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      A Work of Mourning Comes to New York, With No Rothkos in Sight

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, becomes longer and grander for the Park Avenue Armory.Few pieces of music are as tied to the place where they premiered as Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Commissioned to honor the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Sorey’s work was first heard in February in that intimate room, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s brooding late canvases. But the site specificity goes deeper: “Monochromatic Light” closely echoes the instrumentation and the mournful, glacial style of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” written for the space soon after it opened in the early 1970s.Sorey’s work wouldn’t seem fit for any other setting. But along with the chapel and the Houston arts organization DaCamera, the Park Avenue Armory commissioned the work, and from Tuesday through Oct. 8, “Monochromatic Light” will be presented there — with no Rothkos in sight.“We decided we wouldn’t try to recreate the experience of the Rothko Chapel,” Sorey said in an interview. “You can’t do that anywhere. You can’t redo that situation.”The Armory’s vast drill hall dwarfs the chapel, where “Monochromatic Light” was given a straightforward, concert-style presentation. The New York production, staged by the veteran director Peter Sellars, has grown to match.An octagonal playing space, nodding to the shape of the chapel in Houston, has been constructed within the drill hall. The audience — about 600, versus 150 at the premiere — is seated in the round and surrounded by eight paintings by another abstractionist, Julie Mehretu, blown up to billboard-size dimensions. A dancer is stationed in front of each painting, sinuously twisting and bending in the Brooklyn-born street dance style called flex.An octagonal performance space that nods to the Rothko Chapel in Houston has been constructed inside the Armory’s drill hall.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSorey has added to the piece itself, bringing its length to almost 90 minutes, from 50 minutes in Houston, particularly broadening the music for the pianist Sarah Rothenberg. She also plays celesta (the only keyboard instrument in the Feldman) and is joined in the center of the space by the violist Kim Kashkashian, the percussionist Steven Schick, and Sorey, as conductor.Sorey said he knew earlier this year that “Monochromatic Light” hadn’t yet reached its final form, but simply didn’t have enough time before the premiere to write more. And the rehearsal process in New York, particularly the addition of the dancers, had inspired him.“At the Houston performances, while I was very satisfied, I felt I needed more of this experience,” he said. “In terms of having more material and developing off what we did at the chapel, now I’m at a place where it’s like, we’ve left the chapel. I’m dealing with everything the chapel stood for, but also things we’re dealing with now.”His additions had arrived in the musicians’ email inboxes just a few hours before a rehearsal on Sept. 14, on an upper floor of the Armory. The stress level in the room was high. But the meditative music, with its spacious if unsettling quiet, gradually brought down the blood pressure.With mock-ups of the Mehretu paintings on the walls, a few dancers stood in for what would eventually be the full complement of eight, while four singers — one for each voice part — represented the choir of Trinity Wall Street. The choreographer, Reggie Gray, a flex innovator also known as Regg Roc, sat to the side watching, and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines slowly walked around the space, intoning the score’s vocalizations, which can evoke fragments of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”Tyshawn Sorey, center right, conducting his work, which he has expanded to 90 minutes for the Armory production.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSellars occasionally called out cues to the dancers, representing shifts in mood that would be reflected in the staging by dramatic changes in the lighting on the paintings. “The heart of the world opens,” he cried at one point; at another, “walking on the razor-blade bridge on the day of judgment.”Gray, in a joint interview with Sorey, Sellars and Mehretu, said of the dancers’ movements: “It’ll be different every single night. It’s how do the emotions go through their bodies at that time.”When he was discussing the formation of a creative team with the Armory, Sorey said, he wanted to reunite with Sellars, after working with him on several iterations of “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” an evening-length recomposition of Josephine Baker songs, starting in 2016. Sellars, in turn, suggested Mehretu (with whom he had staged Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Only the Sound Remains” in 2016) and Gray (with whom he created “Flexn” at the Armory in 2015).At first, Mehretu didn’t know how closely to hew to the works in the Houston chapel. “I thought a lot about making black paintings,” she said. What she ended up producing was far more active and jittery than the Rothkos, with the swooping calligraphic gestures and kaleidoscopic, colorful flecks she is known for.“I contacted Peter as I was working and said, ‘These are not monochromatic,’” Mehretu recalled with a laugh.Among the performers are members of the choir of Trinity Wall Street, left, rehearsing here with the production’s director, Peter Sellars.