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      Lamont Dozier, Writer of Numerous Motown Hits, Dies at 81

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      With the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Mr. Dozier wrote dozens of singles that reached the pop or R&B charts, including “You Can’t Hurry Love,” by the Supremes.Lamont Dozier, the prolific songwriter and producer who was crucial to the success of Motown Records as one-third of the Holland-Dozier-Holland team, died on Monday at his home near Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 81.Robin Terry, the chairwoman and chief executive of the Motown Museum in Detroit, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. In collaboration with the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Mr. Dozier wrote songs for dozens of musical acts, but the trio worked most often with Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave,” “Jimmy Mack”), the Four Tops (“Bernadette,” “I Can’t Help Myself”) and especially the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby Love”). Between 1963 and 1972, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team was responsible for more than 80 singles that hit the Top 40 of the pop or R&B charts, including 15 songs that reached No. 1. “It was as if we were playing the lottery and winning every time,” Mr. Dozier wrote in his autobiography, “How Sweet It Is” (2019, written with Scott B. Bomar).Nelson George, in his 1985 history of Motown, “Where Did Our Love Go?” (named after another Holland-Dozier-Holland hit), described how the youthful trio had won over the label’s more experienced staff and musicians. “These kids,” he wrote, “had a real insight into the taste of the buying public” and possessed “an innate gift for melody, a feel for story song lyrics, and an ability to create the recurring vocal and instrumental licks known as ‘hooks.’”“Brian, Eddie and Lamont loved what they were doing,” Mr. George added, “and worked around the clock, making music like old man Ford made cars.”In his memoir, Mr. Dozier concurred: “We thought of H.D.H. as a factory within a factory.”The Supremes (from left, Diana Ross, Cindy Birdsong and Mary Wilson) in 1968. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team wrote and produced 10 No. 1 pop hits for the group.Klaus Frings/Associated PressLamont Herbert Dozier — he was named after Lamont Cranston, the lead character in the radio serial “The Shadow” — was born on June 16, 1941, in Detroit the oldest of five children of Willie Lee and Ethel Jeannette (Waters) Dozier. His mother largely raised the family, earning a living as a cook and housekeeper; his father worked at a gas station but had trouble keeping a job, perhaps because he suffered from chronic back pain as a result of a World War II injury (he fell off a truck).When Mr. Dozier was 5, his father took him to a concert with an all-star bill that included Count Basie, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. While the music excited the young boy, he was also impressed by the audience’s ecstatic reaction, and resolved that he would make people feel good in the same way.As a high school student, Mr. Dozier wrote songs, cutting up grocery bags so he would have paper for the lyrics, and formed the Romeos, an interracial doo-wop group. When the Romeos’ song “Fine Fine Baby” was released by Atco Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic, in 1957, Mr. Dozier dropped out of high school at age 16, anticipating stardom. But when Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler wanted a second single, Mr. Dozier overplayed his hand, saying the group would only make a full-length LP. He received a letter wishing him well and dropping the Romeos from the label.After the Romeos broke up, Mr. Dozier auditioned for Anna Records, a new label called founded by Billy Davis and the sisters Anna and Gwen Gordy; he was slotted into a group called the Voice Masters and hired as a custodian. In 1961, billed as Lamont Anthony, he released his first solo single, “Let’s Talk It Over” — but he preferred the flip side, “Popeye,” a song he wrote. “Popeye,” which featured a young Marvin Gaye on drums, became a regional hit until it was squelched by King Features, owners of the cartoon and comic-strip character Popeye.After Anna Records folded in 1961, Mr. Dozier received a phone call from Berry Gordy Jr., brother of Anna and Gwen, offering him a job as a songwriter at his new label, Motown, with a salary of $25 a week as an advance against royalties. Mr. Dozier began collaborating with the young songwriter Brian Holland.“It was like Brian and I could complete one another’s musical ideas the way certain people can finish one another’s sentences,” Mr. Dozier wrote in his memoir. “I realized right away that we shared a secret language of creativity.”From left, Mr. Dozier, Brian Holland and Eddie Holland in an undated photo.Pictorial Press Ltd /AlamyThey were soon joined by Brian’s older brother, Eddie, who specialized in lyrics, and began writing songs together — although hardly ever with all three parties in the same room. Mr. Dozier and Brian Holland would write the music and supervise an instrumental recording session with the Motown house band; Eddie Holland would then write lyrics to the track. When it came time to record vocals, Eddie Holland would guide the lead singer and Mr. Dozier would coach the backing vocalists.In his memoir, Mr. Dozier summed it up: “Brian was all music, Eddie was all lyrics, and I was the idea man who bridged both.”Sometimes he would have an idea for a song’s feel: He wrote the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” thinking about Bob Dylan’s phrasing on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Sometimes he concocted an attention-grabbing gimmick, like the staccato guitars at the beginning of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” that evoked a radio news bulletin.And sometimes Mr. Dozier uttered a real-life sentence that worked in song, as he did one night when he was in a Detroit motel with a girlfriend and a different girlfriend started pounding on the door. He pleaded with the interloper, “Stop, in the name of love” — and then realized the potency of what he had said. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team quickly hammered the sentence into a three-minute single, the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”In 1965, Mr. Gordy circulated an audacious memo to Motown staffers that read in part: “We will release nothing less than Top Ten product on any artist; and because the Supremes’ worldwide acceptance is greater than other artists, on them we will release only #1 records.” Holland-Dozier-Holland stepped up: While they didn’t hit the top every time with the Supremes, they wrote and produced an astonishing 10 No. 1 pop hits for the group.