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      Conductor Dies After Collapsing During Performance in Munich

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      Stefan Soltesz was in the middle of Richard Strauss’s “The Silent Woman” when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act.MUNICH — Stefan Soltesz, a prominent and in-demand Austrian conductor, died on Friday night after collapsing during a performance at Munich’s main opera house.Mr. Soltesz, 73, was conducting the Richard Strauss opera “The Silent Woman” at the Bayerische Staatsoper, or Bavarian State Opera, when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act. He was pronounced dead at a hospital several hours later, said Michael Wuerges, the spokesman for the company.“At some point, the music stopped,” said Sebastian Bolz, 35, a research assistant in the music department at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, who attended the performance with his wife. He said that they did not see the conductor’s fall shortly before 8 p.m., but that they did hear calls for help from the stage and orchestra pit.Mr. Wuerges said that the theater’s on-site doctor and a heart specialist from the audience attended to Mr. Soltesz. Shortly after the conductor’s collapse, the curtain fell on the stage and Tillmann Wiegand, the artistic operations manager of the Bavarian State Opera, announced that there had been an emergency and that there would be an immediate 30-minute intermission.Once the audience filed back into the auditorium at the end of the break, Mr. Bolz said, Mr. Wiegand reappeared onstage to announce that the remainder of the performance would be canceled. Shortly before 11 p.m., the State opera’s general manager, Serge Dorny, used Twitter to announce Mr. Soltesz’s death. “We are losing a gifted conductor,” he wrote. “I lose a good friend.”Deaths at the podium are rare, but Mr. Soltesz is the fourth conductor to collapse midperformance at the National Theater, the Bavarian State Opera’s main venue, since the early 1900s.In 1911, the Austrian conductor Felix Mottl collapsed at age 56 during his 100th performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and died 11 days later; the German maestro Joseph Keilberth died at age 60 at the podium in 1968 during a performance of the same work. Most recently in Munich, in 1989, the Italian conductor Giuseppe Patanè collapsed at age 57 during Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and died hours later at a hospital.At Berlin’s Deutsche Opera in 2001, Giuseppe Sinopoli, 54, an intensely physical maestro, had a heart attack while conducting Verdi’s “Aida.” He died at a hospital hours later.Mr. Soltesz, who was born in 1949 in Hungary, conducted at major opera houses across Europe over the past four decades. He held musical directorship positions at the State Theater of Brunswick, in Germany, from 1988 to 1993, and at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent, in Belgium, from 1992 to 1997. His most recent appointment was in Essen, Germany, where he led that city’s opera house, the Aalto Theater, as well as the Essen Philharmonic from 1997 to 2013.“He took this Central German theater in Essen and he turned it, in 17 years, into one of the best ensemble houses in Europe, and he turned the Essen Philharmonic into an absolute A-grade orchestra,” the Australian opera director Barrie Kosky, who collaborated with Mr. Soltesz on four productions at the Aalto Theater in the early 2000s, said on Saturday after learning of Mr. Soltesz’s death. Mr. Kosky was speaking from Salzburg, Austria, where he was rehearsing a new production of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” that he is directing next month at the Salzburg Festival.During his career, Mr. Soltesz also led performances throughout Asia, and in 1992, he made his United States debut with the National Opera with a performance of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Mr. Soltesz is survived by his wife, Michaela Selinger, a mezzo soprano.“He was a very fine, refined musician, and music, you know, was first. He came second,” Mr. Dorny, a Belgian impresario who said he had known Mr. Soltesz since the 1990s when he ran the Festival of Flanders, said on Saturday.“He was the perfect diener for the art form,” Mr. Dorny added, using the German word for servant.On Friday night, Mr. Soltesz was conducting a revival of Mr. Kosky’s 2010 production of Strauss’s rarely performed “The Silent Woman,” as part of the Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival. Mr. Soltesz had previously led other revivals of the production. And it was one of several throughout Germany that he and Mr. Kosky had worked on together.“He was an amazing musician,” Mr. Kosky said, singling out Mr. Soltesz’s interpretations of Strauss for high praise, adding, “He understood the idea of orchestra accompanying, and understood the idea of the architecture of an act — or a three-act opera. He understood that, and he was at home in the pits. That was his home.”“In a world of dilettantes,” Mr. Kosky said, “he was the real thing.” More

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      Angel Olsen, Yaya Bey and Others On Their Favorite Songs of Summer

