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      Jazmine Sullivan’s Meditation on Courage, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Charlie Puth, Chloe Moriondo, Kali Uchis and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Stand Up’“Stand Up,” from the soundtrack to the film “Till,” captures an awakening sense of courage and purpose with a melody that expands upward and rhythms that coalesce from a tentative waltz to an insistent 6/8. Jazmine Sullivan’s voice is grainy, improvisatory and increasingly determined; at the end, it becomes a choir of solidarity, declaring, “Someone’s counting on you.” JON PARELESJamila Woods, ‘Boundaries’With a syncopated acoustic guitar at its core, Jamila Woods’s “Boundaries” could have been an easygoing bossa nova. Instead, it’s laced with nervous undercurrents of percussion and bass, playing up the ambivalence of a song that’s pondering just how close to let a relationship get. “It’s safer on the outside/I’d hate to find a reason I should leave,” Woods argues. But she leaves the song unresolved, as if her decision might not be final. PARELESCharlie Puth, ‘Marks on My Neck’If the songs on “Charlie,” the new album by Charlie Puth, sound familiar, it’s because no pop star shows their drafts quite like Puth does, revealing both his personality and his process. “Marks on My Neck” began as a TikTok in November 2021 — Puth, his hair bouncing, told a lightly intimate story, and showed off the early stages of putting together a song about what had happened to him. The final product is chirpy in a way the sentiment isn’t, but it’s in keeping with Puth’s recent turn to the saccharine, his zest for process sometimes outstripping his appetite for pain. JON CARAMANICAChloe Moriondo, ‘Dress Up’The new Chloe Moriondo album, “Suckerpunch,” is jubilantly chaotic — the production leans much further into hyperpop muscle than her previous work, and her songwriting is rowdier and looser. Take “Dress Up,” a part-sung, part-rapped Disney evil-princess theme song that nods to Doja Cat, Kim Petras, maybe Kitty Pryde. It’s astute pop, and also an astute read on the state of contemporary pop. CARAMANICASpecial Interest, ‘Foul’Warehouse labor barks its discontents in “Foul” by the New Orleans post-punk band Special Interest. Over a crescendo of gnashing guitar noise and thumping, clattering drum-machine beats, Maria Elena (guitar) and Alli Logout (vocals) shout terse lines back and forth — “Short staffed/Overworked/Sleep deprived/It’s an art” — until they work themselves up to righteous, well-earned screams. PARELESKali Uchis, ‘La Unica’“Unica — you know I’m the only one,” Kali Uchis sings, in one of the few English lyrics to this skeletal, bilingual, rapped and sung track. It’s a computer construction of programmed beats, sampled flute lines and disembodied voices behind Uchis’s supremely blasé lead vocal. The song feels grounded in Afro-Colombian tradition, even as it flaunts every bit (and byte) of its processing. PARELESLil Yachty, ‘Poland’“Poland” is a wobbly sound experiment from Lil Yachty, one of hip-hop’s most flexible performers. Here he leans into a digitized warble, delivering a dreamlike incantation with an undercurrent of silliness. Is it a song? An idea? A demo? A joke? It no longer matters — those are yesterday’s distinctions. CARAMANICAArima Ederra, ‘Steel Wing’“My refugee blood/You can’t take my freedom,” Arima Ederra sings in “Steel Wing,” a song about leaving home to prove herself. Ederra is the daughter of Ethiopian refugees, born in Atlanta and now based in Los Angeles, where she has found fellow pop experimenters. “Steel Wing,” from her new album “An Orange-Colored Day,” opens with a loose-limbed beat and a low-fi, not-quite-in-tune guitar lick. The song blooms into full-fledged reggae, but doesn’t settle there; it dissolves into a hand-clapping beat and echoey piano chords, with a few words from Ederra’s mother at the end. Ederra may be away from home, but the family connection holds. PARELESCourtney Marie Andrews, ‘Thinkin’ on You’Pure fondness peals from “Thinkin’ on You,” a song with an unambiguous sentiment about a temporary separation. “While you’re away, I’ll be thinkin’ on you,” Courtney Marie Andrews sings in a grandly retro production that stacks folk-rock guitars, pedal steel curlicues and a string-section arrangement over a girl-group beat. She sings “Ooh, ooh,” with a cowgirl yip, fully confident of an impending reunion. PARELESJohanna Warren, ‘Tooth for a Tooth’“Tooth for a Tooth” is the outlier on Johanna Warren’s new album, “Lessons for Mutants,” which is mostly volatile, guitar-centered indie-rock. Instead, “Tooth for a Tooth” is a slow-swaying piano ballad — with upright bass and brushed drums — that tries to find solace after a breakup: “I’d rather be lonely and empowered/Than on a cross or devoured,” she croons. The piano closely follows her vocal line, kindly offering unspoken support. PARELESMidwife, ‘Sickworld’Stasis is an illusion in “Sickworld,” a wistful, lush meditation by Madeline Johnston, who records as Midwife. “Don’t tell me about the future/Don’t ask me about the past,” she whisper-sings, “I don’t want to stay here/But I can’t go back. The structure is elementary — two chords, arpeggiated for four bars each — but Johnston enfolds them in layers that waft by like fog banks: guitar, piano, voices, strings, all of them substantial and then ephemeral. PARELES More

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      The Facts and Fictions of Shostakovich’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’

