Music

An end-credits dance scene, set to a new LCD Soundsystem song, is the talk of the fest. The director explains how it came together and what it means for “Barbie.”VENICE — Noah Baumbach is not a fan of Netflix’s “skip credits” feature. When he directed “Marriage Story” and “The Meyerowitz Stories,” Baumbach implored the streaming service not to speed viewers past the closing credits and into the next piece of content before the film has technically concluded. Still, the 52-year-old director realizes that on this front, he might be an old-school outlier.“When I’m watching a movie with my 12-year-old and it finishes, I like to decompress and watch the credits, always,” Baumbach told me Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. “And he’s like, ‘OK, what’s next?’ For him, it’s just words on a screen, but I’m like, ‘Let’s just vibe out on the fonts.’”To ensure the survival of closing credits, filmmakers now have to make something truly unskippable, and it’s here that Baumbach has delivered in spades: At the end of his new film, the Venice opener “White Noise,” he delivers a full-blown musical number starring the entire cast and set to the first new LCD Soundsystem song in five years. It’s a deliriously fun sequence that has dominated chatter in the first 24 hours of the festival and is doubly surprising because, like the movie itself, it finds Baumbach working at a scale he’s never before tried.In “White Noise,” adapted from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play married parents Jack and Babette Gladney: He’s a paunchy professor who blathers about his “advanced Nazism” course, she’s a pill-popper with a mighty ’80s perm. (“She has important hair,” coos Don Cheadle as one of Jack’s colleagues.) The couple’s pillow talk involves morbid debate over which of them will die first, but when a toxic spill forces their neighborhood to evacuate, our leads must confront their obsession with death in a way that hits much closer to home.The only thing that ever seems to soothe these neurotics is the local supermarket, a gleaming, jumbo-sized temple of consumerism where everything is always in the right place. With its abundance, bright-white lights and collection of familiar, beaming faces, a trip to the supermarket in “White Noise” isn’t just like going to heaven — it’s better.Driver in a scene from the film, which opened the Venice festival. Wilson Webb/NetflixThat makes it the perfect place to set the end-credits number. Don’t worry, the sequence isn’t a spoiler — it’s more of a coda, and “a visual, visceral, physical representation of what I felt like the whole movie was about,” Baumbach told me.Here, nearly every character in the movie cavorts among aisles of Hi-C, Doritos and Ritz Crackers while Driver and Gerwig pull boxes from the shelves with Busby Berkeley-level precision. Later, workers in the checkout area throw plastic bags into the air as if they were feathered fans, and a coterie of college professors — played by the likes of Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André Benjamin — boogie in a charmingly fussy fashion.The sequence made me think of the dance-heavy curtain calls from “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” and “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again,” though Baumbach, a more refined cineaste, was motivated by “8 ½” and “Beau Travail,” he told me.“As I arrived at the end of the script, it revealed itself to me as the thing to do,” said Baumbach, who likened it to smaller cinematic flourishes that close his previous films: “‘Frances Ha’ has no unmotivated camera until the very end, and then there’s a push in on her face — it’s very simple. ‘Meyerowitz Stories’ is all piano music and then an orchestra comes in at the end. I like trying to listen for those things.”He went to LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, who also contributed to Baumbach’s “Greenberg” and “While We’re Young,” to craft “New Body Rhumba,” an upbeat, catchy song about death for the sequence. “I said, essentially, write the song you would have written if you were writing songs in 1985,” Baumbach said.“For me, that’s not a hard nudge,” Murphy said at the film’s premiere party. If writing ’80s-inflected songs is well in his wheelhouse, what was the greatest challenge, I asked? “Trying not to die before the song was done,” Murphy replied mordantly. (Jack and Babette could scarcely have phrased it better.)The dance sequence, choreographed by David Neumann, was shot over two days at an abandoned Ohio superstore. “It actually was as happy shooting it as it is to watch it,” Baumbach said. “It was this contagious feeling. It just felt good. And though Baumbach has flirted with making a movie musical before — he and Driver once explored the idea of adapting Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” eventually using that show’s “Being Alive” as the climactic sung number in “Marriage Story” — making “White Noise” hasn’t fully scratched that itch.“It makes me interested in doing more of that,” said Baumbach, who also used Neumann to choreograph the movie’s chaotic family breakfasts and massive crowd scenes. “I think this whole movie opened up things for me, aspects of moviemaking that I’ve always been drawn to that the movies I’ve made haven’t needed or wanted.”And it may offer a tantalizing throughline to Baumbach’s next project: “Barbie,” a big-screen take on the iconic Mattel doll that Gerwig is directing from a script she co-wrote with Baumbach. Little is known about the plot of the movie, which stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, though co-star Simu Liu has divulged that it will feature dance sequences, and Baumbach appeared to confirm that.“‘Barbie’ definitely has that as well, that kind of choreographed naturalism. Well, it’s an artificial world, but a choreographed naturalism,” Baumbach told me.“It’s always exciting to me,” he said, “when a movie can be many things at the same time.” More

The former syndication star and top-flight interviewer is rebuilding his daily show on Amazon’s new app, Amp.LOS ANGELES — One afternoon in June, Zach Sang was curled into an improvised studio nook at the top of a staircase in a warehouse in Hollywood. The setup was ramshackle — right downstairs was the fallow set for Hailey Bieber’s YouTube series “Who’s in My Bathroom?” — but Sang didn’t let the scrappy conditions get to him.The interview guest on this day was Jake Miller, a onetime frat rapper turned anodyne singer-songwriter, an affable bro with a big smile and an unbothered air. While waiting for Miller to arrive, Sang sipped on a Celsius energy drink as he waited for a Gopuff delivery of snacks. He was dressed comfortably in a gray sweater vest and a worn-in pair of Birkenstock Bostons; his fingernails were painted in a casually intricate design.Sang is a relentless optimist and a warm landing place. After Miller arrived, Sang attended to their conversation with an uncommon amount of care, from time to time gently pushing him under the cover of affection. When Miller left, Sang reset himself and began his daily live show the same way he has for years and years: “Helloooo, beautiful humannnn.”At this time last year, Sang was broadcasting to more than a million people each night via his syndicated program, “Zach Sang Show,” which aired on around 80 terrestrial radio stations across the country. But today he’s building from the ground up: In March, he began broadcasting for three hours every weekday on Amp, the still-in-beta radio app recently introduced by Amazon.