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      These tracks will make for a lovely dinner playlist and all but guarantee some after-hours dancing.A lot of us still remember the labor of love that was the mixtape, those countless hours spent pressing record, stop, rewind and play. But, while less time-consuming, curating a digital playlist, rather than relying on an algorithm-fueled compilation, can still be a thoughtful gesture, one that might make all the difference at a dinner party. Song choices can be a way to share (or forget) what’s going on in the world, act as a conversation starter and, above all, set the mood. More

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      Review: ‘Castor and Patience’ Premieres at Cincinnati Opera

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      “Castor and Patience,” a work by Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith with an intense yet relaxed score, premieres at Cincinnati Opera.CINCINNATI — Brett Dean’s tumultuous adaptation of “Hamlet” played at the Metropolitan Opera two months ago, but it is still ringing in my ears.Almost literally: It is a loud, chaotic score, mustering warring batteries of percussion and audience-encircling electronic effects, complex polyrhythms and virtuosic extended techniques. In all these qualities, it stands for a large swath of contemporary operas (some good, some bad) defined by being overwhelming. They are hurricanes of shock-and-awe sound, anarchic and bewildering.The music of Gregory Spears — whose sensitive “Castor and Patience” was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and premiered here on Thursday evening — is the opposite.Warm, steady, restrained, securely tonal, the orchestras in his works tend to serenely repeat small cells of material, without strange instruments or strange uses of conventional ones.So self-effacing is Spears’s style that the somber drone at the beginning of this new piece emerges without pause from the ensemble’s tuning, as if by accident. The overall effect is of a smoothly unfurling carpet — reminiscent of Philip Glass in its unhurried yet wrenching harmonic progressions — atop which voices soar.And soar, and soar. The agonies and pleasures of “Castor and Patience,” running through July 30 at the Corbett Theater at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, are like those of a less densely orchestrated Puccini. As in “Tosca,” “La Bohème” or “Madama Butterfly,” unabashedly, even shamelessly effusive vocal lines draw us poignantly close to characters in a rending situation: here, a Black family riven by disagreement over whether to sell part of a precious plot of land.Precious, because purchased with hard-won freedom. The action takes place on an unnamed island off the coast of the American South that was settled by former slaves after the Civil War. Among their descendants, Castor left and moved north with his parents; his cousin, Patience, stayed put with hers.Decades later, both are adults with children of their own. It is 2008, and Castor — like so many people in the years leading up to the Great Recession — has borrowed far beyond his means. The only way he sees out of financial ruin is to return to the island and sell part of his inherited stake, likely to a white buyer intent on building seaside condos; that is an outcome that the tradition-minded Patience cannot abide.It is a battle between old ways and new, past and future, leaving and staying, overseen by the ghosts of ancestors and the lasting reverberations of their oppression. (“Living means remembering,” as one character sings.) This narrative ground is familiar — gentrification versus preservation, with echoes of “A Raisin in the Sun” — and it could have been simply overwrought.But Tracy K. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate, has produced a libretto as unshowy as Spears’s score. An original story rather than one of the transformations of existing material that currently clog the opera world, her text is largely prose, and never purple; modest arias arise naturally out of the dialogue. Inflamed by aching music — the orchestra of 38 is conducted with calm confidence by Kazem Abdullah — the result is passionate, but also clear, focused and humble.Spears’s two most prominent earlier operas were both accomplished. “Paul’s Case” (2013), based on a Willa Cather story about a restless, dandyish young man, had the pertly stylized formality of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.” That neoclassical (even neo-medieval) feel extended to the more naturalistic “Fellow Travelers” (2016), set amid the anti-gay witch hunts of the McCarthy era. But the lyricism that was tautly, almost unbearably heightened in “Paul’s Case” felt a bit repetitive and listless over the broader canvas that followed.Phillip Bullock, foreground, with, clockwise from top left, Zoie Reams, Victor Ryan Robertson, Amber Monroe and Earl Hazell, in the Cincinnati Opera’s commission, by Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith.Philip GroshongSix years in the making — and two years after the pandemic forced the cancellation of