“I accepted that an artist career just wasn’t in the cards for me at Motown,” Mr. Dozier wrote in 2019. “I still wanted it, but I was constantly being bombarded with the demand for more songs and more productions for the growing roster of artists.”When Marvin Gaye, who had turned himself from a drummer into a singing star, needed to record some material before he went on an extended tour, Mr. Dozier reluctantly surrendered a song he had been saving to relaunch his own career as an artist: “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You).” Mr. Gaye showed up for the session with his golf clubs, late and unprepared, and nailed the song in one perfect take.Mr. Dozier and the Holland brothers left Motown in 1967, at the peak of their success, in a dispute over money and ownership, and started two labels of their own, Invictus and Hot Wax; their biggest hit was Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold,” a Top 10 hit in 1970.“Holland-Dozier-Holland left and the sound was gone,” Mary Wilson of the Supremes lamented to The Washington Post in 1986.Mr. Dozier, center, with Eddie Holland, left, and Brian Holland in 2003.Vince Bucci/Getty ImagesMr. Dozier wrote some more hits with the Hollands (many credited to the collective pseudonym Edythe Wayne because of ongoing legal disputes with Motown) and struck out on his own in 1973, resuming his singing career.He released a dozen solo albums across the years, but without achieving stardom as a singer; he had the most chart success in 1974, most notably with the song “Trying to Hold On to My Woman,” which reached the Top 20, and “Fish Ain’t Bitin’,” with lyrics urging Richard Nixon to resign, became a minor hit when his label publicized a letter it had received from the White House asking it to stop promoting the song.Mr. Dozier had greater success collaborating with other artists in the 1980s, writing songs with Eric Clapton, the Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall (who puckishly released “Infidelity” with the credit “Hucknall-Dozier-Hucknall”) and Phil Collins, who hit No. 1 in 1989 with the Dozier-Collins song “Two Hearts.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Dozier served as an artist-in-residence professor at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and as chairman of the board of the National Academy of Songwriters, imparting his hard-won wisdom to younger writers.“Always put the song ahead of your ego,” he wrote in his memoir. And he revealed the secret to his relentless productivity: “Writer’s block only exists in your mind, and if you let yourself have it, it will cripple your ability to function as a creative person. The answer to so-called writer’s block is doing the work.”Jenny Gross More

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      Olivia Newton-John’s Transformation Into Pop Royalty

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      When the singer smudged her classy image, she “unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus,” our critic writes: “The vestal vamp.”We would’ve just called her ONJ now. But part of the appeal, I think, was all of that name, the possible royalty of it. Nobody wanted to waste a syllable. Olivia Newton-John. Just saying it might bestow a crown. The rest of her allure sprang from that classiness: She was neither queen nor first lady of anything, yet she seemed, ultimately, like … a lady. And that was something she could have some fun with, a category she could smudge. Eventually. I mean, this was a person who, at the heights of funk, disco and glam rock, recorded six country-esque albums, throw pillows for your ears. And most of their singles topped what was once known as Billboard’s easy listening chart. (So maybe she was the queen of that.)By the end of the 1970s, though, she had figured out the whole “lady” thing and spent 90 percent of her first Hollywood movie disguised that way, as a princess. There’s a lot going on in “Grease.” Most of it’s bizarre and has to do with sex and a sort of pure whiteness, particularly how, in both cases, Newton-John, who died on Monday at 73, was holding onto hers. Not for John Travolta, per se, but for “You’re the One That I Want,” the duet with Travolta (and a triple-X bass line) that ends the movie. The virginal bobby-soxer Newton-John had been playing was now in pumps and skintight black pants. Her hair had expanded from Sandra Dee to Sophia Loren. You could see her shoulders.That transformation unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus: the vestal vamp. Nothing about the presentation of a four-minute pop song would be the same. Neither would anybody who sat through a dozen showings of “Grease.” The only reason my 5- and 6- and 10-year-old selves put up with it at all was the knowledge that we’d soon get to the part at the amusement park where Olivia Newton-John turns into an ONJ.In the movie “Grease,” Sandy (Newton-John, left) transforms into a sexpot to get back together with Danny, played by John Travolta.Paramount PicturesI didn’t learn much from Newton-John about sex. Only that its existence was there to be implied and winked at. It’s true that her pelvis was, at last, affixed to Travolta’s near the end of “Grease” but on a redundant ride called the Shake Shack. And, yeah, she does spend that zany video for “Physical” in a disco spa studded with Adonic gym rats, but when the tanned, fatless men walk off hand-in-hand, she gleefully locks arms with one of the spa’s tubbier clients. They’re the ones she wants — and, consequently, the ones I wanted, too.The videos, the hit songs, her lip-syncing them on “Solid Gold”: I also wanted Olivia Newton-John. And one of my parents must have known this because there was a copy of her second greatest hits LP, from 1982, at our house. And knowing what my parents weren’t listening to, the only reason it would’ve been there is for me; I wasn’t even 7. The thing about that album — more than any I’d ever studied up to then, except for Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” (you could see his shoulders) — is the gatefold, a good album’s second strongest intoxicant. And this one was just Newton-John in a horizontal display, head to thigh, hair shortish and characteristically a-feather. White knit top, tight white pants, some gold jewelry. Was she truly on her back or simply shot to look that way? I’d have to wait a whole two months, for the gatefold of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (not a dissimilar pose but with a tiger cub), to see anything as mesmerizingly erotic.Newton-John revamped herself at the dawn of the music-video era. She knew