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      Remembering Loretta Lynn

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe country music titan Loretta Lynn died this month at 90. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she was a chart regular, singing — and often writing — songs about the circumstances of women’s lives, even as she resisted being claimed by the emergent feminist movement.She performed crucial duets about collapsing relationships, underscored the challenges faced by divorced women and sang about the arrival of the birth control pill. She was a vivid chronicler of growing up hardscrabble in Butcher Holler, Ky. And she was one of the genre’s great vocal stylists, delivering heartbreak and sternness with equal aplomb.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lynn’s sly radicalism and the way she was initially received by the country music industry, the many readings and misreadings of her work, and the manner in which legends age in public.Guest:Jewly Hight, a contributor to NPR MusicConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Cavetown’s Heartfelt Bedroom Pop Brings Kindness to a Cruel World

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      The 23-year-old British singer-songwriter Robin Skinner has a listenership devoted to his sensitive (but not despairing) music.If you want to get Robin Skinner to open up, ask about his cat. In conversation, the musician who records and performs as Cavetown is soft-spoken and cautious. But he excitedly recounted Juno’s growth from a timid kitten who hid for a week when she arrived at his London apartment to his affectionate companion who presides over the windowsills of his current house in Cambridge. Then he apologized for rambling.Juno makes frequent appearances on Cavetown’s social media channels. She also shows up a few times on his new album, “Worm Food,” due Nov. 4, most notably on the song that chronicles their bond in its devastating chorus: “I do it for Juno/Pretend her life is on the line/Manipulate myself into staying alive.”For almost a decade, Skinner, 23, ​has amassed a following with his melding of the whimsical and the weepy, revealing his vulnerabilities over melodious alt-rock. Though he’s a sensitive soul, he doesn’t wallow in misery. As a result, he’s found a natural audience in teenagers and some even younger children who are drawn to his kindness in an often cruel world.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” he said during a video interview, his usually red hair dyed black and thin-framed glasses dominating his face. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesSkinner sometimes takes his own struggles with depression and anxiety and turns them into characters in his songs. For “Lemon Boy,” from his 2018 album, he transformed his bitterness into a persistent garden creature in need of a friend. More recently, he’s returned to the bully who lives in his head as a representation of debilitating self-criticism. “It’s helped me to personify that as a separate thing, because often I forget that I’m more than that,” he said.Skinner was born in Oxford to two classical musicians. When he was 8, the family moved after his father got a job at the University of Cambridge, where he still leads a choir and teaches early music history. His mother gives flute and recorder lessons privately and in schools. The couple divorced when Skinner was 14, but he wasn’t upset by their split. On “Devil Town” from 2015, which remains one of Cavetown’s most popular songs, he nonchalantly sings, “Mom and daddy aren’t in love/That’s fine, I’ll settle for two birthdays.”But on “1994,” the crunchy and tuneful lead single from “Worm Food,” Skinner sounds wistful for a period in their lives that he never witnessed. “From pictures and from memories that they’ve shared with me, that sounds like a happy time for them when they were really in love with each other,” he said. “Part of me is curious about what that could have been like and I feel like I missed out a little bit.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. “I grew up pretty fast, for various reasons,” he said. “I missed out on the childhood that I would want to have. Then there’s also missing the freedom that I had then to be a kid. I didn’t realize that I had that freedom at that time.”When he was younger, Skinner’s parents encouraged his interest in music as he tried out instruments like the trumpet and violin. He resisted his mother’s attempts to teach him theory, and remains largely self-taught and self-sufficient, producing all his songs and playing most of the instruments himself.He didn’t have many friends at school during his early adolescence, but found a community online through Twitter, using the platform as a diary for his thoughts. He started a YouTube channel in late 2012 and eventually began uploading ukulele covers of songs by artists like Twenty One Pilots and the Libertines. As Skinner grew as a musician, the ukulele was replaced with guitars, the covers turned into original compositions, and the sparse arrangements were filled in with drums and shimmering electronic textures. His YouTube channel grew to over two million subscribers.In 2018, the musician Chloe Moriondo became one of the many teenagers who found the online Cavetown community, and when she posted a cover of “Lemon Boy,” Skinner left a supportive comment. They eventually became frequent tourmates and collaborators, and Moriondo, now an amped-up pop singer, contributes guest vocals to “Grey Space” on Cavetown’s latest album.“A lot of Robin’s writing is incredibly honest and relatable in a strange and a universal way,” she said. “He really puts himself out there completely and shares his heart with people. That is a really beautiful thing.”After several self-released albums, sold mostly through the digital distributor Bandcamp, Cavetown signed to Sire, and his major label debut, “Sleepyhead,” arrived at the end of March 2020. Skinner has mixed feelings about the LP, which was completed on the road and under stress.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” Skinner said. