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      Karaoke Singers Live the Dream at the Illinois State Fair

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      Near the 500-pound Butter Cow, 16 contestants performed songs by Whitney Houston, Billy Joel, Jamey Johnson and Shania Twain in a bid to win $500 and appear on the Grandstand Stage.SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Tamika Swisher, a 49-year-old nursing home administrator in Kankakee, Ill., was one of 16 people who qualified for the Illinois State Fair Karaoke Contest. But on the day before the event, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.A few weeks earlier, her off-again on-again boyfriend of 11 years, Michael Faber, had died at 54 after a series of heart attacks. Ms. Swisher sang “Amazing Grace” at his memorial service. She then kept herself busy with her job, her children and grandchildren, and volunteer work — but she was still grieving her loss.“You know how they say you have good days?” Ms. Swisher said at the fairgrounds on the day of the karaoke competition. “I don’t have good days. I have good moments. And yesterday was really emotional for me. I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to go.’ If I wasn’t carpooling with Andrew, I probably wouldn’t have gone.”She was referring to Andrew David Johnston, a 30-year-old singer whom she started running into at karaoke lounges more than a decade ago. They got to know each other better while working at the same call center for a few years. “I used to tell him we were karaoke friends until we worked together,” Ms. Swisher said. “Now I’m his friend.”A view of the Illinois State Fair, located on 366 acres in Springfield.On the morning of Aug. 14, he picked her up in his Toyota S.U.V., and they rode southwest more than 150 miles across the broad, flat countryside to the site of the annual Illinois State Fair in Springfield.The people taking part in the Illinois State Fair Karaoke Contest had qualified by taking first or second place in similar competitions at county fairs earlier in the summer. The winner of that afternoon’s karaoke battle — the state finals, in effect — would receive $500 and have the chance to sing two songs as an opening act for the country duo Brooks & Dunn on the Grandstand Stage that same night.Both Ms. Swisher and Mr. Johnston had a shot at winning. Known in Kankakee as “Tamika Karaoke” and “the Karaoke Diva,” she had won multiple regional competitions, and it was her fourth time in the state finals. Mr. Johnston had been singing in public for years as a licensed street performer in Chicago. Five years ago, after a video of one of his performances in a subway station went viral, he appeared on “Steve,” a daytime talk show hosted by the comedian Steve Harvey, and on “America’s Got Talent.”A scene from fairgrounds.The contestant Andrew David Johnston.Ms. Swisher described herself as his No. 1 fan. “Truthfully, I can see him as an international multiplatinum recording star,” she said.After reaching their destination, Ms. Swisher and Mr. Johnston walked across the 366-acre fairgrounds — past Happy Hollow, where giant animatronic dinosaurs roamed, and the Dairy Building, the site of the Butter Cow, a 500-pound sculpture made of unsalted butter.They did not stop to sample the corn dogs, funnel cakes, fried Oreos or the turkey legs worthy of medieval royalty available from dozens of food vendors. Mr. Johnston said he was watching what he ate, and Ms. Swisher said she was “too nervous” to eat before the competition.They reached the open-air Reisch Pavilion. Its roof did not provide much relief from the mid-August heat for the roughly 200 people who would fill the seats, many of them friends and family of the participants.The competitors included last year’s champion, Tyson Schulte, a supervisor at Bimbo Bakeries USA, the parent company of Entenmann’s and Sara Lee. He was a cheerful, talkative 28-year-old with a beard and handlebar mustache. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show off a body-hair innovation: He had shaved and sculpted the hair on his chest and abdomen so that it looked like a large fur necktie. “It’s more or less for humor,” he said. He had posted a video of his man-scaping session on TikTok, and it has nearly 10 million views.Another formidable contender was Juston Vancleve. Wearing sunglasses, a cap and a black T-shirt, he said he was making his sixth appearance in the state finals. Before taking the stage, he seemed confident about his chances, saying, “Last night I went over to some friends, and we had a little get-together and cooked on the grill. We called it a ‘pre-winning party.’ That’s the way you got to think about it.”A top music producer had once invited Mr. Vancleve to give Nashville a shot, he said, but it didn’t work out. “I said, ‘Let me talk to my wife,’” he recalled. “And she said, ‘If you take that offer, then I’m going to take the kids.’ About three years later, we ended up getting divorced, and my kids were like, ‘Dad, you should have just took it.’”Now he runs a detailing business (cars, motorcycles, trucks), and music is a hobby. Mr. Vancleve, 44, added that he still had hopes of going pro: “I might not ever get there, but every time I get the chance, I’m still trying. It only takes one person to hear you, one person to pass the video to the right person.”Juston Vancleve, who said he once flirted with a Nashville record deal, performed songs by Jamey Johnson and Blake Shelton at the competition.Another contestant was Michelle Kaesebier, a 37-year-old corrections officer at a women’s prison near Springfield. She said she loved to sing so much that she did it all the time, even on the job. “Yesterday we took somebody two and half hours away from our facility, and I was singing along with the radio,” she said. “I don’t care who hears it. But we did have somebody in the back and my co-worker was riding with me. It doesn’t bother me, because they’re like, ‘Oh, you can sing!’”Also present was last year’s runner-up, Tyler Robinson, 29, a resident of Cessna Park, a town of about 600 people. “The biggest thing we’ve got, I guess, is the bar and the Dairy Queen,” he said. He added that he had studied theater and voice in college, worked for some years in radio, and now had a job with the Illinois public health department.The competition comprised two rounds, with the 16 singers going in the same order both times. The audience was mostly white, and Mr. Johnston and Ms. Swisher were the only Black contestants. Dennis Reed, a proprietor of Hi-Tek Redneck Karaoke & DJ Service, served as the M.C. while overseeing the sound system and musical backings.Mr. Johnston, who performs under the stage name Andrew David, was perhaps at a disadvantage, because he was chosen to go first. At a little after 1 p.m., he took the stage. “My name is Andrew David,” he said to the crowd, “and this is one of my favorite country songs. It’s called ‘Colder Weather.’ I hope you enjoy.”The song, a 2010 hit for the Zac Brown Band, is a ballad about a trucker unable to tear himself away from a life on the road. Mr. Johnston’s voice soared at the climax, but the audience’s reaction was muted. He got more applause the second time around, when he offered a dramatic rendition of “Desperado,” by the Eagles. For both songs, he did not engage in theatrics, putting the emphasis on his pure, lilting tenor.Tyson Schulte, the winner in 2021, went with a pair of up-tempo country rockers. First came “Chicks Dig It,” a hit for Chris Cagle in 2003. Then he sang John Michael Montgomery’s “Sold (the Grundy County Auction Incident),” in which the narrator finds the woman of his dreams at a livestock auction.The crowd at the Reisch Pavilion, the site of the karaoke finals, shortly before showtime.Before the second song, Mr. Schulte thanked the organizers, the judges and the sound team: “Put your hands together — they’re the ones that make this possible!” As he sang, he roamed the stage, rolling his shoulders forward and rotating his arms in an attempt to rev up the distracted afternoon crowd. His voice was on pitch. The applause was firm.Ms. Swisher followed him. “Hi, everybody!” she said. “I’m Tamika Swisher. I’m from Kankakee, like Andrew David. We car-pooled together. Go, Kankakee!”In Round 1, she sang “River,” a minor hit by the alternative rock artist Bishop Briggs, a song that seemed unfamiliar to the audience. For her second song, she was taking no chances: It was time for “I Will Always Love You,” the Dolly Parton heartbreaker that became one of the biggest hits of all time in the version by Whitney Houston.Ms. Swisher started off quiet, perhaps tentative. By the first chorus, her voice had reached full power. During the instrumental interlude, she seemed on the verge of tears, and it looked for a moment as if she might not go on. “My boyfriend just passed,” she said into the microphone, as the recorded music continued beneath her voice. “If I cry, this is what it is. I’m sorry if I lose it.”She regained her composure and powered through the rest. By the final chorus, she was singing with intensity, tears streaming down her face. Much of the crowd rose to their feet. The reaction gave Ms. Swisher the sense that she might have a real shot: “I hadn’t heard that response to any of the other contestants, so that was encouraging,” she said.Michelle Kaesebier, a karaoke enthusiast who works as a corrections officer at a women’s prison near Springfield, said she sometimes sings while on the job.Then came Mr. Vancleve. He swaggered across the stage in his cap and dark shades. His voice was deep and gruff as he threw himself into “That Lonesome Song,” by the outlaw-country singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson. Before his second number, he seemed slightly miffed, because his song — Blake Shelton’s “Ol’ Red” — had already been done by another contestant, Abbey Gustaf.