the power of the art form — her Grammy-winning 1982 video album, “Olivia Physical,” was the “Lemonade” of its day, inspiring a prime-time network TV event. She only had to toy with going too far. Her real thing was limitations. She seemed to know what hers were — as a vocalist, as a dancer, as an actor. And she luxuriated in them. There was nothing inherently subversive about her. Yet she was an ironist — the person you’d least expect to see, say, mounting a fat dude on a massage table and riding him like a mechanical bull. Even when she was straining for eros — the way she was in the video for “Tied Up,” in a red leather vest, her mouth seemingly in want of irrigation — you were watching an angel pursue a dirty face.That’s the reason she survived “Xanadu” — the musical belch, from 1980, with her as a Greek muse on roller skates: an imperviousness to the surrounding absurdity. It’s the reason she came to embody the sleek fantasies of pleasure, painlessness and profit of the 1980s. Nothing disturbed her. She disturbed no one. Even that gatefold: She’s fully clothed! The skates and spandex were a prop and a metaphor. And “Physical” remained the decade’s longest-running No. 1 song.Gene Kelly, left, and Newton-John in the movie “Xanadu,” from 1980.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut at some point, she stopped perking us up. Well, we stopped letting her. Madonna had come along and threatened to put her out of business. I swore she was a parody of Newton-John’s flirty, jolly, heaven-sent persona; of her being staunchly white while adjacent to a wealth of Black and Latin music. What would it mean to mean it, not just to get dirty but to be dirty, to mix in some of that Blackness and brownness? “Like a Virgin,” for instance, is Newton-John but more ornately ironic, authentically, imaginatively lewd. Even though Newton-John’s hit machine was still going by 1985, she was already becoming a memory of a kind of innocence. Which is to say that she was never, ever forgotten. She’s a place pop music has been trying to get back to: the Stacey Q’s and Cathy Dennises, the Carly Rae Jepsens and Dua Lipas; the one and only Kylie Minogue.What I like to go back to with Olivia Newton-John isn’t her body at all. It’s her singing. There’s always more to it than I remember. I was putting it in sundresses and leotards. But, boy, that voice could work a singlet, too: She learned to flex her soprano so that it bent, barked, yipped and squealed. “Totally Hot,” from 1978, occasionally features sounds more typical for Sea World. Yet any deficiencies in soulfulness were repaid in spirit.She also perfected a great trick: layering. Instead of just one of her, suddenly, in a pre-chorus or a chorus-chorus, there was a fleet, of lilting, undulating, rainbowing, billowing, Bee Gee-ing selves, on “Have You Never Been Mellow,” on “A Little More Love,” on “Magic.” She had but one body, but on a record, she could become a multitude. The warmth of that sound; the glorious blue-sky of it still warrants exclamation — like “oh my lord” but alternatively divine. I like “ONJ.” More

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      A Music Career Is a Risky Bet. In ‘Mija,’ the Stakes Are Even Higher.

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      A new documentary follows Doris Anahi Muñoz, the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, as she balances the needs of her family with artistic dreams.As a middle schooler with big dreams living in San Bernardino, Calif., Doris Anahi Muñoz made her bedroom walls a canvas. She painted her hands on the back of her door, with the words, “These are the hands of Doris Anahi Muñoz, and they’re going to touch the hearts of millions.”As the main subject of the Disney original documentary “Mija,” Muñoz, an artist manager-turned-musician, aims for her story to do just that: connect with children of immigrant families who are yearning to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, yet who may feel alone or guilty about their desires when their households face urgent daily struggles.The film’s director, Isabel Castro, follows Muñoz as she works to catapult the careers of Latin musicians including Cuco and Jacks Haupt while helping her undocumented Mexican family navigate the green-card system.“A lot of us, we carry the weight of our families, and I needed a film like this growing up,” Muñoz said in a recent video interview from Boyle Heights, Calif., where wooden bookshelves outlined with cascading foliage and porcelain vases filled the room. “So, I’m just glad that being in this seat as a protagonist allows other people to see themselves.”Muñoz, the only of her parents’ three children who was born in the United States, grew up playing saxophone and violin in a family of Evangelicals who hoped she would use her talents to become a worship leader. During the summer after her sophomore year of college, Ed Sheeran, with a nod, invited her onstage to sing along to his hit single “Lego House” at a radio event, reigniting her passion for music.She wrote songs and performed live for a while, but she realized that she was uncomfortable in the spotlight and would rather work behind the scenes. Her first major project on her own was managing Cuco, a bedroom-pop artist who broke out by staying true to his Mexican American heritage and making music for Latino kids who felt unseen.Muñoz and the musician Jacks Haupt in a scene from “Mija.”DisneyThe film traces Muñoz’s early work with Cuco as she orchestrates his sold-out concerts and helps him land a seven-figure record deal, a success that helped fund her parents’ application to become permanent residents of the U.S.When the pandemic hits and (spoiler alert!) Muñoz must cope with the pressure of splitting with Cuco, she rediscovers her purpose in Jacks Haupt, an indie singer-songwriter from Dallas who, like many young artists, has struggled to find a wider audience.Haupt, 22, grew up listening to Joe Bataan’s “Mujer Mía” and other Latin soul classics in her Chicano household, and also took inspiration from Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin. Haupt’s bilingual music has since pivoted to a more electronic, trip-hop sound, and she often sings about heartbreak and mental health.Haupt calls music her diary, and it has been a support system for her over the years. But at the beginning of her musical career, she said she lacked the support of her family. “Working in the arts as a photographer, videographer, immigrant, POC parents are more like, ‘This isn’t making money,’” Haupt said in a video interview from Dallas.Building a career in the arts can take money and time — resources that are in short supply for immigrant families facing challenges like navigating the path to citizenship and finding financial footing. The film documents Muñoz’s tight-knit bond with her family: expressing gratitude during a Thanksgiving meal, taking trips to visit her brother, who was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, and the ongoing battle for her parents’ green cards.