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      How a Sooty Old Piano Helped Beth Orton Reach a New Creative Peak

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      With a vintage upright and painstakingly assembled songs, the English folk-pop-electronic songwriter’s eighth studio album, “Weather Alive,” is her best.Maybe the soot helped.The English songwriter Beth Orton wasn’t sure she even wanted to make another album when she started to write the songs for “Weather Alive”: her eighth studio album, her first since 2016, and by far her best. It’s an album that sums up and transcends all the crosscurrents of Orton’s decidedly unorthodox artistic path.“It’s been so many phases and changes, and trying to find my place within my own music, within my own voice and in my own sound,” she said in a video interview. “Who am I in what I do?”On her recordings, Orton, 51, is pensive and measured. In conversation, she is nearly the opposite: voluble and forthcoming, with her thoughts tumbling out.Orton’s main instrument is the guitar; she’s a skillful, sophisticated fingerpicker. But soon after she moved to her current house in London with her husband, the musician Sam Amidon, she happened upon a used-piano dealer at Camden Market. She was so taken with the haunted sound of an old upright that she bought it for 300 pounds, about $350. The lines she found herself playing on that piano — brief, circular, quietly tolling — led her to build songs around them.“I was like, ‘OK, I don’t know how to play this instrument, but wow, it just sounds so beautiful,’” Orton said. “So I started on the piano, just writing simple songs, not worrying about being good at what I do.”Speaking from her home studio in London, a converted garden shed, she turned to that instrument to play a few plangent clusters of notes. “No matter where you touch it, it just has these resonances,” she said. “Little ghosts of other chords just keep ringing out and you’re like, ‘Oh, that speaks of another melody, and that speaks of another feeling.’”“Johnny Marr,” she added, referring to the Smiths guitarist, “said that each instrument has its many songs, and it’s true — they all seem to hold their secrets.”About halfway through recording the album, Orton decided to have the piano restored. “It was a terrible idea,” she said, laughing. “They opened it up, it took a while to settle, and they just found it was full of soot.”For Orton, even that was evocative. “It was like old, old fire.”“Weather Alive” is an album of meditative grace and constant questioning, of elaborate constructions and startling intimacy. In a way, it’s a British, more pensive analogue to Taylor Swift’s albums “Folklore” and “Evermore,” which also rely on brief piano lines. On Orton’s album, acoustic instruments hover in electronic spaces; mantra-like piano motifs promise stability. Yet Orton’s voice fearlessly tests itself. She’s never afraid to sound broken. Her voice trembles and catches, scrapes and cracks, smears some words and obsessively repeats others as she conjures elusive but intense emotions.“I was like, ‘OK, I don’t know how to play this instrument, but wow, it just sounds so beautiful,’” Orton said of her piano.Rosie Marks for The New York Times“This is someone who is very deeply mining their inner self, without a great deal of a filter or artifice or a desire to be manicured in some way, to hide oneself from the world,” said Shahzad Ismaily, who played guitar and keyboards on the album. “She was having none of that.”Orton said she thinks she’s become less afraid. “This is how I sing. This is my voice now,” she said. “This is who I am and this is what life has made of me. And it may be something else next week, or next month, or next year.”In the album’s eight leisurely songs, Orton sings about longings, memories, nature, attachments and separations, about overwhelming sensations and uncertain prospects. She’s equally prepared for bliss or disillusionment. In “Lonely,” she reflects that “Lonely loves my company,” and wonders, “Will you be the ash of a well-tended fire/Will you be the ambush of my desire?”Orton’s first recordings — with the producer William Orbit and with the Chemical Brothers — floated her vocals amid electronic loops. But Orton was never a dance-pop top-liner. Her smoky, plaintive voice, her intricate guitar picking and her modal melodies harked back to British folk roots, while her lyrics grappled with tangled, unresolved relationships.Orton studied and performed with two of her avowed influences — the guitarist Bert Jansch, a founder of the jazzy folk group Pentangle, and the folk-soul songwriter Terry Callier — and she made albums that continually rebalanced elements of folk, jazz, soul, trip-hop and electronics. Her 1999 album, “Central Reservation,” won her a Brit Award as best British female solo artist.But Orton struggled with the demands of performing and touring. In her early years on the road, she said, “I would go out and, like, roll with it, or get drunk enough, or just get stoned enough, or get revved up enough to get up there and do what I do on pure nerves. I think people loved it. But it was hard to live with.”That excess couldn’t last. Orton soldiered through medical problems until 2006, when she had her first child, Nancy; her second, Arthur, was born in 2011. Raising small children kept her largely at home, where she expanded her abilities in electronics and production; her 2016 album, “Kidsticks,” was built on computerized elements that she could record in the moments between caring for her children. For “Weather Alive,” she had more free time since both children were old enough to go to school.She still wasn’t sure she wanted to be a touring singer-songwriter anymore. In London, she participated in a National Theater workshop on writing musicals, with mentors including Stephen Sondheim. But the old upright piano brought her back to the craft of songwriting.