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      The 1934 opera, revived this season at the Metropolitan Opera, stoked the ire of the Soviet state, or so the story goes. But archives tell a more interesting tale.Dmitri Shostakovich’s career is the most deeply politicized in Russian music history, perhaps in all music history. Arguably his most politicized composition is his alluring, macabre opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”“Lady Macbeth,” which is being revived at the Metropolitan Opera through Oct. 21, was condemned in the Soviet press in 1936, two years after its successful premiere in Leningrad. The opera was performed in that city, now called St. Petersburg, some 50 times in 1934, and it had been presented in Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, along with Buenos Aires, London, Prague, Stockholm and Zurich. But the hammer came down. Shostakovich was censured by the Stalinist regime and feared for his career, as well as his safety.Or at least that’s how the story goes. But the archives of Moscow’s theaters tell a more interesting tale, I learned, as do fortuitously published documents from Russia’s federal archives and private holdings.“Lady Macbeth” is based on an 1865 story by Nikolai Leskov, as adapted by Shostakovich and Alexander Preys. The title character, a childless merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, lives grimly in a grim burg. (Mtsensk is an actual place near the city of Oryol, known in the 19th century for its crafts. It’s not far from Moscow by Russian standards, less than four hours by train.) To escape her surroundings, and to enact vengeance on her besotted, cheating husband, Katerina takes Sergey, a laborer at a flour mill, as her lover after he sexually assaults her.When the relationship is discovered by her father-in-law, she feeds him poisoned mushrooms. And when her husband discovers his dead father, Katerina and Sergey strangle him. Katerina and Sergey are condemned to a remote penal colony. On the long trek to Siberia, Sergey takes up with another woman, Sonyetka. Katerina subsequently drowns Sonyetka and herself in the Volga River. Things could have been worse: Leskov’s story, unlike Shostakovich’s opera, includes infanticide.Svetlana Sozdateleva, left, and Brandon Jovanovich in the work’s current revival at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Evan Zimmerman/Metropolitan OperaShostakovich takes Katerina’s side in this ghastliness, pushing his opera beyond the bounds of theatrical convention to make a point about amoral responses to amorality. Lowbrow, “popular” genres represent the opera’s execrable characters. Shostakovich flagrantly abuses these genres to allegorize how most of the men in his opera treat most of the women. Katerina is assigned poignant salon arias and pensive recitatives that bear the contours of folk song. Even she, however, does not escape grotesque caricature. At the end of the first act, she describes her loneliness in a fashion that bears, at the start, elements of the Letter Scene in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” But Katerina can’t read or write, so the point of reference is skewed.Her singing increases in power, morphing from a Romantic mode to unbalanced expressionism undercut by the horrible cancan accompanying her rape. The brass section explodes, the drums attack, the strings squeal, then everything falls apart in postcoital detumescence. The “pornophony,” to quote a critic for The New York Sun who heard the music in 1935, highlights the body’s plumbing: Toilet plungers serve as trombone mutes.Opera is replete with suffering heroines, and one could argue that Katerina avenges not only what she has had to put with, but also what the heroines of the past have had to put up with, setting to rights the bad treatment of her soprano sisters. Whereas, for example, the protagonists of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Puccini’s “Tosca” achieve a state of grace through martyrdom, Katerina achieves payback. Spiritual emancipation, Shostakovich insists like a good Soviet, is a bourgeois decadent concept.That message was lost between 1934, when the opera premiered, and 1936, when it was denounced. The trouble for Shostakovich began on Dec. 26, 1935, with a production on the Bolshoi Theater’s second stage. The action unfolded in front of Katerina’s rickety wooden house, with the sloped floors and exterior staircase collapsed into a platform for the final scene. The rape was not shown, only heard. Afterward, Sergey climbed down from the window to find Boris, who beat him senseless. The music was earsplitting, the brass supplemented to fill the 2,100-seat hall.In a special, concrete-reinforced box sat Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and self-declared opera lover. He attended a performance on Jan. 26, 1926, with Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and two other aides. The din was too much for them. They left before the end.At the same time, another production of “Lady Macbeth” had long been running up the street from the Bolshoi at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater. This production took the name of the heroine: “Katerina Izmailova.” The staging was tightly choreographed and highly claustrophobic, defined by low ceilings, heavy furniture, handmade wallpaper, dark rugs, bricks, mortar and grime. The final scene bunched up a group of convicts in bedraggled derangement, some looking menacing, others injured and hopeless. According to the theater’s lore, Stalin was supposed to have taken in this more restrained, cerebral production, but his chauffeur took him to the Bolshoi instead, since that’s where Stalin typically heard opera.A calculated takedown of the opera in the press centered on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” via Nemirovich-Danchenko TheaterStalin relied on culture, along with the secret police and prison camps, to enforce his rule. Music let him down, however. It had become too discordant, experimental and inaccessible. At the end of 1935, Stalin authorized the establishment of an organization called the Committee on Arts Affairs. It was led by Platon Kerzhentsev, a 54-year-old career propagandist, censor and Lenin hagiographer. Kerzhentsev’s task was to correct culture, which meant correcting the top composer in the land of the Soviets: Shostakovich.On Jan. 28 and Feb. 6, 1936, Shostakovich was the subject of a pair of unsigned reviews — not editorials, as is often claimed — published in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. One concerned “Lady Macbeth,” the other “The Bright Stream,” a ballet that Stalin had seen just before the opera. (The