its planned premiere, in honor of Cincinnati Opera’s centennial — “Castor and Patience” is more intense yet more relaxed than either of those. “Paul’s Case” was 80 minutes long, “Fellow Travelers” an hour and 50. The new opera is more than half an hour past that, but it feels less protracted than unhurried, unruffled. You get to know the characters, and to sit with them.That these figures are so vivid is also thanks to a committed cast, led by the baritone Reginald Smith Jr., an anguished Castor, and the soprano Talise Trevigne, delicate but potent as the implacable Patience.Singing with mellow power, the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano brought humanity and nuance to Castor’s wife, Celeste, who starts the opera pressuring him to sell but ends up in as much agonized ambivalence as anyone. Raven McMillon and, especially, Frederick Ballentine, bristled — convincing teenagers — as their daughter and son, Ruthie and Judah. Patience’s children, West (Benjamin Taylor) and Wilhelmina (Victoria Okafor), were gentle but stirring guides to the satisfactions of island and family life.Their outpourings are so fervent, the melodies so sweet, that you can find yourself moved nearly to tears by more or less random lines — an accomplishment both impressive and, sometimes, overkill, particularly in the first act. But by the second act, the tension inexorably rising, resistance to a work so openhearted, tender and plain-spoken seems futile. If it’s emotionally manipulative — in the distinguished tradition of Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Carlisle Floyd — it’s expertly so.Vita Tzykun’s set stretches the facade of a house across the stage, but leaves the bottom half jagged and cut off, revealing the beams of the foundation and marshy grasses. This is a dreamy netherworld in which characters from the 1860s and 1960s mingle with the 21st century. Kevin Newbury’s production uses some furniture and a few suggestions of shacks to conjure a range of locations on the island. If it’s not entirely evocative — with projections that tend to be murky — it’s at least efficient and straightforward.As are the mechanics of the plot. The conflicts here are as sturdily old-fashioned as in an Arthur Miller play — but, as in Miller’s work, they knot your stomach anyway. Probably unlike the version of this libretto he would have written, however, true tragedy does not strike in Spears and Smith’s telling. Everyone is alive at the end.And the secret that gets revealed near that point isn’t quite a barnburner. But it does offer the real explanation for why Castor’s parents went north — a telling reminder that migrations aren’t just abstract sociological phenomena, but also happen family by family, for individual reasons.There isn’t a clear resolution to the plot. In the last scene we see Castor, Celeste and Ruthie on the ferry back to the mainland. (Judah has decided to stay.) The implication seems to be that they’ll be back on the island for good before too long, but we can’t be sure. In a final aria — an oasis of expressive, elegant poetry from Smith, after so much expository prose — Patience dismisses the possibility of choosing either past or future. We’re always in between.For all the ambiguous peace this ending offers, a bitter undercurrent tugs: In America, especially Black America, ownership is fundamentally tenuous. You can never run fast enough or far enough to escape the forces determined to dispossess you, or worse: “Sometimes I feel like something’s trying to erase me,” Castor sings. If he does eventually return to Patience’s island, it’ll be a homecoming, but also an admission of defeat — for a man and a country.“What more,” the opera asks in its quiet final moments, “must I give away before I get free?”Castor and PatienceThrough July 30 at the Corbett Theater at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, Cincinnati; cincinnatiopera.org. More

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      Billie Eilish Contemplates Distraction, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Flo Milli, Jessie Ware, Montell Fish and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Billie Eilish, ‘TV’“TV” — from a pair of modestly strummed but richly produced “guitar songs” Billie Eilish has just released — starts out like one of her hushed, breathy ballads about estrangement, self-doubt and a longing for numbness, this time using TV; she considers putting on “‘Survivor’ just to watch somebody suffer.” But she’s onto something larger — the ways entertainment nurtures distraction, alienation and apathy — and she turns pointedly 2022 topical: “The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial/While they’re overturning Roe v. Wade,” she sings. But Eilish hasn’t forgotten she’s an entertainer herself; as she ponders her isolation in a closing refrain — “Maybe I’m the problem” — she dials in an arena audience, singing and clapping along. JON PARELESJessie Ware, ‘Free Yourself’Jessie Ware reaches for time-tested disco tools in “Free Yourself,” abetted by the stalwart producer Stuart Price (Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, Dua Lipa). There’s a bouncing-octave piano