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesBut, Sellars said, “a lot of the staging is monochromatic light. Seeing these paintings under these single lighting temperatures or colors, they get new identities under monochromatic light.”The underpaintings — invisible in the final works — are blurred images, mostly taken from the news, including coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Those ghosts of history and trauma, personal and societal, are a veiled presence, like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in Sorey’s score.“It’s constantly playing back as the piece is going, but you only hear it now and again,” Sorey said. “You have this musical information that is in a lot of ways inspired by that spiritual, but you only really hear it from time to time. It’s there, and it’s not there.”In Sellars’s telling, the past is invoked in this way in “Monochromatic Light” in order to heal and press toward the future. “Coming out of the two years we’re coming out of, it’s important to move forward,” he said, “The past is ongoing, but we have to move this whole thing forward.”Unlike in Houston, where audience members faced in the same direction toward the performers, the Armory’s in-the-round presentation also has political reverberations. “It’s about a society looking at itself,” Sellars said. “There is no way out; we’re all in this together. None of us is experiencing the exact same thing, but we’re with each other.”Sorey’s music, he added, “is experiential. It’s lived in; it’s an experience.”The question is how audiences will respond to an experience so long, spare, rigorous and ritualistic. “It is about endurance,” Sellars said. “How long a minute can be. Not ‘Oh, let’s change the subject.’ We’re going to stay here until we really find something. It’s a space of concentrated investing.”And the music gives the sense that it could keep on quietly expanding forever. Sorey, however, said that he thought it had reached its final form: “This feels like what it is.”Then, with a grin, he added: “I’ve got another hour to add. Easily, right?” More

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      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More

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      Rihanna to Perform at Super Bowl Halftime

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      The singer’s highly anticipated return to the stage will include the first halftime show under the N.F.L.’s new sponsorship deal with Apple Music.Rihanna will perform at the Super Bowl in Glendale, Ariz., on Feb. 12 as the N.F.L. enters the first year of a new deal with Apple Music as primary sponsor of the halftime show, replacing Pepsi.It is the first scheduled return to the stage for an artist who last performed publicly at the Grammy Awards in early 2018, and whose most recent solo album, “Anti,” was released in January 2016.“We’re excited to partner with Rihanna, Roc Nation and the N.F.L. to bring music and sports fans a momentous show,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president for Apple Music and Beats.The announcement is an about-face for the singer, who was among the artists who rebuffed invitations to perform on football’s biggest stage in support of Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback who has been unable to find a new team since he became a free agent in March 2017. Kaepernick accused the league of blackballing him because of his kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality toward Black people.Facing player protests and an impending loss of cachet for the show, the N.F.L. in 2019 signed on Jay-Z and Roc Nation, the rapper’s entertainment and sports company, as “live music entertainment strategist,” to consult on the Super Bowl halftime show and contribute to the league’s activism campaign, Inspire Change.Rihanna is both managed by Roc Nation and signed to its record label, according to the company’s website.Last February’s halftime show in Inglewood, Calif., was the third under Roc Nation’s guidance. The hometown rap icons Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar and the singer Mary J. Blige delivered well-regarded performances which book-ended that of the rapper Eminem. In what appeared to be a reference to Kaepernick’s protest, Eminem knelt after performing “Lose Yourself” in a move that was anticipated by N.F.L. officials who had seen him do it in rehearsals.In the years since Rihanna’s last album release, she has appeared as a guest on a small handful of singles by other artists — including DJ Khaled’s “Wild Thoughts,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard chart in 2017 — and intermittently teased new music of her own, though none has materialized.As a result, what would be Rihanna’s ninth studio album has taken on a near-mythic quality among fans — who regularly refer to it as “R9” — even as the singer has focused instead on her business empire, which includes the Savage x Fenty lingerie brand and skin care and makeup lines that have contributed to her $1.7 billion net worth, as estimated in 2021 by Forbes.Earlier this year, Rihanna had her first child with the rapper ASAP Rocky.In a 2019 interview with T Magazine, the singer of hits like “Umbrella” and “We Found Love” said the new album would, as long rumored, be a reggae project, while joking about the fan-given name. “I’m about to call it that probably, ’cause they have haunted me with this ‘R9, R9, when is R9 coming out?’ How will I accept another name after that’s been burned into my skull?”More recently, Rihanna told Vogue, “I’m looking at my next project completely differently from the way I had wanted to put it out before,” adding: “It’s authentic, it’ll be fun for me, and it takes a lot of the pressure off.” More