“The bedrocks, the building blocks that make radio radio — companionship, friendship, music, personality, discussion — that will remain the same,” Sang said. “But the delivery method at which it gets to the people is going to change.”The method is still slightly in flux. Several times over the next three hours, while songs played between conversation breaks, Sang tested out the studio’s Alexa smart speaker to make sure it played his show when prompted — mostly yes. He selected songs to play largely on the fly, sometimes inspired by a conversation in the room. It all made for a far looser approach to pop radio, with flickers of the unpredictable energy of livestreaming.Sang’s new perch allows him to figure out a fresh path for an old format. “I want them to understand that there’s a better version of radio out there,” he said of the listeners he has not yet been able to reach. “Radio that doesn’t play the same songs every 42 minutes. There’s a version of radio out there that doesn’t shove 18 minutes of commercials an hour down your throat.”Sang is 29 but carries himself with the awe of someone younger. It is a byproduct of a career that began in his teenage years, and has never let up since, a run that has made him something like the Ryan Seacrest of young millennials. During his 10-year tenure on terrestrial radio, he became one of the most crucial interviewers of contemporary pop stars, with clips of his most intimate conversations — with Ariana Grande, Halsey, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, BTS and various onetime boy band and girl group members — often gaining viral traction online.Sang is an uncommonly gifted interviewer: formidably grounded, fluid, quick with responses and also keen to steer conversations toward more intriguing topics. He makes an intense (but not uncomfortable) amount of eye contact and delivers his questions not brusquely, as can be the norm for radio interviews, but with a balmy, inviting smoothness. He treats interview subjects not as famous people, but rather people who happen to be famous. Sometimes, in videos of his interviews, there are little moments of relaxation a few minutes in, when stars realize they can turn off autopilot, retreat from the hard shell of fame just a bit and ease back into their humanity.“Deeply personable, researched and funny,” said Finneas, the singer and producer and brother of Billie Eilish. He described Sang’s true peers as much more senior and established: Howard Stern. Zane Lowe, the Apple Music host.“He has an emotional connectivity with artists that I don’t think I see with anyone else right now,” said Matt Sandler, Amp’s head of business and operations, who recruited Sang to the platform.When Ed Sheeran appeared last year on the syndicated show, he concluded his time by telling Sang, “I’m sure you get this a lot, but I end up watching your guys’ interviews with other artists, like, all the time, and I really enjoy it.”Like most daily radio programs, Sang’s has a rhythm. In the past he’s had multiple co-hosts, but there’s currently just one: Dan Zolot, an executive producer who shares the title with Sang. As the show’s longtime counterbalance, Zolot injects cold splashes of reality at unexpected moments. “Awkwardness is always fascinating to watch,” Zolot said. “It brings out a little more personality.” Part of his job includes trimming down Sang’s longform interviews for various social media platforms, because Sang’s true competition now isn’t just conventional radio stars but also YouTubers and podcasters. “Alex Cooper at ‘Call Her Daddy,’ Joe Rogan, ‘Impaulsive’ — that’s who the young kids are going to when they think of radio,” Zolot said.In recent years, as radio stations have leveraged their access to musicians to grow their presence on platforms like YouTube, some of the best radio hosts have become de facto podcast interviewers. But when Sang began his career, the radio station interview was by and large a banal format, a back-scratching relic of old power structures.“He treats his audience like they’re smart, which they are and they deserve to be treated like,” Finneas said.Another way Sang deviated from the strict formatting of pop radio was by sprinkling in progressive political opinions. “To have queer voices on the air in Pensacola, Fla., and Mobile and Montgomery, Ala., I was in the most conservative places in America, right? And I won. I was a queer kid from New Jersey who shared my truth.”Sang is an uncommonly gifted interviewer. He treats interview subjects not as famous people, but rather people who happen to be famous.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesSang also pushed back against the strict playlisting most radio stations require, programming his show a little more eccentrically and holistically: “I never colored within the lines ever. I always went against the rules. I never asked for permission, I always begged for forgiveness.”Occasionally, those decisions were met with resistance. “When you’re syndicated, you’re on 80 stations, you have 80 bosses,” Zolot said. “Those bosses have things they don’t want talked about on their air, and they’ll let you know.”Sang’s negotiations with the radio conglomerate Westwood One went to the 11th hour late last year, but they couldn’t come to terms. The transition was jarring. “Seven o’clock at night would roll around and I would just be driving around my neighborhood, not knowing what to do,” Sang said.“I’ve been going through a deep depression the last few months,” he continued. “And my friends, who are some of the most famous people in the world, send me 77 texts until I answer. The night of my last show, Joshua Bassett showed up at my studio within 40 minutes, on the night before New Year’s Eve, to be with me while I literally cried on the floor of my studio. And then after that, who was there for me was Ariana, who was on me to figure out what my next step was.”Losing his syndicated show forced him to assess whether he was in the business of radio, or the business of Zach Sang. When his contract ended, he’d already been having conversations with Amazon for a few months, and he began to see Amp as an opportunity to spread his gospel of the power of radio even more widely.The very nature of radio is changing and has been for the past two decades. First came the rise of satellite radio, which jeopardized local specificity. Same went for market consolidation. Finally, the ascension of the internet, especially as a facilitator for livestreaming and playlists, threatens — or maybe promises — to undermine the primacy of radio as a delivery system for new music. By July, Sang and his team had relocated to a more substantial studio, the one that Rick Dees, the countdown show kingpin, previously used to broadcast out of. But even though Sang knew how to operate all of the fancy equipment in the room, the entire show was run off his iPad.