“So, earlier, this young lady got up,” Mr. Vancleve said from the stage. “Her name was Abbey. Where’s she at? There she is, right there. And she gave you the female version of this song. And I’m going to give you the male version.”The audience seemed squarely on his side throughout his time onstage.Ms. Kaesebier, the corrections officer, sang Reba McEntire’s “Why Haven’t I Heard From You” and Shania Twain’s “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here.” “Any Shania Twain fans?” she said before her second song. “I’m gonna need y’all to help on this one!” Her cheerful, energetic performance got people clapping along to the beat.Mr. Robinson, the runner-up in 2021, was the only one to look to Broadway for inspiration. As Mr. Vancleve stood watching, arms crossed, Mr. Robinson lent his operatic baritone to “The Impossible Dream,” a showstopper from the 1965 musical “Man of La Mancha.” On his second go-round, he was slightly more contemporary, singing Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man.”After more than two hours of karaoke, Mr. Reed, the M.C., called the 16 contestants to the stage. He shook their hands one by one. Then he went to the microphone and made the announcement everyone had been waiting for.For her second song of the day, Tamika Swisher performed “I Will Always Love You.”“Your grand champion this evening, who will be performing on the Grandstand Stage this evening? Get your hands together for — Tyson!”Mr. Schulte, now a repeat winner, stepped forward amid the applause. He posed for photographs and sang an encore: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.”Mr. Robinson, who had sung “The Impossible Dream,” took a seat not far from the stage. He had been named the runner-up for a second year running. He looked disappointed but said he wasn’t thinking about himself.“That African American woman should have won, hands down,” he said, referring to Ms. Swisher. “Hands down. It should have been Tamika. Hands down.”Nearby, Ms. Swisher and Mr. Johnston were sitting side by side on a bench. They said they had both thought the other would win. “I was like, ‘You got this, baby boy,’” Ms. Swisher said.She added that she was all right with how things had turned out. “It didn’t cost us anything,” Ms. Swisher said. “We had a great time.” After a pause, she added, “So all we have to do is find me a turkey leg and lemonade.”After they went off toward the food stands, the winner sat down on the bench.“It’s almost surreal,” Mr. Schulte said. “I mean, there’s 16 contestants, and every single one of them got vocal talent. The judge walked up to me, and she goes, ‘I wanted to let you know what set you apart was your stage presence.’ And I said, ‘I appreciate that.’”The crowd at the Grandstand Stage awaits the performance of the Illinois State Fair Karaoke Contest winner.Although he was scheduled to sing before thousands of people in a few hours as the opener for Brooks & Dunn, he seemed nonchalant. He said he had grown accustomed to public appearances as a teenager, when he regularly showed and judged livestock at events run by the Future Farmers of America.“If there’s anything that I’ve got some pull in, it’s the livestock industry,” Mr. Schulte said. “I wish I had some pull in the singing industry, because, if I did, I’d probably try and pursue it a lot harder.”His girlfriend, Sydney Boehm, 25, who works for a farm services company, said, “Tyson’s passionate about livestock, and he’s passionate about agriculture, and he’s passionate about his singing.” She added that she would support him if he decided to pursue music full-time, but noted they were remodeling their house in Beecher City. “I think, probably subconsciously, he doesn’t want to put that all on the back burner to go pursue a dream,” she said.“I got bills to pay, man,” Mr. Schulte said.Shortly after 7 p.m., about two hours before Brooks & Dunn would start their concert, Mr. Reed stood on the Grandstand Stage and introduced Mr. Schulte as the karaoke champion.After his win, Tyson Schulte was an opening act for Brooks & Dunn. “I wish I had some pull in the singing industry,” he said, “because, if I did, I’d probably try and pursue it a lot harder.”Mr. Schulte bounded onto the stage and took the microphone from its stand. He complimented his fellow contestants, most of whom were seated in the crowd. Then he sang the songs that had brought him victory, “Chicks Dig It” and “Sold.” There were whoooos from the crowd, with many people pressing close to the stage.In the summer twilight, Ms. Swisher and Mr. Johnston walked across the fairgrounds to the parking lot. During the long drive back to Kankakee, she brought up something she had mentioned to Mr. Johnston many times — the fact that, in all the years they had spent together in the same karaoke rooms, they had never sung a duet.“I’m a little offended,” she recalled telling him.She plugged her phone into the Toyota’s stereo and flicked through a Spotify playlist of duets. He said no to “Shallow,” the Lady Gaga-Bradley Cooper ballad from “A Star Is Born,” saying it was played out. A song that piqued his interest was “Islands in the Stream,” a hit for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Together they sang along with part of it, Ms. Swisher said, and it sounded good.The duet that really took off, as they rode through the night, was “You’re the One That I Want,” the big one from “Grease” by Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. Like many experienced karaoke singers, they knew all the words, and Ms. Swisher said she loved the vocal flourishes that Mr. Johnston added as he did the Travolta part. More

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      The Harry Styles Show (and Some Music) Comes to Madison Square Garden

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      The first two nights of a 15-concert run at Madison Square Garden were heavy on charisma, banter and nods to the past.Over the weekend, Harry Styles began a 15-night stand at Madison Square Garden, an impressive feat befitting one of the most popular musicians in the world. (He’ll begin a similar stretch in October at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif. — his tour supporting his latest album, “Harry’s House,” consists of a series of residencies.) But Styles, who came to fame as part of the British boy band One Direction, is still relatively early in his solo career, and is still establishing his sonic ideas. Two New York Times critics attended the first two nights of his Love on Tour run in New York to see how he wielded his gravitational pull.JON CARAMANICA I always liked One Direction, more or less. Or maybe I liked what the group represented: a rejection of the hyperprocessed boy band, and by extension an acknowledgment that doing the least can still earn you the most. They weren’t trying to delude audiences about their artistry — their casualness was foundational to their appeal. But that approach wears thin in a solo act, and time and again during the Harry Styles show at the Garden on Saturday night, I found myself vexed. Off-the-charts charisma, collective exuberance, decently competent band, and yet at the center of it all, Styles was inscrutable. Musically, at least. I’ve rarely if ever seen someone more confident in their ownership of the stage, but everything underneath felt slight. All razzle, no dazzle. What am I missing? (I’m not missing anything.)The set included songs from Styles’s repertoire that lean toward mid-1970s rock.The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ Hmm, Jon, maybe a