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesBut “Worm Food” was made at his own pace and in cozier spaces. The process included a pivotal songwriting trip to San Diego, where he connected with Vic Fuentes, the lead singer of the post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, Skinner’s favorite group when he was a teenager. They recorded the dynamic and serrated “A Kind Thing to Do” in Skinner’s rental house on the beach, with Skinner in a chair and Fuentes seated on the bed. “You can just tell he is just one of those natural talents waiting to explode,” Fuentes said in an interview.In October, Skinner, who is transgender, also created the This Is Home Project, which aims to give more than a million dollars to the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the next three years. It’s named for a Cavetown song that many fans interpret as being about Skinner reconciling his own identity. For years he has received GoFundMe links from people looking for help, but with This Is Home he hopes to formalize his contributions to foundations that can fund top surgeries, safe housing or other needs.It’s become an unofficial tradition at Cavetown shows for someone in the crowd to pass Skinner a trans flag, which he ties around his neck and wears like a cape. The first time it happened, it just felt like the natural thing to do. “I am part of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and it’s not something that I necessarily talk explicitly about very often,” he said. “I find it hard to find the right words to use and so just holding a flag or having it around me onstage is a silent way of being like, ‘I love you, I understand, and this is a space for us.’ It helps me feel like we’re part of the same world together.”Self-examination remains a major part of “Worm Food,” but Skinner’s also working toward self-forgiveness. On the anxiously peppy “Heart Attack,” he sings, “I’m measuring up against the wall again/It’s always the same, but maybe this time I’ve changed.”In the months leading up to the release of “Worm Food,” Cavetown has been performing the new song “Frog” live. With its blatantly romantic endearments (“I feel wrong/My head’s gone funny, princess/But I’m your frog/Kiss mе better all night long”) it’s already become a favorite, and young fans have thrown stuffed frogs onstage or come wearing frog hats. Skinner thinks a large part of the song’s appeal is just that kids like frogs, but maybe there’s something bigger happening too: “It’s the only happy song on the album that’s genuinely written about a happy thing.” More

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      How Atlanta History Shaped Lil Baby and Generations of Rappers

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      To hear his mother tell it, Dominique Jones always was a special child.Before he was Lil Baby, Atlanta’s latest international rap superstar — and even before he was known only locally on the southwest side of his city as a formidable gambler and precocious teenage hustler — Dominique tended to be a quick study.As a toddler, he was already helping his mother, Lashon, around the house, diligently folding laundry and straightening up the refrigerator without prompting. When Dominique was about 4, Lashon recalled when we spoke in 2019, she bought him a pair of in-line skates and was amazed when, without instruction or even a hand held for balance, her youngest child and only son had soon mastered his glide, tricks and all.“I look up, and he’s out there skating backward,” Lashon said. “He looks at it, he sees it and he can do it.”Dominique also revealed himself early on as a sponge for language. Before he could read, he was quoting the Bible, gaining a reputation as something of a local attraction among the Baptist preachers who visited the Black Southern hub of Atlanta to spread the word. “They would always look for him — ‘Where’s the young man that always gets so excited at church?’” Lashon has said. “Every time they came to town — ‘Where the little preacher man?’”After those verses came music. Once, when Dominique was still a small child, Lashon was driving with her younger sister while listening the local Atlanta bass rapper Kilo Ali. “Turn it up a little bit,” Dominique demanded from his car seat, according to his mother’s memory.After taking in the song for a moment, he called again toward the adults up front. “Turn it down now,” he said, considering what he had just heard. “That’s Kilo Ali?” Dominique asked, apparently knowing full well. “I went to school with him.”“It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV,” Lil Baby said of his hometown. “It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”Kevin Amato for The New York TimesLashon and her sister could only exchange confused glances. Dominique had never been to school a day in his life, and certainly not with an adult rapper from the nearby Bowen Homes projects. Yet somehow, the city’s sounds were already somewhere within him, as if through osmosis. “What’s your comeback after that?” Lashon said, reminiscing and still astonished. “We was blowed.”Some two decades later, the story of Lil Baby, 27, whose triumphant new album, “It’s Only Me,” was released last Friday, is both an individual tale of roundabout stardom by an idiosyncratic artist and also a recurring pattern. As the latest in a long line of Atlanta rappers to take a raw Southern sound to the top of the pop charts — from ’90s and early 2000s industry trailblazers like Outkast, T.I., Jeezy and Gucci Mane to the streaming stars Future, Migos, 21 Savage, Young Thug, Gunna and Playboi Carti — Lil Baby could only have come from one place.