Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Kate Bush Rides ‘Stranger Things’ to a New High on the Singles Chart

      by

      “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” hit No. 4 on the U.S. singles chart this week, 37 years after its release. Harry Styles’s “As It Was” is still No. 1.Thirty-seven years ago, the British singer-songwriter Kate Bush released the song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” as part of her album “Hounds of Love.” The single went to No. 3 in Britain and No. 30 in the United States, and took its place as a signature piece of Bush’s catalog — an intense ballad with a driving beat, a playful synthesizer melody and Bush’s dramatic vocals.Then came “Stranger Things.”After “Running Up That Hill” was featured prominently in the latest season of “Stranger Things,” the 1980s-period horror-drama on Netflix, the song began to climb the charts again, posting huge numbers on streaming services and catching fire on TikTok. It has now reached No. 2 in Britain — held off only by Harry Styles’s “As It Was” — and this week climbed four spots to reach No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the standard U.S. pop singles chart, Bush’s highest position ever. It was Spotify’s most streamed track throughout the world last week, with 57.2 million clicks (about a million more than “As It Was”), and is showing no signs of slowing down.While “Running Up that Hill” has been big on streaming services, radio stations have been slow to play it, giving Styles an advantage when it comes to the Billboard chart. “As It Was” holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 — which is computed from a song’s success in streaming, sales and airplay — for a sixth week.“Running Up That Hill” is the latest example of a decades-old song finding surprising success. In 2020, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” became a streaming hit after an Idaho potato worker made a TikTok video of himself listening to it while drinking Cran-Raspberry juice. And this year, Nirvana’s 31-year-old “Something in the Way” made its first appearance on the Hot 100 after the song was used in “The Batman.”In a note on her website, Bush, who rarely gives interviews, wrote, “How utterly brilliant!” in response to the song’s chart success. “So many young people who love the show, discovering the song for the first time.” She added:The response to “Running Up That Hill” is something that has had its own energy and volition. A direct relationship between the shows and their audience and one that has stood completely outside of the music business. We’ve all been astounded to watch the track explode!On this week’s album chart, the Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny jumps one spot to claim his second week at No. 1 with “Un Verano Sin Ti,” beating out Post Malone’s new “Twelve Carat Toothache,” which opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 121,000 sales, including 128 million streams. Styles’s “Harry’s House,” the top seller for the last two weeks, fell to No. 3. Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 4, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” is in fifth place. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      New York Philharmonic Agrees to Restore Pay for Musicians

      by

      After a stronger-than-expected season, the orchestra said it would reverse pay cuts imposed at the height of the pandemic.When the coronavirus pandemic erupted in 2020, battering the cultural sector and forcing the New York Philharmonic to cancel a season, the orchestra worked to cut costs, slashing its musicians’ pay by 25 percent.The Philharmonic promised at the time to reverse those cuts, which provided more than $20 million in savings, once its financial outlook brightened. And on Monday, the orchestra announced it would do so in September, much earlier than expected.The decision to restore pay is a milestone in the Philharmonic’s recovery, and it offered some hope that the worst of the pandemic, which cost the orchestra more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue, had passed.“There’s nothing more important than our musicians,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “It was just a very important act to make.”Borda said government grants and loans, an increase in donations and better-than-expected ticket sales during the 2021-22 season made the decision possible. The orchestra is on track to finish its season without missing a performance, and it just concluded a series of concerts in Europe, at a time when many ensembles have been unable to tour.“We’re in a different phase of life now,” she said.Geffen Hall, seen here in March, will reopen in fall.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe Philharmonic is at a pivotal moment. The $550 million renovation of its home, David Geffen Hall, is to be completed in the fall. And the orchestra is searching for a music director to replace its departing leader, Jaap van Zweden, who steps down in 2024.The pay cuts had been a source of distress among players as the Philharmonic prepared for its new chapter.In December 2020, the Philharmonic and its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included 25 percent cuts to base pay, which was then around $2,900 per week, through August 2023. Under the deal, pay was set to gradually increase until the expiration of the contract in September 2024, though musicians would have been paid less at the end than they were before the pandemic.But as coronavirus cases fell last year and audiences returned, the Philharmonic’s fiscal outlook brightened. Ticket sales in the 2021-22 season have been better than expected: Attendance at subscription concerts was 90 percent, though the orchestra was playing in smaller halls with Geffen being renovated. Donations have been strong, rising by 11 percent to $31.5 million in 2020, the last year for which data is available. The Philharmonic also received grants and loans of more than $16 million from the federal government.In October, the Philharmonic began making payments to musicians to offset the pay cuts. But it was not until Monday that the orchestra vowed to fully restore musicians’ pay for the remainder of the contract.The trombonist Colin Williams, the head of the players’ negotiating committee, said the decision would help reassure musicians who have grappled with the uncertainties of the pandemic.“We’re feeling much more confident about our institution again — our place in it and our place in the city,” he said in an interview. “We somehow weathered this incredibly traumatic time and have come out of it stronger and more cohesive than we were before.”Borda said the Philharmonic still faced financial risks, including the possible emergence of new variants of the coronavirus. While the orchestra remains in what she called “a state of suspended fluidity,” she said it was important to stay focused on the future, including the opening of Geffen Hall, which she described as “light at the end of the tunnel.”“We improvise, we move forward,” she said. “We are placing our money on the fact that we are moving ahead.” More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Nipsey Hussle Murder Trial: What to Know