famous title of the first of the reviews, “Muddle Instead of Music,” was a Pravda meme, followed by a blasting of a children’s artist called “Scribbles Instead of Drawings.”)Their author was an opportunistic journalist named David Zaslavsky, a former bundist (Jewish socialist political movement member) eager to demonstrate fealty to the Party and to Stalin. Shostakovich knew him and probably found out that he had written the reviews. Zaslavsky used what he was paid for them to settle his Communist Party membership dues.When Stalin exited the Bolshoi performance of the opera in disgust, Kerzhentsev launched an arrow at his rival Alexander Shcherbakov, the first secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers. Shcherbakov had praised the original Leningrad production of “Lady Macbeth” in a letter to Stalin. Stalin redirected that letter to Kerzhentsev, whose arrow struck Shostakovich.Zaslavsky’s takedown of “Lady Macbeth” is vulgarly imaginative, centering on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” It “quacks, hoots, pants and gasps for breath in order to present the love scenes as naturalistically as possible.” And “‘love,’” Zaslavsky added, “is smeared throughout the opera in its most vulgar form.”There are no love scenes, and the circuslike music of the Act I sexual assault is musically linked to the score’s other episodes of brutality, something Zaslavsky neglected to mention in his condemnation. Nor did he mention that “bourgeois audiences” in the United States did not hear all of the panting. It was censored, and, to accommodate conservative critics like Ruth Knowles of the Clean Amusement Association of America, the boudoir scene was concealed behind a curtain.For Stalin, Zaslavsky served his intended purpose. “Yes, I remember the article in Pravda,” he told a cultural official. “It gave the correct policy.” The journal of the Union of Soviet Composers scrambled to reprint Zaslavsky’s articles and devoted several issues to shaming Shostakovich for his “leftism.”There are conflicting accounts of Shostakovich’s reaction to the scandal. Before, Bolshoi dancers remembered him playing through the score of “The Bright Stream,” laughing like a child. After, he turned up at the theater looking for his score in a panic saying he’d do “everything they want me to.” He was frightened, but he also seemed to be offended, for himself and for Russia, hurt that his art had now to be somehow like Pravda itself — that opera, ballet and the other arts had to read in black and white.Levon Atovmyan, a Composers’ Union functionary, once recalled Shostakovich leaving Moscow on the day the scandal broke to perform a concert in Arkhangelsk. The composer received a standing ovation, then headed back to Moscow, getting drunk and playing blackjack on the train. Atovmyan’s account dispels a couple of myths, one being that the opera was banned. It wasn’t. The performance Stalin saw, the fourth in the Bolshoi run, was followed by three more on Jan. 31, Feb. 4, and Feb. 10, 1936. Then the run ended.Another myth is that Shostakovich disavowed opera. “Lady Macbeth” had indeed been conceived as the first of four operas about heroic Russian women. He went back to that plan but put it aside to begin an opera based on Leo Tolstoy’s final novel, “Resurrection.” By that time, in 1940, he had composed himself out of trouble with his Fifth Symphony, which the Soviet musical establishment praised on command. Shostakovich was too valuable to the regime to be silenced.He loved “Lady Macbeth” more than anything he composed before or after it. He dedicated it to his first wife, and it was one of only two compositions that he took with him when he was evacuated out of Leningrad at the start of World War II. He revised it in 1962 under the name “Katerina Izmailova,” excising some of the ghastliness, and it returned to the Soviet stage. Not all of the changes were a response to political demands; some reflected his matured personal attitude toward the drama.“Lady Macbeth” survived a period in which culture became the very thing that its heroine so shockingly resisted: mind-numbing, repressive parochialism. In the final scene of the revised version, after Katerina hurls herself and her rival Sonyetka into the dark waters of the Volga, a convict mutters: “Oh, why is our life so dark, terrible? Are people really born for such a life?” It’s a question for the ages.Simon Morrison teaches at Princeton University. He writes about Russian music, ballet and Stevie Nicks. More

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      Review: The War in Ukraine Looms Over an Orchestra’s Debut

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      Utopia is the latest project from Teodor Currentzis, whose home ensemble has faced scrutiny over its ties to Russian state funding.HAMBURG, Germany — After Claude Debussy heard a young Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” he was said to have quipped, “One has to start somewhere.”That start turned out to be auspicious. And Utopia — a new ensemble that has assembled some top performers from groups throughout Europe and abroad — has similar potential. It debuted this week, with a slight but superbly executed program of, as it happens, “The Firebird” and works by Ravel that it is currently touring, with a stop at the Laeiszhalle here on Wednesday evening.Utopia’s name inspires eye rolls; but its sound, awe. Tensions like that always seems to attach themselves to its founder and conductor, Teodor Currentzis, who often appears to serve himself more than music yet at the same time reveals what can feel like a previously veiled truth.His already complicated artistry has been complicated further since the war in Ukraine began. Currentzis was born in Greece but has long been based in Russia, where he was given citizenship by presidential decree in 2014. The invasion brought fresh scrutiny to his ensemble there, MusicAeterna, and its funding from the state-owned VTB Bank. Currentzis, for his part, has been silent, caught an irreconcilable position between Russia and the West. Members of MusicAeterna, however, have been seen on