boa? Despite all of the construction around Madison Square Garden, I had no difficulty finding the venue’s entrance: I just followed the trail of rainbow feathers shed from the signature Styles neckwear that at least half of the audience seemed to be sporting. My thoughts today (and over the next several weeks of Styles’s 15-date residency) are with the Garden’s cleanup crew.I’ve long considered One Direction to be the quintessential boy band of the fan-service era — expertly primed to respond to the demands of their devoted, social-media savvy stan army — and after catching Styles’s show on Sunday night, I’m ready to declare him the defining solo artist of that era, too. I am not sure I’ve ever seen a pop star wave so much from the stage in my entire life? Roughly a third of his performance seemed to comprise waving, pointing and blowing kisses to various sections of the audience, whose volume approximated a jet taking off. Most of the time I could not hear Styles’s voice well enough to determine if he was hitting all the notes, though the crowd’s reaction was energetic enough that they did not seem to care. This show felt, as so much of Styles’s music does, first and foremost for the fans, which — I agree — can sometimes make the man at the center of it all feel like a bit of an enigma.The Dreamy World of Harry StylesThe British pop star and former member of the boy-band One Direction has grown into a magnetic and provocative performer.A 15-Night Stand: The first two nights of Harry Styles’ run at Madison Square Garden were heavy on charisma, banter and nods to the past.New Album: The record-breaking album “Harry’s House” is a testament to the singer’s sense of generosity and devotion to the female subject.Styler Fashion: Stylers, as the pop star’s fans are called, love to dress in homage to their idol. Here are some of the best looks seen at a concert.Opening Up: For his solo debut, Styles agreed to a Times interview. He was slippery in conversation, deflecting questions with politeness.CARAMANICA Let’s try to distill the Harry Styles musical proposition. He has nowhere near the determined agita of, say, Shawn Mendes; nowhere near the vocal litheness of Justin Bieber. (Also:#FreeZayn) And it goes without saying that despite the rampant Eltonisms on display throughout Styles’s solo catalog, and the (sub?)conscious echoes of John’s sartorial glamour in Styles’s Gucci gear, he has nowhere near John’s verve or panache. It is all quite a brittle foundation upon which to build this fame skyscraper.But yes, the waving. Also the utterly-at-ease shimmying. And that thing he did mid-show where he took a fan’s cellphone and tried calling her ex on it. (Josh, if you’re reading this, you got washed, buddy — everyone at Madison Square Garden hates you.) See also: him singing “Happy Birthday” to his friend Florence. Florence Welch, of the Machine? No. Florence Pugh, his co-star in the upcoming film “Don’t Worry Darling”? Also no. Florence, daughter of Rob Stringer, chairman of Sony Music Group? Yes.This is the essence of his appeal — his is not a top-down sort of fame. He’s the approachable but protective friend, the one who leads with good judgment and progressive wholesomeness. (At previous shows, he’s helped people come out, or to confess their love.) That’s part of why, even though public discussion of Styles often centers on his dating life or the ways he flirts with gender fluidity, his actual show is conventional and chaste. The most risqué bit was when he explained how the in-the-round performance would work. Sometimes, “we’ll be ass to face,” he said. “I’ll be sure to distribute face and ass equally throughout the show — there’s plenty to go around.” It was cheeky. Even “Watermelon Sugar,” his lightly erotic hit, was dry.The New York TimesZOLADZ Styles did not call any exes at our show, but he did a funny bit where he attempted to count all of the “golf dads” in the audience — 34, apparently. He also broke some solemn “bad news” about something that had happened just before the show: “I’ve blown my tongue on some soup.” So yes, effortlessly charismatic banter, and he works every corner of the stage. The set and wardrobe were a bit more minimal than I anticipated; I expected at least one costume change. But I would describe the look he was going for, in a red-and-white-striped jumpsuit, as “sexy candy cane.” The fashion, the fans, the force of personality — it feels like we’re talking about everything but the music here, which is perhaps telling. How did the songs strike you, Jon, and did you get anything out of them that you don’t get on his records?CARAMANICA Basically, we’re of opposite opinions on Styles’s albums — I’m more partial to the most recent one, “Harry’s House,” and I know you lean more toward the previous one, “Fine Line.” When the songs were … funkier — and I use that designation extremely loosely — his performance felt more full. I’m thinking “Satellite,” and also “Cinema,” both from the new album — the rhythm section is in the lead, but doesn’t overpower him. I also liked what he did with “Adore You,” melting the chorus into more of a restrained tease. But when he went unadorned, like on “Matilda,” the air in the room felt heavier. And “Sign of the Times,” the first Styles solo hit, was ponderous, a karaoke take on mid-1970s power-mope.Styles’s performance was heavy on waving, pointing and blowing kisses to various sections of the audience.The New York TimesZOLADZ I sometimes detect a divide between the music Styles wants to make — the big, bold, if somewhat generic-sounding ’70s-style rock of his first album — and the more pop-oriented fare that better suits his personality. Not surprisingly, the songs that worked best for me live were the ones that manage to satisfy both of those impulses, like the groovy, Tame Impala-esque “Daylight” or the still-ubiquitous hit “As It Was.” I wish he’d ended the set on that note, but regrettably he had one more song to play after that, the stomping, Led-Zeppelin-cosplay rocker “Kiwi,” an unfortunate live staple that I consider one of his weakest songs. But, as ever, he seemed to relish playing the role of bombastic rock star, even if the material itself didn’t always electrify.I found it refreshing, though, that Styles is not shying away from his former group on this tour: The first song on his preperformance playlist is One Direction’s “Best Song Ever” — much to the shrieking delight of the thousands of fans who sang along to every word — and during his set he actually played a louder and more rock-oriented version of One Direction’s 2011 hit “What Makes You Beautiful,” which happens to be from an album that his former bandmate Louis Tomlinson recently called a disparaging word we can’t print here. How did you feel about Styles’s raucous 1D cover, Jon?CARAMANICA That was one of the musical high points, if not the peak. It was as if a rowdy bar band momentarily inhabited Styles’s very deliberately understated crew. On Saturday, too, people absolutely lost it when the opening bars of “Best Song Ever” hit right after the conclusion of Blood Orange’s temperate and tasteful opening set. It was the purest release of pent-up demand that I’ve witnessed in quite some time. And that’s how the rest of the night went, too — demand leading supply. Fervor without feeling (and certainly without friction). An arena-size canvas merely doodled on with pencil.And for the record, a friend lent me her pink-and-white boa for a few songs — it didn’t help. More

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      It’s Alive! It’s With the Band! A Computer Soloist Holds Its Own