“The way I view a microphone at this point in my life is, when I lost the show, it’s like I lost every friend I’ve ever made,” he said, in between playing Beyoncé songs. “It’s about regaining chemistry — it takes time. People find out every day we’re not on the radio.”He referred to the Sang universe as a “friend group” — the combination of the characters with him in the studio and the listeners.After more than a decade on the air, part of that friend group are the famous people he’s become close to along the way. That day, he told his listeners about how he’d drunkenly agreed to officiate Selena Gomez’s best friend’s wedding at Gomez’s 30th birthday party, and he mentioned his friend who was playing the role of Glinda, the good witch, in the upcoming film adaptation of “Wicked.” (That would be Grande.)It is a far cry from how he was raised. Sang, who is of Italian, Irish and Scottish heritage, grew up in New Jersey — first Paterson, then Wayne — and attributes his empathy and openheartedness to a challenging upbringing. His mother was a social worker for 35 years: “I watched my mom cry. She would carry people’s burdens every day.” His parents had a yearslong, protracted divorce. Sang had trouble learning to read, endured abusive teachers in Catholic school and was bullied by other children, who identified him as different.He got his start in 2008 at age 14, with a show on the BlogTalkRadio online radio platform that he hosted from his bedroom. Soon, he moved over to Goom Radio, a French internet radio concern that was introducing an American service. He booked his own guests, emailing publicists from his BlackBerry during high school classes, leaning heavily on the teen stars of the day. “On Wednesday nights, kids would camp out in front of my studio waiting to see which artists were going to be there,” he recalled.Sang described his approach back then as “blind confidence, blind naïveté, adrenaline.” In short order, he became a go-to interview stop and developed a quick rapport with his subjects. “They would tell me while on the phone or in person that they were happy, or they’d stay longer, or they’d ignore their publicist when they tried to get wrapped up.”In school, he wasn’t terribly popular. “I had no friends,” he said, but he built something of a double life for himself: “Not having a single kid talk to me in school, but I’d go home and get to get on the phone with Mitchel Musso from ‘Hannah Montana,’ and he’d give me an hour of his time.”Sang, far right, interviewing the rapper Yung Gravy, left, along with Dan Zolot, his co-host on “Zach Sang Show.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIn 2012, Sang moved to terrestrial radio and began steadily accumulating stations for his nightly program, “Zach Sang Show,” which was syndicated via Westwood One. In short order, he was interviewing some of pop’s biggest stars, deploying the same amiability that made his teen-pop conversations so engaging.Peter Gray, the head of promotion at Columbia Records, recalled that when Sang was given just a few minutes with Adele, he “just killed it, nailed it. Five minutes with him was a symphony — no fear, no trepidation, no nerves, just a beautiful nonscripted conversation.”Sang’s show was a crucial entry point into the American media market for the K-pop superstar group BTS. Eshy Gazit, who was tasked in the mid-2010s with helping to break the act in the United States, said, “There was a certain stigma at the time — that K-pop was a bunch of marionettes. The first important thing to me was to show the humanity, that each member has a story, a feeling, a personality.” BTS would return to Sang’s show several times.Sang’s interviews also populate his YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels, and in conjunction with his production partner, OBB Media, he’s in the process of building out his own studio. In the coming weeks, “Zach Sang Show” will begin international syndication.Amp is a creator-focused app meant to allow users to set up their own radio programs, a nod to public access and internet radio and an attempt to harness the democratization of online content creation. Sang’s responsibilities include populating the app with other hosts — currently he’s working with the party promoters Emo Nite and iParty, which specializes in music from Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows. He’s also the service’s most high-profile interviewer — something like the Zane Lowe of Amazon.Still, the platform is new, and the listener numbers modest. “It was difficult to see the numbers and know that it’s not huge at first,” Zolot said. “That kind of got to him.”By last month, though, Sang was getting comfortable being indie again. “Nobody listened to me when I was broadcasting from my bedroom — I literally was talking to myself,” he said. “So, been there, done that.”The friend group he hopes to cultivate, he realized, begins with his own “therapeutic” relationship with the microphone. Everything else good has followed from that.“Every time, without fail, I have built it and they have come,” he noted, “so this will not be any different.” More

The pianist, 92, has been hesitant to glance back: “I’m still evolving, whenever I sit down at the piano.”The first time Ahmad Jamal put out a live recording with his trio, it was an unexpected smash. “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” from 1958, became one of the best-selling instrumental records of its time. Since then, in an extraordinary career spanning more than 75 years, this piano eminence has released dozens more live albums, a catalog sprinkled with gems.But what about the concerts he played that were captured on tape but never released? Ask him about digging those up for archival release, and he’ll almost certainly say “no, thanks.” Even at 92, Jamal resists glancing back. “I’m still evolving, whenever I sit down at the piano,” he said one recent afternoon, speaking by phone from his home in the Berkshires. “I still come up with some fresh ideas.”So when he got wind of a set of pristine old recordings, captured in the mid-to-late 1960s during performances at the Penthouse club in Seattle, he hesitated. It took some cajoling for Jamal to sign off on a release. Eventually, “I went along with it,” he said. “But it’s unusual for me.”His reluctance was thawed by Zev Feldman, the skillful and enthusiastic producer who unearthed the tapes, and by the quality of the performances themselves. Culled from half-hour radio broadcasts that had been caught on the Penthouse’s reel-to-reel tape machine, these recordings will see the light of day starting in November, with the release of two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “(1965-66),” the first albums to arrive on Feldman’s new label, Jazz Detective. A third set, “(1966-68),” will be released soon after.Five-and-a-half hours of music in all, the albums arriving in November are a celebration of both the flexibility and the certitude of Jamal’s style — a modernist marvel, and nearly a genre unto itself. His music can sometimes scan as easygoing acoustic jazz with catchy hooks, which explains its broad appeal. But really it’s packed with combustive overlays of rhythm — and a connection to musical history so deep and expansive that, in fact, it foresaw the future.What to Watch, Listen to and See This FallHighlights from the arts world this coming season.Wolfgang Tillmans: The artist’s career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art looks set to cement his position as one of the world’s most significant living artists.