social media championing the invasion.Some presenters in Europe have canceled MusicAeterna’s or Currentzis’ engagements over the war — most recently, the Philharmonie in Cologne, Germany this week — while others have stood by them, including the mighty Salzburg Festival in Austria.When the creation of Utopia was announced in August, its rollout — seeking little press, and with only brief tours of one program at a time — came off as a rushed reaction to MusicAeterna’s troubles. After all, it was billed as an independent orchestra with independent (a euphemism for Western) funding. But the ensemble has been in development for several years.The State of the WarRussia’s Retreat: After significant gains in eastern cities like Lyman, Ukraine is pushing farther into Russian-held territory in the south, expanding its campaign as Moscow struggles to mount a response and hold the line. The Ukrainian victories came as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia illegally annexed four regions where fighting is raging.Dugina Assassination: U.S. intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist. American officials said they were not aware of the plan ahead of time and that they had admonished Ukraine over it.Oil Supply Cuts: Saudi Arabia and Russia, acting as leaders of the OPEC Plus energy cartel, agreed to a large production cut in a bid to raise prices, countering efforts by the United States and Europe to constrain the oil revenue Moscow is using to pay for its war in Ukraine.Putin’s Nuclear Threats: For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, top Russian leaders are making explicit nuclear threats and officials in Washington are gaming out scenarios should Mr. Putin decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon.Currentzis could have more control over the story of Utopia if he weren’t so reticent because of the war. Then, he might be able to offer a stronger argument for the group’s existence than what has been advertised: simply to bring together “the best musicians from all around the world” for the web3-like purpose of decentralizing classical music.That said, there is undeniable talent among Utopia’s ranks. Sure, the concertmaster on Wednesday was Olga Volkova, who holds the same post in MusicAeterna, but elsewhere there were ambassadors from the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Paris Opera; plenty of players born in Europe, but also ones from Australia, Asia and the Americas.With little rehearsal time, they gave their first concert in Luxembourg on Tuesday. After Hamburg comes Vienna, then Berlin, where vast swaths of the Philharmonie remain unsold. That was not the case on Tuesday at the more intimate Laeiszhalle, which was nearly full with a warmly receptive audience. Outside there was nary a protester, as there have been at the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko’s recent recitals, and inside Currentzis was greeted with cheers surpassed by only the riotous applause that followed each piece.It’s not hard to see why. This was an evening that never sagged or lacked in interest, even if Currentzis’ style tipped toward the profane. He relished extremes, with hyperbolic readings of the scores that you could say reflect a lack of trust or taste — but that you could also say are riveting from start to finish. Love or hate them, his performances make people truly care about music.If there were doubts that this pickup group wasn’t ready for the public, they were dispelled at the sound of the players’ sharp, decisive articulations and unison string downbows in the Stravinsky — his 1945 version of the “Firebird” suite — or their unwavering precision in the encore, Ravel’s “Boléro,” which on Wednesday began so softly, its patient, extended crescendo had the feel of a traveling band entering the scene from afar then boisterously announcing itself.On the program were three ballet scores, and Currentzis treated them with fitting sensuality and freedom. His Stravinsky breathed fire while also luxuriating in the winding tendrils of a flame. Ravel’s second suite from “Daphnis et Chloé” blossomed organically from a wispy opening’s gentle enchantment to a densely textured tableau that, even then, refrained from giving away too much too soon. But when the climax came, it was so powerful that I felt the nudging vibration of my watch warning me that the sound had pushed past 90 decibels.Throughout, the Utopia players were visibly pleased, and united. During Ravel’s “La Valse,” Currentzis didn’t keep time so much as swing his arms broadly from right to left and back again, yet the orchestra maintained controlled instability in this affectionate but darkly ambiguous tribute to Johann Strauss II and his symphonic treatments of Vienna’s signature dance.Ravel nearly named the piece after that city, with the German-language working title of “Wien.” Currentzis’ interpretation was largely one of entropy, but it also had transporting, whirlwind glimpses of a joyous ballroom. Those moments were a painful reminder of his current relationship with Vienna, where Utopia is welcome but MusicAeterna is not.These days, that kind of bitter aftertaste accompanies all of Currentzis’ performances, both the good and the bad — certainly on Wednesday, and who knows for how long.UtopiaPerformed on Wednesday at the Laeiszhalle, Hamburg, Germany. More

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      Review: ‘Tosca’ Returns, Defined by Its Quiet Moments