“For those who feel alone in their process, I want this film to hold them,” Muñoz said. “I had big dreams about my family reuniting and coming together and hopefully telling their story one day as a kid.”Haupt called music her diary.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe “Mija” director Castro’s credits include the documentary shorts “USA v Scott,” about an American geographer facing prison time for aiding migrants in Arizona, and “Darlin,” a New York Times op-doc about a Honduran mother’s fight to reunite with her son after they were divided by the U.S. border detention policy. Castro said she was drawn to Muñoz and Haupt’s stories as an indie music lover who recognized a lack of representation for Latin artists in that world.“I just became really interested in the ways that Doris, Cuco and the entire community were really trying to figure out a place for themselves in this exact musical space that I had grown up listening to,” Castro said.The film shifts from Haupt’s dreamy onstage performances and Los Angeles recording sessions to a heated phone conversation with her mother about what is traditionally considered profitable work. Castro said the conversation was reminiscent of ones she had held with her own mother, in moments when she felt guilty for not living up to expectations.“My ambition and my career is rooted in a sense of responsibility for the sacrifices that my parents made for me,” she said.“I hope people, especially Latinx viewers and viewers of color, will come away from the film feeling a sense of hope,” Castro added, “feeling a sense of security that pursuing creative careers is a worthwhile ambition, and that it can pay off with hard work and tenacity.”In the time since “Mija” was filmed, Muñoz has closed her management company and has begun releasing her own music under her artist name, Doris Anahí. Last week, she performed at the film’s premiere in Central Park, as did Haupt. (The film opened in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Aug. 5, and will come to Disney+ on Sept. 16.)“Our parents come from a generation of survival,” Muñoz said, “and we are a lucky generation that gets to think about thriving rather than surviving.” More

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      At Mostly Mozart Concerts, Casual Vibes and High Musical Values

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      The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra offered a series of breezy but focused programs at Lincoln Center, filled with treats big and small.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra bears the name of a festival that no longer exists, but over the last three weeks, it played 12 concerts that showed it still has a place in the new creative landscape at Lincoln Center.In April, Lincoln Center announced a newly streamlined festival for this year, “Summer for the City,” that subsumed (or really replaced) a sprawling collection of offerings, including the Mostly Mozart Festival and Midsummer Night Swing. Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, Shanta Thake, has said that the organization plays a civic role, so while the updated lineup still sprawls, its emphasis is squarely on community. Social dances, celebratory gatherings for Pride and Juneteenth and a tribute to the Brooklyn-born hip-hop star Notorious B.I.G. have filled the schedule, with many events at no cost.Classical music, a longtime centerpiece of Lincoln Center’s identity, was allotted roughly two and a half weeks of prime time in the middle of its three-month calendar.How does a genre that has wrestled with accusations of elitism fit with the populism of “Summer for the City”? The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and its music director, Louis Langrée, wasted no time finding out, offering up breezy yet focused concerts that unfurled as effortlessly as a picnic blanket — welcoming, comforting and filled with treats big and small.I attended the first four programs before being sidelined by COVID-19, and the concerts I saw were a joyous success. They largely followed a template of spotlighting highly personable soloists and making a quiet point of incorporating works by Black composers after years of neglect.As a siren sounded in the distance while Conrad Tao performed at Damrosch Park, he paused and shot the audience a look as if to say, “I’ll wait.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe series began with a free show at Damrosch Park that juxtaposed works by Black composers and their contemporaries. Joseph Boulogne’s rousing overture to “L’Amant Anonyme” flowed seamlessly into a briskly elegant account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17. A glassy, small-scale piece by William Grant Still connected more tenuously to George Gershwin’s ecstatic “Rhapsody in Blue.”Taking a jubilant jaunt through Gershwin’s crowd-pleaser, the pianist Conrad Tao seemed to conduct his own symphony at the keyboard, plunking out a pitter-patter of notes, coloring in sunset shades and slamming his forearm delightedly on the keys. At one point, as a siren sounded in the distance, he paused and shot the audience a look as if to say, “I’ll wait.” The crowd loved it.Before the concert, Thake led the audience in a spoken ritual derived from the three themes of “Summer for the City” — remember, reclaim and rejoice — a reflection on the healing process that communities have undertaken during the pandemic.The orchestra played six programs in total, performing each twice, on consecutive days. The other five programs, all at Alice Tully Hall, had a choose-what-you-pay model, with a minimum price of $5. The concerts lasted 90 minutes or less without intermission.Concertgoers at the Damrosch Park concert on July 19.