“With my kids at school I was able to go deep again,” she said. “What I couldn’t do when the kids were little was really dig into the internal workings, like I like to. So I was left again with this sort of meditative quality, or maybe for the first time seeing my own thought patterns. Because I was writing for no one.”The album often sounds as if all the musicians are quietly huddled together, listening intently to one another, whispering ideas. But that’s an illusion that Orton created as producer and engineer. Like many pandemic-era albums, much of “Weather Alive” was recorded at widely separated times and places.In the album’s eight leisurely songs, Orton sings about longings, memories, nature, attachments and separations, about overwhelming sensations and uncertain prospects. Rosie Marks for The New York TimesOrton tried, at first, to record the songs entirely on her own. “I had many iterations and inventions of like creating my own drum kits out of cardboard boxes and tambourines, just fooling around and then making loops,” she said. “But I had to put it aside because I knew, at some point, that I was going to make a piano record.”The sound of “Weather Alive” began with in-person London sessions with the jazz-rooted rhythm section of Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet, the Smile) on drums and Tom Herbert (the Invisible, Polar Bear) on bass. Orton sent songs-in-progress to Ismaily and to the saxophonist Alabaster DePlume, then reworked them around what came back. An idea briefly improvised during an outro could be turned into a loop and reshape an entire song.Ismaily recorded his parts remotely, exchanging hundreds of takes with Orton. “There were a few tracks where I received vocals that were just sounds without the lyrics written yet, so she might just be humming a melody,” he said in a telephone interview. “But even then, you felt pulled into what the world was that you were occupying. She was continuing to discover what the song itself was all the way to the end, which is beautiful.”Orton said the album “just took on its own life and I was the doula. It was on the one hand sculpting and having as much control as it was possible to have, and on the other, let’s just birth this!”It was as if, she added, “the record became its own kind of weather.” More

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      Bad Bunny Leads 2022 Latin Grammy Nominations With 10

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      Rosalía has eight nods, while Jorge Drexler and Christina Aguilera have seven each for the awards, which will be held on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas.Bad Bunny, the chart-topping Puerto Rican star, dominates the nominations for the 23rd annual Latin Grammy Awards, leading stars from across the spectrum of Latin music, like Shakira, Rosalía, Carlos Vives and Jorge Drexler.Bad Bunny, whose “Un Verano Sin Ti” is an international blockbuster — and the biggest LP of the year in the United States — has a total of 10 nods in seven categories, including album of the year, according to an announcement on Tuesday by the Latin Recording Academy, which has been presenting the awards since 2000. The Mexican songwriter and producer Edgar Barrera has nine, and both Rosalía, the genre-blending Spanish performer, and the Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro follow with eight.Artists with seven nominations include Drexler, the doctor-turned-songwriter from Uruguay who first came to international attention in 2004 when he won an Academy Award for a song from the film “The Motorcycle Diaries,” and Christina Aguilera, the American pop diva behind hits like “Genie in a Bottle” and “Beautiful,” who released a Spanish-language album, “Aguilera,” this year.Camilo, a playful Colombian pop singer with a handlebar mustache, whose recent music has been documenting his domestic life, has six nods, as does Carlos Vives, a veteran singer-songwriter from Colombia with 15 Latin Grammys already.This year’s Latin Grammys will honor music released from June 1, 2021, to May 31, 2022. To be considered, songs must be new and contain lyrics in Spanish, Portuguese “or Indigenous dialects of our region, regardless of where such product was recorded or released,” according to a statement from the academy.In addition to album of the year, Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is nominated in the record of the year category for “Ojitos Lindos,” featuring the Colombian electronic duo Bomba Estéreo. “Un Verano” is also up for urban music album, and Bad Bunny’s other nods reflect his prolific work over the last year, solo and in collaboration.Bad Bunny competes against himself in the urban fusion/performance category (with “Tití Me Preguntó” from “Un Verano,” as well as “Volví,” a track with the New York bachata band Aventura); in reggaeton performance (two non-album tracks, “Lo Siento BB:/” with Tainy and Julieta Venegas, and “Yonaguni”); and in best urban song (“Tití Me Preguntó” and “Lo Siento”). Another non-album track, “De Museo,” is up for rap/hip-hop song.One surprise this year: a shutout for “Encanto,” the animated Disney film that came out in late 2021. Its songs, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer behind “Hamilton,” draw from Latin styles including salsa and Colombian folk music, and tracks like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” became ubiquitous hits. The soundtrack was eligible for awards, and was submitted for consideration, according to the academy, but it failed to get any nominations.In addition to “Un Verano,” the album of the year field includes “Aguilera”; Rosalía’s “Motomami”; Drexler’s “Tinta y Tiempo”; Bomba Estéreo’s “Deja”; Marc Anthony’s “Pa’lla Voy”; Alejandro Sanz’s “Sanz”; Fonseca’s “Viajante”; Sebastián Yatra’s “Dharma”; and Elsa y Elmar’s “Ya No Somos los Mismos.”Also up for record of the year are “Pa Mis Muchachas” by Aguilera, Becky G and Nicki Nicole, featuring Nathy Peluso; Rosalía’s “La Fama,” featuring the Weeknd; Anitta’s “Envolver”; Camilo’s “Pegao”; “Te Felicito” by Shakira and Alejandro; Pablo Alborán’s “Castillos de Arena”; Karol G’s “Provenza”; “Baloncito Viejo” by Vives and Camilo; Drexler’s “Tocarte,” with C. Tangana; Juan Luis Guerra’s “Vale la Pena”; and the title track of Anthony’s “Pa’lla Voy.”“Tocarte,” “Provenza,” “Pa Mis Muchachas” and “Baloncito Viejo” are also up for song of the year, a songwriter’s award. The other nominees in that category include Rosalía’s “Hentai”; “A Veces Bien y a Veces Mal,” as performed by Ricky Martin and Reik; “Agua,” performed by Daddy Yankee, Alejandro and Nile Rodgers; Mon Laferte’s “Algo Es Mejor”; Fonseca’s “Besos en la Frente”; Carla Morrison’s “Encontrarme”; Yatra’s “Tacones Rojos”; and “Índigo,” as performed by Camilo and Evaluna Montaner.The nominees for best new artist are Angela Álvarez, Sofía Campos, Cande y Paulo, Clarissa, Silvana Estrada, Pol Granch, Nabález, Tiare, Vale, Yahritza y Su Esencia and Nicole Zignago.Tainy, who worked on both Rosalía and Bad Bunny’s albums, is competing for producer of the year against Barrera (Camilo, Maluma), Eduardo Cabra (Elsa y Elmar, Mima), Nico Cotton (Conociendo Rusia, Elsa y Elmar) and Julio Reyes Copello (Fonseca, Cami & Art House).The awards are voted on by members of the Latin Recording Academy, which include artists, songwriters, producers and other music creators in all genres. The ceremony will be held on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas.A complete list of nominees in all 53 categories is here. More

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      America’s Most Interesting Opera Destination? The Midwest.