‘Monarch’: Starring Trace Adkins, Anna Friel and Susan Sarandon, Fox’s new TV series brings the dynastic drama genre to the world of country music.Ahmad Jamal: Two live albums capture this music innovator in his prime, celebrating both the flexibility and certitude of the pianist’s style.“I think when he was creating those grooves that became iconic, he was finding another way: It left funk music, it left soul music, it left jazz,” said the pianist Jason Moran, who as the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz has presented Jamal multiple times in recent years. “He was phrasing for the future. He wasn’t just phrasing for the ’60s, he was phrasing for the ’90s.”The “Emerald City Nights” albums come from the period when Jamal had just returned to touring, and his piano playing was growing more lush.Don BronsteinJamal’s music with his trio — and then, in later years, a quartet with a hand percussionist added to the mix — reaches into a deep reserve of Black rhythmic practices, even as he wears the influence of Romantic piano music on his sleeve. In the process, as far back as the early 1950s he was sounding out grooves and feelings that would not catch on broadly until years later.Plenty has been made of his influence on Miles Davis, who declared Jamal his favorite piano player. But it goes beyond that. Before James Brown had helped invent funk, Jamal was rearranging the organization of time in jazz, adding a heavier emphasis on the downbeat — like Brown eventually would — and syncopating the heck out of the rest of the measure, as an Afro-Cuban musician might.“There are things that occur in your sound that you’ll never be able to trace, because they go too far back. And I feel like he is totally aware of that ancestral rhythmic connection,” Moran said. “Ahmad on the piano is one of the rare ones that figured out that sensibility that was gluing together so many decades, in the past and the future.”It’s little wonder that he became one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop history. Jamal’s piano phrasing haunts iconic tracks like Nas’s “The World Is Yours” (the producer Pete Rock sampled his “I Love Music,” from 1970) and De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” (J Dilla plucked a few bars from Jamal’s “Swahililand,” from 1974).He first sidled up to a piano at age 3, the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as president of the United States. He’s been playing ever since. At that time, when pianists still played the role that jukeboxes would soon take over, Pittsburgh was turning out future jazz stars as reliably as it was generating steel. Jamal was preceded at Westinghouse High School by Erroll Garner, Mary Lou Williams and Dodo Marmarosa — all future piano greats. The city was also full of Western classical music, a tradition Jamal learned from his piano teacher, Mary Cardwell Dawson, who would later found the National Negro Opera Company.“In Pittsburgh, we didn’t study just the American classical music, also sometimes referred to as jazz,” he said. (Jamal has always rejected the word “jazz,” calling it both imprecise and racially insensitive.) “We studied European classical music, and Duke Ellington, along with others. So that’s the difference.”He joined the local musicians’ union at 14, and headed out on tour three years later with the George Hudson Orchestra. While playing in Detroit, he was exposed to the growing Ahmadiyya Muslim movement. He converted and began studying Islam intensely — something that he credits with saving him from the snares of life on the road. It also fortified his conviction to abide by his own code.“I always tried to divest myself of the music business. I wasn’t too thrilled with the music business at any time,” he said. “So I have always sought to do other things.”Soon Jamal began traveling to Africa, and he began what he says was the first company to import greeting cards from Africa to the United States. (His first mention in The New York Times, from 1959, is in an article titled “Pianist-Investor Is a Hit in Cairo.”) He also briefly ran a music venue, the Alhambra, in Chicago, where he was living in the 1950s. And for a time he stopped performing publicly altogether, focusing instead on running a series of small record labels that put out LPs by musicians on both sides of the Atlantic.The “Emerald City Nights” albums come from the period when Jamal had just returned to touring, and his piano playing — always centered on finely wrought patterns and spare, interwoven phrases — was growing more lush. The Penthouse was one of his favorite clubs to play, so the new collections showcase Jamal in a number of different engagements, with a variety of trio lineups.The tracks include Jamal originals like “Minor Moods”; contributions from his bandmates; jazz standards by Cole Porter and Benny Golson; and pop ditties like “Feeling Good,” performed here just months before Nina Simone’s famous rendition was released. On “(1965-66),” one side features a particularly exciting (and rarely recorded) lineup: the drummer Vernel Fournier, whose famous beat had set the gamboling foundation for “Poinciana,” and the bassist Jamil Nasser, one of Jamal’s most consistent collaborators in the 1960s and ’70s.“He supervised every part of this production: listening to the music, ID-ing the tracks,” Feldman said of Jamal’s involvement in the archival release.“There are a few things that didn’t make it,” Feldman conceded. Then, with an artful touch of understatement, he explained: “He has a discerning ear.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherHere’s one sort of simulated artist: This month, a virtual rapper called FN Meka became the center of a critical storm involving digital blackface and the ethics of using artificial intelligence to (re)create cultural production. As a result of the backlash, FN Meka was dropped from Capitol, the major label that had signed the project, though it was debatable exactly how much of the rapper’s music was algorithmically derived at all.And here’s another sort: Spotify continues to populate some of its main playlists with so-called “fake” artists, which is to say, music made by artists under pseudonyms who create tracks purely to populate these playlists at a lower cost to Spotify than artists who are signed to major record labels. They have, in some cases, millions of listens, but outside of the walls of the streaming platform, they fundamentally don’t exist.Are either of these cases acceptable? And more pressingly, are they avoidable?On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the various ways music is being alienated from the humans who created it and the listeners who hear it, and the philosophical implications for creative agency.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterRyan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletterTim Ingham, founder and publisher of Music Business WorldwideConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