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesWhether it was the ticket prices, the inviting run times or the chance to escape the enervating heat, concertgoers seemed energized and unguardedly enthusiastic, often applauding between symphonic movements (though, instinctively, not after the slow ones). And why not, given the conductor Xian Zhang’s tight, decisive reading of Beethoven’s Fourth in the first Alice Tully Hall program? Summer seems a good time to shed some layers and some concert decorum.There’s something heartening about audiences in shorts and T-shirts leaping to their feet in a concert hall to cheer well-turned showpieces by Ravel, Barber and Jacques Ibert. It shakes loose the idea that casual vibes are incompatible with high musical values.The luminous Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique sang a rendition of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” so touching and minutely observed that I instinctively reached for my husband’s hand. De Bique’s voice, rich and grounded, seemed to bloom from somewhere deep inside her, taking on a slender, shimmery quality as it extended toward the top of her range.Other soloists included the saxophonist Steven Banks, who radiated mellow glamour in the long lines of a Glazunov concerto; the violinist Augustin Hadelich, who dug into the raw strangeness of Ravel’s “Tzigane” and drew out the warm midrange of his Guarneri violin in a relative rarity by Boulogne; and the violinist Joshua Bell, who played pieces by Florence Price and Henri Vieuxtemps in a concert I missed led by Jonathon Heyward, who will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony in 2023.The replacement of printed programs with QR codes felt like a budgetary constraint, a nonchalant trimming of concert amenities and a nod to our new, continuing pandemic normal. But it drew at least one loud complaint from an attendee.As if in reply, Langrée took the stage and offered entertaining explanatory remarks — a new tradition in the making — before his translucent account of Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. The conductor Roderick Cox spoke movingly of his program a few nights later, though the distinctive atmosphere of Barber’s “Knoxville” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite suffered from his unshaped orchestral climaxes.There were new frontiers, too: Nokuthula Ngwenyama wrote the beautifully direct “Primal Message” (2020), a more emotive version of the Arecibo message sent into space in 1974, and the ensemble’s musicians invited concertgoers to mingle with them in the lobby after each concert.If the series told a story — one of remembrance, reclamation and exultation — then it seemed appropriate to conclude with Mozart’s Requiem, a piece of vaulting yet intensely personal feeling, which I was sad to miss on Friday and Saturday.But there’s another story here: Langrée’s contract runs through the 2023 season, and the orchestra’s contract is up for negotiation in February. (Thake has already expressed a desire to engage it next season.)If these concerts felt like the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s audition to join Thake’s new Lincoln Center, then the ensemble did everything it could to secure its part. More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Is No. 1 on the Charts

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      The pop star’s seventh album debuts at No. 1 with the second-biggest opening week of the year, while her song “Break My Soul” climbs to the top of the Hot 100.For her last two solo albums, Beyoncé turned the music business on its head by rewriting the standard marketing playbook. “Beyoncé” (2013) came without warning and had a music video for every song; for “Lemonade” (2016), she teamed with HBO for an hourlong film. Each went straight to No. 1 and became an instant pop-culture moment.For her latest, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé, now 40, took a more conventional route, sending a single to radio stations weeks ahead of time and taking advance orders for CDs and vinyl (though she released no music videos). The album leaked online two days early — the kind of breach that once upon a time could have sunk a new release.But “Renaissance” opens at No. 1 on the Billboard chart with the equivalent of 332,000 sales in the United States, slightly beating early predictions and notching the second-highest debut of the year, behind Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House.”Beyoncé also dominates the Hot 100 this week, as “Break My Soul” rises five spots to No. 1, becoming her first song to top Billboard’s flagship singles chart since “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” in late 2008 and early 2009.The success of “Renaissance,” her seventh solo studio LP — every one of them, beginning with “Dangerously in Love” (2003), has gone to No. 1 — affirms Beyoncé’s status as a chart-topping megastar. Her opening-week total bests those of a string of recent albums by younger, streaming-heavy stars like Drake (204,000), Kendrick Lamar (295,000) and Post Malone (121,000). But it was nowhere near the total for “Harry’s House,” which started with 521,000, thanks in part to record-breaking vinyl sales. (Now in its 11th week out, “Harry’s House” is in fifth place on the album chart.)The 332,000 “equivalent album units” for “Renaissance” includes 179 million streams and 190,000 copies sold as complete packages, including 121,000 on CD and 26,000 on vinyl, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data behind Billboard’s charts. “Lemonade” arrived with the equivalent of 485,000 sales, and “Everything Is Love” (2018), Beyoncé’s joint album with Jay-Z, arrived at No. 2 with 123,000.Also this week, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” by the Puerto Rican streaming king Bad Bunny, drops to No. 2 after holding the top spot for the last five weeks straight. Counting two earlier peaks since it came out in May, “Verano” has logged seven times in the top spot.The K-pop boy band Ateez opens at No. 3 with its latest mini-album, “The World EP.1: Movement,” driven largely by CD sales. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” a steady hit since early last year, is No. 4. More

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      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

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      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      A Road Trip to Sample America’s Many, Many Music Festivals