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      Aleksandra Kurzak, moving into heavier repertoire with Puccini’s opera, played the title diva as touchingly human.When Aleksandra Kurzak, a graceful lyric soprano with impressive coloratura, released an album of surprising, heavy repertoire from the Romantic and verismo eras two years ago, she seemed to announce: Staged performances are on the way.Her Tosca arrived at the Metropolitan Opera last March, and on Tuesday, she revisited the title role of Puccini’s tragedy in David McVicar’s attractive, if stolid, production. For a singer who made her house debut in 2004, scaling Olympia’s vertiginous runs and high notes in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” “Tosca” is a departure. Wagnerians and Verdians have sung it; Mozarteans, too. But an Olympia? That’s rare.On Tuesday, Kurzak’s best moments were gentle ones. Tosca, an opera singer herself, is often portrayed as a volcanic personality, a creature made for the stage whose feelings constantly threaten eruption. But Kurzak’s softly focused heroine was the kind of performer who transforms before an audience. Jealous tantrums and high moral stakes spurred her to summon fire and grit.Kurzak seemed to manipulate her otherwise silky tone to make it bigger, darker and more dramatic. It sometimes sounded swallowed and breathy. Whenever she let a more fragile sound emerge, alighting on a silvery high note or shaping throwaway lines with color and care, it was captivating. The end of her “Vissi d’arte” — when most singers are recovering from the aria’s exposed climax — was exquisitely handled.It’s unusual to remember a Tosca for the small moments instead of the big ones, but Kurzak’s approach made her Roman diva touchingly human and acutely tragic.In the orchestra pit, Carlo Rizzi also mined Puccini’s lacerating score for tenderness. Scrappy filigree accompanied the Sacristan (a characterful Patrick Carfizzi) in his fussy, officious role as the opera’s designated comic relief. The strings shivered with romance during a transitional lull in Tosca’s Act I scene with Cavaradossi. Rizzi let notes hang in the air with a hint of menace, then turned up the intensity for the score’s splashy, hair-raising torments. In Act III, he painted a dusky morning scene and signaled the nefarious business of execution to come without shortchanging either effect.Michael Fabiano lent Cavaradossi a handsome, propulsive tenor. His middle voice has consistently been gorgeous, and his stage presence kinetic, but as recently as a 2018 “Mefistofele” and a 2019 “Manon” at the Met, his high notes were unreliable. No issue there: In “Tosca,” they rang out with confidence and muscularity, capped by a dome of sound. Fabiano’s full-throttle style in “Recondita armonia” revealed the heart of a revolutionary rather than an artist; and if soft singing in his Act III solos was weak, his desperately clinging to Tosca before his execution was rending.Luca Salsi, an engrossing, casually evil Scarpia, sang in a manner more like pitched speech, pointing his voice into the hall in a way that balanced the police chief’s debonair manner and thinly veiled malice. As Spoletta, Rodell Rosel was a smarmy henchman; as Sciarrone, Christopher Job was a rugged one.McVicar’s staging is so harmless, with just enough good taste to keep detractors at bay, that it already seems like a part of the Met’s furniture, despite being only five years old. Still, with the right performers bringing a sense of intimacy to its vast canvas, it feels like a success.ToscaThrough Nov. 4, then again next spring, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Loretta Lynn Didn’t Pretty Things Up

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      The country star sang about desire, cheating, heartache and righteous revenge in three-minute vignettes that depicted lives she knew and understood.“Loretta Lynn Writes ’Em and Sings ’Em.” Plain-spoken and unassailable, that was not only the title of an album she released in 1970, but also a typically laconic summation of what made her a titan of American music.Lynn, who died Tuesday at 90, was nobody’s mouthpiece but her own, and she created an archetype that spoke to the heart of country music and reached far beyond it. Her songs were terse, scrappy and so skillfully phrased that they sounded like conversation, despite the neatness of their rhymes. With each three-minute vignette, she sketched a down-to-earth version of lives she knew and understood, refusing to pretty things up.Lynn was the coal miner’s daughter who kept her Kentucky drawl and remembered clearly what it was like growing up poor in Butcher Holler. She was a loyal wife but hardly a doormat. Drawing on the experiences of the turbulent 48-year marriage that she began in her teens, she sang about desire, cheating, heartache and righteous revenge. With anger and just a hint of humor, she set strict boundaries for both her husband and any would-be rivals in songs like “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath,” “Fist City” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough.”While mainstream country moved away from Lynn’s lean traditionalism toward arena-scale production, she persevered, earning generation upon generation of new admirers.David Redfern/Redferns“The more you hurt, the better the song is,” she told me in a 2016 New York Times interview, when I visited her at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. “You put your whole heart into a song when you’re hurting.”During the 1970s, Lynn chose and wrote songs, like “One’s on the Way” (by Shel Silverstein) and “The Pill,” that were bluntly and realistically resentful about the drudgery of parenthood. “The Pill” — with a narrator who compares herself to a brood hen and declares, “You’ve set this chicken your last time/’cause now I’ve got the pill” — was banned by many country stations when it was released in 1975, but reached the country Top 10 anyway.“I wasn’t the first woman in country music,” Lynn said in an Esquire interview in 2002. “I was just the first one to stand up there and say what I thought, what life was about. The rest were afraid to.”Lynn’s forthrightness — along with the homely details that make her songs so believable — has become a foundation of country songwriting over the last half-century: through Reba McEntire, the Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Margo Price and Ashley McBryde, to note just a few names from a list that could run into the hundreds.Her voice helped make her songs indelible. The Appalachian traditions Lynn had grown up on lingered in her music; she wrote tunes in the familiar forms of waltzes, ballads and honky-tonk shuffles. As a singer, Lynn applied what she learned from the twang and vibrato of Kitty Wells and the torchy intensity of Patsy Cline to her own voice: reedy and tart with steely underpinnings, ready to summon tearfulness or indignation, slyly eluding the beat to hesitate at one moment and blurt something the next.Lynn was broadly comic in her duets with Conway Twitty, center, including “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.”Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty ImagesShe was broadly comic in her duets with Conway Twitty, like “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” and she could open up her voice to grapple with Jack White’s electric guitar on their 2004 collaborative album, “Van Lear Rose.” Yet her more subtle moments were just as arresting.Her 1969 single “Wings Upon Your Horns,” sung by an “innocent country girl” who was seduced and betrayed — with an overlay of religious imagery that was controversial at the time — has a placid midtempo backup. But Lynn’s vocal makes every line a tangle of conflicted emotions. “You called me your wife to be,” she sings, with a bitter downward swoop on “wife”; she sings “You turned a flame into a blaze” with an upward leap on “flame” and a quaver on “blaze” that make the fire almost visible. It just sounds natural.Lynn had her prime hit-making years from the 1960s into the 1980s, as the 1980 film “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” an adaptation of the 1976 book, made her life story public. While mainstream country moved away from Lynn’s lean traditionalism toward arena-scale production, she persevered, touring through the decades and earning generation upon generation of new admirers.In recent years, Lynn embarked on a new spurt of recording with John Carter Cash, Johnny’s son, both revisiting her catalog and writing new songs. By the time she released “Still Woman Enough” in 2021, her voice had lowered a bit and taken on some grain. But it still held the ring of truth. More

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      The Sudden Rise of Zach Bryan

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOne of the year’s biggest pop breakouts is Zach Bryan, a Navy veteran who makes calm and detailed country-folk. His major label debut album, “American Heartbreak,” has steadily held in the Top 20 of the Billboard album chart since its release in May.Bryan is not a radio fixture, and mostly has found success on streaming, translating into live crowds of several thousand per night. He is also a reluctant star, offering very little to the public outside of his music and Twitter feed.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Bryan’s old-fashioned artistry and 1990s attitude, the shifts in mainstream country music that have in part set the table for his rise and how genre boundaries serve as guideposts, even for artists who assiduously try to skirt them.Guest:Grady Smith, who hosts a YouTube channel about country 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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      ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’: Bringing Loretta Lynn’s Story to Life

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      The 1976 book (and its 1980 film adaptation) helped the world see the country star’s remarkable resilience. The writer who worked by her side remembers his one-of-a-kind collaborator.When I was helping Loretta Lynn with her book, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” I hung around backstage while she performed. Sometimes she would call me out onstage and introduce me — “Here’s George, he’s my writer.” (In her Appalachian twang, it came out “rah-ter.”)I like to profess that I was not so much her writer as her stenographer. She would chatter away, whatever was on her mind, and usually it was pertinent, part of the emerging autobiography. She was a songwriter, who saw life in snappy couplets, most of them taken from her head-of-the-holler upbringing and later her tumultuous marriage with Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr. (His nickname, Mooney, came from his past delivering moonshine, and maybe sipping some of the product.)I had never written a book with somebody else, but I used my reporting and writing skills, with considerable help from Loretta’s memory and storytelling talents in the verbal Appalachian tradition. We’d do most of the talking in her motel, when she summoned me sometime before noon, and she usually had her own agenda. Tucked into the motel bed, sometimes she would be focused on something that had gone right or wrong in the show the night before, or family matters. But she was usually businesslike, respectful of the visitor.One day she wanted to talk about her late father, Melvin (Ted) Webb, who loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt for helping Appalachian people in the Depression. “Daddy thought he hung the moon,” she said. Then she would say, “George, you write a few things about FDR.” Yes, ma’am.She accepted me into her world. She knew I was a New York Times national correspondent based in Louisville, Ky., covering Appalachia. I wore jeans, had a beard and hair near my shoulders, and loved the ham and biscuits her fans sent into the bus. I had been introduced to country music in summers way upstate New York, where you could get the radio station WWVA — Hank Williams or Kitty Wells — clear as a bell from West Virginia.The writer’s wife, Marianne Vecsey, pushed for the book’s cover to feature a photo of Lynn in a high-neck Victorian dress.J.P. Roth CollectionBut I first heard Loretta in 1967, in the good old days when New York City had a country station. One day it played “Sweet Thang,” her duet with Ernest Tubb. It was written by Nat Stuckey, but pretty much told the story of Loretta and Mooney’s life.The man sings how he “slipped out of the house about sundown,” and his wife traces him down to the bar, “yellin’ loud enough to wake the dead.” Then Loretta sings, in an ominous feline yowl: “Well … has anybody here seen Sweet Thang?” The heart and soul of country music — cheatin’ songs. Or, at least his and hers. Even coming from the radio or the jukebox, her voice cut through the