riff, a solidly thumping beat and eventually the sounds of a swooping, hovering string section, as Ware promises that freedom will feel good: “Keep on moving up that mountaintop,” she urges. “Why don’t you please yourself?” The breakdowns and buildups assemble with a sense of glittery inevitability, strutting toward a big finish that, startlingly, never arrives: “Don’t stop!,” Ware sings, “Baby don’t you …” Suddenly, she’s left hanging. PARELESFlo Milli featuring BabyFace Ray, ‘Hottie’A Flo Milli song is like a Blingee filter: loud, flashy, and confrontationally femme. This week the Alabama rapper put out her major-label debut album, “You Still Here, Ho?,” a kind of spiritual sequel to her irresistible 2020 mixtape “Ho, Why Is You Here?” Following an introductory invocation of the muse, which in this case is the reality TV legend Tiffany “New York” Pollard, the album is a showcase for Flo Milli’s braggadocious humor and the chatty ease of her signature flow. Plenty of other rappers would slow their tempo when given a beat as dreamy as the one on “Hottie,” but Milli is relentless as ever, antically flirty while still taking a breath to set some boundaries (“I don’t text back if I’m cranky”). Here, as on other highlights from the record, she spits like a cartoon character gleefully gliding across a rainbow. LINDSAY ZOLADZTyler ICU featuring Nkosazana Daughter, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, ‘Inhliziyo’Three notable South African producers — Tyler ICU, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa — worked on “Inhliziyo” (“Heart”), a spacious amapiano track built from shakers, sustained keyboard chords, sparsely tapping percussion and shadowy, nearly subterranean bass lines. What makes it even more haunting than most amapiano songs are the vocals by its songwriter, Nkosazana Daughter: quiet and nearly private, hinting at non-Western inflections and suffused with the inconsolable heartbreak of her Zulu lyrics. PARELESSun Ra Arkestra, ‘Somebody Else’s Idea’The Sun Ra Arkestra conjures a loose communality, the feeling of mavericks gathering for a shared purpose. When the Arkestra recorded “Somebody Else’s Idea” during Sun Ra’s lifetime, June Tyson sang lyrics like “Somebody else’s idea of things to come/Need not be the only way.” The current Arkestra, led by the saxophonist Marshall Allen, reclaims the song without words, as a leisurely bolero with saxophones or wordless voices carrying the succinct melody over Afro-Caribbean percussion. They’re joined at times by Farid Barron’s floridly dissonant piano, by brass interjections, by flute trills, and by wavery strings, each adding its own contribution until, like a caravan at sunset, the tune settles into a resting place. PARELESJulianna Riolino, ‘You’“You,” from the Canadian singer-songwriter Julianna Riolino’s forthcoming debut album, “All Blue,” is a twangy, deliriously catchy blast of power-pop. Riolino’s impassioned delivery and boot-stomping energy will appeal to fans of the more upbeat songs on Angel Olsen’s “My Woman,” but Riolino also blends the sounds of vintage country and jangly garage rock in a way that’s uniquely her own. “Everyone is fine until they are drowning in someone,” Riolino sings on this ode to devotion, with the intensity of someone hanging on for dear life. ZOLADZMamalarky, ‘Mythical Bonds’The indie-rock band Mamalarky, formed in Austin and now based in Atlanta, celebrates a deep, joyous friendship in “Mythical Bonds,” the first single from an album due in September, “Pocket Fantasy.” With a teasing smile in her voice, the guitarist Livvy Benneett sings, “I don’t care what I do so long as I do it with you.” The complications — and there are plenty of them — are in the music: stop-start meter changes, peculiar chords, gnarled counterpoint, all packed into two playful minutes. Mamalarky makes math-rock sound like fun. PARELESBlondshell, ‘Kiss City’“Mama, I’m adjacent to a lot of love,” the Los Angeles singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum sings, in one of several highly quotable lines from her second single as Blondshell. (Also: “I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty.”) During the first half of “Kiss City,” Teitelbaum delivers these lines in an arch, somewhat self-deprecating croon, accompanied by an understated arrangement of piano and guitar. But around the midway point, “Kiss City” rips open and becomes a towering rock song, giving Teitelbaum the space to shout those same lines with all of her heart, as if she’s suddenly in a dream, confessing the sorts of things she’d be terrified to admit in waking life. ZOLADZKelsey Waldon, ‘Simple as Love’Sometimes, amazingly, romances actually work out. With a pedal steel guitar sighing affirmations behind her, the plain-spoken country singer Kelsey Waldon rolls out images and similes — “like a monarch to a mimosa tree,” “simple as a cotton dress,” “patient as the moon” — to marvel at a reliable, nurturing love: no drama, just comfort and gratitude. PARELESMontell Fish, ‘Darling’Recorded in Montell Fish’s bedroom in Brooklyn, “Darling” — from his new album, “Jamie” — is a love song infused with fragility, delivered as a serenely undulating