“Honestly, I think there’s something in the water,” he said in an interview over FaceTime last week. “It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV. It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”That he and his forebears all happen to share geographic roots with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan, Uncle Remus and Spike Lee, “Gone With the Wind” and the Black spring-break party Freaknik is not a coincidence. It could only have been Atlanta.Long a site of collision — politically, racially — and contradictory cultural history, Atlanta was called “south of the North, yet north of the South” by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903. In the decades since, the city has been “a bastion of both white supremacy and Black autonomy,” according to one historian, and often “on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline,” in the words of another.Building upon this confluence of tension and opportunity is Atlanta’s constantly regenerating rap scene, which has become, over the last 30 years, one of the most consistent and consequential musical ecosystems in the world. The generations (and micro-generations) of local artists who have emerged from it have routinely exploded the expectations of what a Black man from little or nothing — and they have, until recently, tended to be overwhelmingly men — could hope to achieve in the wider American consciousness.Largely through music, Atlanta has become a conveyor belt of exceptions.LIL BABY IS nothing if not a product of the city’s extensive rap lineage, but he has been equally influenced by Atlanta’s nonmusical history. Now a mainstream figure and the father of two sons, he grew up the unruly teenager of a single mother on government assistance.Baby’s eventual descent into what he and his friends refer to as “the streets” — an amorphous world of violence, drug-dealing, camaraderie, rivalry, risk and reward — would go on to inspire most of his music. But even beyond the effects of Atlanta’s vast income inequality, or the neglect and destruction of its public housing around the 1996 Olympic Games, the harsh realities he raps about in semi-autobiographical detail also stem from how he was raised, rooted in his mother’s own story.Lashon grew up in a strict Baptist family in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, an area that had once been an upper-class white suburb but was 86 percent Black by 1976, following waves of white flight. Her father worked for Delta, fixing planes for the Atlanta institution that helped to make the city a worldly concern.But Lashon’s otherwise placid youth was rattled by what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, when more than 20 Black boys and girls were kidnapped and killed between 1979 and 1981. The sixth child to go missing, Jeffrey Lamar Mathis, 10, was one of Lashon’s best friends at J.C. Harris Elementary School. (The spelling of Mathis’s first name varies in the public record, from FBI files to news accounts, a detail perhaps indicative of the attention paid to the case.) She knew him as the class clown.In the neighborhoods directly affected, parents saw the lack of initial law-enforcement interest in the disappearances as neglect based on their racial and socioeconomic status. Children were no longer allowed to play outside, some were pulled from school altogether and the city eventually imposed a curfew.“We definitely couldn’t go anywhere,” Lashon recalled. “We could hardly go out and play, and we weren’t even really allowed to before that. But after, we never gonna have a childhood.”The writer James Baldwin, who covered the case for “Playboy” and later in a book, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” tied the violence and tragedy of those years to the area’s history, dismantling the fantasy that Atlanta, only 100 years on from slavery, represented any sort of sanctuary for Black people. “There is absolutely nothing new in this city, this state or this nation about dead Black male bodies floating, finally, to the surface of the river,” he wrote.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Lil Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up. But he is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesIn 1982, Wayne Williams, a local aspiring music mogul, was convicted of killing two adults, and blamed also for the child murders, although no one was ever tried in those cases. In the years that followed, skepticism remained, especially in the Black community, about the scope of Williams’s overall guilt.This was the backdrop against which Atlanta rap was born, and the sounds, words and beats that would come to define the city bore more than a trace of the chaos and pain of this era.André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, who would become known as André 3000 and Big Boi of Outkast, were 4 years old when the first children disappeared. Jermaine Dupri, the mastermind behind So So Def Recordings, was 6. Jeezy and 2 Chainz were toddlers. T.I. and Gucci Mane were right behind them. All were raised among the paranoia, the skepticism of institutions and the two-sided coin of parenting options — shelter versus exposure to the cold world — only exacerbated at that time.“The music, storytelling, folklore and culture that emerge from the poor and marginalized communities of Atlanta — what we call ‘trap’ — are built on the generational, psychological, linguistic and ideological roots that grew from the traumas of the Atlanta Child Murders,” wrote Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, who has used hip-hop to teach social justice.FOR LASHON, THE crimes were decidedly local, close at hand. “The crazy part was, we knew Wayne Williams,” she said. He had worked with one of her aunts. “It took me a long time to get over it.”Yet it was only later that Lashon realized how directly she could trace that foundational thread of her life through the decades to the kind of mother she would become.As Dominique grew into a mischievous and independent teenager, earning the nickname Lil Baby from the older boys he hung around with in the nearby Oakland City neighborhood, her initial instinct was to smother him the way she had been smothered by her parents.But Lashon soon realized that this was futile — a mother’s desperate helplessness in the face of her son’s unwieldy ambitions. “Skipping school, smoking weed — I was rebellious,” Baby said. On “Shiest Talk,” from “It’s Only Me,” he raps, “Of all my mama’s children, I’m the bad one/I admit that.”But Baby knows now that his success in music may have rearranged those rankings, and finally being able to make his mother proud — and financially secure — is a sentiment that occurs over and over again in his new songs. “Mama, I got rich/look at your dropout,” he raps on another track.“I was the bad one, but now I’m the good one,” Baby said with a smirk during our recent interview. “Look how life changes.”Lashon had warned her son all along about “the streets,” to the extent that she could. “When you make the decision to get in them, know that it’s consequences for being out there,” she told him. But she knew he had to find out for himself.