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      Four classical music festivals. Three children. Two exhausted parents, with a brave grandfather in tow. One bedraggled minivan.It’ll be fun, my wife promised me. Surprisingly, it was.While some of my colleagues have been taking in the mighty festivals of Europe over the past few weeks — premieres in Aix-en-Provence, France, and the charms of Salzburg, Austria — the revival of programming after the darker days of the pandemic affords the adventurous a fresh chance to get better acquainted with the summer offerings here in the United States.There are plenty of them, after all. Several of our major orchestras benefit from their own vacation homes, whether Tanglewood for the Boston Symphony or Blossom for the Cleveland Orchestra, Ravinia outside Chicago or the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Others, not so fortunate in padding their bottom lines with picnickers, play on in their usual halls, or piece together short residencies in various climes.Then there’s Ojai, and Ravinia, and Spoleto, and Caramoor, and Bard, and Cabrillo and many, many more festivals; if your budget stretches and your stomach is strong, you can even take a jet boat down the Colorado to hear “Quartet for the End of Time” in a riverside grotto outside Moab.Attending a music festival in the Rockies offers the chance to combine listening with visiting national parks and resorts like this one, in Vail. Andrew Miller for The New York TimesThe opportunities are endless, but for anyone interested in combining soundscapes with scenery, as our Junior Rangers demand, one road trip through the mountains begs to be explored.My family and I — including children aged 6, 3 and not quite 1 — started with the up-and-coming Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, which is within easy reach of Rocky Mountain National Park. Then it made sense to a climb up to the ski resorts west of Denver — first to Bravo! Vail, then to the next valley for the Aspen Music Festival and School. Jackson Hole, Wyo., didn’t look all that far away, really. There, the Grand Teton Music Festival plays just outside the park of the same name, with Yellowstone National Park an hour to the north. Why not?Of course, we could have left at that, and that would probably have been wise. Still, there’s also an alluring route back south, down through the Canyonlands of Utah and on toward Santa Fe Opera. Tempting.With the rest of the family flying home, I reported on “Tristan und Isolde” and “M. Butterfly” there recently. But what about the other four festivals, which we visited over 12 days in July?They are all quite different, serving discrete audiences in distinct atmospheres even if spending time at some of them is expensive, whatever the ticket price. Each has its own idea of what — and whom — a summer festival should be for, and each turned out to be valuable in its own way.John Adams leading a performance of his composition “City Noir” at the recent Colorado Music Festival.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesColorado Music FestivalGlance at it from a distance, and you might mistake the auditorium of the Colorado Chautauqua, where this 44 year-old, five-and-a-bit week festival is based, for Wagner’s temple in Bayreuth. Built in 1898, it is perched on Boulder’s southwestern flank, the Flatiron rock formations brooding behind it with hiking trails all around. Get there at the right time, and you can just about hear a rehearsal from the playground down the hill. Our youngest watched deer wandering the grounds from his swing, while I eavesdropped on some John Adams.Fetchingly ramshackle, the wooden hall offers an acoustic that is as comfortable for string quartets as for the festival’s orchestra, and it draws an audience that listens closely. It’s a solid platform, one from which the music director, Peter Oundjian, who has recently taken over the Colorado Symphony in Denver, hopes to turn this festival from a primarily local event to something with broader reach.That’s an easy enough mission to believe in if you have friends like Adams. Contemporary scores are dotted through even the more traditional evenings here, which this season included commissions from Wang Jie and Wynton Marsalis, and there’s a flair to the programming that mixes slightly unusual works with cornerstones of the canon.Peter Oundjian, the festival’s music director, hopes to turn it from a primarily local event to something with broader reach.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesEven so, my visit coincided with the start of a new music week that Adams took part in organizing as composer in residence, albeit without offering any novelties himself. The Attacca Quartet came in for a night to feast on works by Philip Glass and Gabriella Smith, but of the three concerts I heard, the two orchestral programs were most revealing of this festival’s virtues.Take the second: a brief premiere from Timo Andres, “Dark Patterns,” prefaced Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, a violin concerto in disguise that smartly refracts Baroque forms and was played amazingly by the soloist Helen Kim, before Samuel’s father, John, stepped up to conduct his own, pulsating “City Noir.”Adams visibly enjoyed himself on the podium, and with good reason: The festival ensemble is an admirable one. The players mostly hail from regional orchestras — the wind soloists, for instance, include regular-season principals from Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii and Florida — and they come together each summer to play with terrific commitment and no shortage of virtuosity.They can play pretty much anything, too. The first program I heard was one of three that intriguingly paired the piano concertos of Beethoven with works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oundjian busily drew crisp, energetic support for Jan Lisiecki, who was a rather clangorous soloist in the “Emperor” Concerto, but the real shock was the rarefied eloquence that his orchestra lavished on the Vaughan Williams’s World War II-era Fifth Symphony. I’m still thinking about it, weeks later.Concert-goers listening from the lawn seats at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater during the Bravo! Vail summer music festival.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesBravo! VailCelebrating its 35th season, the delightfully friendly Bravo! Vail is an entirely different kind of affair. Digging deep into its donors’ pockets, it brings three major orchestras, as well as a chamber ensemble, to town for six intense weeks of performances, the most prominent of them in a stunning outdoor amphitheater named for the local vacationer-turned-civic-booster Gerald R. Ford (yes, that one).It’s a jaunt that the ensembles clearly value. The fourth one rotates from year to year; this season, it was the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. But the Dallas Symphony Orchestra just signed up to appear through 2024, while the Philadelphia Orchestra is contracted through 2026 and New York Philharmonic through 2027.The magical setting — cradled in forested mountains, the amphitheater abuts a botanical garden and backs onto a creek — doubtless has a lot to do with that, and the players and their families have time to enjoy the ski resort’s abundant amenities.But Juliette Kang, the first associate concertmaster of the Philadelphians, told me during a break in rehearsals that she and her colleagues also take inspiration from the hardy folk who turn down a seat in the pavilion, where the atmosphere is relaxed enough that nobody minded my six year old drawing the flowers behind the stage during Brahms’s Fourth, for the tiered lawn. Out there, where our baby babbled his way through Bruch to no complaints, lightning warnings are routinely ignored and no amount of rain sends the attentive patrons scuttling for cover; tarpaulins, not just golf umbrellas, are necessary here.Classics and pops are mostly what these audiences brave thunderstorms for — the Texans brought the Beatles as well as Beethoven — even if the artistic director, Anne-Marie McDermott, has valiantly begun a commissioning project that this summer saw three premieres reach the main stage. And the chamber music and free community concert series roam more enthusiastically across the repertoire.Nathalie Stutzmann conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Vail festival last month.