      by

      More than three years after the Los Angeles rapper was shot and killed, the trial of Eric Holder Jr., the accused gunman, is finally underway.More than three years after the fatal shooting of the rapper Nipsey Hussle, a proudly local Los Angeles artist whose killing reverberated far beyond the world of West Coast hip-hop, the trial of the accused gunman, Eric R. Holder Jr., is finally underway. Jury selection in the case, which had been repeatedly delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, began on June 2. Opening arguments are expected to start this week, with the trial likely to last about four weeks.Hussle, whose real name was Ermias Asghedom, was shot and killed on March 31, 2019, outside a clothing store he owned in South Los Angeles, with the police soon attributing the attack to a personal dispute. Two days after the shooting, which also wounded two bystanders, Mr. Holder, then 29, was arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder and possession of a firearm by a felon. He pleaded not guilty and has since been held in lieu of $6.5 million bail.According to court records, Los Angeles County prosecutors plan to argue that Mr. Holder and the 33-year-old Hussle, two old acquaintances who belonged to the same street gang, had a chance encounter in a strip mall parking lot, during which the rapper mentioned neighborhood rumors that Mr. Holder had cooperated with law enforcement — “a very serious offense” in the gang world. Minutes later, prosecutors say, Mr. Holder returned with two handguns and began firing repeatedly. Here is what else to know about the case.Who was Nipsey Hussle?A workmanlike rapper with underground credentials and an A-list network of supporters, Hussle was more than 15 years into his music career when he released his proper debut album in 2018. Before the Grammy-nominated “Victory Lap,” Hussle had built a career that was richer in industry respect and good will than hit records, though he collaborated widely with artists like Snoop Dogg, Drake and Rick Ross. Known for his independent business ethos and novel marketing ideas, like the limited-edition $100 mixtape “Crenshaw,” Hussle had partnered with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation management company as he eyed a move toward the mainstream.A self-proclaimed member of the Rollin’ 60s Crips, Hussle had also made a name for himself as a community ambassador and an entrepreneur in his South Los Angeles neighborhood. While seeking to stem gang violence in the area, he preached Black empowerment through business ownership, reinvesting his earnings as a musician in the place where he grew up.With a group of backers, Hussle had bought the strip mall at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue that housed his Marathon clothing store, while also helping to open a nearby co-working space dedicated to increasing diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.At the same time, even as Hussle was praised after his death as an inspirational neighborhood fixture and a peacemaker, his properties were the subject of a longstanding investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and the city attorney’s office, which considered the area a Rollin’ 60s stronghold.Some 20,000 people attended Hussle’s public memorial at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where a statement from President Barack Obama highlighted the rapper’s life as “a legacy worth celebrating.”After his killing in 2019, mourners held a vigil ouside his Marathon clothing store.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesWhat happened on the day of the shooting?That Sunday afternoon, according to grand jury transcripts, Hussle arrived at the shopping plaza for an unannounced visit, as he often did. While catching up with neighborhood friends and employees in the parking lot in front of his Marathon store, Hussle spent about half an hour signing autographs and posing for photos with fans.At the same time, a woman Mr. Holder was casually dating was driving him around the area just to hang out, the woman testified to the grand jury in 2019. As they stopped to get something to eat, the woman noticed Hussle outside the store and remarked in passing that he looked handsome, she said. Mr. Holder did not indicate that he knew the rapper, but approached him for a brief conversation after ordering chili cheese fries at a nearby burger place while the woman waited in the car.“Apparently the conversation had something to do with Mr. Asghedom telling Mr. Holder that word on the street was that Mr. Holder was snitching,” John McKinney, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, told the grand jury, citing witnesses. “The conversation wasn’t particularly intense, it wasn’t particularly belligerent, and it lasted for about four minutes.”Hussle, the witnesses said, seemed to be looking out for Mr. Holder, telling him he needed to address the rumors. When Mr. Holder asked Hussle and those around him if they had heard the music he had been working on, they said they had not. As the men finished speaking, the woman driving Mr. Holder approached Hussle for a selfie, which she soon posted to Facebook.Upon returning to the car, Mr. Holder told the woman to pull into another nearby parking lot so he could eat his fries, she said. After a few bites, he loaded a 9-millimeter pistol, she testified, and walked back toward Hussle’s store. According to witnesses, Mr. Holder confronted the rapper and said, “You’re through” as he opened fire with a gun in each hand, hitting Hussle at least 10 times and then kicking him twice in the head.“You got me,” Hussle said, according to court testimony. Two other men, Kerry Lathan and Shermi Villanueva, were wounded by the gunfire.How was Eric Holder identified as the suspect?Recognized in the neighborhood as another member of the Rollin’ 60s Crips, Mr. Holder was better known by his nickname, a descriptive epithet. Surveillance footage captured the shooting, in addition to the car he used to flee the scene, and the police soon publicized the information. Upon seeing her vehicle on the news, the woman who had been with Mr. Holder submitted to a five-hour interview with police officers, along with searches of her car and her mother’s home, where Mr. Holder had spent the night of the shooting before moving to hide out at a Motel 6.The woman later testified that she had heard the gunshots but was confused about what had occurred until she saw coverage of Hussle’s death online. When Mr. Holder first returned to the car, she recalled, “He’s like, ‘Drive, drive, before I slap you.’” The woman declined to press him on the specifics of what happened out of fear, she said.That Tuesday, two days after the shooting, Mr. Holder was arrested without incident in Bellflower, Calif. The murder weapons were never found.The woman, whose identity has been kept secret to protect her from threats and harassment, later agreed to immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony at trial. She is expected to be among the prosecution’s key witnesses.What is Mr. Holder’s defense?Mr. Holder was originally represented by Chris Darden, a lawyer perhaps best known as one of the prosecutors in the 1995 trial of O.J. Simpson. But Mr. Darden soon withdrew from the case, citing death threats against his family. Instead, Mr. Holder will be represented at trial by a public defender, Aaron Jansen, who said in an email that he plans to argue that the case was “overcharged.”“Mr. Eric Holder, Jr. should not have been charged with First Degree Premeditated Deliberate murder in the unfortunate death of Mr. Asghedom,” Mr. Jansen wrote. “Similarly,” Mr. Jansen added, he should not have been “charged with First Degree Attempted Murders of Mr. Lathan and Mr. Villanueva. Mr. Holder, Jr. did not know either man, had no beef with them, and certainly did not have the intent to kill either gentleman.”The lawyer has also alluded to Mr. Holder’s struggles with mental health, noting that the defendant was on a high dosage of medication and had been treated with electroshock therapy “as a last resort to help him.” Whether Mr. Holder will testify, the lawyer said, is his client’s decision. He faces life in prison. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Two Gems of June: Premieres at Carnegie Hall and Harlem School of the Arts