“At first, I didn’t let him do nothing or go nowhere,” she said. “But I felt guilty for keeping him in, ’cause he’s a boy — they supposed to get out, do stuff, have friends. I don’t know if that was because of my childhood — sheltered because of the Wayne Williams thing. But I knew that boys, once they get out there, they get out there.”Lashon was confident that her son was bright, self-possessed and excelling at the things he was putting his mind to, even when she was forced to confront what exactly that was. She realized that Baby’s drug-dealing and gambling money was serious when she heard him going up to the attic repeatedly. One day, unable to quell her curiosity, she went to see the gains for herself and found stacks of dirty bills, smoothed out and carefully rubber-banded.But by the time he was 20, following arrests for guns and marijuana possession, plus some failed diversion programs, Lil Baby found himself in a maximum-security prison.IT WAS WHILE incarcerated that he finally decided he would give rap a try. After his release in 2016, he started working with Quality Control, an Atlanta label that specialized in stories like his, joining the flock of the local executives Kevin Lee, or Coach K, and Pierre Thomas, who had shepherded acts like Migos and Lil Yachty to stardom.In his first two years as a rapper, Baby showed his commitment by releasing seven mixtapes and albums, ultimately leaving his old life behind. In 2020, his breakout LP “My Turn” became the most-listened-to release of the year in any genre, topping even Taylor Swift.“I moved on from slanging drugs and pistols/can’t be thinking simple,” he declares on “Real Spill,” the opening track from “It’s Only Me.”But first, in prison, Baby learned the extent of the Atlanta area’s small-town feel, the way that his mother’s life folded into his. “That’s one of the most craziest things she’s ever told me,” he said of her connection to the child murders. “But I actually ended up in prison with Wayne Williams. In the same dorm.” Williams worked around the facility, so they saw each other every day.“My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta,” Lil Baby said.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesThat, to Lil Baby, was the essence of Atlanta — his ties to the city’s darker side as omnipresent and relevant to his story as his pre-fame relationships with rappers. “There’s so much of a deep-rooted connection,” he said. “Even the artists. If it wasn’t for the Young Thugs, the Migos, the Peewee Longways — I was around a lot of people, and I’ve seen them come from where I come from. That gave me a lot of inspiration.”Today, Lil Baby has been nominated for eight Grammys, winning once, and earned corporate endorsement deals, an Amazon documentary and a spot performing at the 2022 World Cup.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up, something he expresses not just with boasts, but with survivor’s guilt and ambivalence.“Youngins out here wildin’ with no guidance/all they care about is who they kill,” he raps on “Heyy.” “I was tryna keep that [expletive] in order/it got harder ’cause I was never there/it’s a better life out here/I promise, brodie, I’mma keep it in they ear.”There is even a song called “California Breeze,” with lyrics about private dinners in Malibu.But Baby is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him, his roots there inseverable and his essence inextinguishable. “The main thing that I do still keep with me from Atlanta, when I go everywhere, is me,” he said. “My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta. No matter where I go, I’ll never be able to get distance from Atlanta.”“Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story” will be published on Oct. 18 by Simon & Schuster. More

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      Review: Igor Levit Takes on a Shostakovich Kaleidoscope

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      The pianist returned to Carnegie Hall with the first complete performance of the 24 Preludes and Fugues there.The pianist Igor Levit presents compelling ideas with a remarkable ease.On his most recent album, “Tristan,” he casually posits a connection between the well-known grandness of Wagner and the less-recognized grandeur of the 20th-century modernist Hans Werner Henze. Outside the concert hall, Levit has mastered the art of social media — both as a musician and a passionately political civilian — and conducted sustained, substantive conversations with journalists, whether for his book “House Concert” (whose English translation comes out in the United States in January) or the recent documentary “Igor Levit — No Fear” (out now in Europe).Given his multifaceted public profile, it can be possible to lose sight of his artistry. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, Levit brought the focus back to the piano.He played just one work: Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. That music, though — inspired by Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and written in the early 1950s, during one of Shostakovich’s frequent bouts of official Soviet censure — is a marathon, a two-and-a-half-hour kaleidoscope of melodic and harmonic invention. Until Tuesday, it had never been performed in its entirety at Carnegie.Levit released a recording of the Preludes and Fugues with Sony Classical in 2021, so the evening also provided an opportunity to hear him continue a conversation with Shostakovich. On Tuesday, that dialogue was rich in risk taking, and rewarding. From the first prelude, in C, Levit’s daring tempo — much slower than on his album — made clear that he was not on autopilot, but taking advantage of the Stern Auditorium’s resonance to consider the music anew.But if the first pair seemed to signal a gentler interpretation more broadly, Levit dispelled the notion with a flashy, upbeat second prelude. Live, as on disc, he proved as fleet as Keith Jarrett (whose recording of the work came out in 1992) or Tatiana Nikolayeva (who gave it its public premiere in 1952). Yet Levit produced his devilish speed with even