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      Belle, Sebastian and Me

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      Following the world’s twee-est band down the Pacific Coast after a divorce and the death of a parent.May 31, 2022, Seattle, Paramount TheaterMy favorite band is on the road and I’m putting on a mask and going with them. I’ve been a little beaten up by the world the last couple years — maybe the same amount as anyone, but that’s plenty. I need to get out. Like the saddest, oldest groupie in the world, I’m following the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian down the west coast of America.I’m starting out in Seattle, where I live. My grown children come along and this feels just right, for the band’s presence in my life maps directly onto my motherhood. I discovered them when my first child was a baby. The voice of the lead singer, Stuart Murdoch, accompanied me over the next two decades, ringing out as I drove the school run in my VW van (little kids), then my Prius (medium-size kids), then a sensible Mazda (teenagers).Or should I say “lisping out.” If you know anything about Belle and Sebastian, you know they are twee and also, sometimes, the singer lisps. That’s what’ll be on their grave: TWEE LISPERS. As a person who grew up suckling at the bitter teat of punk rock, I didn’t see myself ending up here. But Belle and Sebastian has been the great musical love of my adulthood, and as the years slip by, it’s my belief that I am lucky to love anything at all. I don’t exactly understand why I love them, but I do.I’ve seen them so many times that I know exactly where to stand: at the rail, stage right, because that’s the direction Stuart faces when he plays piano.At the Paramount, the kids and I line up, stage right, and the band files out. There are so many of them: seven in the band, plus the few local musicians they add at each stop. They sound fantastic, but there are off-kilter notes: Sarah Martin, the violinist, is out with Covid. And they don’t do their traditional rave-up dance party to “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” when the audience jumps onstage with them. They’re all here, my secret friends, my superheroes, but I feel slightly cut off from the experience. My eyes dart around the crowded theater, looking for maskless folks who might be exposing me and my kids to the virus.I’m focused on my own fear, my own story. I am here, but not quite here.June 1, 2022, Portland, Roseland TheaterBarreling down I-5 the next morning, I have some time to reflect, not necessarily a welcome state of affairs. Reflection is a young woman’s game — it tends to go better when you don’t have quite so much to reflect about. And I have plenty: In the last two years, my very long marriage has ended (amicably, but still), I’ve sold the family home, I’ve nursed my beloved father to his death in the midst of a Covid-riddled hospital. These are the things I think about, or try not to think about, as I drive the familiar freeway.In Portland, I’m meeting up with my boyfriend — such a strange word for me, a person who was married for 20-plus years. He’s a music writer who has occasionally mocked me about my B & S love. He’s game to go to some shows, but I’m a little worried he might not get it, whatever it is. That indefinable thing that makes me love this band.Roseland is hot and crammed with all kinds of people — young queer couples, middle-aged former punks, families with little kids. My boyfriend angles us to a spot stage left, and I’m too embarrassed by my trainspotter-ish tendencies to insist that we move to the other side. I fall into conversation with a bunch of fellow enthusiasts, the kind of middle-aged white men who show their band love by accruing details about set lists and venues.Sarah is back! The venue is tiny. Stuart is right there. I start to feel the miracle of seeing a band you love — they have flown out of your car speaker or your earbuds and are now made flesh before your eyes. Stuart sits on the edge of the stage and slings one leg over the other. He looks like a very relaxed, debonair lamb. He extemporizes verses to “Piazza, New York Catcher.” A bald man leans his bulk on me. Two wild-haired young people in front of us twine their arms around each other’s necks. We all hold our breath and can’t believe our luck.When we walk out into the hot night, my boyfriend pulls his mask down and says, “I loved that” with great force.June 3, 2022, Oakland, Fox TheaterThe drive to Oakland passes in a dream of sunshine and grubby rest areas and Starbucks. This is the road trip that has been eluding me since the pandemic started. It turns out I only need a single day of being, as Gram Parsons sang, out with the truckers and the kickers, and I am starting to feel more human. My boyfriend, with the fervor of the newly converted and the completist tendencies unique to music writers, Spotifies his way through the Belle and Sebastian catalog as we drive.At the Fox, in downtown Oakland, I take my spot at the rail. The band fills the stage and the evening unfurls its magic. There’s a mysterious exchange between band and audience at their best shows; their very multitudinousness makes you feel somehow like you’re part of their project. All these other people are in the band, why not you? I forget my fears, I forget to be annoyed by the other audience members, or afraid of them. I lose myself in the