Music

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

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

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

“Maxident” is the latest release to top Billboard’s album chart on the strength of CD or vinyl sales, rather than streams.Week after week, the Billboard album chart is a tale of two formats.Most of the time, the titles that reach No. 1 are the ones that are most popular on streaming services. So far in 2022, that has included Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack, various rap records (by Drake, Lil Durk, Future) and this year’s biggest hit, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which has held the top spot for 13 weeks.The rest of the time, the top position belongs to the records that make a splash with physical versions, like vinyl LPs, CDs and collectible boxed sets packed with goodies like posters and T-shirts. Some of the most skilled marketers of physical media these days have been K-pop groups, like BTS and Blackpink.This week, the eight-member Stray Kids, from South Korea, opens at No. 1 for a second time this year with “Maxident,” which had the equivalent of 117,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. As with its last release, “Oddinary,” which topped the chart back in March, most of the sales of “Maxident” were on CD, with the band releasing the album in as many as 10 different packages, including exclusive versions for retailers like Target and Barnes & Noble.Of its total, 107,000 were for CDs. “Maxident,” like “Oddinary” before it, is officially a “mini album,” with just under 27 minutes of play time on its standard versions. The eight tracks on “Maxident” — by comparison, “Un Verano” has 23 — collected a little less than 10 million streams in the United States, or about 6 percent of the total consumption of the release in its opening week.The success of “Maxident” bumps “Un Verano” to No. 2 with the equivalent of 76,000 sales. Now in its 23rd week out, “Un Verano” still has never dipped lower than second place, and it has racked up about 3.7 billion U.S. streams alone.Bad Bunny’s reign at the top may soon be coming to an end, however, with the arrival of two new albums: Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” which came out on Friday and is already a major streaming hit, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights.”Swift, whose ingenuity as a marketer may be unsurpassed in the industry, has been paying close attention to physical media in recent years, and for “Midnights,” which comes out this Friday, she has a clever offering. The four variant vinyl editions, when turned around and placed in a grid, contain numbers that form the hours of a clock.“It’s a clock,” she said when showing it off on Instagram. “It can help you tell time.”The popularity of physical media can be surprising, since streaming now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States. But vinyl has been growing at double digits for years, and in 2021 had just over $1 billion in sales, for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.For artists, CDs and LPs can be especially appealing when it comes to climbing the charts — according to the formulas used by Billboard and Luminate to determine chart positions, it takes as many 1,250 track streams on paid services, or 3,750 on free ones, to count as much as a single album sale.Also on this week’s album chart, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” rises two spots to No. 3, after its vinyl version became widely available. (Perhaps you caught Beyoncé’s retail takeover on TikTok, featuring the queen gamely signing LPs in jeans, cowboy boots and a Rolling Stones T-shirt?)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is in fifth place. More

Many arts groups, worried about alienating older patrons, have maintained strict rules. Now “the time has come to move on,” one leader said.Masks are no longer required in New York City schools, gyms, taxis and most theaters. But a night at the opera or the ballet still involves putting on a proper face covering.That will soon change. Several of the city’s leading performing arts organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet — announced on Monday that masks would now be optional, citing demands from audience members and a recent decline in coronavirus cases.“The time has come to move on,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.The Met, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic will end mask requirements on Oct. 24, along with Film at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The David H. Koch Theater, home to City Ballet, will follow on Nov. 1. Two venues on the Lincoln Center campus, the Mitzi E. Newhouse and Claire Tow theaters, will maintain their mandates.The decision is a milestone for classical, dance and opera institutions, which had been among the most resistant to relaxing mask rules — wary of alienating older patrons, who represent a large share of ticket buyers. As coronavirus infections have declined and masks have vanished from many other settings, arts groups are feeling pressure from audiences to make a change.At the Met, for example, only about a quarter of ticket buyers said in a survey last month that they would feel uncomfortable attending a performance if masks were optional. Over the summer, that number had been close to 70 percent.“People’s attitudes are changing,” Gelb said. He hoped that relaxing the rules would help make the Met more accessible to “younger audiences who really don’t want to wear a mask.” With the elimination of the mandate, the company will also reopen its bars, many of which have remained closed during the pandemic.Proof of vaccination, as well as masks, were required to gain entry to many venues starting last year, when arts organizations returned to the stage after a long shutdown. Over the summer, however, as hospitalizations and deaths declined, many groups began to ease their rules. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped the vaccine requirement on May 1, and the mask mandate on July 1.While most classical, opera and dance groups eliminated the vaccine requirement this fall, many kept in place strict mask mandates on the advice of medical advisers. The question of masks posed a challenge for many groups; they risked alienating some ticket buyers, no matter how they proceeded.At the Met, stage managers have delivered announcements from the stage before each performance reminding audiences to keep masks on for the duration of opera. At Carnegie Hall, ushers have checked each row and called out people who were not wearing masks.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the hall kept mask rules in place this fall because of lingering concerns about the virus among some medical advisers and audience members. But it decided to make a change after medical advisers said it could operate safely without masks, and after complaints from the audience were growing.“Ushers were finding it actually quite difficult because a lot of people were very annoyed having to still wear masks when in most of their lives they’re no longer doing so,” Gillinson said in an interview.By eliminating the mask rules, arts leaders hope they can help restore a sense of normalcy at a time when many groups are struggling to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic. While live performance is flourishing once again in New York and across the United States, audiences have been slow to return.Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview that the mask rules could change if the virus emerged as a deadly threat once again.“This is an ever-evolving situation,” she said. “We will stay on top of whatever the current medical protocol dictates.”But for now, she said, it is time to change focus.“We feel it’s important that we do our part to help the city return to a much more normal state of affairs,” she said, “and to encourage people to come back into the city and to reinvigorate the economy.” More

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

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

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