      by

      The festival circuit may be getting underway but the city offers fine fare with programs of work by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Adegoke Steve Colson.This month, you might feel the momentum in classical music swinging to the domestic festival circuit, with splashy premieres and revivals coming courtesy of Spoleto, Ojai and the Opera Theater of St. Louis. But New York isn’t finished yet, either.Two premieres here over the weekend — one loudly trumpeted and one that enjoyed comparatively little fanfare — were newsworthy and enjoyable on their own terms, while also serving as reminders not to neglect the city’s June calendar.Along with the New York Philharmonic’s presentations Friday of Barber’s Violin Concerto — featuring the star violinist Hilary Hahn — and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the audience at Carnegie Hall heard the premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s 14-minute “Forward Into Light.”The composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, center, with the conductor Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Friday, for the premiere of her work “Forward Into Light.”Chris LeeCommissioned by the orchestra as part of its “Project 19” focus on female composers, “Forward Into Light” was inspired by the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. With music that was by turns fragile and ferocious — and that also boasted touches of mordant wit — “Light” ably communicated its story about new ideas struggling for space (and for longevity). Spare, ascending motives in the harp anchored some early sections. When the orchestra responded and added in new, consonant melody in turn, there was a sense of material developing through collaboration. Elsewhere, a brief song for clarinet spurred material for other winds. Subsequent interplay, with Minimalist pulses in the violins offset by glissandi in the cellos and basses, recalled the swooning call-and-response arrangements of past Snider works, like “Circe and the Hanged Man,” from her 2010 song cycle “Penelope.”The typically hard-charging Philharmonic music director Jaap van Zweden allowed these moments to breathe. Yet he also relished hairpin turns during which the music throttled into tutti writing. Late in the piece, he managed Snider’s quick dynamic shifts with a Hollywood sound-mixer’s feel for drama.Overall, “Forward” was packed but not overstuffed with historical references, both abstract and concrete. Sometimes Snider’s Sturm und Drang suggested early feminist boldness, or corresponding public sphere controversy. However, a prerecorded sample of Dame Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women,” late in the piece, didn’t register as strongly as the rest of the music. But even in the densest moments, you could discern Snider’s feel for wry commentary. A few walloping brass passages seemed to offer knowing nods and the subtlest of eye-rolls — as though the characters who inspired this music were aware that the unshakable strengths of the suffrage movement could outlast early, noisy objections.The violinist Hilary Hahn performing Barber’s Violin Concerto on Friday, with van Zweden conducting.Chris LeeAnd so, just as in her ecologically oriented “Mass for the Endangered,” the composer’s intellectual concerns dovetailed smoothly with the lush, inviting score. (The Death of Classical concert series presents Snider’s Mass, Monday through Thursday this week at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.)It was the beginning of a fine night for the Philharmonic. In partnership with Hahn, the orchestra gave Barber’s violin concerto some thrillingly rough-hewed edges, cutting against its public reputation as lighter fare. And though van Zweden’s over-articulated grimness in the middle sections of Mahler’s symphony came at the expense of the composer’s more colorful twists, the conductor’s handling of the outer movements delivered undeniable galvanic thrills.While the Carnegie crowd received Hahn’s appearance with an ovation befitting her global-star status — and responded to the culmination of the Mahler with fever-pitch satisfaction — they also greeted the new piece with enthusiasm. It all made for a richly satisfying close to the orchestra’s challenging year outside its own auditorium.The next time we hear them indoors, it will be at the newly refurbished, redesigned Geffen Hall, inside Lincoln Center. What they’ll play there, over the next few years, is beginning to come into focus. And as the Philharmonic’s administrators continue to deepen their engagement with music by Black composers, they might have looked uptown on Saturday for a few more ideas.Adegoke Steve Colson’s “Suite Harlem,” a six-movement work, was dedicated to the Harlem School of the Arts and its founder, the soprano Dorothy Maynor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesKendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, performed a dance accompaniment in the third movement of Adegoke Steve Colson’s work.