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      Barrie Kosky and Yuval Sharon, two of opera’s finest directors, open new productions in Chicago and Detroit.New York City, despite its bona fides as a cultural capital, can be surprisingly provincial when it comes to opera.As ever-fewer international directors pass through with their productions — events that, once upon a time, could reliably be found at Lincoln Center’s festivals or the Brooklyn Academy of Music — and New York City Opera exists as a shell of its former self, the only major player left in town is the Metropolitan Opera, an increasingly adventurous if still conservative house.It’s a different story elsewhere in the United States. While the Met prepares to start its season next week, two other companies opened new productions on Saturday, with imaginative directors who won’t grace the Met stage any time soon but should: at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a “Fiddler on the Roof” by Barrie Kosky, and at Detroit Opera, a version of “Die Walküre” by Yuval Sharon.I saw both over the weekend, which made for an unlikely pairing: “Fiddler,” Bock and Harnick’s golden-age musical, on Saturday, and the third act of “Walküre,” from Wagner’s “Ring,” on Sunday. But while there were subtle thematic connections between the two, they were more notable for simply happening — the latest examples of conceptual daring and directorial promise beyond New York City limits (among others this season, like productions of Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers” in Houston and Dylan Mattingly’s “Stranger Love” in Los Angeles).Kosky’s “Fiddler” staging reveals the musical as the masterpiece that it is: perennially relevant, smartly constructed and richly complicated.Todd RosenbergKosky’s “Fiddler” is an import from the Komische Oper in Berlin, the house he ran for a decade before stepping down this year. It’s both a preview — he will direct one musical each of the next five seasons — and a glimpse at his range as one of Europe’s leading directors, an artist capable of shattering minimalism, in productions like “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival in August, and archaeological curiosity, in the obscure operettas he has reintroduced to Germany.There are hallmarks of his showman style throughout this “Fiddler,” but perhaps the most Koskyesque accomplishment here is his revealing of the musical as the masterpiece that it is — perennially relevant, smartly constructed and richly complicated — rather than what many critics have seen as borscht belt kitsch. His staging, in which no emotion is ever forced, is funny only in the way that life can be: dark humor in the face of absurdity, joy at a harmless misunderstanding.Most natural, perhaps, is the way in which Kosky’s take on the musical — unaltered, but for welcome Yiddish additions — unfolds as an act of memory, at once melancholy and warm. It begins with something like a summoning of the past: A child (Drake Wunderlich) rolls across the stage on a scooter, beats emanating from his headphones. At the center is a wardrobe; and inside is a violin, on which the boy begins to play the show’s opening theme. He pauses, and the tune continues with a whistle from within.Out from the wardrobe steps Tevye — Steven Skybell, who played the role in the recent Yiddish-language “Fiddler” Off Broadway and who again lends the character the sculptural dimensions of a Shakespeare protagonist — then the rest of the villagers from Anatevka. Among them are a wealth of sympathetic, skilled performers: Debbie Gravitte as a resilient Golde; Lauren Marcus, Austen Danielle Bohmer and Maya Jacobson as her and Tevye’s pathbreaking daughters; Drew Redington as a meek then audacious Motel; Adam Kaplan as a brazen yet desperate Perchik; Michael Nigro as a honeyed Fyedka; and more.Many more: This is a “Fiddler” beyond Broadway proportions, with a cast large enough to fill out a shtetl and a full orchestra, conducted with committed enthusiasm and dancelike flexibility by Kimberly Grigsby. Yet while the forces were operatic, the scenic design, by Rufus Didwiszus, wasn’t; the first act sprang out of and around a unit set of wardrobes and dressers stacked like a barricade, some of their doors and drawers opened to reveal lingering clothes, as if they had been hastily emptied and gathered in a public square. You could imagine it as a memorial.To what? Take your pick. “Fiddler” is specific, a tale of change coming rapidly to the traditions of Anatevka in the early 20th century; yet it has resonated time and again, whether for its themes of rigidity amid progress or for its depictions of intolerance and exile. The last Broadway revival, in 2015, was haunted by the Syrian refugee crisis. This year, it’s impossible to see the show’s characters — inhabitants of present-day Ukraine — haphazardly packing up their lives for an unknown future and not think of the war there.Yuval Sharon’s “The Valkyries,” at Detroit Opera, is presented on a bifurcated stage in which singers perform in front of a green screen, below a video produced live.Mary Jaglowski/Detroit OperaAnd yet Kosky’s staging is also entertaining. Otto Pichler’s choreography, a nod to and break from Jerome Robbins’s original, left the audience on Saturday roaring. And the production’s nearly three hours breeze by. It is the finest “Fiddler” I’ve seen, one that could be adapted with ease and success on Broadway — where, in addition to the Met, Kosky belongs.Sharon is also woefully absent from New York’s stages. The brightest director in the United States, he put on a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage when live performance was virtually nonexistent during the pandemic and, as artistic director of Detroit Opera, has made that city an opera destination — along with Los Angeles, where his company the Industry has created the most innovative, original productions of recent years.His excerpt from “Die Walküre” — the 85-minute third act, called here “The Valkyries” — reflects Wagner’s ambitions for the work’s stage magic, but also the state of opera performance in our time, by presenting it as a sci-fi movie filmed against a green screen and rendered live with the help of Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson from PXT Studio. Yet a casual audience member could also enjoy it at face value, a self-contained drama with the subtlety and punch of short fiction.The production places the “Ring” in the metaverse, with Valhalla as a digital creation whose back story is recounted by Sigourney Weaver in a video introduction. Having a queen of sci-fi make this cameo is among the show’s campy touches, like Carlos J. Soto’s winking costumes, which suggest “Tron” and its low-budget cousins of the 1970s and ’80s.On the bifurcated stage, singers (accompanied by Andrew Davis leading a reduced but undiminished orchestration by David Carp, to accommodate the theater’s smaller pit) perform in front of the green screen — on green props, and supported by stage hands in green body suits, who, for example, wave capes during the “Ride of the Valkyries.” At the same time, the film, which reflects changes in scale and placement on a digital landscape, is shown above. The singers, especially the soprano Christine Goerke, still earning her title as a reigning Brünnhilde, rise to the challenge of the close-ups with actorly delivery; she, facing an indefinite slumber atop a mountain as punishment, sobs with audibly shallow breathing.At quick glance, Sharon’s production has the appearance of window dressing; the action ultimately unfolds in a conventional way. But, as ever, the medium is the message.