifs, the effect is gentler and less chugging than Glass, and — as in “Silent Night” (2012), Puts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera about a Christmas cease-fire during World War I — all else is pushed into the background by surging, strings-forward lyricism.Early in “The Hours,” Puts introduces passing hints of distinctions between the women’s worlds: for 1923, austere piano and a curdled atmosphere of syncopated winds and eerie pricks of strings; for 1949, some period light swing and echoes of the style of cheerful ad jingles. But nearly every scene in the opera eventually gets to the same place musically and dramatically, whipped into soaring emotion. The tear-jerking gets tiring.Pierce’s libretto artfully brings the women into even closer proximity than in the novel or film, enabling Puts to create, for example, gorgeous close-harmony duets for Virginia and Laura. But an awkward scene with Clarissa at the florist — Mrs. Dalloway, per Woolf’s classic opening line, is buying the flowers herself — doesn’t seem sure whether it is, or should be, comic relief. A late trio for Clarissa; her dying friend, Richard; and Louis, with whom they were enmeshed in a youthful love triangle, goes on far too long.The choral writing, which starts the opera pretty clearly representing the voices in the characters’ heads, gradually dissolves into a vaguer, more all-purpose texture — and occasionally into stentorian wails, like the villagers’ music in “Peter Grimes.” A vocalizing countertenor (John Holiday), mystifyingly called the Man Under the Arch in the cast list, hovers around, faintly suggesting the angelic.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, gave the work its premiere in March in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he also leads, and whose strings blossom in a way that sumptuously rewarded Puts’s score.But on Tuesday — with Nézet-Séguin making his first appearance at the opera house this season, nearly two months in — the Met’s orchestra brought muscular energy to what could easily turn turgid and syrupy. (The most risible part in Philadelphia, in which a contemporary novelist named, yes, Michael arrives onstage to swear his devotion to Woolf, has thankfully been excised.)In Tom Pye’s set, the three women’s domestic spaces are realistic islands floating around a bare stage, an efficient solution to a fast-flowing drama. But Phelim McDermott’s production clutters the smooth action with choristers, actors and dancers who, in Annie-B Parson’s dull choreography, sleepwalk, slouch, wield flowers like cheerleader pom-poms, wave pots and pans, slump atop chairs and sprawl over floors.Fleming, center, among flowers held by dancers in Annie-B Parson’s choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDenyce Graves, Sean Panikkar and Brandon Cedel bring dignity to the protagonists’ romantic partners; Kathleen Kim has a piquant cameo as the coloratura-wielding florist; and, best of all, Kyle Ketelsen sings the strong-willed, delusional Richard with haunting authority.O’Hara, her classical technique secure enough to have brought her success at the Met in “The Merry Widow” and “Così Fan Tutte,” is a focused actress — watch the quiet terror of her slow walk back toward her son from center stage — even if her bright, silvery soprano takes on a slight edge at full cry.But it is hard to focus on anyone else when DiDonato is onstage, often standing magnetically still. Her voice is clear in fast conversation, as she darkly relishes the words. Then, as the lines slow and expand, her tone grows smoky yet grounded, mellow yet potent. She plays Virginia as solemn and severe, but with a dry wit; if anything, she comes off as almost too robust to make paralyzing depression entirely plausible.DiDonato is a commanding enough singer and presence to render persuasive what had seemed in Philadelphia like bombastic overkill: a booming fantasy of London, a crashing evocation of incapacitating headaches. It’s only at the very top of its range that her voice tightens a bit; all in all, though, she gives a generous, noble portrayal, at its peak in her crushing delivery of lines from Woolf’s suicide note.The poignancy of the plot is amplified by Fleming, who has returned to the Met’s stage sounding pale: not frail or ugly, but at first almost inaudible and by the end underpowered, a pencil sketch of her former plushness. Having bid farewell to the standard repertory, this diva never wanted to age into opera’s supporting mother characters, and she has the influence to commission works like this, in which she can still be cast as the lead.But just as Clarissa Vaughan throbs with nostalgia for her life a few decades before, so we listen to Fleming at this point in her career and hear, deep in our ears, her supreme nights in this theater in the 1990s and early 2000s: as Mozart’s Countess, Verdi’s Desdemona, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana.And as Strauss’s Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” in which she made her last staged appearance here in 2017, and whose sublime final trio is rendingly recalled in “The Hours,” as Clarissa, Laura and Virginia at last acknowledge one another, joining in sober then swelling harmony. It’s a superb sequence, a nod to Strauss that has a sweet longing all its own.