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe bassist Luke Stewart was part of the octet performing “Suite Harlem.” Each soloist had a chance to shine throughout the piece.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn the closing night of the second annual A Train Festival at the Harlem School of the Arts, the pianist and composer Adegoke Steve Colson — a veteran of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.) — presented a 75-minute premiere of a six-movement work. Titled “Suite Harlem,” it was dedicated to the school, and presented in its 120-seat black box theater. Like Snider’s “Forward,” this work was also dedicated to a female pathbreaker: the soprano Dorothy Maynor, who founded this school in the 1960s.Scored for an octet of piano, vocalist, trumpet, bass clarinet, violin, vibraphone, bass and drums, Colson’s music occasionally felt like a thrilling update of the soul jazz tradition — particularly when the composer’s piano took a subtly swinging yet harmonically unpredictable background role. At other points the work had all the high-energy markers of the 1970s avant-garde. And thanks to some stirring playing from the violinist Marlene Rice, the music also proposed a lineage with some of Ellington’s chamber-adjacent music with Ray Nance on violin (as in “Dance No. 3” from the Liberian Suite).During “Searching Harlem,” the first movement of this premiere, the composer’s wife and longtime collaborator and vocalist Iqua Colson gave affecting voice to Maynor’s intentions in founding this institution. She brought crisp intonation to some mournful melodic lines that described the historical dearth of spaces for the neighborhood’s children “to sing or dance or act a part.” And later in the suite, during the explosive, uptempo penultimate movement, “Resilience,” she channeled the fiery sense of artistic expression made possible by the school, with an inventive solo of scat singing. It wasn’t supper-club-style scat, either — but an ingeniously shaped solo, concluding with some darting phrases that earned one of the night’s biggest rounds of applause. It brought to mind the couple’s long and fruitful collaboration, going back to 1980s releases like “Triumph!” and “No Reservation.”The interdisciplinary nature of the school — and of the A.A.C.M. itself — was brought into enjoyable focus thanks to contributions by students, during the third movement (“Our Beautiful Children”). Two dancers, Kendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, provided fluid accompaniment to funk-inflected rhythms of the percussionist Pheeroan akLaff and the bassist Luke Stewart.Adegoke Steve Colson shined especially bright in the suite’s final half.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesEvery soloist had a chance to shine, throughout the piece. But Adegoke Steve Colson’s piano playing in the suite’s final half was a cut above this generally high standard: densely avant-garde and joyously singing in equal measure. This solo aspect of his art has been only rarely heard on recordings — like “Tones for” (2015) — so it was a treat to hear him in this manner, in the suite.The music of the Montclair, N.J.-based Colson, who is now 72, is not as well known as that of his A.A.C.M. contemporaries like Henry Threadgill. But there’s still time to give him more airings in New York. “Suite Harlem” was the climactic result of his time as an artist in residence at the school in Harlem. Given his pedagogical bent, perhaps Carnegie could commission a chamber work from him, for its young professional group Ensemble Connect. And a revival of his large-scale opus dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “ … as in a Cultural Reminiscence …” might also fit in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall space.For now, this weekend’s performances were reminder enough of the veteran’s long contribution to music, and of Snider’s emergent career. The back-to-back relationship of their premieres on the calendar was a reminder, too, of the city’s aggregate cultural riches. Even if relatively few concert halls are flexible enough to combine these complementary artistic communities under a single roof, sagacious concertgoers can still plot their own course through New York’s venues, in any season. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      After 10 Years, Barrie Kosky Leaves His Opera House Dancing