waltz. “Did you fall out of love, my darling?” he wonders in an otherworldly falsetto, over acoustic guitar picking and low-fi string squeaks. A big, bedroom-grunge chorus arises as he begs, “Please don’t run away,” but the beat falls away and ghostly piano chords are his only accompaniment as he resigns himself: “I’m finally letting you go,” he decides. PARELESObjekt, ‘Bad Apples’TJ Hertz, the electronic musician who records as Objekt, uses the proudly unnatural tones of techno to generate constantly escalating tension in “Bad Apples.” He undermines the methodical predictability of most dance music. Even as the beat stays foursquare and danceable, sounds and silences keep arriving, accreting, suddenly vanishing or fracturing themselves. Buzzes, chimes, nagging nasal tones, deep bass cross-rhythms, slides and crackles, blips that turn into swarms: in the next two bars, anything might appear, from any direction. PARELES More

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      Amanda Shires Isn’t Letting Nashville, or Her Marriage, Off the Hook

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      The singer, songwriter and fiddler found comfort with an unexpected collaborator and plumbed new depths on her latest album, “Take It Like a Man.”Amanda Shires wasn’t trying to name-drop, honest. It’s just that she’s been working alongside country music legends since she was 15, so most of the characters who populate her anecdotes happen to need no introduction.My onyx ring reminded her of one John Prine once gave her — which she promptly dropped down a sewer grate. A few years back, when Shires got a long-tipped manicure shortly before she had to play fiddle at a show, Dolly Parton gave her sage advice she’s never forgotten: “You can’t just show up, you’ve got to practice with the nails.” The first person to believe in her as a songwriter, when she was still just a teenager, was the outlaw country icon Billy Joe Shaver, with whom she played in the long-running Western Swing group the Texas Playboys. Shires met Maren Morris, her friend and bandmate in the supergroup the Highwomen, when Morris was a precocious kid of just “10 or 12” singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” around a campfire when the two of them happened to be playing the same local festival.Shires added, in her characteristic bone-dry deadpan, “She hasn’t gotten any taller.”On a humid Friday earlier this month, the singer-songwriter nursed a Diet Coke in a cozy corner of the Bowery Hotel lobby in Manhattan. Shires, who is 40 and has been married to the musician Jason Isbell for nine years, wore a white tank that showed off her many tattoos (including a red “Mercy” on her biceps, the name of the couple’s 6-year-old daughter), black jean shorts, and — despite her dark-auburn hair still being a little wet from the shower — a full smoky eye. She was discussing her electrifying new album “Take It Like a Man,” which, if there’s any justice in the world or maybe just in Nashville, ought to make this wildly underrated country-music Zelig into a household name.A violinist since childhood, Shires began her career as a sidewoman. But after taking Shaver’s advice and moving from Texas to Nashville in 2004, she found her footing as a solo artist, releasing six increasingly sophisticated solo albums and one with the Highwomen, which features Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby. (She is also a member of Isbell’s band, the 400 Unit.)From left: Shires, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby of the Highwomen, the supergroup Shires wanted to start after growing frustrated with the lack of women played on country radio.Jason Kempin/Getty Images North AmericaShires hasn’t always felt like herself in the recording studio, though. When they first met, Isbell said in a phone interview, “She was a great songwriter and singer, but she was terrified” after some bad experiences. “Not everybody treated her with respect,” he added, “and a lot of people made her feel small.”Even after the release of her excellent 2018 record “To the Sunset,” the thought of recording another solo album triggered such anxiety that Shires was sure she’d never make one again. She’d come to experience the studio as like being “under 2,000 magnifying glasses where you’re hearing everything you’ve ever done wrong really loud.”Rekindling her faith in recording required building trust and working with the right people. She found one of them in an unlikely collaborator, the gender-fluid, Los Angeles-based musician Lawrence Rothman, known for making bold, haunted indie-folk. Rothman, a huge fan of the Highwomen’s album, had contacted Shires out of the blue, asking her to sing backup on a new song and was shocked when Shires said yes.“I cold reached out, not expecting it to go down,” Rothman said in a phone interview. “Then we got on the phone and had such a great conversation, almost like we were long-lost relatives.” That chemistry carried over into the recording process, and eventually Shires decided she could make another record, as long as Rothman was producing.