“The Valkyries” could be seen as a meditation on opera in the 21st century: the proliferation of video in stagings, as well as pandemic-era livestreams and the genre of studio productions that grew out of them. What, now, is a live performance? Sharon provokes a tension of perception, with the eye and ear unsure of whether to focus on the singers or the screen. What is lost, and gained, in their interplay? He doesn’t offer an answer so much as lay out a balance sheet that the audience is left to settle.If Sharon does make a case, it’s for the durability of an opera’s essence. No matter the format, “Walküre” is a rending portrait of love, family and regret; Sunday’s performance wasn’t any different. And, as in “Fiddler,” the emotional core of “The Valkyries” was drawn out in a way that was unforced and honest, yet stylistically distinct. New York would be lucky to have either show. More

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      ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ Review: An Opera Becomes a One-Man Show

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      The actor David Greenspan is a tour-de-force, taking on all the roles of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s large-cast opera from 1934, sans music.One minute the actor David Greenspan is giving the preshow speech, as welcoming and easy as can be, explaining that the theater has held the curtain a few minutes because of trouble with the subway, and asking us, the audience, to turn off our phones.An instant later, with no warning whatsoever, not even a change of light, he has slipped into the play and pulled us with him. It seems somehow like he’s gentled us into it with benevolent trickery — as if he’d said, “Look! Over there,” and while we were distracted ripped a Band-Aid off our skin.Because, truth be told, even those who adored the experimental virtuosity of his earlier solo projects “The Patsy” and “Strange Interlude” might approach his latest project with some trepidation: a staging of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s large-cast, 1934 opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” as a one-man play, divested of its music.The script is simply Stein’s libretto, unaltered — a chaotically opaque, willfully bizarre text that occasionally turns inquiring and poetic but is most often principally concerned with the sound of language and the human voice. It doesn’t much go in for fripperies like character and narrative and sense.Actual number of saints in the play? Dozens, though you will swiftly catch on that Saint Therese is Stein’s unrivaled favorite. Number of acts? Four. This show wants to mess with you, and it will — especially since Thomson decided, before the opera’s premiere in 1934, that Stein’s stage directions should be verbalized by the performers, just part of the show.The Lucille Lortel Theater, which is presenting “Four Saints” at the Doxsee in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, seems to acknowledge the audience’s potential unease, emblazoning the cover of the program with a quote from Stein about the play: “If you enjoy it you understand it.”I’m not so sure that’s true of her text, but it certainly is of Greenspan’s mesmerizing interpretation, which rides the circles and switchbacks of Stein’s language like a current. His tone and volume ever-shifting, his sense of humor well in evidence, he makes flickering sense of her verbiage, even as the fragments together form a cyclone of non sequiturs.Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the lives of saints should look elsewhere; nothing in this play is that conventional. Still, the performance is approachably easy to enjoy, with one strict caveat. If you are the caregiver of a small child who is going through a repetitive phase, “Four Saints” is likely to drive you straight up the wall. Repetition, loads of it, is Stein’s métier.“Ordinary pigeons and trees,” Greenspan says, somewhere in the thickets of Act 3. “This is a setting which is as soon which is as soon which is as soon ordinary setting which is as soon which is as soon and noon. Ordinary pigeons and trees.”Well, of course.Greenspan’s mesmerizing interpretation rides the circles and switchbacks of Gertrude Stein’s language like a current.Steven PisanoWatching Greenspan perform this play, with his silent-screen expressiveness and full-body eloquence, is like watching a manic movie montage spliced together from bits of film, each brief segment making a kind of sense in its moment, independent of the whole. Or like watching channels flipped fast fast fast by someone with zero attention span. And yet Greenspan doesn’t squander a second.Stein, for all her formidable reputation, liked a good time — and loved experimental derring-do. This pleasurable production, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll and designed by Yuki Nakase Link, makes me wish Stein could see it, maybe trade letters about it with her good friend and playwright pen pal Thornton Wilder, whom she first met when “Four Saints” was new.“Stein often referred to ‘Four Saints’ as a play,” Greenspan writes in a program note. “I have taken her at her word.”Ninety-five years after she wrote it, in 1927, her text is as inscrutable as ever. Yet Greenspan, an intrepid investigator, has thrown himself into its mysteries and come away relishing them. Through the generous affection of his meticulous performance, so do we.Four Saints in Three ActsThrough Oct. 9 at the Doxsee at Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn; lortel.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Robert Fripp Lightens Up

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      No one expected to see the leader of King Crimson dancing in a tutu on YouTube. In a rare interview, the guitarist explains “an entirely different trajectory.”Robert Fripp became a rock star without acting like a showman. As the guitarist and leader of King Crimson — the band he founded in 1969 — Fripp, 76, has written music that’s barbed, visceral, complex and ambitious, seizing the vanguard of progressive rock yet reaching a broad audience.King Crimson’s catalog has found multiple generations of admirers among musicians, including the Rolling Stones, the Clash, the Mars Volta, Black Midi and even Kanye West, who sampled “21st Century Schizoid Man” in the song “Power,” which has been streamed more than 135 million times. (The deal involved is still under litigation.)Fripp’s guitar riffs are saw-toothed and dissonant; his solos lines slice and sear. But onstage, he has always been the picture of an introvert: seated, taciturn, entirely concentrating on his guitar.