sea of fans.When we walk outside, people line the sidewalks, dancing and singing. I had forgotten what it was like to be “out among ‘em,” as my granny used to say. It feels like the world has erupted with joy.The next day we go to the de Young to see a show of Alice Neel paintings. Neel burst into creative flower in midlife. In the 1970s her work became vibrant, celebratory, wicked, funny, communal. Her paintings are crowded with unexpected people wearing violet scarves and robin egg blue eye makeup. I walk around and around the galleries, taking in the spectacle of unending difference. “People Come First,” the show is called.And then I see it, the why of my love: Belle and Sebastian people my world. Their songs are filled with louche, ungovernable characters: the lazy painter Jane, who gets a dose of thrush from licking railings; Judy, who fantasizes about horses; Sukie, who likes to hang out in the graveyard; Hillary and Anthony, who kill themselves because they are bored and misunderstood; Chelsea and Lisa, who find solace in each other’s arms.My own world, over the last few years, has grown smaller and harder. Between divorce and death and quarantine, my soul has shrunk like a wool sweater in a washing machine. Even as I’ve walked alone through my difficulties, trying to solve every problem through sheer force of my solitary will, Belle and Sebastian have kept me company — with the characters they’ve invented, and with the performance of collaboration that defines the band. “We’re four boys in our corduroys,” one of their oldest tunes goes, “we’re not terrific, but we’re competent.” Their bleak cheerfulness has made them my boon companions, even when I was trying my hardest to do everything myself, when I was beginning to see other people as the enemy. They remind me that people come first.We have tickets to shows in Southern California but we’ll abandon the tour and stop here in San Francisco for a while. We’ve gotten what we came for. And we’re awfully old to be driving that far.Episode is a weekly column exploring a moment in a writer’s life. Claire Dederer is the author of “Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning” and “Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses.” More

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      Stalin Once Banned This Opera in Russia, but Audiences Still Enjoy It

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      “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, a tale of love and betrayal once banned in Soviet Russia, is returning to the Metropolitan Opera.When Joseph Stalin gives your opera a scathing review in Pravda, history is bound to find a spot for you.Such was the case for Dmitri Shostakovich, whose “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” has certainly taken its place in the history books as a classic modern opera, but also as an infamous moment in opera history. In 1934, it was the toast of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known then, before setting off on a tour of the Soviet Union for nearly two years. But it was turned into a reviled piece of music after Stalin, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, attended a performance in January 1936 in Moscow.The Soviet leader called it “muddle instead of music, an ugly flood of confusing sound” and “a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and crashes” in a review attributed to him in Pravda, then the official newspaper of the Communist Party. The opera was banned for decades in the Soviet Union, and Shostakovich feared being arrested. It returned to Russian stages, in a revised version, in 1962 under Nikita S. Khrushchev (though Shostakovich’s original opera is the standard now).As “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” returns after eight years to the Metropolitan Opera on Sept. 29 (for six performances through Oct. 21), the timing feels suddenly urgent against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This production, which premiered in 1994, was first directed by Graham Vick, who died in 2021, with sets and costumes by Paul Brown in a vaguely 1950s setting. For some, the opera stands as testament to one composer’s patriotism, but also to his disdain for the ruling party, all wrapped up in dissonant, volatile music and a raw depiction of lust, violence and the struggle for truth and freedom.“I think every single note he wrote was about him and how he saw the world he was living in, and in that context ‘Lady Macbeth’ is an absolutely seminal work,” said the British director Tony Palmer, whose film “Testimony” in 1988 starred Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich. “Most of the Russians knew instinctively that Shostakovich spoke for them, which says a lot about the power of his music. That’s why it will always resonate, particularly at this moment.”Keri-Lynn Wilson, the conductor, leading a rehearsal. This production will be her Metropolitan Opera debut.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaThat resonance feels particularly strong for the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is making her Metropolitan Opera debut with this production.“The parallel right now is that Putin is trying to destroy artistic expression just as Stalin did,” Ms. Wilson said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “This opera, to me, feels like a direct affront to that, so this is a vehicle for me to channel this incredible anger that I have toward Putin.”Ms. Wilson, who is Canadian with Ukrainian roots, for the past several months has been conducting the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which she conceived this spring, and organizing with her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. They helped line up the Ukrainian musicians, as well as performance dates and funding, with the assistance of the Ukrainian government, for a tour across Europe (and in Washington and New York), so moving from that experience to “Lady Macbeth” felt like a natural segue, she said.