“There’s a lot of dancing now in the studio,” Shires said. “A lot of joy, occasional tears. It’s become a beautiful thing again.”Isbell said the difference is palpable: “You’re really hearing her true self on this record.”Rothman recalled the incredible scene that unfolded when Shires wrote the new album’s title track in a kind of creative trance in early January 2021. A friend had come over to the Nashville barn that Shires and Isbell converted into an all-purpose studio — strewn with instruments and the abstract canvases Shires had started painting in acrylics during the lockdown — to give Shires her first haircut in 10 months.“I was just messing around on the piano,” Rothman said, “and she’s like, ‘Wait, what is that?’” Shires leaped out of her chair — one side of her hair chopped shorter than the other — and told Rothman, “Don’t stop playing!” For the next hour, she sat on the floor in deep concentration, scribbling lines and flipping through notebooks and the index cards onto which she transcribes her best ideas. Suddenly she popped up and told Rothman to start recording a voice memo, sang the entirety of what would become “Take It Like a Man,” and sat back down to finish getting her hair cut.“And then she’s like, ‘All right, what do you think?’” Rothman recalled with an awed chuckle. “And I’m like, ‘Uh, I’ve got to digest. This is like one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.”“Take It Like a Man” is a haunting torch song that showcases both Shires’s voice — a little bit Parton, a little bit punk — and one of her strengths as a writer, the way her lines can be abstract and concrete at once. “The poetic and literal, trying to marry the two together — I think that’s what makes a great songwriter,” Rothman said. “And she’s doing that.”In Nashville, Shires is an agitator and a problem solver. “If something is wrong, it is not allowed to stay wrong,” Isbell said of his wife’s outlook. “She refuses to ignore things that she thinks are wrong, and that is a hard way to go about your day.”Shires’s idea to form the Highwomen was a direct result of realizing, while listening to countless hours of country radio on tour, how few female artists got airplay. (There’s a wonderful video online of her calling a station manager to ask why he’s not playing more women.)When Rothman, who uses they/them pronouns, came to Nashville to produce the record, they observed Shires switch into a similar mode, correcting people who misgendered them and drawing attention to gender-segregated facilities. “Over two or three months, all of a sudden the bathrooms in restaurants and the recording studios were changing to gender-neutral,” Rothman said. “She really went around town and schooled everybody, which was kind of amazing. She really made it feel welcoming and like not a big deal.”“There’s a lot of dancing now in the studio,” Shires said of how working with Lawrence Rothman shifted her perspective. “A lot of joy, occasional tears. It’s become a beautiful thing again.”Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesAS A SONGWRITER Shires’s musical influences are remarkably varied. On Twitter she identifies as a “Disciple of Leonard Cohen” (she also does a hell of an “I’m Your Man” cover) and posts about her admiration of Kendrick Lamar. Mixed metaphors make her skin crawl; basically anyone who appreciates the infinite power of a well-chosen word, she said, is all right by her.In 2011, she enrolled in a graduate program at Sewanee: The University of the South to get an M.F.A. in poetry. “I just needed more tools in the toolbox,” Shires said. But she believes that the degree, which she finished in 2017 after taking some time off to have Mercy, helped her become a more precise writer, better able to capture what is “vague about emotions and the human experience with as much accuracy as possible,” as she put it.That certainly includes the tough stuff. While there are a few upbeat numbers on “Take It Like a Man,” which is out July 29, a misty melancholy hangs over the majority of the record.“Empty Cups,” which features tight harmonies from Morris, is an aching chronicle of a longtime couple drifting apart. “Can you just stop with these little wars?/Can you just hold on and hope a little longer?,” Shires asks on the gorgeous, soulful ballad “Lonely at Night,” written with her friend Peter Levin. Perhaps the most devastating song, though, is “Fault Lines,” one of the first she wrote for the album, during a period when she and Isbell were navigating what she called “a disconnect.”When Isbell heard a demo of “Fault Lines,” he said, “the first thing I noticed was that it’s a very good song. Rule No. 1 with us is, if the song’s good, it goes on the record. Everything else, we’ll figure out.” (He told his version of this challenging period in their marriage on his own 2020 album, “Reunions.”)Being part of a Nashville power couple didn’t make Shires want to paint an overly rosy portrait of her relationship — just the opposite, actually. “Because we’re a married couple in love, I didn’t want folks to think that if they’re in a marriage and it doesn’t look like that, that something’s wrong with theirs,” she said. “Not like I’m trying to expose my own marriage or anything. All I’m trying to do is tell the truth that it’s hard, and