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesWhile the Philharmonic often uses its time in Vail to test out programs for the Lincoln Center season to come, the Philadelphians repeated pieces from the season prior, given the single rehearsal on offer for each evening. Nathalie Stutzmann, their principal guest conductor, who was on the podium for the two concerts I heard, said she finds that performances seem to breathe more naturally in the mountain air; there was not even a whiff of complacency in hers.Vail’s amphitheater, with its four-paned roof redolent of ski runs, offers fair sound, and though it is a tad reticent with details, it has enough body that the Philadelphians still sounded like the Philadelphians. Deluge be damned, Stutzmann turned in one of the most honestly moving Tchaikovsky Sixths that I have heard.At the Aspen Music Festival, Gil Shaham, left, shared the spotlight with the young cellist Sterling Elliott, performing the Brahms Double Concerto.Tessa NojaimAspen Music Festival and SchoolFor the musical tourist, the problem with Aspen is that its title is a misnomer.Founded in 1949 as part of Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke’s plan to turn a sleepy Colorado town into a haven for the soul and mind alike, this venerable endeavor is best thought of as a finishing school for budding elite musicians, about half of whom now receive a free ride scholarship for the considerable costs.Although plenty of guest artists pass through for recitals, most of the hundreds of performances in the sprawling, eight-week season here have a primarily pedagogical purpose, as the students put to use what they have learned from the enviable faculty. Renée Fleming, no less, now directs the opera program with the conductor Patrick Summers.The festival serves the students, in other words, and the reverse is less the case.Not that Aspen sprawls quite as much as it once did, despite a gorgeous, $75 million campus renovation that was completed in 2016. Wind the clock back a couple of decades, and you would have found a thousand students here; this year, officials had to cut an entire orchestra from the program because of a housing shortage, leaving the student body at 500 or so. Alan Fletcher, Aspen’s chief executive, said that it’s not yet clear whether that number will become the norm.Patrons picnicking outside the Aspen festival’s Benedict Music Tent.Tessa NojaimThe Benedict Music Tent, which succeeded two previous structures as Aspen’s main venue when it opened in 2000, could do with as much of a refresh as the programming, which is dismayingly staid given the usually eclectic tastes of the music director, Robert Spano; next to the ostentatious glamour of the city, the tent looks unkempt. Tickets also don’t come cheap to sit on the hard blue benches indoors, though anyone — families included ­— can listen for free on the meadows outside.That would just about have been worth doing for the concert I heard, a Sunday afternoon feature from the school’s leading ensemble, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, that Fletcher said from the stage was “purely emblematic” of what the school aims to achieve.Faculty take the principal seats while their students play alongside them; alumni often return as soloists, in this case the ever-popular violinist Gil Shaham, who shared the spotlight with the excellent young cellist Sterling Elliott in an engaging Brahms Double Concerto. Although the tent’s acoustic is distant, and the conducting of the guest maestro John Storgards in Saariaho’s “Ciel d’Hiver” and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6 was oddly brusque, the playing standards were high.Grand Teton Music FestivalI’m not sure that the residents of Jackson Hole, whether they are fortunate enough to enjoy their first or their fourth homes in sight of the Grand Tetons, quite understand what they have going for them at Walk Festival Hall, a happily unpretentious, 700-seat indoor theater beside the gondolas in Teton Village.Donald Runnicles, the music director here since 2006, is a no-nonsense man with a no-nonsense festival. Though a piano series started this year and there are weekly chamber music nights to attend — if you, unlike my wife, can tear yourself away from seeing the sun set from the mountaintop — the main attraction is the Festival Orchestra, which operates on a subscription-season schedule, performing programs twice and rehearsing thoroughly.It shows. This is another ensemble made up of players from across the country: some retreat here from orchestras as prestigious as the Boston and Chicago symphonies, while a number usually play in opera pits, including at the Metropolitan Opera, and a few are even conservatory professors who come here to sharpen their performance skills. Some of the musicians stay for the whole season, but most can only manage two or three weeks. If that constantly changing roster might pose problems — five concertmasters are listed in the program book, and 15 horns — it also lends an eagerness to the playing.Donald Runnicles, who has been the Grand Teton music director since 2006, conducting the Festival Orchestra in July.Chris LeeRunnicles, one of the most underrated musicians of his generation, knows how to use it. The all-Russian program I heard was of unerring quality, one in which even a political statement was carefully conceived for its musical value.Before a strong, big-boned account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which is often thought of as the composer’s declaration of liberation after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Pittsburgh Symphony violinist Marta Krechkovsky, whose family remains in Ukraine, played the solo line in Myroslav Skoryk’s “Melody,” which has been in wide use as a hymn to freedom since the Russian invasion. Heard in that context, the Shostakovich became all the more immediate.You could have asked for a mite more focus to the orchestral sound in the concert, though you would struggle to hear a more astounding rendition of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, or anything else to be honest, than the one that soloist Augustin Hadelich contributed.You could ask for a little more variety in Grand Teton’s programming generally, too, although there’s a dexterity to how it incorporates new music — John Adams’s “Absolute Jest” alongside Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” for instance — and it’s no small feat to put on Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony and Puccini’s “La Bohème” in a place where bears roam the night.But to quibble like that would be to miss the point; not every festival needs to be an Ojai. What Grand Teton offers, like Bravo! Vail and the Colorado Music Festival in their own ways, is a simpler kind of joy, of good music in glorious surroundings. I know where I’d while away my summer, if I could. More