ozone, every inflection proclaiming, “This lady is different.”Now, in 1970 I was moving to Loretta Lynn’s home state of Kentucky. I started at the Times as a sportswriter but leaped at the offer from great Times editors Gene Roberts and Dave Jones to go cover Appalachia, I had read the book “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” by the activist lawyer Harry Caudill of Whitesburg, Ky., not far from Loretta’s Van Lear, and I wanted to follow up on Caudill’s visions.On Dec. 30, 1970, I happened to be an hour away from the horrible coal-mine explosion in Hyden. A few months later, I learned that Loretta Lynn had taken her band off the road to play a concert in Louisville for the benefit of the Hyden survivors.In the fall of 1972, I arranged an interview with Loretta in Nashville the morning after she became the first woman to win entertainer of the year at the Country Music Awards. By now country music was fused into my internal mission — telling the story of the mountains, the people, the language, the beliefs. I wanted to do right for Appalachia.The first interview was like all the ones that followed, except that she was exhausted from the awards ceremony and getting up early to be on a morning TV show. But she had time for me, a stranger. Her manager David Skepner often said, “Loretta never met a stranger,” which I would see over and over again.Loretta escorted me into her world — “mah rah-ter, George” — and I began to feel at home.I became friendly with Skepner, a Beverly Hills guy, now living in Nashville, who doubled as her bodyguard. As a city boy, I had to get used to him depositing his big iron on the windowsill when we were sitting in Loretta’s room. (“David, could you put your ball cap over the pistol, and point it toward the window?” I would ask.)I became friendly with the fans, so many of them women — particularly the Johnson sisters from Colorado, a three-person fan club — Loudilla was the leader; Kay was the heart; and Loretta Johnson was the gall.One time at a picnic, Loretta Johnson was dishing out pie, pecan, I think it was, and when I said please, she slopped it into the palm of my hand. Laughs all around. For many years, Loretta Lynn would bring up the look on my face as I lapped up the bits of pecan pie. My initiation. Welcome to the country.Mooney Lynn was my linchpin, caring for their twins at the ranch but sometimes back on the road. I liked him immensely, but then again, I wasn’t married to him. One day, sitting around their motel room, I asked Mooney and Loretta about his image, the source for the songs Loretta wrote and sang.I can still picture Mooney saying, “Hell’s bells, if it’s true, write it.”That day, the book got even better.(They never told me that Loretta had lopped three years off her age when she started performing. She said she had been 13 when she got married, when in fact she had been 16. It came out long after the book and the paperback and the movie. I never got to ask why they made her sound so young.)One other thing about the book: my wife, Marianne Vecsey, an artist, had seen a glamour photo of Loretta in a long, high-neck, frilly, white Victorian dress, and she told Bernard Geis, the publisher, that any woman would want to look at that photo. The editors, being guys, dawdled a bit, but eventually put the color photo on the front cover.When the book came out, the editors heard reports that ladies who lunch — on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue or Michigan Ave. — were picking up the book, and buying it, and buying it.Loretta and Mooney trusted me to get it right. I was her “rah-ter,” but the pretty lady in the frilly dress had put herself into the project the way she wrote songs. It’s her book. More

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      Nathalie Stutzmann Ushers In a New Era at the Atlanta Symphony

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      Stutzmann, the only female music director among the largest 25 American orchestras, takes the podium with a strong sense of self.At Bravo! Vail this summer, Nathalie Stutzmann was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in a reading of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony as volatile as the thunder that echoed around the mountains that evening.It wasn’t so much impulsive as poetic. The players phrased their lines with the arc and the articulation of a singer — a good one. They seemed to breathe together, too, even to gasp for air.In the depths of the first movement, immediately before Tchaikovsky’s most consuming cry of desolation, the bassoons, basses and timpani hold a low F sharp, for just a beat and a half. Most conductors plunge straight into the torment to come; no pause, after all, is marked in the score.Stutzmann waited. She inhaled. The beat and a half stretched to four, then eight. That low F sharp came to sound lonely, bereft. Only then did she let the pain flood out.Textually, it was blatant. Emotionally, it hurt. And for Stutzmann, that’s what matters.“What is respect for a score?” Stutzmann, who for three decades was among the world’s leading contraltos before she turned fully to conducting, said during an interview the next day. “Is it to play exactly what is written, or is it to play what is written and put your own life in it, your emotions, your feelings, which means sometimes you might need to take a bit of time? Why not?”She continued: “To respect the score is to make it alive, and the score lives because of us. The only thing we can do for the score is to dare.”This week, a daring new era dawns at the Woodruff Arts Center in Georgia, as Stutzmann officially takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, giving her first concerts as music director. The sole woman holding that title at one of the largest 25 orchestras in the United States, Stutzmann’s inauguration comes at the start of a season in which she also makes conducting debuts at the New York Philharmonic, the Bayreuth Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, where she oversees new productions of “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte” in May.Jennifer Barlament, the executive director of the Atlanta Symphony, called her “a really tremendous artist,” one who “brings a whole different set of voices, artistic tastes, personal experiences, musical experiences to the institution.” She added that “to have someone like her come to work with us, and partner with our musicians, is going to be transformative, because she goes for it every time as an artist.”Atlanta’s search was a thorough one. The ensemble worked its way through a longlist of 80 or so candidates after its chief for two decades, Robert Spano, announced his departure in 2018. But when Stutzmann led two streamed concerts with the orchestra during its 2020-21 season, her talent and connection with the players quickly became clear, Elizabeth Koch Tiscione, its principal oboe, recalled.