      by

      To say goodbye to a transformative tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin, this director staged an “All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue.”BERLIN — It’s difficult to pinpoint the most outrageous moment of “Barrie Kosky’s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,” which opened at the Komische Oper here on Friday. Is it the 1960s-era pilot and flight attendant in drag belting “My Way” (sorry, “Mayn Veg”) under a shower of golden confetti? The subtle camp of an imaginary Choir of Temple Beth Emmanuel singing with straight-faced sincerity? The “message from our sponsors” advertising “delectably light, always right, gefilte fish in jars”?But maybe the evening is less about those moments than about Kosky himself: the Australian-born director who has become an essential figure of the Berlin, not to mention European, opera scene, an erstwhile foreigner who speaks in a fluid blend of German, English and Yiddish and has risen to being addressed on Friday by Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture commissioner, as “lieber,” or dear, Barrie.So much of the “Revue” embodies the ethos of the house he has built during the decade of his leadership, which comes to an end this summer. Queer, Jewish, entertaining and executed at a high level, the show is a quintessential production of the Komische Oper, the city’s most reliably interesting and revelatory opera company.Under Kosky — a showman through and through, who operates with a young idealist’s belief in the power of theater and a brazen disregard for divisions between so-called high and low art — the Komische Oper has been the kind of place where you could see Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” one night and Mozart the next, followed by a Broadway musical, a Weimar-era operetta and, for good measure, something Baroque.Thankfully, that spirit will survive once he leaves and the house is jointly led by Susanne Moser and Philip Bröking. And, as Kosky said during a curtain call speech on Friday, the “Revue” is “kein Abschied”: no farewell. At 55, and more comfortable working as a freelancer than taking on a new house, he will remain at the Komische in an advisory role and direct one musical each of the next five seasons. His first? Jerry Herman’s “La Cage aux Folles,” given a grand treatment and sharing the calendar, in typical fashion, with Luigi Nono’s avant-garde, borderline strident “Intolleranza 1960.”“That must be the only time in history that the words ‘Nono’ and ‘Jerry Herman’ are in the same sentence,” Kosky said in a recent interview. “It’s even the same orchestra and the same chorus. My God, I mean, that’s just sensational.”Compare this atmosphere with those of the city’s two other major houses: the respectable but relatively stuffy Deutsche Oper and the Berlin State Opera, a company hopelessly wed to a core repertory heavy on Strauss and Wagner. The Komische, fittingly, attracts a varied audience that Kosky — true to my experience over the years — described as “five leather queens” next to “two tattooed lesbians” next to “grandpa and grandmother” next to “four Japanese tourists.”Kosky at the Komische Oper, the company he has run for 10 years, and where he will remain in an advisory role after he steps down this summer.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesKosky’s crowning achievement may be the degree to which he has elevated and restored operetta — a genre “stopped dead in its tracks” by the Third Reich, he said, and “Aryanized” in post-World War II performance — on the Berlin stage. He has either directed or invited guests to mount productions of long-neglected works including Paul Abraham’s “Ball im Savoy,” Oscar Straus’s “Die Perlen der Cleopatra” and Jaromir Weinberger’s “Frühlingsstürme,” which is considered the last operetta of the Weimar Republic.“These pieces were a fundamental, important part of the landscape of Berlin culture before 1933,” he said. “And we’re not just talking about Jewish composers. We’re talking about Jewish librettists, we’re talking about Jewish choreographers, we’re talking about Jewish singers.”It can be tricky to stage an operetta convincingly and compellingly; Kosky and his team have performed some dramaturgical surgery as part of their rescue missions. But above all, he has avoided linking his productions with history. Absent are Nazi intrusions or attempts at “setting the thing in Buchenwald, which a German director might probably do,” he said.“You know, it doesn’t work if you’re going to batter people,” Kosky added. “I feel the audiences have been enabled in the last 10 years to sit here and enjoy it without guilt. What I’ve tried to tell the German audiences, and the Berlin audiences, is, listen: The best way you can honor these people that your grandparents or parents killed or sent into exile is enjoy it.”So he has aimed for humor, charm and, of course, a little subversiveness. And operetta allows him to be “completely ludicrous,” as he said. “I can put in my Mel Brooks Barrie Kosky moments, and then I can be very heartbreakingly real the next moment, and it’s authentic to the pieces. I think most German directors don’t do that. They haven’t watched ‘The Muppet Show.’ I always say to people, if you want to understand my work, it’s basically a combination of the Muppets and Franz Kafka.”For now, Kosky plans to step away from operetta and make room for others: “I’ve opened the sweets shop, and I’ve said, ‘Look, guys, look at these delicious, fabulous things. And I’ve given you the keys. Take over the shop.’”Hence his future directing musicals, which after “La Cage” will include “Chicago” and “Sweeney Todd.” He is committed to opera projects throughout Europe in the coming years, but he would gladly take on Broadway as well. That, however, would entail getting a foothold where he has been woefully underrepresented. Productions by Kosky have traveled to Los Angeles and Houston; in September, his Komische “Fiddler on the Roof” will open at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. But aside from a co-directed, not-truly-his staging of “The Magic Flute” that appeared at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, his work hasn’t found the audience it deserves in New York. (The Metropolitan Opera had planned to present his “Fiery Angel” in fall 2020, but it’s now in pandemic purgatory.)Dagmar Manzel, one of the house’s stars, in a sober turn from her comedic roles, such as the title character of “Die Perlen der Cleopatra.”Monika RittershausFirst, though, Kosky needs to finish the run, through July 10, of the “Revue,” an original creation he arrived at after not wanting his final production to be something expected, like an operetta, and after the pandemic upended his plans for a Stravinsky marathon. Few directors would, or could, dream up the result: a tribute to the Yiddish entertainment common at resorts in the Catskill Mountains during the mid-20th century.“The list of performers who were there — it’s like a who’s who of American culture, all going to this Jewish utopian, sort of summer kibbutz,” Kosky said, mentioning the likes of Joan Rivers, Danny Kaye and Brooks. “I mean, what was the Catskills if not a kibbutz without politics?”Paced like a playlist — with the accompanying ups, downs and, at times, lulls — the show features popular music arranged and conducted by Adam Benzwi (called Adam Benski from the stage) and follies-like choreography, with an eye for physical comedy, by Otto Pichler. Company members and guest stars appear in different guises, none more surprising than Dagmar Manzel in a rendingly sober turn from her riotous Cleopatra earlier last week.Throughout, Kosky — who also hosts the show through prerecorded introductions — is committed to the bit in a delicate balance of irony and camp. Both men and women sing in drag; borscht belt humor (“below the girdle”) abounds; and the performers assume personas on a Marvel Cinematic Universe scale. There’s the “mezzo from Minsk” Sylvie Sonitzki, a boy band of orthodox Jews, and don’t forget the temple choir. In an ending out of something like Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Kosky brings out everyone, an enormous ensemble backed by an enormous orchestra, for a spectacle that, joyous and celebratory, sends off the audience with a command: “Dance!”Kosky couldn’t have said goodbye any other way. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jennifer Hudson Becomes an EGOT as Co-Producer of ‘A Strange Loop’