“I wanted to make something good, something true,” Richard tells Clarissa near the end of the opera. “It didn’t have to be great.”That’s a reasonable standard. And, measured against it, Puts and Pierce have succeeded.The HoursThrough Dec. 15 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Sphinx Was Ahead of the Curve on Diversity in Classical Music

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      It was the late 1990s, and Afa Sadykhly Dworkin saw a woman crying backstage at a concert hall in Michigan.Dworkin was there helping to run a competition for young artists started by the Sphinx Organization, a newly founded group devoted to fostering diversity in classical music. When she spied the woman in tears, she assumed that a bow or string had broken. But when she tried to help, the woman waved her off, saying that although her child had lost the competition, her tears were happy ones.“I’m crying because we thought my daughter was the best,” Dworkin recently recalled the woman telling her. “There’s no one who lives near us who plays at her level, so we came assuming we were going to win. And we didn’t win anything, but she has a family now. She has all these sisters and brothers now.”Sphinx, which turns 25 this year, has come a long way since that first competition. While the prize-awarding event remains at the core of its activities, the organization, which Dworkin now leads, has also started training programs and ensembles, and has pushed for more diverse repertory and orchestra rosters. It has promoted young soloists and arts administrators, and operates an ever-expanding annual conference. With a burst of new attention to phrases like diversity, equity and inclusion over the past two years, Sphinx’s steady, patient work has come to seem prescient.“They were raising the profile of the critical importance of diversity in orchestras before almost anybody was,” said Simon Woods, the chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “And before the League. They were there before everybody.”But perhaps Sphinx’s most fundamental and meaningful achievement has been its simplest one, the part that crying mother caught onto: creating a community of people who had thought they were the only one of their kind, or close. Forming what those in the Sphinx network call “la familia.”From left, members of the Sphinx Virtuosi, Hannah White, Alex Gonzalez, Clayton Penrose-Whitmore and Thierry Delucas Neves, at Carnegie.Rafael Rios for The New York Times“It’s so much more than our life’s work,” Dworkin, 46, the organization’s president and artistic director, said in an interview in October, the morning after Sphinx’s 25th-anniversary gala concert at Carnegie Hall. “It’s a family. It’s a society.”When Sphinx started, Dworkin was an undergraduate violin student at the University of Michigan. Raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, she had come to the United States as a teenager, when her father feared that political shifts at home might not be friendly to mixed-heritage part-Jews.Her parents were well educated — her father a chemical engineer and her mother an academic — but music wasn’t on their radar as a career option. Dworkin begged to play an instrument, though, so at 7 she entered the Soviet Union’s tightly organized music education program, and chose the violin. It quickly became her passion.The move across the Atlantic was a shock; she spoke no English. But with the help of a devoted teacher, she began to piece the language together. Then Aaron Dworkin, a transfer student from Penn State, enrolled in her teacher’s studio at Michigan.“We started talking immediately,” she said. “He’d zeroed in on something more than his own fiddle playing. He was interested in repertoire.”The child of a white mother and Black father, Aaron had been adopted by a Jewish family and raised in New York City. He introduced Afa to Black composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and told her about the negative assumptions people had made about his artistry as almost always the only person of color in classical music settings. (After a decade as friends, then colleagues, they married in 2005.)Xavier Foley, a bassist and composer whose piece “An Ode to Our Times” was performed at the gala.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesAmaryn Olmeda, the winner of the Sphinx Competition’s junior division in 2021, rehearsed Carlos Simon’s solo “Between Worlds.”