articulation, bringing to mind Glenn Gould’s mature Bach. And the second fugue made clear that Levit would push into louder dynamics, too.Throughout the evening’s first half, Levit offered contrast after contrast. Using Carnegie’s acoustics, he emphasized Shostakovich’s prismatic writing, as when the cautiously eerie beginning of the fourth prelude was juxtaposed with a hazy, enveloping account of its partner fugue.And Levit made connections within this mammoth work. The dotted-note patterns of the sixth prelude sounded more joyous here than on Levit’s starker recording, and suggested an affinity with the more obviously lighthearted 11th prelude. Elsewhere, a forceful bass voice in the eighth fugue served as a preview of the climactic wallops in the ninth and 12th fugues.After intermission, Levit’s account of the final 12 preludes and fugues did not move along with the same thrills. That might have been by design — a decision to slacken the pace of interpretive variation so that big moments could come across even more powerfully. Or it could have been that work’s immensity was taking its toll, since Levit frequently stretched his right arm and wrist, as though he were trying to wring out pain.Whatever the cause, some stretches felt underdramatized. Still, Levit saved enough power for the big moments — especially the 15th prelude and fugue.Officially in the key of D flat, it’s more a flirtation with crunchy, 12-tone modernism. Some artists treat every musical reference in Shostakovich as an opportunity for a broad joke, but Levit’s unalloyed sincerity as a performer steers him away from that — which paid off marvelously here as he unfurled a prelude and fugue that sang out even while rumbling and barreling along.After the conclusion of the 15th fugue, someone in the audience let out an admiring, brisk “bravo.” Then more applause rippled out from the Carnegie crowd, which up until then had been respectfully silent.There was pleasant laughter — and then even more forceful applause, which Levit gratefully acknowledged before continuing. This truly spontaneous ovation was another reminder of Levit’s power as a musician: He turned a moment of atonal imitation into the pinnacle of the evening.Igor LevitPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      From the Underworld to Our World: An Opera About Frida and Diego

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      “I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.” Frida Kahlo confided these remarks to her diary in 1954, just a few days before making her final exit.In a new opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), the composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz imagine Kahlo overcoming her reluctance to return from beyond. She is summoned back on the Day of the Dead with a mission: to escort her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld. What lures her is the prospect of being given a chance to paint once more.“Sueño,” the debut opera by Frank, 50, has had a long road to the stage. In 2007, she was invited by the Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen to write a work. He suggested the Mexican painter‌ Kahlo as an ideal topic. It resonated with her immediately.“On a personal level, the fact that Frida is a multiracial woman of color with a disability is something I can really relate to,” Frank said in a recent video interview, referring to her heritage — Peruvian-Chinese on her mother’s side, Lithuanian-Jewish on her father’s — as well as her history of hearing loss and Graves’ disease. “She lived this rich, full life that any able bodied, non-disadvantaged person would love to be able to live. And she did so through some very dangerous times in world history.”The commission from Arizona Opera fell through. But in the meantime, Frank established herself as a significant American composer, winning the Latin Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition in 2009.Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl” from 1949, which depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by Kahlo and by an earth goddess.The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation; Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWhen the “Sueño” project was revived, San Diego Opera’s general director, David Bennett, took the lead. In 2015, he convinced San Francisco Opera to come onboard as a co-producer, securing the support needed to bring “Sueño” to the stage. Now, after further pandemic delays, the work will premiere at San Diego Opera on Oct. 29, with San Francisco’s production coming in June.The material is well-trodden — Kahlo’s life and work have inspired films, books, dance and Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s musical theater-tinged opera “Frida” (1991) — but Frank and Cruz determined from the outset to take a novel approach to it. Instead of dramatizing Kahlo’s physical and emotional torments and her notoriously tempestuous relationship with Rivera realistically, they embed these biographical details in the mythic context of a Day of the Dead ritual. Motifs from their paintings are integral to the story — as is the act of painting itself.“I thought: Let’s do something different,” said Cruz, 62, recalling the first time he and Frank met to discuss the project. Frank had gravitated toward Cruz, a Cuban American playwright and poet, after reading his “Anna in the Tropics,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003. “It looked like a libretto,” she said, “with monologues that could obviously be arias and lots of witty banter with a great sense of rhythm that composers can get into.”Thus began a collaboration that has shaped the development of the careers of these two artists. Over the course of the opera’s prolonged incubation, the pair have worked on about a dozen projects, from a brief choral piece about the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca to “Conquest Requiem,” an oratorio inspired by the complex, contradictory legacy of the Nahua woman Malinche and her role in Cortés’s war against the Aztecs.And the long postponement of “Sueño” had its upside. “The opera is different for having this long relationship,” Frank said.Sketches by the costume designer Eloise Kazan; above, Frida. Eloise KazanAnd, here, Catrina. Eloise KazanA rendering of a “Sueño” set, by the scenic designer Jorge Ballina.Jorge BallinaWhen they started to work on it, Frank played samples of her music for Cruz, including “Requiem for a Magical America: El Día de los Muertos” (2006), a “folk requiem” ballet originally scored for band and dancers, and “La Llorona,” a viola concerto about death and the afterlife. Cruz found these pieces so evocative that he decided to use the Mexican folk tradition of the Day of the Dead to anchor the opera.