“Some players can put on a really great show playing guitar. I can’t,” Fripp said in a rare video interview from Long Island, where he was preparing to teach one of his Guitar Craft seminars. His white shirt, vest and tightly knotted tie were a sartorial contrast with his hair: a gray, upright Mohawk. “I have to focus and pay attention very closely. I have no room for jumping around or symbolic gestures. So the excitement isn’t in what the player is doing in terms of his gestures. It’s in terms of the music which is appearing.”But during the pandemic, Fripp has showed a new public face: droll, chatty and unpretentious. He and his manager, David Singleton, are on a speaking tour called “That Awful Man and His Manager,” promising to discuss music and business and to answer fan questions; it comes to City Winery in Manhattan on Friday. (The “awful man” designation teases at Fripp’s many disgruntled former bandmates and business associates.)Spurred by his wife, the pop-rock singer Toyah Willcox, in 2020 Fripp started co-starring in a charmingly homemade weekly series of YouTube videos, “Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch,” that has them attacking pop and rock hits from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” often in costumes and makeup. The couple has also danced — both in tutus — to “Swan Lake.”Outside of King Crimson, Fripp has made ambient music using Brian Eno’s “Frippertronics” looping setup; added indelible solos to songs like David Bowie’s “Heroes”; produced albums for Peter Gabriel, the Roches and Daryl Hall; written voluminously in an ongoing online diary; and taught Guitar Craft seminars, where he seeks to instill the same technical and philosophical discipline — an important word for Fripp — that he brings to his own playing.He has repeatedly dissolved and reconfigured King Crimson to his shifting but exacting specifications. “When there is nothing to be done, nothing is done: Crimson disappears,” Fripp has said. “When there is music to be played, Crimson reappears. If all of life were this simple.”A documentary, “In the Court of the Crimson King,” appeared at festivals earlier this year, and Fripp completed a book, “The Guitar Circle,” with the lessons of his Guitar Craft seminars. He is about to release a collection of his long-accruing aphorisms about music, ethics and creativity in three sets of 78 cards each, the same number as a Tarot deck. Leaving no merchandising opportunity unturned, he also offers personalized, handwritten, metal-leafed versions of his aphorisms.A chat with Fripp invariably spirals outward, from the particulars of guitar tunings to what he jovially calls, with an expletive, “cosmic” horse manure. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What makes a man go on tour with his manager?Probably to present our work to the world in a way that doesn’t quite get across in social media, in the same way that performance, for me, is really the only place where you connect with music. When you meet someone face to face, you can engage. And a key part of the so-called speaking tour is likely to be the Q&A.During the pandemic you became very active on social media. Did YouTube change your life?Yes, very much indeed. The main change in my life, following lockdown, is I got to spend time with my wife for the first time in 34 years of marriage up to that point. And I loved it. I have a wonderful, dear wife, but I kept leaving her. For me, lockdown was an opportunity to address some subjects of interest to me, including catching up on my academic reading in music. But there is my dear wife thinking, “This old character is losing it — I’ve got to get him going.” So then out came the tutu and “Swan Lake,” which was something of a turning point in my life.You’ve been more performative on YouTube than you have been for 40 years in King Crimson.I think that’s probably true.“Some times have been better than the others,” Fripp said, “but riches and popularity have never been on the top of my to-do list.”Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesIs that going to change you when you go back to performing concerts?I don’t think I can look back. I think the future has now shot off on an entirely different trajectory. A personal interest for me is kicking received opinion. Because if you were only seen in a certain way, there is a richness in life which is somehow closed to you. A question: Have you seen Toyah and Robert live sitting in with the Trevor Horn band at the Cropready festival?Yes, you played Lenny Kravitz and tuned your guitar in the standard tuning, E-A-D-G-B-E, for the first time since 1984. You broke your streak. But most of your lockdown songs were probably written in standard tuning.That’s right. I’m learning to play in E again. And after spending nearly two years working very hard, translating classic rock riffs into a C pentatonic tuning — that’s C-G-D-A-E-G — to actually tune to E is a lot easier, but it’s also a challenge.How did the C tuning start?I was in the Apple Health Spa on Bleecker and Thompson back in September 1983, in the sauna at half past 10 in the morning, almost asleep, and the tuning flew over my head. At the time I couldn’t understand what it was for. I was asked to give a guitar seminar at Claymont Court in December 1994, to raise funds for the running of the estate and the children’s school. There was a click and I realized the tuning was for the guitar class. So at that point, anyone who came into a Guitar Craft seminar was pretty much on the same page. Whether you had experience or not, you have a new tuning. Including me.Which has now led to the book, “The Guitar Circle.”It’s pretty much what, as a young guitarist, I would have liked to have known. The aphorisms are probably the most useful part of the book.What unanswered questions do you still have?I know pretty much all I need to know at this point in my life. But it’s a question of engaging with it. And I hesitate because it’s so easy to get involved in cosmic horse [expletive]. An understanding is what you can take onstage that’s entirely practical.Speaking of the stage, the most recent version of King Crimson turned the typical setup inside out, putting the drums up front and the other musicians in the back. Why did you do that?It’s a very simple story. I think maybe it was July 2013 — Toyah and I were visiting chums in Vauxhall. I was sipping gently on prosecco, and for some reason I asked the question, “If King Crimson were to perform tomorrow night, what would it be?” And then it appeared: three drummers at the front, the conventional front line at the back. It was what we call the point of seeing, and I trust points of seeing in that way. And then I knew what King Crimson would be if it formed.But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to take that up because King Crimson for me is grief. Nothing else in my life can happen when King Crimson is in go mode. It is such a responsibility. The background to King Crimson is in the counterculture. And we probably wouldn’t use the term today, but the aim was to change the world. Can music change the world? Well, back then, all the young players and probably most in the audience would say, “Of course it can.” But moving 53 years later, we’d say, Well, that’s horse [expletive]. But for me it’s not. It’s still an ongoing