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      Voyager, a computer program, played with Ensemble Signal in the U.S. premiere of a George Lewis piece that was a highlight of this year’s concert calendar.Two guest soloists, each skilled in the art of improvisation, appeared in New York City on Friday night with the cutting-edge chamber group Ensemble Signal.One soloist was human: Nicole Mitchell, the veteran flutist, composer and bandleader whose albums and performances are regularly (and rightly) celebrated by jazz critics.The other soloist was a computer program — called Voyager — that can listen to live performances in real time and offer improvised responses. Originally programmed in 1987 by George Lewis, the composer, performer and computer-music pioneer, Voyager’s discography is slighter than Mitchell’s, but likewise thrilling.On a 1993 CD for the Avant label, Voyager played the role of a real-time improvising orchestra — alongside Lewis’s trombone and the saxophone of Roscoe Mitchell (no relation to Nicole Mitchell). By the time of the 2019 RogueArt album “Voyage and Homecoming,” Voyager had been updated to perform — next to those same soloists — on a computer-controlled Disklavier piano. This, in turn, has made it possible for Voyager to enter into the tradition of the distinctive soloist, partnering with orchestras or chamber groups like Signal.On Friday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen, Voyager improvised on a concert grand Yamaha Disklavier, sharing the stage with Nicole Mitchell and members of Signal. These forces united to give the U.S. premiere of Lewis’s “Tales of the Traveller,” the final composition on a program presented as part of this year’s Time:Spans festival, which runs through Saturday.Lewis’s material for Signal is fully notated. But his score gives an improviser no notes to play — nor does it specify the instrumentation or number of improvising soloists. (The composer offers only entry and exit points for soloists.) Lewis merely gives soloists some advice regarding what not to do, when entering the fray. “Direct imitation of melodic or harmonic passages is to be avoided,” he says, referring to what the chamber group is playing. So what should the improvisers do? “Strategies for dialogue with the written music include blending, opposition or contrast, and transformation.”Without question, this was a lot of to-do for a 20-minute-plus performance at the end of a single show. But as “Traveller” unfolded, it proved a highlight of the year’s concert calendar, thus far, in New York.In large measure, this was because of Lewis’s instrumental writing for the chamber group. You could take Voyager out, and “Traveller” would still sound vivacious — full of high-stakes drama and responsive good humor. (The 2016 world premiere performance of the work by the London Sinfonietta involved only a single human improviser.)Lewis has been on a particularly strong chamber music run in the last 10 or so years. This hot streak has included larger-group efforts like “The Will to Adorn” and “As We May Feel” — as well as more intimate pieces like the “The Mangle of Practice.”In these works, and in “Traveller,” you are often immersed in instrumental density — quick rhythmic accelerations and parched sound-production textures. But paradoxically, these moments rarely feel abrasive (as in some other forms of modernism).Even when the music whips up complex, noisy nimbuses of competing motifs, the fast, finely judged changes within the dense activity are preparing you for variations on the weather. And, soon enough, there’s a clearing of skies: The music decelerates and makes room for melodic fragments that are voiced more sweetly. From there, you’re taken to the in-between states, with varieties of gradation. You get the sense that the suggestions Lewis lays down for his improvisers in “Traveller” — de-emphasizing imitation, and promoting contrast and transformation — are similar to the directives he charges himself with when composing.On Friday, the Disklavier piano was turned toward the audience, allowing viewers to watch for the moments when the Voyager software — running on a nearby computer — elected to depress the keys of the Disklavier.“It’s alive!” I thought — with a monster-movie watcher’s delight — when the piano first started playing, quietly. But since “Traveller” also has a part for a human pianist within the chamber group, you had to pay close sonic and visual attention to discern which pianistic choices were Voyager’s.Mitchell was a guest soloist with Ensemble Signal on Friday. On Saturday, the International Contemporary Ensemble performed her composition “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.”Stephanie BergerFor all that techno-drama, it wound up being Mitchell who took the early, demonstrative lead in improvising — with some fluid, songful passages that added a depth of lyricism to the boisterous material for Signal. During this stretch, Voyager limited its contributions to fluttering, high register filigree. And it sometimes chose silence.But since improvisation is also about knowing when to listen, that was no mark against the software’s intelligence. And when Voyager decided to make a forceful, fortissimo statement, late in the piece — in a relatively quiet passage for the chamber players — the provocation felt right on time. During the applause, as the conductor Brad Lubman made a gestures to both soloists, there was some laughter when he encouraged an ovation for Voyager. But the computer program had earned its plaudits.This was the kind of performance that you want to hear in a residence, night after night. The improvisations would be different. And the notated music would be great to hear multiple times. But that’s not the world we live in. So while Lewis’s duos for live players and electronic partners are performed with some frequency, the star-soloist turns for Voyager — in the company of many human partners — are more rare.Time:Spans is to be commended for producing the concert, even for a single night. This festival — put on each August by the Earle Brown Music Foundation — specializes in filling just this kind of contemporary-music niche. In past years, Time:Spans was where you could find important local premieres by John Luther Adams or works by comparatively lesser-known members of the Wandelweiser school. And it’s the rare festival at which you’ll also find members of Freiberg, Germany’s SWR Experimentalstudio.In addition to Signal’s hugely entertaining take on Lewis’s “Traveller,” Time:Spans has already presented several other rewarding concerts this year. In a single week I enjoyed gigs by the quintet Splinter Reeds, the Argento New Music Project chamber ensemble and the International Contemporary Ensemble.The ensemble’s set on Saturday had many points of connection with the Signal show — in part because of the presence of three other works by Lewis. Enjoyable as those were, the brightest moment of that concert was a contribution from the pen of Mitchell, “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.” (This concert was entirely for human players.)Written for the cello, violin, flute, a percussionist and a clarinetist (who doubled on bass clarinet), the 10-minute piece was often powered by a succession of duos within the quintet; these vivid episodes were often connected by gloomy but propulsive motifs played by the percussionist Levy Lorenzo.This week brings sets by the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire and the Talea Ensemble. Tickets are affordable; the acoustics grand. It’s a reason to hang around town in the depths of summer swelter. More

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      Blondie on the Music That Defined Its Legacy

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      Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and their bandmates built a career rooted in wit, excitement, pastiche and sex. A new boxed set, “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” traces their journey.As Chris Stein searched for rare recordings to include in “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” a handsome chronicle of the new wave band Blondie’s emergence from underdogs to pop stars, he rummaged diligently inside a packed barn on his property near Woodstock and —“I don’t have a barn,” Stein exclaimed in a recent interview, in a tone that was exasperated but also comedic. “The boxed set says I have a barn?” He sighed. “It’s a garage.”Up in the Blondie stratosphere, something has always gone wrong, even when things were going right. “Against the Odds,” out Friday, documents a volatile timeline of massive chart successes accompanied by personal and professional missteps.“I mean, missteps is an understatement,” Debbie Harry said with a chortle.In an hourlong video conversation, Stein, 72, who plays guitar and functions as the abstract mastermind of Blondie, and Harry, 77, the alluring singer who fronts the band and writes its most elegant lyrics, reflected on the unlikely success hinted at in the title of the boxed set. From 1974 to 1982 and beyond, the pair were inseparable lovers who, with their bandmates, built a career rooted in wit, excitement, sex and a Pop Art sensibility that included pastiche and appropriation. Harry and Stein remained close even after their romance ended in 1987. She’s even godmother to his two daughters.Because they combined an omnivorous curiosity with a playful foxiness rarely attempted in that era of rock music, the band was not taken as seriously as its peers — Talking Heads, Television, Ramones — yet found its way to national TV appearances, arena shows and the top of the charts. Its biggest successes came when it traversed styles: Of Blondie’s four No. 1 hits on the Hot 100, two are disco (“Heart of Glass” and “Call Me”), one is reggae (“The Tide Is High”) and one is a prescient celebration of hip-hop (“Rapture”).The boxed set — the first authorized by the band — makes an argument for Blondie’s greatness, both musical and visual. The Super Deluxe Edition includes the band’s first six studio albums, 36 previously unreleased tracks, and a foil-wrapped 144-page hardcover book with liner notes and photos. At 17 pounds, it’s the definitive account of a sound, attitude, look, and aesthetic that proved inspirational to generations of artists across a spectrum of genres. Madonna has called Harry “a role model,” and the band’s songs have been covered or sampled by Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, the Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliott, the Bad Plus and Def Leppard.