“What I love about that idea is that we go into a mythic landscape that is bigger than life,” he said. “I think those are the brushstrokes that an opera needs.”‌The Spanish-language libretto ‌he wrote uses the Day of the Dead to enact a reversal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — a myth central to the history of opera itself. Frida crosses the threshold from the underworld to the living for the single day allotted and guides the ailing Diego back with her as he accepts his mortality.The opera is replete with references to the pre-Columbian Mexican culture and folklore that so profoundly inspired Kahlo and Rivera. The realm where the departed souls reside is depicted as Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Access back to the world of the living for the Day of the Dead ritual is controlled by Catrina, a trickster figure.Catrina also serves as the mouthpiece for the wit that leavens Cruz’s poetic, magic realism-inflected text. “Nothing illustrates the Mexican sense of humor and irony toward death more than the sugar-candy skulls that are made for the festivities of the Day of the Dead,” Cruz said, “as if death were sweet to eat and it can disintegrate in our mouths.”The most surprising of the opera’s quartet of characters is a young actor named Leonardo — a countertenor role — who impersonates Greta Garbo for a fan, whom Leonardo crosses over from Mictlan to visit every year.Leonardo embodies the world of art, which coexists with the worlds of the living and of the dead. The entire opera is structured around the passage among these three worlds, which are separate yet also connected. Frank said she set out to create “evocative soundscapes so that the audience is very clear when we enter a different phase of Frida and Diego’s story.”Frank established a musical vocabulary to conjure these worlds by assigning distinct gestures and instrumental colors to each: lush harmonies to evoke “the grandeur of the underworld beneath the moonlight, a big, night sound”; hints of folkloric music and lighter dance rhythms for the world of the living; and intimate, chamber music-like textures for the world of art.Diego Rivera’s “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park,” at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, in Mexico City.Fernando Llano/Associated PressFor authenticity, said Bennett from San Diego Opera, it was important to round out the creative team with Mexican artists and to hire native Spanish-speaking singers for the two leads. The mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz and the baritone Alfredo Daza will create the roles of Frida and Diego.The Mexican-born conductor, Roberto Kalb, who recently led the premiere of Tobias Picker’s opera “Awakenings,” admires the diversity of colors in Frank’s score, with the marimba threaded throughout as a unifying timbre. “She’s a master orchestrator and writes for the chorus as well as anyone,” he said. “It’s her first opera, but it doesn’t sound like it.”Frank’s references to Mexican music tend to be subtle and, for Kalb, “are always done elegantly, with great respect. As a Mexican, I appreciate that, because so many pieces just slap it on.”Kalb described the overarching tone of Frank’s music as “ancient spectralism” — referring to a focus on the phenomenon of sound itself, which she blends with an early-music flavor.“A timeless kind of sound is important,” Frank said. “That’s how Frida and Diego saw what they did. Yes, they were creating new art. But they were obsessed with old Mexican art and tradition.”Specific examples of their art influenced Cruz’s ideas for the dramatic structure. In “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” from 1949, Kahlo depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by herself and by an earth goddess. Cruz said that from this image he derived the opera’s core concept of Kahlo helping Rivera cross over at the end of his life, three years after her death: “It is a self-portrait that celebrates the union of the Riveras, perhaps in the afterlife, or in a more idealistic and artistic world.”Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park” (1946-47), which mingles his life story with a political history of Mexico, springs to life at the beginning of second act as the artist is shown painting it. Frida emerges from its composition to re-enter the world of the living.The director, Lorena Maza, who is from Mexico City, said that she and her design team took their cues from the two painters’ shared love of Indigenous and folk art, as well as their activism. But equally fundamental to the opera’s mise-en-scène are their differences in outlook: the intimacy of the self-portraits that figure so prominently in Kahlo’s work — “each one a battle against pain and disintegration” — and the social realism of Rivera’s epic murals.“Mainly what we bring to the table is the Mexican view of the story,” Maza said. “What Anglo-Saxon culture knows about the Día de los Muertos, or about Frida and Diego, is a bit different from how we live it. We want to avoid the folkloric, cliché version of this celebration and of these two artists. For us, these are very close, personal characters who have been with us since we were children and who both created a Mexican visual identity for us.”The opera’s aim, suggested by the final lines of the chorus of departed souls, is to invite us to enter into the world of Frida and Diego, to erase the borderlines between the real and the imagined:“Life is briefbut the light will followthe strokes of your paintbrush.From your paintings emerge,an anthem of sun,the glory of your gaze.” More

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      Did Crush Snub Black Fans at a Concert in South Korea?