concern and a responsibility to the originating intention within King Crimson, which is something that is always possible when music is available. That is a continuing theme and a continuing imperative.Isn’t there some pleasure in performing?During the rehearsals, as we were playing the notes, I felt the music move into the notes. There is a quite distinct experience of King Crimson as an individuality in this thing, entirely apart from whoever is playing it, moving into this certain place onstage. And for me, that is validation. But if, for whatever reason, a performance doesn’t meet what is possible, it is an acute suffering for me.People can recognize your guitar tone from a single note. What do you want that tone to be?True. That’s all.The actual sound of the note may change, like if you’re sustaining or whatever. But that’s the criterion. Is this note true? And I remember with King Crimson, I think it was in Preston — it might have been Darby — in the autumn of 1972. And I threw off a lick. And it was awful. It felt like I was lying to my mother. It violated conscience for that one lick. I was lying to music and that was appalling. And it still irks me to this day.What have you learned from all the pop songs you’ve been playing on YouTube? When I heard “Toxic,” that sounded like a Crimson riff.Some of the riffs, I think, “Hmm, maybe we supped at the same table.” I love playing classic rock riffs. They are relatively easy, providing you’re alert when you’re playing them. It was a privilege playing in Crimson, but it was a very specific repertoire. As a guitar player, it’s like the Olympics of guitar, phenomenally difficult lines, and it required two to four hours of practicing a day. Now, King Crimson is not in go mode. I can step back from it to a certain extent and move my attention into learning E tuning.You’re touring with your manager, and you have an aphorisms deck called Finance. How does having to earn a living affect your music?I have no problem singing for my supper. My sense has always been: Present your work to the public. Some people change their work to meet what they believe their public is. Well, that might work for a while, but I have no idea what my public will want, so if I hear something, I follow it. If I see something, I follow it and present it to the public, trusting that there will be a sufficiency in order for a supper to arrive. And historically that’s worked. Some times have been better than the others, but riches and popularity have never been on the top of my to-do list.I’ve learned to trust the music, trust the process. And it’s important that the audience should know they are as important as the musician. If the audience is present and engaged and listening, the relationship is qualitatively different. When that happens, the moment becomes actually real. And there is a profound satisfaction in there. And then you go back, you get on the bus and you drive overnight to the next venue and it all begins again. More

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      After 13 Years, a Zesty Haydn Survey Makes Its Mark

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      Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has released a rare, 11-volume collection of the composer’s 62 piano sonatas.Jean-Efflam Bavouzet faced both good and bad news in 1989.This French pianist, still then making his way as what a New York Times review from around that time called “a rigorously severe modernist,” had earned his first recording contract, with a small label of impeccable taste.But at the same time, his right hand had been diagnosed with functional dystonia, a painful muscle condition that has blighted the careers of many musicians.Unable to bite into octaves as he usually could, Bavouzet had to abandon his hopes of recording Bartok. What to do instead? He eventually chose Haydn, four or five of whose piano sonatas he had in his repertoire at the time. It was just about the only music he could still play.Cleanly articulated, a little cheeky and taking the composer seriously but never too seriously, the tone of that buoyant recording was amply summed up by the title of the booklet notes that his fellow pianist Zoltan Kocsis wrote for the release: “Haydn Without Wig.”Three decades later, that is exactly what Bavouzet, 59, has delivered on a far greater scale with the release last month of the 11th and final volume in his flamboyant, ebullient, brilliant survey of Haydn’s 62 sonatas on the Chandos label, with a few sets of variations and some other works thrown in for the fun of it.An addition, 13 years in the making, to a discography that already includes similarly excellent explorations of Debussy and Beethoven, Bavouzet’s Haydn is unmatched in its zest and its wit. But it is also substantial, informed and deeply rewarding.Sonata No. 35 in A flat: Rondo(Chandos)Moreover, it is a scarce achievement. Routine is the pianist of stature who records the Beethoven sonatas, but pianists who release even one or two albums of Haydn are all too rare, and few indeed have paid the arguably underperformed composer such sustained attention.“I did it with the most intense pleasure,” Bavouzet said in an interview. “Out of 62 sonatas, you have probably 25 indisputable masterpieces that we know, that are on concert programs — not enough, but still. Playing them is wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But they didn’t bring me the same joy as discovering the much less-known sonatas and bringing them to life.”The spirit of discovery suffuses every bar that Bavouzet has recorded, whether reinterpreting one of the almost symphonically sonorous sonatas from Haydn’s days in London in the early 1790s, or reinvigorating a slighter, two-voiced partita or divertimento from the late 1750s.“Haydn wrote all these sonatas almost as a laboratory of musical experience, an IRCAM for its time,” Bavouzet said, referring to the French avant-garde institute that Pierre Boulez founded in 1977. “These were a place where he could experiment and see what works.”“What I will miss the most, now that I have covered everything,” Bavouzet said, “is the joy of discovering one of the early sonatas.”Aurélien Bergot for The New York TimesIt’s the distinctly forward-thinking quality Bavouzet hears in Haydn that makes his set an especially valuable antidote to the view that all but the latest or the grandest of the composer’s piano works offer meager fare compared with his string quartets or symphonies — the idea that they are pieces written for amateurs that require “all our historical sympathy” to appreciate now, as the pianist Charles Rosen, a Haydn interpreter himself, wrote in “The Classical Style.”“When I was a student at the Paris Conservatory in the late ’70s, early ’80s,” Bavouzet recalled, “Haydn was a composer you would consider playing if you were not totally, fully equipped to master a Beethoven sonata — a composer that was too ‘easy,’ so to speak.”But Bavouzet was convinced otherwise by hearing Sviatoslav Richter play four of the sonatas at La Grange de Meslay, an abbey near Tours, France, where the Russian master held an annual festival. Richter had 19 of the sonatas in his repertoire, and counted the composer among his favorites.