“She came in and read Brahms’s Second Symphony with us,” Tiscione said. “Usually Brahms in our orchestra is played with this weightiness, and we do the same thing every time, no matter who is on the podium. She came in with this completely fresh approach.”It was crucial, Tiscione added, “that people were willing to do it, because she was so convincing. You can just tell that the way she makes music is from her truth.”BORN IN THE SUBURBS OF PARIS in 1965, Stutzmann is the daughter of two opera singers, and she grew up backstage. “I spent half of the time watching the singers, admiring them,” she said, “and half of the time in the pit, looking at these men.”She learned the piano, bassoon, cello and viola, and she attended conducting classes as a teenager; her teacher refused to let her work with an orchestra while his male students could. She turned to singing instead, though after her vocal career took off in the late 1980s, she took care to watch the conductors she worked with closely. Eventually, at the end of the 2000s, she decided to take a chance.“I sang with the best orchestras in the world, the best conductors in the world, and I felt I had achieved a lot of dreams,” she said. “Musically, it was time to try, and society was starting to change a little bit.”With Seiji Ozawa and Simon Rattle as her mentors, Stutzmann studied with Jorma Panula and started a chamber ensemble, Orfeo 55, in 2009. That group, which she dissolved a decade later, was originally intended to allow her to sing Baroque repertoire that countertenors had otherwise claimed, she said, but podium dates started to follow.“First I was asked to conduct Handel all the time,” Stutzmann recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I love Handel, but I’m not a Baroque conductor.’ My core repertoire is Strauss, Bruckner, Wagner. I get a strong sound from the orchestra. This was also gender related. You know, women can conduct Mozart, and anything else, no. It’s so stupid.”Even if Stutzmann says she declined many invitations to avoid limiting herself, her rise has been stunningly rapid. In 2017, she became the principal guest of the RTE National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin, then the chief conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra in Norway a year later. In 2021, she picked up a post as principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which she releases an invigorating recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos (with Haochen Zhang) on Friday.Stutzmann has her own style, and even her own sound — brawny yet supple. She never wanted to be “one of those soloists who pretends to be a conductor,” she said, and if there is little risk of that now, her interpretations are propelled forward through melodies, with even minor lines in textures singing out characterfully. Fittingly, she is willing to use her voice in rehearsals.“Some conductors will get up there and give you some strange metaphor, and you’re like, you want me to play — purple?” Tiscione said. “I had one conductor tell me that he wanted a solo to sound like I cooked with too much garlic. She’ll just sing the phrase. It’s refreshing.”At a time when orchestras are generally responding to pressures to diversify, and in an Atlanta metro area where the population is now majority-minority, Stutzmann nevertheless will focus on traditional repertoire from the Baroque and Romantic eras. (One exception is a Hilary Purrington premiere in her first concerts.)“I need to be touched,” Stutzmann said, explaining her commitment to performing works in which she feels particularly inspired. “If I don’t feel touched myself, I don’t want to conduct. It’s hard, because you are asked to conduct many things. But I try to stay very strong with my identity. I will never be someone who can just conduct anything every day.”Gaetan Le Divelec, Atlanta’s vice president of artistic planning as of this season, who was, for several years, Stutzmann’s manager at the Askonas Holt agency, said that while he had learned over time not to assume anything about her, he intended to broaden the range of guest conductors who work with the ensemble, and that they would continue to venture further afield.“Part of my role is going to be to introduce Nathalie to the variety of styles that exist in music from living composers, and I certainly hope that she will be part of that picture,” he said. “But this is an important topic for any orchestra, and an orchestra’s approach to new music should, in any case, be bigger than just its music director.”Stutzmann is passionate about music that the orchestra needs more of to build up its sound, Barlament said, as well as music that Spano and his longstanding principal guest, Donald Runnicles, played infrequently, such as the works of Mozart.“I think of diversity and variety and things that are new from a lot of different perspectives,” Barlament said. “I wouldn’t say Franck’s ‘Le Chasseur Maudit’ is common repertoire, and I don’t even know when the last time is that the orchestra played Bizet’s Symphony.” (Stutzmann will conduct both pieces this season.)Stutzmann, for her part, insists that taking on an American music directorship will not stop her staying true to her identity.“You like it or you don’t like it, what can I do?” she said. “The secret is still to focus on the music.” More