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented, “which spoke of what was acceptable for girls at that time, and the way I had steered myself through life, having a certain facade,” she said from her Chelsea apartment, with a garden view behind her. “It was the same thing David Bowie did.” In her flinty 2019 memoir, “Face It,” Harry says she “was playing at being a cartoon fantasy onstage,” much like Marilyn Monroe. She never pretended that men and women didn’t stare at her, never pretended she didn’t like the attention, but also never took herself too seriously.“I loved how she presented herself,” Shirley Manson of the rock band Garbage said in an enthusiastic phone call. “It wasn’t pandering to the male gaze. She looked smart and sassy, and felt a little dangerous. You forget, because Blondie make it seem so stylish and effortless, how good the songwriting is. They’re the complete, untouchable package.”Harry was raised by adoptive parents in Hawthorne, N.J., but frequently wandered off to Manhattan, and moved into a $64-a-month apartment on St. Marks Place after college. She worked as a model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny and a clerk at a head shop. None of it was satisfying. “Music was always a huge, haunting influence,” she said. “I wanted to be in the art world. I felt I should be making music.”Harry sang in a short-lived, bucolic hippie band called Wind in the Willows, and was “sort of a hippie” herself, she said. Her next band, the Stilletos, was an almost vaudevillian girl group whose set included a song called “Wednesday Panties,” and when the Warhol associate Eric Emerson brought his roommate Chris Stein to see the band, he was entranced by Harry.Stein, like Harry, had graduated with an art degree, and he had the advantage of growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as the only child of intellectual immigrant parents who met as members of the Communist Party. When he was 17 and a self-described hippie weirdo, his band opened for the Velvet Underground, and he resolved to never get a job. “I was on welfare,” he said from his Lower Manhattan loft. “And I painted a bathroom once,” he added, deadpan.Both got a jolt of inspiration when they saw the New York Dolls play at the Mercer Arts Center. “They were funny and nasty and naughty,” Harry recalled. “It was everything I needed at that time.”Harry was naughty, too. A 1979 profile of Blondie in this newspaper made note of Harry’s “disregard for underwear.” Her purposeful use of sexuality wasn’t much more explicit than, say, contemporaneous TV ads for Serta mattresses or Calvin Klein jeans, but it was also an era when everyone, especially men, felt entitled to comment on women’s bodies. The attention on Blondie was “all about how I flaunted my underwear. It’s the Madonna/whore dichotomy — those seem to be the two acceptable occupations for women,” Harry said with a laugh.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesTheo Kogan, the singer of the punk band Lunachicks, said she saw Harry as part of a triumvirate of 1970s tough girls that also included Olivia Newton-John’s leather-encased transformation at the end of “Grease” and Pinky Tuscadero, the motorcycle-riding, butch-but-femme character on the hit show “Happy Days.” “They showed that you can be a glamorpuss and also be tough,” Kogan said in a phone interview.A clever and stylish couple, Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground. The two share many qualities, including hard-shelled cynicism and a capacity for not giving two figs about criticism. But Harry admits that at first, criticism “really floored me. It can knock you down, or it can make you want to fight harder. So it has a lot to offer,” she added with a laugh.So about those missteps Harry alluded to: Blondie’s backstage distractions included fights with the band’s manager and accountant, exploitative contracts, internal band squabbles that evolved into lawsuits, and for Harry and Stein, drug addiction. “Heroin and cocaine,” Stein said. “That’s what you did back then.”Much of this narrative becomes clear in “Against the Odds.” The first of the eight discs features early home recordings and demos of the band from 1974, all of them tentative and uncertain of style. Naysayers at CBGB who were unimpressed with the band used the derisive nickname Blandie, and they were relegated to a perpetual opening act.When they released their first album in 1976, Harry was 31 and Stein was almost 27, which was ancient per punk standards. But the material improved in subsequent years, especially with “Dreaming,” one of the best songs ever written about being young, broke and fabulous in the big city. The guys in the band — the keyboardist Jimmy Destri, the bassist Nigel Harrison, the drummer Clem Burke, the guitarist Frank Infante and Stein — perfected a look: dark suits, skinny ties, mod hair. The songwriting took a leap, with key contributions from Destri, Harrison and Infante, right as Blondie paired with Mike Chapman, a sharp Aussie producer who’d had glam rock hits with the Sweet and Nick Gilder. “It was like the Beatles getting together with George Martin,” Stein said.That creative relationship, however, was not without drama. “The first time Mike saw us play live,” Harry recalled, “he said afterward that he’d never laughed so much in his life. I guess I felt it was a compliment.”Chapman produced the band’s first No. 1, “Heart of Glass,” a thumping, synthesized, drum-machined disco track in which Harry finds herself “lost inside adorable illusion” and “riding high on love’s true bluish light,” a poetic summary of romantic ambivalence.Not for the first time, Blondie was accused of “selling out” (that was once a thing) by embracing trendy dance music. “The whole anti-disco movement smacked of class war to me,” Stein said. “When I was a kid, my heroes were 60-year-old Black men — Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf. Disco was just an extension of R&B.”“For me, it was about dancing,” Harry added. “I loved going to clubs.”Blondie earned a second No. 1, “Call Me,” working with the producer Giorgio Moroder, who observed the band working — or more precisely, bickering — in the studio and decided to record the music with players who weren’t wasting his time. “He’s a happy guy,” Harry said. “Why would he want to have that around?”A fifth album, “Autoamerican,” came out in 1980 and featured a smash cover of “The Tide is High,” a 1960s ska song by a Jamaican group, the Paragons, as well as “Rapture,” the first No. 1 song in the United States to feature a rap vocal. Stein and Harry were curious scenesters, always eager to find new trends, and it was inevitable that they’d cross paths with rappers. The “Rapture” video featured the future “Yo! MTV Raps” host Fab 5 Freddy, his fellow graffiti artist Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Accusations that the group had appropriated music by people of color followed, and Stein doesn’t deny it. “I always say, Black people invented and the white people presented,” Stein said. “It’s just part of the power imbalance in America and elsewhere.”Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground.Stephen SprouseBy 1982, the final year of the boxed set, conflicts within the band were untenable, and Harry was spending most of her time tending to Stein, who was hospitalized with a near-fatal skin disease. “We were pretty stoned,” Stein said. “That’s what exacerbated the illness I had,” he added. Blondie broke up.Stein and Harry did, too, in early 1987. Their split seems to have been more sad and resigned than rancorous, and Stein was heavily involved in Harry’s post-Blondie solo albums. In 1997, they re-formed the band, which has continued to record and tour, now with only one other original member, Burke. When Blondie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, the former members Nigel Harrison and Frank Infante stood onstage and fruitlessly beseeched Stein and Harry to let them perform at the ceremony. Blondie drama is eternal.Harry and Stein continue to work, both together and apart. He’s an accomplished photographer, has his own memoir coming out next year, and is toiling away on a Blondie documentary, which has been in progress since at least 1978. “We’re still hustling,” Stein said. Perhaps new missteps lie ahead.Harry has acting gigs, a reissue of her first solo album, “Koo Koo,” and is still active in the downtown music scene, braving smelly rock bars in search of inspiration. Well past the age of a Madonna or a whore, she’s inventing another acceptable occupation: the inspirational septuagenarian. “You’re not used to seeing someone Debbie’s age hanging out and going to clubs,” said Kogan, the Lunachicks singer. “That’s the beauty of her — she’s a role model for us as adults, as well as when we were younger.” More