that people go through disconnects and that sometimes the idea of finding your way back seems like, Why? But it’s possible.”Shires and Jason Isbell, her husband and frequent collaborator. Both musicians have written about challenging moments in their marriage.Jason Kempin/Getty ImagesIsbell plays guitar on nearly every song on the album (which was recorded live to tape in Nashville’s storied RCA Studio B) — the most brutal ones about marital difficulties, and the heartfelt “Stupid Love,” which begins with one of Shires’s sweetest lyrics: “You were smiling so much you kissed me with your teeth.”In September 2020, Shires and Isbell released a duet called “The Problem,” a stirring story song about a young couple considering an abortion; all proceeds from the song went to Alabama’s Yellowhammer Fund.Last August, while on tour in Texas with the 400 Unit, Shires began experiencing abdominal pain that she at first chose to ignore, because the pandemic had derailed live music for so long, “I was like, ‘I’m going to play music now! I don’t feel anything! I feel great!’” she recalled with a weary laugh.Then one morning she fell to the ground in pain and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors told her she had suffered an ectopic pregnancy that progressed far enough that one of her fallopian tubes had burst. (“I have a high pain tolerance,” she said, once again in deadpan.) The experience prompted her to write a piece for Rolling Stone decrying the Texas abortion ban that could have affected her treatment had it been passed just a few weeks earlier.She urged — by name — more country artists to take a stand about the then imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade. “Where are our Nashville folks?” Shires wrote. “Are they just going to sit around and drink beer? I want Garth Brooks out there telling people that women’s health is a priority. That’s what I want. Why not? What does he have to lose?”“She refuses to ignore things that she thinks are wrong,” Isbell said of Shires, “and that is a hard way to go about your day.”Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesIn 2022, when success in country music is still tied to institutions like radio that don’t reward rocking the boat, being as outspoken as Shires is a big risk. But she wouldn’t have it any other way. “She’s a searcher, and that’s probably the thing that she values most in herself and other people,” Isbell said.That individualistic streak makes Shires seem like a modern-day country outlaw, applying the rugged and righteously combative spirit of elders like Shaver and Prine to the version of Nashville she finds herself inhabiting — and challenging to change. That’s the animating spirit, too, she said, behind the provocative album title “Take It Like a Man.”“To be successful as a woman working in an industry, we’re taught you’re not supposed to get emotional,” Shires said. “Don’t cry, don’t have your feelings. Be strong, show your strength, be stoic.” The song had sprung from her realization that true strength actually comes from “being vulnerable, saying your feelings, and also having the courage to just be” — which Shires certainly has in spades.“So,” she added with a fiery laugh, pointing a finger at an imaginary enemy, “how ’bout you take that like a man?” More

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      Baltimore Symphony’s New Conductor Breaks a Racial Barrier

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      Jonathon Heyward is the first person of color to be the orchestra’s music director in its 106-year history.For decades, the 25 largest orchestras in the United States have been led almost exclusively by white men.That is going to change. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced on Thursday that it had chosen Jonathon Heyward, a rising African American conductor, as its next music director. He will begin a five-year contract in Baltimore at the start of the 2023-24 season.Heyward, 29, who grew up in Charleston, S.C., the son of an African American father and a white mother, will be the first person of color to lead the orchestra in its 106-year history. In an interview, he said that he would work to expand the audience for classical music by bolstering education efforts and promoting underrepresented artists.“This art form is for everyone,” he said.Heyward will succeed Marin Alsop, the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra, whose tenure in Baltimore ended last year. His appointment comes amid a broader reckoning in classical music over severe gender and racial disparities.The choice to hire Heyward is a milestone for Baltimore, where Black residents make up more than 60 percent of the population.