Michael Tilson Thomas, in the face of an aggressive brain cancer, returned to his roots to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.LENOX, Mass. — Michael Tilson Thomas had just brought the first movement of Copland’s Symphony No. 3 to a radiant close here at Tanglewood on Saturday night when applause broke out at the back of the Shed.And why not? Copland’s score is one of the works most associated with the Boston Symphony, and he wrote parts of it on these very grounds. It was music, Thomas has suggested, “that the world would come to accept as the sound of America.”The applause went on, until it sounded like just a single admirer was left clapping, insistently. Thomas turned, smiled, and joked, “I agree.”He always has agreed, and this great American maverick will to the end. The conductor, 77, underwent surgery last year to treat glioblastoma, a lethally aggressive brain cancer, and in March he announced that he was permanently reducing his activities. “I intend to stick around for a bit,” he said then; despite the odds, he has.So Thomas could have been forgiven reflectiveness, if not more, leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in concerts on Saturday and Sunday, Copland in one and Ives in the other. After all, for all his might and ideas as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, a tenure that lasted from 1995 to 2020 and defines his career, it was the Boston Symphony with which he made his way, and Tanglewood where that part of his life began.Thomas emerged as a Tanglewood fellow, arriving here for the first time in 1968 and winning the Koussevitzky Prize for an outstanding student conductor a year later. He was named the Boston Symphony’s assistant, associate, and principal guest conductor in turn — the latter a title he shared with Colin Davis — and until his departure in 1974, he drew note for programs that put the new in the context of the old, as well as for recordings that still sound fresh, lush and keen, including a glorious Piston Second and a pungent “Rite of Spring.” Four instrumentalists who played with Thomas then — the bassists Lawrence Wolfe and Joseph Hearne, the violinist Ikuko Mizuno and the violist Michael Zaretsky — played with him last weekend, too.But in a recent interview with The New York Times, Thomas said that he felt “calm and resigned” about his circumstances, and though the Tanglewood grounds seemed to flower for him with a special resplendence, there was little sense of a farewell to these performances, little sense of there being some grand valedictory message, even if there were those in the audience who stood to welcome him before he had conducted a note.There was just Michael Tilson Thomas, doing Michael Tilson Thomas things.And what things. Thomas is understandably not so excitable on the podium now, but he is anything but disengaged, and, standing throughout the concerts, his old theatricality still takes the odd bow. His right hand dominates, keeping a steady if revealing beat, and his interest in carefully shaping details is still there, as is his accuracy of gesture. Clarity appears to be his aim, and he spent a lot of his time dealing with balances in each of the four works he conducted: holding a hand up here, twinkling his fingers there, sprinkling experience into the routine.Since his days exploring the avant-garde as the conductor the Monday Evening Concerts in the 1960s, Thomas has considered the concert hall to be a place of inquiry and thought, of connections and contrasts, and the Shed was no different on these occasions. He still has things to say.Saturday’s concert could have been political if Thomas had wanted it to be, but he voiced nothing explicit. The program put Copland’s symphony, which was given with typically heartfelt commitment, in conversation with “Dubinushka,” a jaunty though trite little tribute that Rimsky-Korsakov based on a workers’ song and offered to the Russian revolutionaries of 1905, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which the composer wrote specifically for American audiences ahead of a tour in 1909.Thomas, left, conducting Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with Alexander Malofeev as the soloist.Hilary ScottAlexander Malofeev, 20, was the soloist, which made the performance delayed compensation for a collaboration between him and Thomas that had been canceled in March, when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra declared that it would be “inappropriate” for the Moscow-born pianist to perform. Entirely innocent to begin with, Malofeev had condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine days earlier, calling it a “terrible and bloody decision” after another concert in Canada had been called off far in advance. Thomas, a devoted supporter of up-and-coming musicians in his founding of the New World Symphony and in other work, was clearly pleased that they could perform together here, beaming during the ovations.You could hear why: Malofeev is already a special pianist. Plenty of young artists use the Rachmaninoff to show off sparkling technical skills, and Malofeev had those in abundance. But he was interested in something more than that. The first movement was broad, dreamy, nightmarish, the left hand disrupting melodic lines; the cadenza was unsettlingly introspective. The second movement became a balm, the third a triumph, and if that finale was dangerously soaked in schmaltz, well, that’s Rachmaninoff for you. Thomas, to his credit, went where Malofeev took him, and brought the orchestra along, too.Sunday’s concert offered an opportunity for Thomas to make more of an interpretive statement with the season-ending performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a Tanglewood tradition. He did, in a sense, sticking to the way his Beethoven has been of late, steadier and heftier than the new norm.With the Tanglewood Festival Chorus on hand, along with a vocal quartet of Jacquelyn Stucker, Kelley O’Connor, Ben Bliss and Dashon Burton, this was stoic Beethoven, calm, confident and controlled, lyrical in the slow movement but tender rather than rapt — Beethoven of the here and now, in other words, and not of the beyond. Some hard-thwacked timpani aside, it was also firmly of the old school. With its forward woodwinds and its resolute strength of line — the fugue in the finale was downright stubborn — it almost reminded me of Otto Klemperer.Charles Ives’s “Psalm 90,” an ethereal yet cosmically dissonant prayer for soprano, tenor, chorus and organ, prefaced the Beethoven in a characteristically ear-dislocating bit of Thomas programming, though he left the choir director, James Burton, to conduct. Ives worked on it for years, and he eventually came to think of it as his farewell to composition; its ending is profoundly comforting.“So teach us to number our days,” its text reads in part, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”Perhaps there was a message, after all. More