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      Rod Wave’s ‘Beautiful Mind’ Is His Second No. 1 Album

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      The rapper and singer’s latest LP easily beat the other major debut in the Top 5 this week, Megan Thee Stallion’s “Traumazine.”The Florida rapper and singer Rod Wave tops the latest Billboard album chart with “Beautiful Mind,” easily beating out the latest from Megan Thee Stallion.“Beautiful Mind” opened with the equivalent of 115,000 sales in the United States, including 158 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate, with tracks like “Yungen,” featuring Jack Harlow, performing particularly well on Apple Music. The total take for “Beautiful Mind” was a bit less than Wave had for “SoulFly,” his last time at No. 1, which opened with 189 million streams in April 2021.On Billboard’s Hot 100, Nicki Minaj’s new single, “Super Freaky Girl,” is No. 1, her first time topping that chart as an unaccompanied artist. (She went to No. 1 twice in 2020, with “Trollz,” a joint release with 6ix9ine, and on a remix of Doja Cat’s “Say So.”) Like MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” Minaj’s track draws heavily from Rick James’s 1981 song “Super Freak.”Megan Thee Stallion lands at No. 4 with “Traumazine,” her second studio album, which was announced just one day before its release and earned the equivalent of 63,000 sales, with 86 million streams.Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” a steady streaming hit since early May, fell one spot to No. 2 after its eighth time in the top spot; over 15 weeks on the charts, “Un Verano” has racked up two million in equivalent sales, including about 2.7 billion streams.Also this week, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” holds at No. 3, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “The Last Slimeto,” which came within striking range of No. 1 last week, falls three spots to fifth place. More

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      Review: A Ukrainian Orchestra Speaks With Quiet Intensity

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      Brahms’s Fourth Symphony doesn’t mean anything. Like much of the classical music repertory, it has no text, no plot. It elicits emotions, but not in a rigidly defined way. At a concert, your neighbor’s experience of it, her explanation of its impact, will almost certainly be different from yours.It’s also, like much of the repertory, chameleonic — a different piece if you’ve suffered a heartbreak or celebrated a joy. On Thursday, when the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra performed the symphony at Lincoln Center, the notes were the same as ever. But, played by dozens of Ukrainian musicians on a mild evening in Damrosch Park, the score took on an air of calm but implacable defiance, what Rimbaud once called “burning patience.” There was no hysteria to this Brahms, just resolute intensity.Though the performance, with its unified, focused passion, seemed like the work of a well-practiced ensemble, this orchestra convened for the first time only a month ago, as an effort to showcase Ukraine’s culture and what the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called “artistic resistance” to the Russian invasion.It is the brainchild of the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who has Ukrainian roots, and her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Wilson and Gelb rallied sponsors and the assistance of the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, which hosted rehearsals and the first show of a 12-city tour, which continues through Saturday in Washington.Anna Fedorova was the soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a nod to the Polish support for the Freedom Orchestra project.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesPlaying under Wilson’s baton, the musicians represent a range of Ukrainian ensembles, and some are members of orchestras elsewhere in Europe. The Ukrainian government made the crucial contribution of allowing male players to participate in the tour, even though men of military age are now barred from leaving the country.But make no mistake: The men and women of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra are fighting. As the critic Jason Farago wrote last month in The New York Times, the risks to Ukrainian culture “are more than mere collateral damage” in this battle. This is, he added, a true culture war; Russia is seeking not just land but also the erasure of a country’s artistic output and history. Anyone who is resisting that is a soldier.“I don’t have a gun,” one of the orchestra’s musicians told The Times recently, “but I have my cello.”So it was natural that the evening had its moments of national pride. Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, took the stage to declare “Glory to Ukraine,” and Wilson echoed that sentiment — in Ukrainian — from the podium. A huge Ukrainian flag stretched behind the musicians; at the end, the soloists took a bow wrapped in flags, and still more were waved in the audience.The Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, spoke before the performance.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut this wasn’t a performance given over to jingoism; it favored refinement. You got the impression that the best way to fight imperialism and authoritarianism — from the concert stage, at least — was with sophistication, craft, rigor, subtlety. For all its moments of high drama, the program was admirably even-keeled and soft-spoken, an embodiment of a cultured nation. Even the arrangement of the Ukrainian anthem at the end was impressionistic and elegant, the opposite of stentorian.There has never been a perfect outdoor orchestral performance; instruments made for warm indoor acoustics take on an edge, and overamplified strings swamp the woodwinds every time. This was not the best possible setting for the American premiere of the pre-eminent Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 7 (2003), a poignant and canny single-movement work that begins in agony; dips (à la Shostakovich) knowingly into kitschy sweetness; and then slowly dissolves, ending with the eerie, toneless sound of breathing through brasses.The pianist Anna Fedorova was a sensitive, poetic soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a nod to the Polish support for the Freedom Orchestra project. The soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska — who replaced Anna Netrebko at the Met after Netrebko’s contracts were canceled in the wake of the Russian invasion — sang Leonore’s aria of rebellion from Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”Flags were also waved by members of the audience at Damrosch Park.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut most impressive was the Brahms symphony, not a piece easily thrown together by a pickup orchestra. (On Friday at Damrosch, as the closing night of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival, the Brahms will be replaced by Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, and the “Fidelio” aria by Aida’s paean to her homeland, “O patria mia.”)Despite the outdoor acoustics, the sound was remarkably rich in the first movement; the second was eloquent; the third buoyant but still substantial, carried off with understated panache.The finale was less ferocious than you might have thought it would be, given the occasion, and was all the more moving for that restraint. Some have heard in the end of Brahms’s Fourth grimness and destruction, a kind of gorgeous annihilation. This was the opposite: a declaration of continued presence.It’s not quite true that the work is pure music, without any external connections; you just have to dig a bit. Brahms derived the theme of the finale from the final movement of a Bach cantata, the opening words of which could have been this concert’s — and this orchestra’s — credo: “My days of suffering, God will finally end in joy.”Ukrainian Freedom OrchestraThrough Friday at Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