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      The singer Crush apologized for a “misunderstanding” after the exchange, which highlights what experts call K-pop’s uneasy relationship with Black culture.It happens so fast in the videos that you need to rewatch them to notice: As Crush, a South Korean R&B singer, high-fives fans during a recent performance, he avoids an area where some Black concertgoers have extended their hands.A fan on Twitter called the episode, at a music festival in Seoul this month, an act of discrimination. When others piled on, some of Crush’s supporters pushed back, saying that videos showed him skipping other parts of the packed audience and warning fans about overcrowding.Crush apologized last week for what he called a “misunderstanding,” telling his 2.7 million Instagram followers that he had avoided high-fiving some fans out of concern for their safety. He also told The New York Times that he loved and respected Black culture and had not meant to offend anyone.“I would never intentionally act in a way that would disrespect nor offend any individual,” he said.The debate over the episode has called attention to what experts call an old problem: the K-pop industry’s struggle to develop the level of cultural sensitivity that fans in the United States and elsewhere expect.The criticism also highlights resentment that has built up for years among many Black fans who feel that K-pop acts adopt their culture but do not respect them, just as earlier generations of white musicians appropriated Black music and reaped the riches.“There are Black fans who love K-pop so much,” said CedarBough T. Saeji, an expert on the K-pop industry at Pusan National University in South Korea. “But they also do have a bone to pick with the way that their fandom has been ignored, and the way that their concerns about things like cultural appropriation have also been ignored.”The Big PictureCrush, 30, whose real name is Shin Hyo-seob, is an A-list K-pop star at a time when South Korea’s cultural exports are winning legions of new fans abroad. As the K-pop industry becomes increasingly international, more of its lyrics are being written in English, and agencies that promote K-pop acts are opening offices abroad.Crush’s record label, P Nation, was founded in 2018 by the singer Psy, whose breakout 2012 hit, “Gangnam Style,” helped K-pop carve out an international profile.The label’s chief executive, Lionel Kim, said it had always tried aggressively to scrutinize its artists’ content for cultural sensitivity.“We want to reach as many fans as we can around the world,” Kim said in an interview. “We’re extremely cautious to ensure that our artists and music videos do not disrespect any ethnicity or culture.”The K-pop group Exo performing at the Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018.Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto AgencyBut gaps in awareness have been frequent in South Korea, an ethnically homogeneous society that has generally been slow to welcome other cultures at home.“Some people don’t even know what counts as racist or not — and that includes artists,” said Gyu Tag Lee, a professor of cultural studies at George Mason University’s South Korea campus.Members of Exo, a boy band in Seoul, have been accused of making racist remarks during a live broadcast in which they applied makeup that resembled blackface. And last year, the Korean American rapper Jay Park removed the music video for his song “DNA Remix” after fans noted that some of the performers, who were not Black, wore hairstyles that included Afros, braids and dreadlocks.A Rising StarCrush has explored R&B, hip-hop, soul, jazz and other genres in his decade-long career. He began writing rap lyrics in middle school and listened to Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, James Ingram and other Black musicians in high school, he has told the South Korean news media. In 2018, he released a song that paid homage to Stevie Wonder.Last month, Crush released “Rush Hour,” a hit single with the rapper J-Hope of BTS. The lyrics are a mix of English and Korean, the style riffs on funk and hip-hop, and the music video was filmed on a New York City-inspired set.But frustration toward Crush has been building among Black K-pop fans since 2016, when he performed on a Korean television show wearing a mask with dark skin, big lips and frizzy hair — and did not apologize after the backlash that followed.Some fans were also disappointed when Crush removed an Instagram post two years ago about his donation to a George Floyd memorial fund in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Crush’s label, P Nation, told The Times last week that Crush had archived that post, along with dozens of others that were not related to music, later that year. The FalloutAfter the high-fiving episode at the 2022 Someday Pleroma festival this month, some Crush allies seemed to backtrack on their initial support.J-Hope “liked” Crush’s apology on Instagram. Devin Morrison, a Black singer in Los Angeles who has also collaborated with Crush, wrote on Twitter that he had been astounded to see criticism of “an artist who has treated me and my (Black) friends with nothing but respect and kindness.”But J-Hope’s like and Morrison’s tweet later disappeared. Neither artist responded to requests for comment.Some Black fans took a nuanced view of the episode, saying that they were frustrated less with Crush than with the culture of racial bias that they feel pervades the K-pop industry.Videos of Crush “skipping over the Black fans seemed unlike him, but it didn’t seem like it was unlike K-pop,” said Akeyla Vincent, 32, an African American public-school teacher in South Korea. Melissa Limenyande, 29, a Black South African who also teaches in South Korea, said she believed Crush’s explanation that he had acted out of concern for fans’ safety.At the same time, she said, she has struggled to reconcile her enjoyment of K-pop with what she sees as its creators’ insensitivity toward other cultures.“I like these artists so much and I love their music and their personalities,” she said. “But if I can take my time to learn about their culture or where they come from, why can’t they do the same?” More

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      Apollo Theater’s Longtime President Will Step Down