“Fórmula Vol. 3” soars when it expands the scope of the genre and the singer’s own approaches to its trademarks, but falls flat when it relies on backward-looking tropes.Ever since he left the Bronx boy band Aventura a decade ago to go solo, the bachata luminary Romeo Santos has been teaching a graduate seminar in melodrama. He is a disciplined thespian, especially across his “Fórmula” series, a collection of albums driven by audacious, genre-crossing collaborations and intrepid experiments with pop, hip-hop and reggaeton.Santos, 41, has an unwavering devotion to bachata — a Dominican genre with Black and working-class origins known for its bedrock of amargue, a peerless brand of bleeding-heart bitterness. Still, he has never really been a traditionalist. (His 2019 album, “Utopía,” was a rare exception, an LP that genuflected to and recruited genre-defining forebears like Raulín Rodriguez and Anthony Santos.)Instead, he has consistently sought out new ways of refreshing bachata’s templates while developing some of his own trademarks — signature catchphrases, caustic disses and salacious onstage antics. He has brought in English lyrics and hints of R&B, and ventured into the world of reggaeton, most memorably alongside Don Omar (“Ella y Yo” from 2005) and Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam (“Bella y Sensual” from 2017). Years before the music industry became obsessed with Anglo pop artists singing in Spanish, he had A-list figures from the world of hip-hop and R&B appearing on his albums, including Usher, Nicki Minaj and Drake. At a moment when other high-profile stars are experimenting with bachata (see Rosalía and the Weeknd on “La Fama,” as well as the intro to Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó), it feels even more urgent to recognize that Santos saw its potential for global popularity and creative reimagining all along.On “Fórmula Vol. 3,” the latest, 21-track installment of the series and his fifth solo album overall, Santos includes unexpected team-ups with Justin Timberlake and the regional Mexican star Christian Nodal. He also doubles down on the theatrics, submerging listeners further into his acerbic torch songs about cruel betrayal, bitter revenge and unrequited love, sometimes with mixed success.Of the collaborations, “El Pañuelo” with the Spanish star Rosalía is an immediate standout: Her melismatic vocal runs flutter into focus in the intro, and in the chorus, a call-and-response lament between the two singers recalls the 2002 hit “Te Quiero Igual Que Ayer” by Monchy y Alexandra. The misty-eyed merengue “15,550 Noches,” which unites the genre stalwarts Toño Rosario, Rubby Pérez and Fernandito Villalona, is nostalgic, doleful and explosive all at once. And on the booming Christian Nodal feature “Me Extraño,” a song about returning to yourself after being wronged by a paramour, Santos finds a perfect balance between the thematic commonalities of mariachi and bachata.His dramatic flourishes are most palpable when he makes full use of cohesive metaphors and potent storytelling as on “Ciudadana,” a diaspora tale about a romance separated by borders, complete with aerial sound effects, like a flight attendant announcing a landing. Santos’s yearning, crisp falsetto is most effective in these contexts: On the corrosive opener “Bebo,” an alcohol-soaked send-off to a duplicitous lover, his voice trembles with despair, and he feigns intoxication in a spoken outro. It’s a vocal performance that magnifies the best parts of bachata’s theatrical core.But Santos missteps when he falls into religious and gendered tropes. On “Nirvana,” a ballad written as a monologue to God, he attempts to reconcile the existence of social and political injustice with God’s assumed benevolence. It descends into low-level political signaling, with an exculpatory name-drop of the Dominican dembow star Tokischa and the Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA, who have been blamed for promoting crime and drug use.Both “La Última Vez” and “Suegra” reproduce antediluvian gender stereotypes. “Suegra” is the bigger disappointment, though it is expertly produced and arranged by Iván “MateTraxx” Chévere, Martires De León and Santos. The nylon-string guitar-picking complements his high-pitched tenor as Santos sings about the clichéd image of an overbearing mother-in-law. But then his lyrics turn violent, as he describes poisoning her coffee and pushing her body off the side of a cliff in a car (the song even ends with a car crashing sound effect). In a country that currently has the second highest rate of femicide in Latin America, the gag doesn’t land as a lighthearted farce; it just feels irresponsible and out-of-touch.“Sin Fin,” a collaboration with Timberlake, is perhaps the most paradigmatic song on an album rooted in both the past and future. Its syrupy celebration of endless love sometimes verges on sappy idolatry, but it also maximizes Timberlake and Santos’s talent for pop sentimentality. The track is a full-circle moment for Santos: On Aventura’s second album, the band transformed ’N Sync’s “Gone” into a bilingual bachata requiem. Here he once again finds common ground between two worlds once thought irreconcilable, demonstrating how bachata can stretch beyond both its real and imagined borders.Romeo Santos“Fórmula Vol. 3”(Sony Latin) More

LENOX, Mass. — The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, during his half-century career in music, has led many performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its rousing “Ode to Joy” finale.But when he took the podium on Sunday at Tanglewood, the summer music festival here in the Berkshires, Thomas felt different. It had been more than a year since he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, which has drained him of energy and forced him to confront his mortality earlier than he expected. He has emerged with new appreciation for the wonder in Beethoven’s music and the electricity of live performance.“It feels really great,” Thomas, 77, said after the performance. “It feels restorative.”Thomas, the former music director of the San Francisco Symphony, who has spent his career as a musician studying questions of time and existence, knows that his days are limited. He has taken bucket-list trips to Tahiti and Nova Scotia with family and friends; organized journals on life and art that he has kept for more than 60 years; and started contemplating the music to be played at his memorial service.But he refuses to be confined by his illness. “Even in a situation where the time is short, whether in rehearsal or in life, you can accept and forgive yourself,” he said. “You can say, ‘I had this much time and this is what I could accomplish.’ And that’s fine. I am at peace with it.”He has continued to compose and record favorite piano pieces. A devoted educator, he is working on a new set of videos exploring musical ideas.And he is planning an ambitious slate of concerts through at least next summer, in San Francisco, Miami, Cleveland, New York and beyond, tackling Mahler symphonies, a specialty; cantatas by Olivier Messiaen; and a new cello concerto by the film composer Danny Elfman.After Sunday’s concert at Tanglewood, Thomas received a standing ovation that lasted more than six minutes.Hilary ScottThomas’s return to Tanglewood, where he led two programs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra over the weekend, was especially poignant. This was where his career took off: In 1969, after winning a prize here, he was named assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony, where he remained for more than a decade.Some in the orchestra worried that cancer would prevent Thomas from making the journey to Tanglewood, his first appearance at the festival since 2018. But he arrived with energy and humor, mentioning his health struggles only briefly at the first rehearsal. During several days of intense sessions with the orchestra, he showed his trademark wit and fastidiousness, leaping from his stool when he wanted more energy from the players, and flashing a thumbs-up when they mastered tricky passages.