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      Blackpink’s Genre-Clashing Return, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Blake Shelton, Chloe Moriondo and Madonna.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.Blackpink, ‘Pink Venom’Over the four years leading to its 2020 debut album, Blackpink — Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, Rosé — became one of K-pop’s biggest global success stories: musically modern, engaged with pop from around the world, versatile. The first single from the group’s upcoming second album, “Born Pink” (due next month) has the comfort of anarchy.  Every four bars, a new approach enters — familiar K-pop elasticity, loose Middle Eastern themes, gaudy rock, West Coast rap, and more. It exists out where maximalism moves past philosophy to aesthetic. JON CARAMANICAMadonna, ‘Get Together’ (Jacques Lu Cont Vocal Edit)The remixes on Madonna’s “Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones,” out Friday, throb, zigzag and shimmer, highlighting the pop superstar’s deep connection to the dance floor — starting with her 1983 single “Holiday” and wrapping with “I Don’t Search I Find,” the glorious house standout on her most recent studio album, “Madame X” (its lyrics give the collection its name). As a full body of work, Madonna’s 2005 LP “Confessions on a Dance Floor” represents her most potent love letter to the form, and the Jacques Lu Cont Vocal Edit remix of its “Get Together,” available digitally for the first time, is a refreshing break from the (still great!) 4 a.m.-at-the-club pound that marks most of the set. Replacing its oozing synths with a snaking guitar riff, the track rides nearly like an indie-rock song that eventually glitches out and finds a way home again. CARYN GANZ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ), ‘[] vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ (۝ʅ(Ɵʅ():::()̵̳̗̊(Ɵʅ()vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ)’This garble of characters is an alias of the innovative electronic music producer Kieran Hebden (also known as Four Tet). His fleet and cheeky new song is indebted to sensual garage and boisterous house. CARAMANICAZedd, Maren Morris and Beauz ‘Made You Say’Like Zedd and Maren Morris’s previous collaboration, the unavoidable pop smash “The Middle,” “Make You Say” is the expertly engineered product of a whole cadre of collaborators: This time around, that includes co-writing credits from the sibling D.J. duo Beauz and the thirst trap aficionado Charlie Puth. All throughout, Morris hopscotches nimbly across Zedd’s syncopated arrangement and sing-songy melody, but the song is at its best when it really lets her rip, contrasting the grainy texture of her voice with the sleek surfaces of Zedd’s production. “You got your arms around her when you sleep,” she belts with alluring sass, “but I’m the one you dream about.” LINDSAY ZOLADZIsabella Lovestory, ‘Sexo Amor Dinero’An industrial post-reggaeton thumper about the sweat at the intersection of money and sex. CARAMANICAChloe Moriondo, ‘Fruity’The ever-evolving Chloe Moriondo — a young musician who basically came of age on her YouTube channel — makes an exhilarating pivot to hyperpop on “Fruity,” the first single from her forthcoming album, “Suckerpunch.” The song begins with Moriondo singing in her signature, sweetly muttered register atop some bright, pulsating synths, but as it builds in intensity her vocals become increasingly urgent and start to warp like melting plastic. “So close I can almost taste,” she sings of a “fresh and fruity” crush who she compares to a whole litany of sugary treats, building toward a chorus that’s deliciously hysterical and relentlessly catchy. ZOLADZPony, ‘Peach’It turns out that Pony, the tuneful grunge-pop band from Toronto, is quite aptly named: Earlier this year, the vocalist and guitarist Sam Bielanski announced a new gig: voicing a character in a “My Little Pony” cartoon. The charismatic pull of Bielanski’s vocals are on full display on the group’s new, ’90s-alt-rock-nodding single “Peach,” a bittersweet tale of love bombing and, eventually, cold clarity. “Picturing the salt of the beach,” Bielanski sings on the chorus, as a kind of personal reminder, “’Cause I don’t wanna drown in the taste of this peach.” ZOLADZBlake Shelton, ‘No Body’A sashaying splash of early ’90s power-country revivalism from Blake Shelton, a superstar who’s traversed many styles with ease in his career, but never quite owned one. Here he’s reviving a once-rowdy sound and nodding to Brooks & Dunn (“Don’t wanna scoot the boots with nobody”) — a convincing mimic, as ever. CARAMANICANick Hakim, ‘Happen’“Happen,” from the Brooklyn-based indie musician Nick Hakim, is a hypnotic, woozily romantic ballad that nonetheless contains flashes of melancholic darkness: The muted, sludgy acoustic guitar conjures Elliott Smith, while the close-miked, near-whispered vocals are faintly reminiscent of the softer side of the Deftones. That overcast sound, though, balances out the openhearted nature of Hakim’s lyrics, which are almost devotional in their description of a transformative love. “The sweetest angel fell into my world,” he sings. “She gives me reason, was lost for a damn long time.” ZOLADZ More

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      She Made Glimmerglass a True Festival. Now She’s Moving On.

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      During Francesca Zambello’s 12 years as the festival’s leader, she did what she set out to do: took on “complex issues through storytelling and music making.”COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Before every opera performance at the Glimmerglass Festival, Francesca Zambello, its artistic and general director, cruises around its bucolic campus in a golf cart that she calls “Grane” after Brünnhilde’s trusty steed. Zambello greets audience members, gives welcome lifts to some older patrons, and gets out regularly to mingle. That a leader should be the festival’s public face is something Zambello takes seriously.On a recent steamy Friday afternoon, she was an especially enthusiastic greeter. A performance of “The Jungle Book,” a youth opera she had commissioned, was about to begin at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, and lots of children, including very young ones, were in the crowd. “Hi,” she said to two little girls holding hands. “Is this your first opera?” When the girls nodded yes, Zambello, like a den mother, said: “That’s so exciting. I bet you’ll love it!”After 12 ambitious, innovative years running Glimmerglass, Zambello, 65, is stepping down after this year’s six-week summer festival, which ends on Aug. 21. She will turn her focus to the Washington National Opera, where she has been artistic director since 2012. Proud of her tenure at Glimmerglass, and for leaving the company, in “a very healthy financial position, far different than I found,” she said in a recent interview, she felt the time was right to move on.She has accomplished what she set out to do. “Creating a ‘festival’ environment and focusing on our brand of theater as a bridge to diverse communities,” she wrote in an email, as well as “addressing complex issues through storytelling and music making.”Commissioning youth operas was just one initiative that Zambello brought to Glimmerglass, one that allowed her to give composers and librettists a chance. And it was essential to her, she said, that “young people should see works by living composers; they should know that music is alive.”She also expanded the young artists program, created an artist residency (this year, it’s Kamala Sankaram, the composer of “Jungle Book”), and commissioned works for almost every festival — 11 in all, including one-acts and, a high point, “Blue” (2019), a timely opera with a score by Jeanine Tesori, and a libretto by Tazewell Thompson. A gripping, timely work about a Black policeman and his wife trying to raise a rebellious teenage son in Harlem, “Blue” has gone on to national stages. It plays in Toledo, Ohio, this month and next spring at Zambello’s Washington company and the English National Opera in London.From the start, Zambello set a goal that “a third of the company should be nonwhite,” she said. This was a public manifestation of her efforts at diversity, and for the most part, she delivered.And while most performing arts institutions talk up their community outreach programs, few have made more efforts than Glimmerglass under Zambello, including bringing opera to Attica, the maximum-security prison in western New York.A scene from the “The Jungle Book,” with a score by Kamala Sankara, this year’s artist in residence.