      by

      With a win for “A Strange Loop” in the best new musical category, Jennifer Hudson, one of the show’s co-producers, joins a select group of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.The singer and actress was added as a producer of the Michael R. Jackson show as it transitioned to Broadway. Other celebrities listed as producers include RuPaul Charles, Don Cheadle, Mindy Kaling, Billy Porter and Alan Cumming.“This brilliant, funny masterpiece exposes the heart and soul of a young artist struggling with his desires, identity and instincts he both loves and hates,” Hudson said on the awards show Sunday while introducing a performance of the musical.Hudson won an Oscar in 2007 for her role in “Dreamgirls” and two Grammys — one for best R&B album and another for the cast album of “The Color Purple.” An interactive animated short that she was an executive producer on, “Baba Yaga,” won a Daytime Emmy Award.Hudson, who shot to fame in 2004 as a contestant on “American Idol” and starred in the 2015 Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” is the latest addition to a short list of EGOTs that includes Rita Moreno, John Legend, Audrey Hepburn and Whoopi Goldberg. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      At the Met This Season, Opera Was Icing on the Cake

      by

      Amid a labor battle, the continuing pandemic and war in Ukraine, it often felt as though the real drama was in simply putting on a show.Has there ever been a Metropolitan Opera season like the one that just ended? In which the stuff onstage — the homicidal brides, mystical pharaohs and longing stepsons — felt so anticlimactic? Over the past eight months, amid a labor battle, a pandemic that surged again and again, and a war, it was as if the real drama was in simply getting the doors open. Once that was achieved, what followed was almost beside the point.Or, to put it more accurately, what followed was like icing on the cake. Rarely has it felt so sweet to be inside the gilded Met, has opera seemed — whatever you thought of a given work, singer or production — so much a gift. A groundswell of gratitude was palpable throughout the season, which finished on Saturday evening with Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”You felt it in the explosive ovation that greeted a virtuosic step-dance sequence in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season as a double milestone: the first production since the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, and the first work at the Met by a Black composer since its founding in 1883.You felt it in the cheers for Lise Davidsen’s vast, star-making Ariadne; Nadine Sierra’s sensual Lucia di Lammermoor; Matthew Polenzani’s earnestly agonized Don Carlos; Allan Clayton’s quivering Hamlet; and the chorus’s shimmering “Prayer for Ukraine” at a benefit concert in March.The soprano Lise Davidsen in the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYou felt it in the roaring curtain calls at the revival of “Akhnaten,” which proved once again that Philip Glass’s idiom has been welcomed by the Met audience as wholeheartedly as those of Mozart or Puccini.Around this time a year ago, it seemed like the great battle would be returning after a canceled 2020-21 season. Bad blood was in the air: The Met’s unions were furious at the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, for his insistence that unpaid furloughs were the only way it could survive the long lockdown. The situation grew so bitter that it seemed possible a strike or lockout would keep the Met closed past the planned opening night.But the promise of coming back after 18 months proved too strong to resist, and the unions and management came — warily — to terms. No one who was at the outdoor performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony over Labor Day weekend, or, especially, at the return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, will forget the relief and joy of the Met once again making live music at Lincoln Center.The Met returned to indoor performance with a concert of Verdi’s Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.Richard Termine/Met OperaThe opening months of the season had an air of triumph. There was the sold-out success of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; a series of ambitious revivals, including the Met’s first performances of the brooding original version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Wagner’s six-hour “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” the longest opera in its repertory; and Matthew Aucoin’s recent “Eurydice,” in which a sprawling orchestra thrashed Sarah Ruhl’s winsome version of the Orpheus myth.Then the rise of the Omicron variant in late fall began to claim performances, festivals and concerts. The Vienna State Opera was closed for almost a week. But the Met buckled down, strengthening its already stringent health protocols and dipping into a broad pool of covers to fill in for sick artists. With luck on its side, it stayed open through the winter — and into yet another rise in cases this spring.Broadway shows kept canceling at the last minute or closing entirely, but the Met, America’s largest performing arts institution, never did. That will be Gelb’s legacy from this troubled period, along with the landmark “Fire” and the unrelenting position he took after the invasion of Ukraine, when he declared that the Met would sever ties with artists who supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. That ultimatum had one singer in mind: the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, the company’s leading diva, who criticized the war but remained silent about Putin. In a coup, Gelb replaced her as Puccini’s Turandot with the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who drove the audience wild when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag to take her bow.The Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska wrapped herself in her country’s flag to take her bow after “Turandot.