“He’s irrepressible,” said Lawrence Wolfe, the orchestra’s assistant principal bass. “He’s not going to let his illness overpower him. He doesn’t dwell on it. He simply rises above it.”Before he was diagnosed with cancer, Thomas was at the height of his career, an elder statesman of classical music, known by the nickname M.T.T., who was revered for his mastery of the standard repertory and for championing American composers.In 2020, after 25 years, he stepped down from the San Francisco Symphony, where he was credited with transforming the ensemble into one of the best in the nation. He also won accolades for being a founder of the New World Symphony, a training orchestra for young artists in Miami, in 1987.Then, last summer, he learned he had glioblastoma, one of the most lethal forms of brain cancer, which also afflicted President Biden’s son Beau Biden, and Senator John McCain. His doctors estimated that he might have only eight months to live. He underwent surgery to remove a tumor and withdrew from performances for several months.Frightened and exhausted, he struggled to come to terms with his diagnosis. He was also eager to stay busy.“There was an initial moment of shock and sort of ‘OK, so I’m going to gird my loins here and finish and accomplish all these things,’” he said.Thomas has an ambitious slate of concerts planned through at least next summer, in San Francisco, Miami, Cleveland, New York and beyond.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAs he recovered from surgery, his outlook began to change. He became less focused on achievement and more interested in relaxation and deep thought. He was also eager to spend more time with loved ones, including Joshua Robison, his husband and manager.“I began to accept and even be appreciative of those quiet moments of restfulness in which I could cast my mind back over people and experiences in music that connected us all in a profound way,” Thomas said.Slowly, he has returned to the stage, making a triumphant appearance with the New York Philharmonic in November, his first concert since announcing he had cancer, followed by engagements in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, where he lives.In March, saying he was “taking stock of my life,” he announced he would step down as artistic director of the New World Symphony to focus on his health.Though he often feels tired and sometimes has difficulty studying scores, his artistic instincts and drive remain intact. His illness has forced him to learn to be more efficient in his conducting, he said.“I feel more exhausted, more on edge physically, more on the edge of my nerves, than I have felt over the years,” he said. “On the other hand, I’ve learned that I can make some wonderful things happen without having to push myself so much physically.”In January, he appeared with the pianist Emanuel Ax in Los Angeles, in a program that included Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Ax recalled that Thomas was intensely focused on the music, seemingly determined not to let his illness interfere.“You just felt like everything is going to go on the way it always has,” Ax said. “I know intellectually that’s not true, but that’s how he makes you feel. He’s handling this in just an incredibly positive and creative way.”At Tanglewood on Sunday, Thomas and the musicians received a standing ovation from the audience of 7,000 that lasted more than six minutes. He basked in the applause, beaming as he shook hands with the players onstage.After the concert, people lined up to thank Thomas and take photos. Many were in tears, unsure whether they might see him again at Tanglewood.“You have brought so much musical joy into my life,” said Maressa Gershowitz, a Connecticut-based photographer who brought her children and grandchildren to the performance.At a reception later that day, Thomas spoke about the potential of orchestras to achieve a “unifying sense of purpose” when they played pieces like the Ninth Symphony.“There’s a unified dedication to making the music very special, and that’s totally what I felt in these last days with the wonderful members of the B.S.O.,” he said before a crowd of friends and musicians and staff affiliated with the Boston Symphony. “I was very grateful in this last part of my life to have the opportunity reconnect with them, and with you.”Despite occasional setbacks, Thomas eagerly seeks out opportunities to make music, especially with close friends. On Monday morning, he invited the cellist Yo-Yo Ma to his rental near Tanglewood to fulfill a longtime wish, to play the piano part alongside Ma in Debussy’s Cello Sonata.Ma said that he was struck by the imagination in Thomas’s playing, and that he felt questions of life and death have been palpable in the conductor’s music since his diagnosis.“Everything that we see in culture deals with the space between life and death,” Ma said. “When you’re faced with such a severe diagnosis, you obviously are thinking about your whole arc of life.”Thomas said that he felt “calm and resigned” about the possibility of death. As he has come to terms with his illness, he said that he had found comfort in a Buddhist teaching: “Things are not what they seem. Nor are they otherwise.”“That seems to be so much the essential mystery of music and art and everything else,” he said.Lately, he has been listening to a song by Schubert, “Wandrers Nachtlied,” which he said reminded him of the need to let go of unimportant struggles. The text of the Schubert song reads:Ah, I am weary of this restlessness!What use is all this joy and pain?Sweet peace!Come, ah come into my breast!“Why all this desire and pain still?” Thomas said. “For what next accomplishment? For what position? For what sized type will my name be printed in, any of that nonsense. These experiences have taken me further down the road of not caring about any of that any more. And now I can be at peace.” More