“I have cousins who are fighting, and they are writing to me and thanking me for what I’m doing with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra,” Ms. Wilson said. “What it is for me is the feeling of doing justice to show that we can really perform Russian music while shouting at Putin.”Anger is a theme that runs throughout “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” Based on the novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Nikolai Leskov, it tells the story of Katerina, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who falls in love with a village worker named Sergei. The opera’s depiction of their affair is highly sexual, and after a couple of heat-of-the-moment murders gone wrong, the lovers are exiled to a Siberian labor camp and Sergei takes a new lover. The tragic ending, on an icy river, has some of Shostakovich’s most jarring and riveting music. It was a huge success — for a brief spell.“What a lot of people don’t realize is that there was an 18-month gap between opening night of this opera and when Stalin went to see it,” Mr. Palmer said. “There were more performances of this opera in Russia those 18 months than operas of Wagner, Puccini or Verdi.”Shostakovich in the early 1940s. He feared being arrested after “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was banned in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesDespite his fear of backlash after Stalin’s review, Shostakovich continued to be incredibly prolific. In 1937, he unveiled his Fifth Symphony, which was a triumph both with the Communist Party apparatchiks, who saw it as the composer honoring the roots of classical Russian music, and with the intelligentsia of Russian culture who saw it as a requiem for the Great Purge, which Stalin had unleashed the year before.“Shostakovich put everything that he defends as a human and a composer into ‘Lady Macbeth,’ but his genius is that he found a way to compromise and exist in that world after that,” said Kirill Karabits, the Ukrainian-born chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England. “He wanted to remain true to himself but write in a way that satisfied the authorities.”“His music after ‘Lady Macbeth’ is different because it has so many layers,” he added. “He was hiding his criticism. Are his finales happy endings? Or are they happy endings through struggle?”Ms. Sozdateleva in rehearsal. She will make her Metropolitan Opera debut with “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaFor the Russian soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in a role she has sung several times in Europe, the opera stands on its own for what Shostakovich intended as an artist and a human being: the power of love and betrayal.“The most important thing for me is the theme of all-consuming powerful love and how important it was for Shostakovich to portray such deep feelings and create such a complex character,” Ms. Sozdateleva said. “What’s remarkable is that by the end of the opera, she is a murderer, but the audience is sympathetic to her.”Shostakovich’s understanding of his heroine — and his own reality in the Stalin era — plays into the opera’s rocky history, not to mention its legacy as bold art full of messages and even musical notes that are still being deciphered.“If you wrote a line of poetry that said, ‘Stalin was a bad man,’ then you were dead,” said Mr. Palmer, the director of the Shostakovich film. “But if you wrote a harsh tune that says it, it was a lot harder to prove.” More

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      Charles Castronovo, an American Tenor, Is ‘at Home Everywhere’

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      The Metropolitan Opera is just one of the stops in a busy itinerary for Charles Castronovo, a New York-born singer who performs around the world.In an age of steep global competition, some tenors come and go. Not Charles Castronovo.Since leaving the Metropolitan Opera’s program for young artists just over two decades ago, he has proved his tenacity in a range of lyric and, steadily, more dramatic roles. He compares the requisite balance of vocal refinement and mental stability to a “yin and yang” relationship.“You have to be very sensitive to create something beautiful onstage,” he said by phone from London, “but at the same time remain quite strong because there are ups and downs in a career, let alone in life.”Mr. Castronovo, 47, has a full schedule at leading houses on both sides of the Atlantic where he has become a regular fixture. He started the season this month as Don Ottavio in a revival production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Royal Opera House in London. Next up is the Teatro Verdi Salerno in Italy, where he will sing the leading tenor part in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur.”Also coveted in French-language repertoire, Mr. Castronovo will return to the Vienna and Berlin State Operas next year for Massenet’s “Manon” and Cherubini’s “Médée.” At both the Bavarian State Opera this December and at the Met, from May 26 to June 9, he will take on the classic role of Rodolfo in Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The