      Rafael Rios for The New York Times“He had a problem with the world,” she said, “and he was going to do something about it.”What he had in mind was a competition — with the goal of discovering the musicians of color who were out there, and of building camaraderie among them. He was fearless about fund-raising and asking for assistance, and with the university as a partner and Afa working frenetically on the side of her violin teaching and playing, the inaugural Sphinx Competition took place in Ann Arbor in 1998.“It was never designed to be an affirmative action mechanism,” Aaron Dworkin said in an interview. “We told our jurors, ‘If you find no one rises to the right level, don’t give it.’ And there have been a couple of years of the competition in which we didn’t give certain awards.”The organization grew organically as issues presented themselves. “They have been really good at creating programs or initiatives where there is a gap,” said Blake-Anthony Johnson, the chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta and an alumnus of Sphinx LEAD, which is aimed at fostering arts administrators of color. “They have found all the crevices of nationwide issues, and tried to home in on them.”Some parents complained that their children had to play on cheap, borrowed instruments, so Sphinx organized higher-quality loans. Scholarships were arranged with prominent summer programs. Early on, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington offered performance opportunities for competition winners.Sphinx began to serve as something of a management firm, and also started a summer program of its own, the Sphinx Performance Academy; a large orchestra; a training structure for young children, Sphinx Overture; an elite touring chamber ensemble, now called the Sphinx Virtuosi; the annual conference, SphinxConnect; Sphinx LEAD; and a regranting program to support others’ projects, the Sphinx Venture Fund.Deborah Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said: “I’m very positive about Sphinx because they actually do something. Sphinx isn’t theoretical. They provide specific, effective programs.”What they have not ever wanted to do was create their own edifices. “One option would have been to start a kind of Sphinx Conservatory, but the vision was never separate but equal,” Afa Dworkin said. “It was how do we nurture, empower, lift up and create on-ramps within the existing structure. Aaron knew the talent was out there, so he wanted to find it, nurture it, give it a level playing field. He didn’t want a new Juilliard; he wanted Juilliard to look like New York.”In 2015, Aaron became the dean of the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the University of Michigan. It was a potentially uncomfortable moment for Sphinx: Finding a successor to an organization’s founder is always delicate, and in this case the most obvious candidate was the founder’s wife.“I have to give the board credit,” Afa said. “They didn’t just say, ‘Oh, you’ve always been around.’ They looked at other things out there, and took a six- or seven-month process to see if I was the right person.”She has remained in charge even though, two years after starting, Aaron stepped down as dean, saying in a statement it was “necessary for me to have the opportunity to focus more on my family.” (Afa said that his packed schedule at Michigan had been “taking a toll” on their two children.)“There are definitely things we disagree on,” she said of her husband. “Direction, choices. We have different aesthetics relative to music. I really love new music, and Aaron has an absolute dedication to the Romantic era. But he has given me plenty of space; I can’t think of one place where he overstepped.”The Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie. The group made its international debut in Brazil, and will perform next year in England.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesHer days in New York last month leading up to the Carnegie gala were a swirl of meetings, coffees and lunches with donors, alumni, staff, musicians and composers. Everyone had advice to give and receive, and logistical challenges to present to her. Most pressing, the Sphinx Virtuosi was then about to make its international debut in Brazil, and has also been planning events next year in England, as well as recording projects. She fielded everything with the calm humor and gentle decisiveness of a den mother.“She has no vanity about her,” said Victoria Robey, a member of the organization’s board. “She just wants to see Sphinx be the best it can be. And she’s fantastic at fund-raising. She doesn’t do it in an aggressive, transactional way; she does it in an organic way. Donors want to have the mission explained to them; they don’t just want to plop down their money and disappear. She builds with warm cohesiveness.”Alexa Smith, an associate vice president at the Manhattan School of Music, said, of her fellow Sphinx LEAD alumni: “One of the things we have all agreed has been impactful has been having the community, having people all over the country, where we can lean on each other. It’s somehow not competitive. And that’s a cultural thing that comes from Afa.”There have been debates, both within Sphinx and from outside, about the organization’s tactics. The Dworkins’ preference for quietly lobbying legacy institutions has struck some as old-fashioned in a culture dominated by call-outs fueled by social media. And although string players have always had a home at Sphinx, some in the field wish that there were more programs for other types of instrumentalists, too.The violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery, who has been involved with Sphinx from its early years, said that she has observed the musical level and socioeconomic status of the average Sphinx Performance Academy student steadily rise. Is the program, in that case, truly opening doors for those who would otherwise lack opportunities?And racial diversity in orchestras, dismal when Sphinx was founded, remains stubbornly low, though there are profound disagreements in the field about how to address the problem. Sphinx, true to its tradition of working within existing institutional bounds, has resisted calling for the elimination of the prevailing system of blind auditions, instead starting the National Alliance for Audition Support to offer financial assistance, coaching and other resources.Both the pandemic pause on performances and the broad push for racial justice in 2020 brought Sphinx more attention and resources. The mood was celebratory at the Carnegie gala, which featured a spirited performance by Sphinx Virtuosi members and a precociously poised solo from the 14-year-old violinist Amaryn Olmeda, who won the competition’s junior division in 2021. Nine years ago, Aaron Dworkin had taken the Carnegie stage for a speech in which he sharply criticized the field’s stagnancy; but this year, brought on as the 25th-anniversary honoree, he offered an uplifting, optimistic slam poem.“I think we owe them a lot,” said Woods, from the League of American Orchestras. “Not only for having a vision, but for plugging away at that vision year after year. For me what is really interesting is, it feels like their time has come. The work that they’ve been doing is now beginning to translate into meaningful change.”Even to the point where its leader can speculate — however hypothetically — about a world in which Sphinx would not be necessary.“On a practical level, is there enough talent today for that to be true, for Sphinx to become superfluous?” Afa Dworkin said. “Absolutely. Is our society and sector ready for it? No, not totally.”“I just think,” she added with a smile, “we have a little ways to go.” More