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      Jonelle Procope, who transformed the Harlem organization from a struggling nonprofit to an internationally recognized cultural center, will leave in June after two decades in the role.Jonelle Procope, who has served as the president and chief executive of the Apollo Theater in Harlem for nearly 20 years, will step down in June, the theater announced on Tuesday.“The Apollo is in such a strong position now — financially stable, with all the pieces in place for the future,” said Procope, who has led the nonprofit since 2003 after joining as a board member in 1999. “It’s a great time for the next leader to be able to step in and take the Apollo into the future.”Procope has overseen a transformation that has taken the theater from a struggling nonprofit to the largest African American performing arts presenting organization in the country. On Tuesday, the Apollo also announced it had raised $63 million in a capital campaign to fully renovate the 108-year-old building, as well as to support new 99- and 199-seat performance spaces that will be managed by the Apollo at the nearby Victoria Theater and are scheduled to see their first audiences in fall 2023.The renovation of the Apollo Theater is scheduled to begin in spring 2024, with the first cultural programs taking place in spring 2025. Along with a new lobby cafe and bar that will be open to the public, plans include added and upgraded seating, new lighting and audio systems and updates to the building’s exterior.“It was really important for me to complete — or nearly completely reach — that goal before I decided to make the transition,” Procope said of the capital campaign.Over her two decades at the Apollo, Procope, 70, carried out a long-term plan for the restoration and expansion of the theater. She grew the organization’s community and education programs, which served more than 20,000 students, teachers and families each year before the coronavirus pandemic.Procope said she was most proud of the relationships the theater forged with cultural partners such as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His 2015 book “Between the World and Me,” which explores racial injustice in America, was adapted into a communal performance that had its world premiere at the theater in 2018.Another one of those partnerships was a planned revival of Charles Randolph-Wright’s play “Blue,” which was canceled because of the pandemic; it was set to star Leslie Uggams and Lynn Whitfield with direction by Phylicia Rashad. Procope said that the Apollo was hopeful the production would still happen, but that no plans had yet been made.Charles E. Phillips, the chairman of the Apollo’s board, said a search committee would be formed this fall to begin a national search for Procope’s successor, noting that it would be no easy task.“It’s hard to find leaders like Jonelle who are so consistently good for so long,” Phillips said. “She almost single-handedly turned the Apollo around.” More

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      Jakub Hrusa Set to Lead Royal Opera House

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      The young Czech conductor will replace Antonio Pappano, who is heading to the London Symphony Orchestra.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall, in New York, in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLONDON — Jakub Hrusa, a rising Czech conductor, on Tuesday was named the music director of the Royal Opera House in London, one of the highest-profile positions in opera.Hrusa, 41, who has been the chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany since 2016, will take on the role in September 2025, replacing Antonio Pappano, who announced last year that he was leaving to become the chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra after a successful 20-year tenure at the opera house.There has long been speculation in London’s opera world over who would replace Pappano. Neil Fisher, a critic for the Times of London, rounded up a dozen contenders last year, including Edward Gardner, a former music director at English National Opera, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who, until recently, led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Hrusa was not on the list. But the Czech, who is also the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Pappano is the principal conductor, has long received praise.When Hrusa made his New York Philharmonic debut, in 2017, the critic Anthony Tommasini, in The New York Times, wrote: “With his sweeping arm gestures and choreographic swiveling, Mr. Hrusa is a very animated conductor.” He added, “His approach worked, judging by the plush, enveloping sounds and impressive execution he drew from the Philharmonic players in an auspicious debut.”In a highlight at this year’s Salzburg Festival, Hrusa led a breathless rendition of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova,” directed by Barrie Kosky.Critics have also praised Hrusa’s two performances at the Royal Opera House: a 2018 production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” also directed by Kosky, and a run of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this spring. In The Times of London, Fisher wrote that Hrusa’s conducting of “Lohengrin” “cannily distills the eeriest sonorities of the score, highlighting its bleak beauty.”Hrusa is not the first relatively lesser known option to become the opera house’s music director. When Pappano took the job, in 2002, he came from La Monnaie in Brussels and had little reputation in London at the time.In a news release, Hrusa, who grew up in Brno, the Czech city where Janacek lived, said he was thrilled to accept the position. “I have always dreamt about a long-term relationship with a house where one can reach the highest standards in opera, and I realized very quickly that I adored the whole team of artists and staff at Covent Garden,” he said.Oliver Mears, the director of the Royal Opera, said in the release that everyone at the house had “been hugely impressed by not only his superlative music and theater-making but also by the generosity and warmth of his personality.”On Tuesday, the Royal Opera House detailed some of Hrusa’s early engagements in the new role. In the 2027-28 season, he will conduct Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” with Kosky directing.Pappano described the all-encompassing role of music director last year in an interview with The New York Times: “With all the competition that there is for people’s attention, for fund-raising, even for survival for classical music institutions,” he said, “the job has become much more than just conducting.”A looming challenge for the Royal Opera could be a cut in its budget. The British government is slashing the amount of funding it gives to cultural institutions in London by a total 15 percent, so that it can give more money to arts organization in poorer regions. Last year, the government gave the Royal Opera House £35.8 million, or about $40 million, equivalent to 43 percent of the house’s total income, including for the Royal Ballet. An announcement on future funding is expected this month. More