tenor pointed to the sincere and direct nature of the character, a poet who becomes smitten with the fatally ill seamstress, Mimi: “He’s super in love, super romantic, super jealous, super crazy — all those things at once. And you think, why did he do this? But I find his reactions to the situation very honest.”Mr. Castronovo drew a parallel to Alfredo in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” a role that he has now sung over 200 times. “They act exactly how I would imagine a young guy in love would,” he explained.Mr. Castronovo with Irina Lungu in a 2011 production of “La Traviata” in Aix-en-Provence, France.Bertrand Langlois/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe music of Verdi will increasingly come into focus for the tenor, as his voice has grown richer and darker. This year, he will release his first solo album — of Verdi arias — on the label Delos.He said that the works of the composer’s middle period, in particular, were “really fitting like a glove.”“It has just a bit more oomph to it,” he continued. “It feels like the next step — probably because I have sung a lot of Mozart and other bel canto [repertoire].”Mr. Castronovo was born in Queens in New York City and raised in California. He credits his ability to tolerate constant travel to the roots of his mother, who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador at 16 (his father is originally from Sicily). “I can find a way to feel at home everywhere,” he said.The singer discovered opera as a teenager through a recording of Plácido Domingo in the title role in Verdi’s “Otello.”“For me, it was like the rock ’n’ roll of classical music because it was dramatic and sexy and strong,” he recalled. “So I listened to tenors’ CDs and tried to mimic them at home. Before I knew it, that was all I could do.”Once in his early twenties, Mr. Castronovo entered a prestigious track that included singing small roles as a resident artist at the Los Angeles Opera and joined the Lindemann Young Artists Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1999, Mr. Castronovo made his professional Met debut as Beppe in Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci.”“In the end,” he said, “you have to get onstage as much as possible. It’s a very different thing to sing a whole role in a studio or in a lesson.”Mr. Castronovo immediately landed leading parts at smaller American opera companies. In 2000, his career migrated to Europe with performances at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland, then at the Berlin State Opera, Vienna State Opera and Royal Opera House.“It took off like crazy,” he recalled. “I am happy to have survived and to keep getting better. It’s [a question of] constantly readjusting; adding new roles; finding new challenges and overcoming them.”He said he was now at a point in his development where he could allow himself to focus less on vocal technique and more on dramatic expression.“I can concentrate more on the arc of the character and add a nuance here and there,” he said. “I feel comfortable enough technically to let myself go emotionally.”Performing as Rodolfo at the Bavarian State Opera last season, he became so carried away that he nearly screamed the character’s utterance of “Mimi” that ends the opera as the heroine dies of consumption, also known as tuberculosis.“When you get choked up and feel like crying, you cannot sing a perfect note,” he explained. “But I could only do it at the very end because I don’t have anything else to sing after that. It was actually perfect.” More

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      Jim Post, Known for a Memorably ‘Groovy’ Hit Song, Dies at 82

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      He and his wife, Cathy Conn, had a Top 10 single with “Reach Out of the Darkness” as Friend & Lover in 1968. It’s still played today, but it was their only hit.Jim Post, best known as half of the duo Friend & Lover, whose only hit was a memorable one — “Reach Out of the Darkness,” which proclaimed with flower-power earnestness, “I think it’s so groovy now that people are finally gettin’ together” — died on Sept. 14 in Dubuque, Iowa. He was 82.His former wife Janet Smith Post, with whom he wrote two children’s books, said his death, in hospice care, was caused by congestive heart failure.“Reach Out of the Darkness,” which rose to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1968, featured Mr. Post and his wife at the time, Cathy Conn, singing lyrics that say, in part:Don’t be afraid of loveDon’t be afraid, don’t be afraidDon’t be afraid to loveListen to meEverybody needs a little love.Although the lyrics say “Reach out in the darkness,” an executive of Verve Forecast Records, the label that released the record, gave it the title “Reach Out of the Darkness.” That title suggested something different to Mr. Post, who wrote the song.“Reach out in the places where you’re not enlightened,” he explained to The South Bend Tribune in 2009. He then recited the chorus: “Reach out in the darkness, reach out in the darkness, reach out in the darkness and you may find a friend.”The song fared better than the duo’s album of the same name, and after a few more singles that were not successful, Friend & Lover disbanded and Mr. Post and Ms. Conn divorced. Ms. Conn died in 2018.Mr. Post injected extra elements into “Reach Out” for a 2009 recording, giving it a radically new arrangement and merging it with “Get Together,” the late-1960s Youngbloods hit that urged listeners, “Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now.” He called the medley “Reach Out Together.” He said at the time that “Reach Out,” mashed up with a song from the same era with a similar sensibility, was as relevant as it had been in 1968.