“Dear Haydn, how I love you!” Richter wrote privately in 1971. “But other pianists? They’re rather lukewarm towards you. Which is a great shame.”Bavouzet, who recalled taking Martha Argerich’s mother along to the performance, said: “We went to hear the maestro, Richter, of course, but we were thinking, four sonatas of Haydn — that’s very light, that’s not a real concert program. The revelation was that when the concert finished, we were totally fed with centuries of musical gestures. Richter did not miss any opportunities to make it sound as modern, as striking as possible. It was incredible, how Richter played Haydn onstage.”From Richter, Bavouzet borrowed a taste for playing Haydn on a Yamaha piano, and he is equally eager to draw connections across the centuries in his own work. “I love the analogy of Haydn throwing arrows into the future,” he said, “and these arrows land on the page of Schumann, of Brahms, of Prokofiev, of Stravinsky.”Haydn’s Sonata No. 50 in D: Largo e sostenuto(Chandos)Beethoven’s Op. 10, No. 3 in D: Largo e mesto(Chandos)Sometimes those arrows don’t fly terribly far, though they still strike true. The slow movement of No. 50, as numbered by the scholar H.C. Robbins Landon, is a Largo e sostenuto in D minor, and stares straight at its kin in Beethoven, the brooding Largo e mesto of Op. 10 No. 3; draw out the dramatic opening of No. 33 in C minor, the most substantial of the earlier works, and you find yourself in the anguished sound world of Schubert’s last sonata.But in other works, Haydn displays the range of a longbowman. The Moderato of No. 44 in F looks to Prokofiev with its repeated notes; the trio of No. 12 in A, when practiced at half the speed, struck the pianist as being so close to Chopin or even Scriabin that he recorded it that way as a postscript to the fifth volume; the Adagio of the Piano Concerto in G, among the three that Bavouzet recorded as a side project with Gabor Takacs-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata, inspired a nod to Poulenc in its cadenza.The original version of Sonata No. 12 in A: Trio(Chandos)Bavouzet’s version of the Trio(Chandos)If Bavouzet feels free to engage in a little bit of anachronism when the time seems right — partly inspired by period-instrument pioneers like Paul Badura-Skoda, his Haydn has a touch more spontaneity to it than Paul Lewis’s strict rigor or Marc-André Hamelin’s awe-inspiring bravura allows in their hugely admirable recent recordings — that’s because the composer left the pianist plenty of choices to make, especially in the earlier works.“What I will miss the most, now that I have covered everything,” Bavouzet said, “is the joy of discovering one of the early sonatas, where you have absolutely no indications, and it is sight-readable quite easily, but you start working on it and there is the feeling of a bottomless well.”Recording Haydn’s sonatas, in other words, is not entirely like recording Beethoven’s, even after a decision has been taken as to how to make enjoyable, coherent programs out of them. Beethoven’s scores are comparatively explicit about how they should be played, although they are, of course, open to interpretation. Haydn’s are far less so.“You try to dig,” Bavouzet continued, “and every time you dig you find new beauties, and new ideas, and you start embellishing, putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton, and you try to have a valid dynamic plan, and your interpretation takes shape, trying to make it as interesting as possible, with your taste, with your instinct, with the knowledge you have. You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Sometimes the problems are specific to a work — how to interpret the crazily brief finale of No. 41, for instance, in which Bavouzet imagines that Haydn suddenly decided that he had something else to do the day he wrote it — but the pressing ones are common. There is ornamentation, or an implied cadenza.Sonata No. 41 in A: Finale(Chandos)Then there is the fraught issue of whether to take repeats indicated in the second halves of sonata-form movements — a practice Haydn adhered to but his successors sought to escape from — and, if so, whether to include codas within the repeats, so that the endings would effectively be played twice. Consulting with the scholars Laszlo Somfai and Marc Vignal for the sake of historical accuracy, Bavouzet found himself moving repeat markings around for the sake of flow.One aspect of the choices involved in filling in Haydn’s blanks has convinced Bavouzet that these works are much more profound than they often get credit for. “We easily forget that the solemn Adagio,” another great champion of the composer, Alfred Brendel, once wrote in an article about Schubert, “originated in Haydn.”If Haydn the joker is amply on display here, the pauses that he so often uses before delivering his punch lines can suggest something much deeper, Bavouzet said.“You can read them as a pause to have an effect on what comes next,” he said, “but you also can read them as a pause of reflection, a moment when Haydn asks if all this agitation and activity is actually in vain. He is stopping because he is doubting, in a moment of introspection, which of course gives a totally different, almost philosophical attitude to this continuous energy.”Sonata No. 62 in E flat: Finale(Chandos)That’s particularly true, Bavouzet said, of the later sonatas, as in the first movement of No. 53 in E minor, which has 14 pauses to deal with, or in the finale of the culminating sonata, No. 62 in E flat, which is the last work programmed in his collection aside from a little Allegretto that he offers as an epilogue, holding the pedal down in dreamy nostalgia for his years of work.“The task is never anything other than absolutely fascinating, but for the performer it is also testing, and even risky,” Bavouzet writes of all these decisions in the booklet notes for his sixth volume, defending a mini-cadenza of his that takes the jolly finale of No. 36 in a momentarily dark direction.“He must, even more than usual, create his own world, his own logic, left only to hope that, in the absence of tangible evidence, he will not distance himself too far from the composer’s intentions, which remain forever unknowable,” Bavouzet continues. “The more my work progresses down this course, the more an almost infinite horizon of interpretive possibilities opens up before me, all of them valid.”And that, this project confirms, is one of the many elations of Haydn. 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      Review: A Molten Song Recital, Without Comic Relief