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesGelb’s Netrebko decision wasn’t universally praised, and other major opera houses now seem to be inclined to welcome her back, classifying her as merely a prominent Russian, not a hardcore Putinist. But within the Met, the moral clarity of the war proved a unifying force: At the benefit concert for Ukraine, some players in the orchestra even applauded Gelb, their nemesis during the grueling furlough, as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music.”Somewhere in the midst of politics and the virus was opera. Under the focused baton of Sebastian Weigle, “Boris Godunov” was memorably grim in the concentrated form Mussorgsky gave it before a hodgepodge of revisions; “Meistersinger,” expansive enough that it really does seem to convey a whole world, was relaxed and sunny, and gently comic as led by Antonio Pappano.Simon Stone’s technically savvy staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia,” set amid the malaise of a contemporary postindustrial American town, didn’t translate its bold concept into a convincing portrayal of its pathetically suffering title character. The Met’s de facto house director these days, David McVicar, offered a grayly old-fashioned production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Simon Stone’s new staging of “Lucia di Lammermoor” had a bold concept but little grasp of its title character.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavidsen, in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” a mythic creation of flooding tone, also lavished her soaring soprano on Eva in “Meistersinger” and Chrysothemis in Strauss’s “Elektra,” her voice almost palpable against your skin. The mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard brought silvery elegance to Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and the Composer in “Ariadne.”There were sympathetic soprano star turns from Ailyn Pérez as a fiery soloist in the Sept. 11 Requiem and a girlish Tatiana in “Eugene Onegin,” Eleonora Buratto as a reserved Madama Butterfly and Elena Stikhina as a kindly Tosca — as well as from Sonya Yoncheva, in a solo recital of shadowy sensitivity.While Blanchard’s score moved comfortably between bars, college parties and fraught, tender nocturnes, “Fire” was fairly turgid as drama, its individual sequences clear but the broader conflicts driving its characters obscure. (It was telling that the most dazzling sequences in this opera were Camille A. Brown’s dances.)Perhaps most remarkable about the offerings this season were the three — count ’em — works from the past five years: “Fire,” “Eurydice” and Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” which set to seething music Matthew Jocelyn’s moodily distilled version of Shakespeare. The Met has not had so many recent operas on a single year’s lineup since the early 1930s, even if that number is notable only in the context of the stubbornly backward-looking world of opera.Not long ago, the idea of three contemporary operas in a Met season would have been preposterous. This was largely because the company’s longtime music director, James Levine — while he expanded the repertory significantly and presided over a handful of premieres — didn’t prioritize newer work.Among the Met’s contemporary offerings this season was “Hamlet,” featuring, from left at front, Allan Clayton in the title role and Brenda Rae as Ophelia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut his successor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, agrees with Gelb that contemporary operas are crucial, both artistically and for expanding the company’s audience. And Nézet-Séguin is putting his money where his mouth is: He conducted both “Fire” and “Eurydice,” and leads Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” in the fall and Blanchard’s “Champion” next spring. (The early months of this season, though, were an exhausting workload when coupled with his duties as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra: He dropped out of a run of “Le Nozze di Figaro” to take a four-week sabbatical around the new year.)The continuing transition out of the Levine era has been obvious not just in the repertory, but also in the orchestra’s sound — which was noticeably lighter and lither in three works closely associated with Levine: “Meistersinger”; Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” led by Susanna Mälkki; and “Don Carlos,” which Nézet-Séguin brought to the Met for the first time in its original French.This change is for better and worse. The ensemble played these pieces with brisker transparency and perhaps more varied colors; Nézet-Séguin’s textures in “Don Carlos,” airier than Levine’s, felt of a piece with the elegant nasality of French. In “Hamlet,” conducted by Nicholas Carter, the orchestra was ferocious. But a certain grandeur is now missing, more often than not: the weight of Levine’s “Meistersinger” prelude, for one thing, and the gleefully straight-faced bombast of Baba the Turk’s entrance in his performances of “The Rake’s Progress.”Even a frequent operagoer or critic can’t see everything or everyone. I missed a new, family-friendly abridgment of Massenet’s fairy-dust “Cendrillon.” And after opening a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve, the baritone Quinn Kelsey — acclaimed in the title role — came down with Covid-19 and missed a few performances, including the one I attended. But I got to see his credible replacement: the baritone Michael Chioldi, finally getting his first big role at the Met after years as a stalwart of the New York opera scene.That was one of four performances at the opera house that I watched in a single weekend in early January, during the first Omicron wave. Such a marathon was an extraordinary exclamation point on the Met’s achievement in merely keeping the lights on.It wasn’t enough to taste opera after a year-and-a-half fast. I wanted to gorge. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Julee Cruise, Vocalist of ‘Twin Peaks’ Fame, Dies at 65