“What is the theme of our country now?” he asked. He answered his own question: “Coming together.”“Reach Out of the Darkness” received new life in 2013 when it was heard over the closing credits of a sixth-season episode of “Mad Men” while Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was being reported on television. Writing on the arts and culture website Across the Margin, L.P. Hanners said that the upbeat 45-year-old song “was perfectly paired with the duality featured in the final scene of ‘Man With a Plan.’”The song was also heard on the soundtrack of the 2015-16 TV series “Aquarius,” which starred David Duchovny as a homicide detective on the trail of Charles Manson in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.Jimmie David Post was born on Oct. 28, 1939, in Houston and grew up on a farm about 20 miles outside the city. His father was a longshoreman, his mother a homemaker.A singer from an early age, Jim won a school talent contest in first grade, which led to a performance on a local radio show. Later, he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1972, he was a “successful evangelistic singer” who had performed in more than 500 churches around the United States by the time he was 22.In the early 1960s, Mr. Post became part of a three-man folk group, the Rum Runners, which in 1963 released a version of the traditional song “You Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dog Around” as a single on Mercury Records. When they played at a club in Kansas City, Mo., a year later, Dick Brown of The Kansas City Star wrote, “To a major extent, the vocals depend on the remarkable tenor voice of Jim Post.”While on tour in Canada with the Rum Runners, Mr. Post met Ms. Conn, a dancer, and left the group to be with her. They soon began performing as Friend & Lover and made their name at the Earl of Old Town, a folk club in Chicago where singers like Steve Goodman and John Prine also performed.Although Friend & Lover was a folk act, their records used studio musicians and achieved more of a pop sound — and, at least at first, pop success.After the breakup of both Friend & Lover and his marriage to Ms. Conn, Mr. Post became a solo act and returned to folk music.“Jim was a wonderful character with a wide vocal range,” the folk singer Bonnie Koloc, who watched Mr. Post perform both with Ms. Conn and alone at the Earl of Old Town, said in an interview. “He was such an enthusiastic performer. We all loved him.”Mr. Post, who was married and divorced five times, is survived by a daughter and a grandson.He later changed directions, conceiving and touring with one-man musical shows. The first, in 1986, was “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West,” about a 19th-century lead-mining rush in Galena, Ill., where he lived for many years.Then, in the mid-1990s, when he began to look like Mark Twain, Mr. Post created “Mark Twain and the Laughing River,” a show that married his songs to Twain’s words. The CD of the show earned him an American Library Association award for notable recordings.He followed that about a decade later with “Mark Twain’s Adventures Out West.”“Reach Out of the Darkness” remained a notable part of Mr. Post’s life 54 years after its release, through continued airplay and the royalties he received.“Two months ago, he got a check for $6,000,” his friend Bob Postel said in an interview.He added: “He was always proud that he wrote it and it surprised the hell out of him that it was a hit. That song paid for a lot of gas.” More

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      Red Hot Chili Peppers Honor Eddie Van Halen, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Margo Price, Jamie xx, the Comet Is Coming 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.Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘Eddie’Red Hot Chili Peppers memorialize Eddie Van Halen and 1980s Los Angeles with what sounds like an old-fashioned, real-time studio jam in “Eddie.” Anthony Kiedis sings biographical snippets — “My brother’s a keeper/I married a TV wife” — while Flea’s bass and John Frusciante’s guitar chase each other all the way through the song, in an ever-changing counterpoint of hopping bass lines and teasing, wailing, shredding, overdriven guitar — the sound of a band in a room, still pushing one another. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘Muscle Memory’In “Muscle Memory,” Kelsea Ballerini orchestrates an instinctive reunion with an old flame — “my body won’t forget our history” — with classic tools: two chords, a backbeat, a lead guitar with wordless caresses. “How long will you be back in town?” she asks, concealing her eagerness. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Change of Heart’Margo Price reaches toward the 1960s and the confrontational side of psychedelia with “Change of Heart.” A wiry blues guitar riff and jabs of organ hint at the Doors as Price delivers a breaking-away song that toys with paradoxes: “You run from danger/straight into trouble,” she sings, adding, “Way down deep you’re as shallow as me.” Just to keep things off- balance, every now and then the band adds an extra beat, while a long, gradual fade-out suggests she’s still a little reluctant to move on. PARELESJamie xx, ‘Kill Dem’It’s now been seven long years since the D.J., producer, and longtime xx member Jamie xx released his beloved solo album “In Colour,” but this year he’s put out two rousing new singles: first the ecstatic “Let’s Do It Again” and now the elastic “Kill Dem.” Built around a sample of the dancehall great Cutty Ranks’ “Limb by Limb,” Jamie minces his source material into barely discernible syllables and launches it into hyperspace, leaving its component parts to ping off one another with a bouncy, exuberant energy. ZOLADZThe Comet Is Coming, ‘Pyramids’The British jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who lived in Barbados from ages 6 to 16, is at the core of multiple groups with different lineups. In the Comet Is Coming, he works with the synthesizer player Dan Leavers, or Danalogue, and the drummer Maxwell Hallett, a.k.a. Betamax, in a zone where electronic dance music and jazz collide. “Pyramids” is from the trio’s new album, “Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam”; the title of this track might allude to “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead, which shares some of the same ascending yet foreboding chords. Danalogue uses 1980s synthesizers for plump bass tones and upward swoops; Betamax mixes drums and drum machines, constantly accenting different offbeats. And with his meaty tone on tenor saxophone, Hutchings plays a jumpy, dissonant line that’s equally mocking and party-hearty, a bent Carnival shout. PARELESWitch, ‘Waile’In the 1970s, the Zambian rock band Witch — an acronym for We Intend to Cause Havoc — fused garage-rock, psychedelia and funk with African rhythms, spurring a movement called Zamrock. The wider world discovered them with the release of a 2011 collection, and surviving members of the band — the singer Emmanuel (Jagari) Chanda and the keyboardist Patrick Mwondela — returned to the studio in 2021 backed by international musicians, including the Dutch neo-psychedelic songwriter Jacco Gardner. “Waile,” written in 1978 but not previously recorded, addresses “sorrow and suffering” and the separation of a family. It moves through a percolating xylophone-and-guitar riff, blasts of fuzztone, some brisk African funk and, midway through, a slower lament carried by women’s voices before the beat picks up again and hard-nosed guitar riffs push ahead — undaunted. PARELESFlo, ‘Not My Job’On “Not My Job,” the British girl group Flo update the glittering sound of Y2K pop-R&B with a little modern-day therapy-speak: “It’s not my job to make you feel comfortable,” the trio asserts on the chorus. “If you ain’t being vulnerable, that says it all.” The blingy sheen, skittering beat and synthesized strings all conjure an aesthetic you may have not even realized you were nostalgic for — it’s giving “Case of the X”; it’s giving “The Writing’s on the Wall” — albeit enlivened with a fresh, contemporary twist. ZOLADZLil Nas X, ‘Star Walkin’If Lil Nas X continues to play jester, expertly, on social media — this week, he posted impishly hilarious videos of himself sending pizzas to protesters outside of one of his concerts, and of his newly minted wax figure FaceTiming his confused friends — his new single “Star Walkin’” suggests that he is still interested in using his music as an outlet for feelings that complicate that persona, like anxiety, light melancholy and self-doubt. “They said I wouldn’t make it out alive,” he sings defiantly on this gleaming, synth-driven track, which serves as the theme song for this year’s League of Legends World Championship. The one-off certainly doesn’t rank among his most memorable singles, but it’s further proof that he’s figured out a reliable sonic formula to turn personal apprehension into steely braggadocio; by the end of the song, he asks, “Why worship legends when you know that you can join them?” ZOLADZEmiliana Torrini & the Colorist Orchestra, ‘Right Here’Emiliana Torrini attests to the reassurance of a lasting relationship in “Right Here”: “Here’s to all the roads that we’ve been down,” she sings with a smile. “I’m right here by your side.” She’s backed by the Colorist Orchestra, a happily quirky Belgian chamber-pop ensemble that mixes standard instruments with homemade ones — including, for this song, the sound of stone scraping stone. Torrini and the Colorist Orchestra rearranged some of her older songs on an album they shared in 2018, while “Right Here” previews an LP of new collaborations due early next year. There’s pointillistic syncopation from marimba, glockenspiel and pizzicato strings, with a backdrop of sustained chords: the ticktock of everyday minutiae held together by the promise of constancy. PARELESShannen Moser, ‘Oh My God’Shannen Moser recreates a community sing and a hometown band concert in “Oh My God,” from an album arriving next week. In “The Sun Still Seems to Move,” Moser offers theological and existential musings — “I know that life’s not one linear seamless destination” — over fingerpicking and woodwinds, muscles and hands and breath. The music is thoughtful but determinedly physical. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘The Ghost’The London-based artist Anna B Savage’s devastating new single, “The Ghost,” derives its power from a gradual accumulation of small, intimate details. “We used to notice the same things: His toenails, that little bug,” she sings to an old flame in a trembling low register. “But that changed, you couldn’t see the grave we dug.” Long after the breakup, though, the memory of her ex still lingers. “Stop haunting me, please,” she begs on the chorus, as the austere, piano-driven arrangement suddenly fills up with an eerie atmosphere. It sounds like an exorcism — or at least a yearning, last-ditch attempt at one, in desperate hope that it works. ZOLADZ More