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      Mary Ellin Barrett, Daughter and Defender of Irving Berlin, Dies at 95

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      When the great American songwriter’s character came under attack after his death, Ms. Barrett sought to correct the record with a candid but tender memoir.The songwriter Irving Berlin defined a very American style of sunniness. “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” delighted in competition. “Puttin’ On the Ritz” made social mobility silly. “White Christmas” exalted innocence. With “God Bless America,” Berlin, an immigrant from Russia, wrote the unofficial second national anthem of his adopted home.Yet by the time he died at 101 in 1989, after years of avoiding the spotlight and restricting the use of his music, many puzzled over an apparent gap between Berlin’s art and his character.“The man who wrote such wonderfully romantic songs as ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ ‘Always’ and ‘What’ll I Do?’ appears to have been an egotist and a boor,” the book critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote in 1990 in a review of a biography. In a news article the same year, the paper reported that people in the theater and music businesses described Berlin as a “recluse” and “miser.”Then, in 1994, Mary Ellin Barrett, one of Berlin’s three daughters, disputed the criticisms of her father in an interview with The Times and announced a mission: “Presenting the father I knew to the world.” She said she was writing a book.“Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir” was published later that year. In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”Ms. Barrett died on July 16 in Manhattan at 95, her daughter Katherine Swett said.Ms. Barrett’s account of family life helped reconcile Irving Berlin the artist and Irving Berlin the man.Ms. Barrett did not take the position of a biographer, giving a full account of Berlin’s life, or the position of a critic, translating to prose the power of his music and the sources of his creativity. (She instead called him an “inexplicable genius.”)But her account of family life helped reconcile Berlin the artist and Berlin the man.She recalled her father making head-spinning comparisons between their childhoods. Young Mary Ellin got a scar from falling off a swing; young Israel Beilin, as he was then known, got a scar in the berth of the ship he took to America when someone dropped a penknife on him, almost hitting his eye.In the East River, near Mary Ellin’s penthouse home, her father had once, at 8 years old, nearly drowned; when rescued, he was found still clutching the pennies he had earned that day selling newspapers.He often seemed a “shaky, uncertain man,” Ms. Barrett wrote — drumming his fingers, molding the inside of dinner rolls into compact balls, smoking too many cigarettes, chewing too much gum, jumping when the telephone rang, fiddling with his piano.Yet out came hit after hit after hit; between his 20s and his 60s, he wrote about 1,500 songs.Ms. Barrett came to see her father’s drive as the product of anxiety and toughness that lingered from a ghetto childhood. He was “the street fighter,” she wrote, “not noisy and brawling but quiet, dogged,” never shaking the sense that he acted “with his back against the wall, writing, composing, negotiating his way out of a corner.”Mary Ellin Berlin, who was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Manhattan, grew up in a different universe. Her girlhood memories included dinner parties with the Astaires, the Goldwyns, the Capras and Somerset Maugham, who once lay on the floor, balanced a glass of water on his forehead and stood up without spilling a drop.Though she sometimes had to chase her father for attention and felt alienated by the fame of her parents — her mother, Ellin Mackay, was an heiress and a popular novelist — Mary Ellin felt less resentment than enchantment with her good fortune. When she relentlessly invited people to the family’s theater house seats for her father’s 1946 Broadway megahit, “Annie Get Your Gun,” one annoyed friend told her to knock it off.She graduated from Barnard College in 1949 with a degree in music and worked as an editorial trainee at Time magazine, where she met the author and journalist Marvin Barrett. They married in 1952; he died in 2006. Later in her career, Ms. Barrett worked at Glamour and Vogue magazines and wrote book reviews for Cosmopolitan. She published three novels in addition to the book about her father.Ms. Barrett, right, with her sisters Elizabeth Peters, left, and Linda Emmet at Town Hall in New York in 2016, attending a performance of the one-man show “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.”Eugene Gologursky/Getty ImagesMs. Barrett’s sister Elizabeth Peters died in 2017. In addition to her daughter Ms. Swett, Ms. Barrett is survived by another sister, Linda Emmet; two other daughters, Elizabeth Matson and Mary Ellin Lerner; a son, Irving Barrett; five grandsons; and a great-grandson.When Ms. Barrett was 2 years old, her infant brother, Irving Jr., died on Christmas Day. Although her father, who was Jewish, would later write one of the nation’s best-loved Christmas tunes (her mother was Irish Catholic), her parents came to “hate” the holiday, her mother told her when Ms. Barrett was an adult.As a girl, Mary Ellin did not know that she had ever had a brother. At the time, she considered Christmas “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” she wrote. She saw a revealing parallel looking back at the celebrations of her youth.“The tree was trimmed behind closed doors and revealed to the children in full splendor, with all the presents beneath it, on Christmas morning,” she wrote. “So it was with a show.” More