      by

      In projects for the director David Lynch, she brought an eerie, otherworldly style to “Falling” and other songs.Julee Cruise, a singer who brought a memorably ethereal voice to the projects of the director David Lynch — most famously “Falling,” whose instrumental version was the theme for Mr. Lynch’s cult-favorite television show, “Twin Peaks” — died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. She was 65.Her husband, Edward Grinnan, said the cause was suicide. He said she had struggled with depression as well as lupus.Ms. Cruise was building a career off Broadway in the early 1980s when serendipity struck: She met the composer Angelo Badalamenti when they worked on a show together.“I was in this country-and-western musical in the East Village,” she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I was a chorus girl with a big skirt and a big wig, singing way too loud. Angelo was doing the music for the show, and we became friends.”A few years later, Mr. Badalamenti was engaged by Mr. Lynch, who was still early in his career, as a vocal coach for Isabella Rossellini in the 1986 Lynch movie “Blue Velvet” and ended up writing the score for that film as well. Mr. Lynch and Mr. Badalamenti had written a song for the film that needed a vocalist.“Angelo asked me to find someone to sing a song for the soundtrack called ‘Mysteries of Love,’ but he didn’t like any of the singers I recommended,” she told The Chronicle. “He wanted dreamy and romantic. I said, ‘Let me do it.’”Ms. Cruise had always thought of herself as “a belter,” as she often put it (she had once played Janis Joplin in a musical revue called “Beehive”), but the voice she came up with for “Mysteries of Love” was something else entirely, enigmatic and wispy. It suited that and other Lynch-Badalamenti compositions perfectly. One writer called her style “angel-on-Quaaludes vocals.”The three were soon collaborating on Ms. Cruise’s first album, “Floating Into the Night,” which featured songs by the two men, including “Mysteries of Love” and “Falling.” They also collaborated on a stage production called “Industrial Symphony No. 1,” performed at the New Music America festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1989, with Ms. Cruise performing amid an elaborate set that included an old car.“Often, Ms. Cruise floated far above the stage, like a prom-gowned, bleached-blond angel,” Jon Pareles wrote in his review in The New York Times. “At one point, her body plummeted to the floor and was packed into the car’s trunk by helmeted workmen; later, she re-emerged to face a video camera and sing ‘Tell your heart it’s me,’ as 10 chorus girls in gold lamé danced next to her image on television screens.”Ms. Cruise achieved a longtime goal when she performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2003 in “Radiant Baby,” a musical about the artist Keith Haring. She played his mother (among other roles).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNational exposure came the following April when “Twin Peaks” premiered on ABC, with an instrumental version of “Falling” serving as its theme. Ms. Cruise appeared in the pilot and subsequent episodes as a roadhouse singer.The show quickly became the talk of television, and in May 1990 it led to an appearance by Ms. Cruise on “Saturday Night Live.” She wasn’t in the original lineup, but the controversial comic Andrew Dice Clay (he called himself “the most vulgar, vicious comic ever to walk the face of the earth”) was the scheduled host, which led to protests from at least one cast member, Nora Dunn, who refused to appear in that episode, and caused the original musical guest, Sinead O’Connor, to drop out at the last minute.Ms. Cruise was one of two acts summoned to replace her. Mr. Grinnan said in a telephone interview that Ms Cruise, who was still not well known, was working as a waitress at the time and had to skip out on her job. But, he noted, she didn’t call in sick.“She said that she called in famous,” he said.Though “Twin Peaks” brought Ms. Cruise wide exposure, Mr. Grinnan said she found a stint touring with the B-52’s in the 1990s to be particularly enjoyable. She replaced Cindy Wilson, an original member, when Ms. Wilson took a break from the band.“It was probably the happiest performing of her life,” Mr. Grinnan said.Julee Ann Cruise was born on Dec. 1, 1956, in Creston, Iowa, to Wilma and Dr. John Cruise. Her father was a dentist, and her mother was his office manager.Ms. Cruise was something of a musical prodigy on the French horn, her husband said, and received a music degree in the instrument from Drake University in Iowa. He said she had applied the delicacy and phrasing of classical French horn to the voice she came up with for the Lynch projects.But once she graduated, she thought that acting and singing would be more appealing than playing in an orchestra. She went to Minneapolis, a good city for theater, and spent several years performing with the Children’s Theater Company there before moving to New York in about 1983.After “Twin Peaks,” Ms. Cruise made another album with Mr. Lynch and Mr. Badalamenti, “The Voice of Love” (1993). She also continued acting. Mr. Grinnan said it was her performance in an Off Broadway musical, “Return to the Forbidden Planet,” in 1991 that caught the attention of the B-52’s. Mel Gussow, reviewing that show for The Times, said she stood out.“Only Julee Cruise invigorates the show with musical personality,” he wrote. “Well remembered for her singing on ‘Twin Peaks,’ she is spunky as well as amusing, although the script unwisely keeps her offstage for most of the first act.”Ms. Cruise later toured with Bobby McFerrin and worked with electronic musicians like Marcus Schmickler. In 2003 she fulfilled a longtime goal of performing at the Public Theater in New York when she was cast in the musical “Radiant Baby,” about the graffiti artist Keith Haring.Ms. Cruise as Andy Warhol, one of four roles she played in “Radiant Baby,” with Daniel Reichard, who played Keith Haring. The hardest part of performing in that show, she said, was “the costume changes.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was a demanding assignment. As The Times wrote, she played “Andy Warhol, Haring’s mother, a demonic nurse and a critic who resembles Susan Sontag.”Which of the roles was most difficult, a reporter asked?“The costume changes,” she said. “I’m the oldest person in this cast.”Ms. Cruise alternated between homes in Manhattan and the Berkshires. In addition to her husband, whom she married in 1988, she is survived by a sister, Kate Coen.Ms. Cruise reprised her “Twin Peaks” role in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” Mr. Lynch’s 1992 film, and, a quarter-century later, in an episode of Showtime’s reboot of the TV series. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2017, she reflected on her long “Twin Peaks” ride.“It was so much fun to be part of something that just went ba-boom!” she said. “You didn’t know it was going to do that. What a nice surprise life takes you on.” More