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalThese initiatives helped Zambello with her mission — to transform the Glimmerglass Opera, as it was known when she arrived, into the Glimmerglass Festival. Many opera companies and orchestras present summer seasons called festivals that are essentially more of the same. Under Zambello, Glimmerglass has been a true festival, with mostly new productions of works, new and old, with ancillary concerts and talks. All of these often touch on larger themes and issues, a way, she said, to make the festival “more socially responsible,” particularly “during the second half of my tenure.”Last summer, with the pandemic lingering, Zambello presented Glimmerglass on the Grass, with inventively staged, trimmed-down productions performed on a makeshift platform outdoors with amplification. This summer, opera has returned to the main stage — an intimate 918-seat theater — but, to be cautious, no ancillary events were scheduled.This year’s six productions touched to various degrees, Zambello said, on “serious questions around faith, around resistance, around freedom and community.” Especially, to my delight and surprise, “The Jungle Book.”In this version, directed by Zambello and Brenna Corner, Mowgli, the feral boy raised by a pack of wolves, is a girl (the sweet-voiced, impish Lily Grady). In the opening scene, Raksha, the matriarch of the pack (Kendra Faith Beasley), gathers her underlings and tells them: “To get along in the jungle, you have to know who you are.”Sankaram’s music is an enchanting blend of Indian styles, especially from the Carnatic tradition, with Western harmonies, cyclic rhythms, inventive instrumental colors and tender, snappy vocal writing. I hope the young girls and boys in attendance noted that the composer, librettist (Kelley Rourke), conductor (Kamna Gupta), and directors of this enchanting production were all women.A scene from “Taking Up Serpents,” a one-act by Sankaram.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalSankaram’s range came through in a production of “Taking Up Serpents,” a 2018 one-act opera, with a libretto by Jerre Dye, on a double bill with a Glimmerglass commission and premiere, “Holy Ground,” with music by Damien Geter and a libretto by Lila Palmer. “Taking Up Serpents” is a dark, intense story of a young woman, Kayla (Mary-Hollis Hundley), who has taken a job at a drugstore in an Alabama gulf town to get away from her parents, who lead a rural church that believes in speaking in tongues and practices rituals with snakes.Sankaram and Dye dig below the parents’ seeming fanaticism to explore the spiritual yearnings that drive them and that, in some way, speak to the confused Kayla. “Holy Ground” explores spirituality quite differently. With a fanciful, skillfully written score, the piece presents a beguiling present-day story of a group of hapless archangels having trouble recruiting a young woman to bear God in human form. (Again? Did the first time not take hold?)Within the context of this summer’s offerings, even a work as familiar as Bizet’s “Carmen” came across with extra bite: a tale of exploited female factory workers and a dark portrait of a “community,” Carmen (Briana Hunter) falls in with a group of bandits. Denyce Graves, a renowned interpreter of the title role, directed the psychologically penetrating production. Zambello’s imprint on the festival had never seen clearer.But back in 2010, when her appointment was announced, she might not have seemed a logical choice for the job. For nearly 30 years, Paul Kellogg (who died last year) had brought gracious leadership skills and a “superb aesthetic,” as Zambello said, to Glimmerglass. When he stepped down in 2006, amid staff turmoil, it went into a four-year transitional period under Michael MacLeod. It was ready for an artistic jolt.Zambello had earned international acclaim as an opera director at major houses in Paris, Milan, London, Moscow and more. She had taken her share of knocks for staging concepts that critics felt did not work, especially in the early years. Her 1992 debut at the Metropolitan Opera, “Lucia di Lammermoor,” was deemed by many a symbolism-strewn fiasco. She came back to the Met in 2003 with a visually stunning and emotionally involving production of Berlioz’s epic “Les Troyens.”But she had never run a company.Ben Heppner and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Zambello’s visually impressive and emotionally involving production of “Les Troyens” at the Met, in 2003.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I had hit 30 years of being an itinerant director,” she said. “I wanted to have an anchor.”Sherwin M. Goldman, then the president of the Glimmerglass board (and still a member), said the board took a leap in going with Zambello.“I was not overwhelmed by her taste, to be quite frank,” Goldman said in an interview. “It was more her intelligence than her talent that intrigued me.” Zambello, who was born in New York and grew up in Europe, speaks five languages and talks with sweeping confidence about all facets of theater and the arts.What finally convinced Goldman, he said, was Zambello’s readiness “to fight for what she believed in.” And she was no pushover. “Every day was a fight with Francesca,” he said. “That’s the way she communicated.”At the time, Glimmerglass’s endowment had gone down, and there was a stubborn deficit, Zambello recalled. Along with tireless fund-raising skills, she articulated a bold vision that moved the festival into its next chapter. Her commitment to diversity was clear by her second season, in 2012, when artists from the Cape Town Opera were on the summer roster along with a number of Black American singers. That summer, years before the current discussions about race-conscious casting in opera and theater, Zambello’s festival explored dimensions of this complex issue.Zambello, dressed for “The Sound of Music,” which she director this summer.via The Glimmerglass FestivalThere was a poignant production (by Thompson) of Kurt Weill’s musical “Lost in the Stars,” based on Alan Paton’s novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” about a Black priest in South Africa struggling to serve his rural congregation. The festival was able to cast with affecting sensitivity to the racial identities of the characters; Eric Owens excelled in the lead role of Stephen Kumalo.There was also a contemporary production of Verdi’s “Aida” directed by Zambello with a Black soprano (Michelle Johnson) in the title role of an Ethiopian princess held captive in Egypt, and, daringly for the time, a Black tenor (Noah Stewart) as Radamès, the leader of the Egyptian forces who is in love with her. The production was asking you to see beyond assumptions about the racial identities of the lovers.Verdi’s opera “is not about race,” Zambello said. “It’s almost a civil argument between Ethiopia and Egypt. It’s not even like there is a fixed border; these are like two tribes.”Then there was a lively staging, by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” With so many Black singers to call upon, the town of River City, Iowa, and its small-minded, gossipy citizenry, came across here as a racially mixed community.“The Music Man” was an early entry into Zambello’s series of classic American musicals, presented in fresh productions, with full orchestras (a rarity on Broadway), singers who combine operatic training and musical theater savvy, and, for the most part, no amplification.This summer Zambello directed “The Sound of Music,” starring Mikaela Bennett in a radiant, endearing performance as Maria. In this vibrant staging, with adorable child performers as the von Trapp children, the musical’s themes of faith, community and resistance to tyranny, which often seem smothered in sentimentality, felt real and timeless.Mikaela Bennett, right, as Maria in Zambello’s production of “The Sound of Music.”Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalZambello’s successor will be Robert Ainsley, who has been the director of the Washington National Opera’s young artists program and its American opera initiative. “Rob will bring his own sensitivity to programming,” Zambello said, adding, “I know he is committed to continuing to provide a range of ways for people to come together around song and story.”For her part, Zambello is gratified to have overseen the return of live opera to Glimmerglass. Nothing, she said, can replace a “group of strangers, responding together, magnifying each other’s sense of tension, shock, wonder and delight.” More