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      The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo doubled down on melancholy in a superb concert at the Park Avenue Armory.There wasn’t comic relief on offer at Emily D’Angelo’s recital on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. Not a giggle, not a wink. Her rare smile during the performance was wistful. The subjects she sang about were, for the most part, longing, death and tears.Instead of leavening the gravity, D’Angelo, joined by the pianist Sophia Muñoz in the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, doubled down. Her program was like her mezzo-soprano voice: a flood of melancholy, molten but articulate.Rarely, though, is it so pleasurable to linger in so much pain. The event — D’Angelo’s first American solo appearance — gave a small audience the treat of an intimate encounter with one of the world’s special young singers.Still in her 20s, and emerging on the international scene just in the past few years, D’Angelo has a rich, mellow voice, an encompassing serenity and confidence. But with a slight press on the gas her tone turns stern and flashing, almost scary. In “I’ve Heard an Organ Talk Sometimes” — one of her three selections from Aaron Copland’s “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” — her sound really did take on organlike amplitude.The first half of her program borrowed some numbers from her debut solo album, “Enargeia,” released last year — but now in new company, like the two austere songs by Schoenberg that followed Hildegard von Bingen’s “O frondens virga,” a sober introduction.But while on “Enargeia,” lush, woozy instrumental arrangements turned some of the tracks lugubrious, on Friday, with just Muñoz’s gentle, sensitive piano accompaniment, they felt both more restrained and more affecting, D’Angelo’s voice even more direct. Shorn of its new age-y trappings, Sarah Kirkland-Snider’s “Nausicaa” was a consolatory prayer, and two Missy Mazzoli pieces smoldered without being too heavy.There was nothing affected about her singing or her presence. D’Angelo wore a black vest over a sleeveless top with drawstring pants and a pixie haircut, looking a bit Peter Pan and a bit Joan of Arc. Her hand resting on the edge of the piano’s curve, gently leaning into the instrument, she had the casual assurance of an experienced cabaret artist.So it wasn’t surprising to find she also has a gift for pull-up-a-chair storytelling, whether in Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy” or Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” — the words clear without being overenunciated, her manner patient, as if she had all the time in the world. She was superb in Cecilia Livingston’s monologue “Penelope,” in its 2020 version for mezzo, which starts with a watery tremble in the piano and moves to a series of slow-burning, sometimes fiery questions: “What is it to be waiting? What is it to be waiting for you?”Near the end came a series of nocturnes — here true premonitions of death — by Clarke, Fanny Mendelssohn and Florence Price. Before D’Angelo’s encore, a glowing account of the Dvorak chestnut “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” she closed the written program with Clara Schumann’s “Lorelei,” about that folkloric temptress.The Heinrich Heine poem that Schumann sets describes the Lorelei’s singing as “wundersame, gewalt’ge”: wondrous and powerful. D’Angelo’s is, too.Emily D’AngeloPerformed on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. More

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      ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ Broadway’s Longest-Running Show, to Close

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      The theatergoing audience has been slow to return after the pandemic lockdown, and the show hasn’t been selling well enough to defray its running costs.“The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history and, for many, a symbol of musical theater, will drop its famous chandelier for the last time in February, becoming the latest show to fall victim to the drop-off in audiences since the pandemic hit.The closing is at once long-expected — no show runs forever, and this one’s grosses have been softening — but also startling, because “Phantom” had come to seem like a permanent part of the Broadway landscape, a period piece and a tourist magnet that stood apart from the vicissitudes of the commercial theater marketplace.But in the year since Broadway returned from its damaging pandemic lockdown, the theatergoing audience has not fully rebounded, and “Phantom,” which came back strong last fall, has not been selling well enough to defray its high weekly running costs.The show will commemorate its 35th anniversary in January, and then will play its final performance on Broadway on Feb. 18, according to a spokesman. The cast, crew and orchestra were informed of the decision on Friday.The show will continue to run elsewhere: The London production, which is even older than the one in New York, closed in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, but then returned, with a smaller orchestra and other cost-lowering reconfigurations, a year later. A new production opened last month in Australia, and the first Mandarin-language production is scheduled to open in China next year. Also: Antonio Banderas is working on a new Spanish-language production.“Phantom” is an icon of 1980s Broadway, created by three of the most legendary figures in musical theater history: the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the director Hal Prince and the producer Cameron Mackintosh. All were long devoted to the show — in 2018, when it turned 30, they celebrated with a light show projected onto the Empire State Building in sync with parts of the score; last year, when the show resumed performances after the lockdown, Webber D.J.’d a block party outside the theater. (Yes, there was a remix of the “Phantom” theme.)The show, about a mask-wearing opera lover who haunts the Paris Opera House and becomes obsessed with a young soprano, is famous for that chandelier, which crashes onto the stage each night, and is characterized by over-the-top spectacle and melodrama.When the Broadway production opened on Jan. 26, 1988, the New York Times critic Frank Rich criticized many elements of the show, but began his review by acknowledging, “It may be possible to have a terrible time at ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ but you’ll have to work at it.”By 2014, when Times critic Charles Isherwood revisited, the show had won over many of its skeptics. “Soon after the orchestra struck up those thundering, ominous organ chords, I found my expectations upended, my jaded armor melting away,” Isherwood wrote. “With the distance of more than a decade — and a couple hundred new musicals — since my last visit, I found myself with a new appreciation for this beloved show’s gothic theatricality.”Over the years “Phantom” has become a fixture that has drawn enormous audiences around the world. Since the first production opened in London in 1986, the show has been seen by more than 145 million people in 183 cities around the world; it has been performed in 17 languages, and next year that number is expected to rise to 18, when the Mandarin production opens.On Broadway, the show has been seen by 19.8 million people, and has grossed $1.3 billion, since opening, according to figures compiled by the Broadway League. It grossed $867,997 during the week ending Sept. 11, which is decent but not good enough to sustain a run of a musical of this scale (with a large cast and large orchestra and elaborate set, all of which drive up running costs).The production’s intention to close the show was reported on Friday by The New York Post. More