The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra unites players from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine with a message of peace and dialogue.In February, Grigory Ambartsumyan, a 22-year-old Ukrainian violinist of Armenian descent, awoke in Kyiv to the sound of bombs. It was the beginning of Russia’s assault on his country, and the coming days and weeks were a blur of restless nights in bomb shelters.Now, six months later and with war still raging, Ambartsumyan and dozens of his fellow musicians with the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra have reunited in Tsinandali, a bucolic village in Georgia for the fourth annual Tsinandali Festival of classical music. It’s been a difficult three years since the orchestra debuted in September 2019, given the coronavirus pandemic (which stopped it from performing at the festival for two years), as well as continuing tensions between Georgia’s neighbors Azerbaijan and Armenia, and, of course, the lingering war in nearby Ukraine.This year, there is an urgent sense of camaraderie and hope among these young musicians and the festival organizers in this historically volatile region. Some 80 performers from seven countries from the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and a few neighboring nations — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine — will play three of the 19 concerts at the festival, which runs Sept. 2-11.Members of the orchestra celebrate after their Mahler performance in 2019.Tsinandali Festival“If we don’t establish a new relationship across borders with music, we are going to lose the opportunity to plant some seeds in the hearts of these young musicians,” said the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the Tsinandali Festival. “You have to start with the young people to solve problems through connections rather than divisions.”The orchestra opens this year’s festival on Friday with “Adagio” by the Ukrainian modern composer Bohdana Frolyak (along with pieces by Brahms and Beethoven). The concert will be conducted by Oksana Lyniv, also Ukrainian, who in 2021 became the first woman to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival.The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra is the brainchild of Martin Engstroem, the director of the well-heeled Verbier Festival in Switzerland. In 2018 he was hired, along with Avi Shoshani, the secretary general of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, by the private-equity investor George Ramishvili, a Georgian, to start a music festival in his home country. The festival began in September 2019 on an estate northeast of the capital of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.But Engstroem and Shoshani didn’t just want to put on another summer festival for the elite. “I felt one needed to create a festival in this part of the world with a message,” Engstroem said, something “humanitarian and geopolitical.”The Tsinandali Festival is held on the grounds of an estate northeast of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.Tsinandali FestivalLike many classical music festivals, the festival celebrates the works of major European composers — but it also includes music from the Caucasus, as well as Turkey and other countries that border the region, where tensions stretch back hundreds of years, including between Turkey and Armenia and, more recently, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as Russia and Georgia.The State of the WarA New Counteroffensive: Ukraine has long vowed a major push in the southern region of Kherson to retake territory seized by Russia. It may have begun.Nuclear Plant Standoff: After renewed shelling intensified fears about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, United Nations inspectors arrived in Ukraine for a high-stakes visit to the Russian-controlled station.Russia’s Military Expansion: President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a sign that he expects a prolonged war — an outcome Ukraine has incentive to avoid.Unusual Approaches: Ukrainian troops, facing strained supply lines, are turning to jury-rigged weapons and equipment bartering among units.“Georgia and this region of Tsinandali are right in the center of where countries have been fighting forever,” Engstroem said.“Now, more than, ever, a dialogue is so important. We have seen that classical music is a universal language,” he added. “It’s relatively easy for kids from different backgrounds to create a common language through music.”For Ambartsumyan, the violinist, this year’s festival seems like a miracle. After enduring the bombardment of Kyiv earlier in the year, he remained in the city to study at the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music this summer before traveling to Tsinandali for rehearsals. Speaking through a translator in a video interview, Ambartsumyan fought back tears as he talked about his journey in the last six months and recalled several friends killed in the war.“Starting in February, the explosions woke me up at night, and people were running and hiding everywhere,” he said. “It was such a tough time. And these past two years have been hard because I’m both Armenian and Ukrainian.”He was referring to the simmering clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It’s a conflict that much of the world seems to not know much — or care much — about, he said.“In 2019 I met an Azerbaijan girl in the youth orchestra, and I remember her saying that we can communicate together, all of us, despite the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” he said. “It’s important for me and other musicians to realize that peace is the most important thing in life.”War has also touched other members of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.“We were a little bit scared when the festival started in 2019 because there is always something going on or that could explode at any time,” said Diana Sargsyan, 23, an Armenian violinist. “And then Armenia and Azerbaijan fought for 44 days in 2020. I had brothers in the war, and I was always thinking about them.”The Tsinandali Festival continued in 2020 and 2021 but on a smaller scale and without the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.Tsinandali FestivalAlthough the orchestra didn’t reunite in 2020 and 2021 (the Tsinandali Festival continued, but on a much smaller scale), many of the young musicians stayed in touch and hoped they would play this year.“People might wonder how we can sit next to each other, but it’s OK for us,” Sargsyan added. “The language we speak is music. It doesn’t matter which country you come from. We are all the same.”It’s a sentiment echoed by Ekaterine Tsenteradze, 25, a Georgian oboist who remembers the brief war between her country and Russia as a child.“I was 12 in 2008, and I remember seeing Russian soldiers in the streets,” Tsenteradze said, referring to the occupation of Georgia by Russian forces in August 2008 before a cease-fire was brokered after 12 days. “I have this fear again now. It feels like another country could be next. We’re in peace now and playing music, but it could all change.”Ambartsumyan said he found a certain pleasure that the orchestra would play works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, two composers who were repressed by the Soviet regime, for the festival’s closing performance on Sept. 11.The conductor Derrick Inouye, the ensemble’s assistant conductor, working with the orchestra this month in rehearsal.Tsinandali Festival“It will be emotional for me because in their music there is a small grain of tragedy, but also underlying a lot of their music is a satire of the government,” he said. Ambartsumyan said it was an ironic bit of programming in 2022, given that music written to criticize the Russian government is being played decades later in a region where Russian aggression is once again in the headlines.“When I saw Prokofiev and Shostakovich on the program, I thought to myself, ‘perfect!’” he said. “I know a little something about what these two composers went through.” More