“We are inspired by his artistry, passion and vision for the B.S.O., as well as for what his appointment means for budding musicians who will see themselves better reflected in such a position of artistic prominence,” Mark Hanson, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.Heyward, who is the chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Germany, has garnered a reputation as a sensitive and charismatic conductor. His appointment comes at a challenging time for orchestras, with many ensembles, including Baltimore’s, struggling to win back arts patrons because of the pandemic — a crisis that has exacerbated long-term declines in ticket sales and forced arts groups to look for new ways to reach audiences, including through livestreaming.The Baltimore Symphony recently announced that it would cut 10 concerts from its coming season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its longtime home, amid tepid ticket sales. Attendance in Baltimore during the 2021-22 season averaged at 40 percent of capacity, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Heyward said that he was confident audiences would eventually return, and added that he would work to make the orchestra more relatable by programming a wider variety of works, featuring a greater diversity of performers and moving some concerts away from traditional venues.“It’s simply a knack of being able to really understand what the community needs and listening to what the community needs and then being able to get them in the door,” he said.Although Heyward has been based in Europe for much of his career, he has started to appear more frequently in the United States. Last spring, he led several concerts in Baltimore, including the orchestra’s first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, as well as a benefit concert for Ukraine. He is scheduled to appear with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center in early August, leading a program that features the violinist Joshua Bell.In 2017, when Heyward was 25, he was widely praised for a series of performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when he substituted at the last minute for an ill conductor. That program included a premiere by the composer Tania León, as well as works by Stravinsky, Glinka and Leonard Bernstein.“He knew when to lead and when to follow, effortlessly balancing his roles as a natural showman and sensitive collaborator in service to the music,” the critic Rick Schultz wrote in The Los Angeles Times.The conducting field has long struggled with a lack of diversity. In recent years, there has been only one Black music director in the top tier of American orchestras, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.With turnover expected soon at several major orchestras, there are signs of change. This season, Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She will be only the second woman to lead a top-tier American orchestra.Heyward will also be among the Baltimore Symphony’s youngest leaders. He began studying cello at 10. A graduate of the Boston Conservatory, he later served as an assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in England, under its longtime music director, Mark Elder.Heyward said that his own experience of falling in love with classical music had convinced him of its enduring appeal.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston, South Carolina, with no music education background, with no musicians in the family, can be enamored and amazed by this, by the best art form there is — classical music — then I think anyone can,” he said. “I plan on trying to prove that in many, many ways.” More

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      Smoke Rises: A Jazz Room Returns on the Upper West Side

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      This storefront club that’s been mostly shuttered since spring 2020 has long been home to small-group jazz steeped in tradition. Now, it reopens, with some renovations.On a recent Friday evening at Smoke, the storefront Upper West Side jazz club that’s been mostly shuttered since the spring of 2020, owners and staff scrambled about as you might expect in the run-up to a long-awaited reopening. As the crowd took its seats for a preview concert, technicians climbed ladders and handled minor crises. One of the venue’s co-owners, Paul Stache, consulted with an engineer on the in-room and livestream sound, while the other, Molly Sparrow Johnson, kept tabs on a wait staff that will be serving an expanded capacity of about 80 when it reopens on Thursday.The band, meanwhile, couldn’t have looked more calm. On the newly widened bandstand, with red curtains as plush as the inside of a jewelry box as a backdrop, the pianist David Hazeltine and his longstanding trio — “the cats,” as Stache called them — beamed at each other, glad to be back. Their set, once it started, exemplified the sound of Smoke: warm, small-group jazz steeped in tradition but powered by in-the-moment invention. It’s inviting but uncompromising, sophisticated yet playful, the sound of a neighborhood jazz club with an international reputation.“It’s always been a musician’s dream to play here, even when it was a hole in the wall,” Hazeltine said in an interview between sets. “From the beginning, it’s been set up as a music room above all else, which is actually rare for jazz clubs. Smoke’s always had the greatest sound system, and the owners care deeply about the music itself and the musicians’ welfare.”Paul Stache and Molly Sparrow Johnson, the owners of Smoke, in their upgraded space.Geoffrey Haggray for The New York TimesThe storied singer Mary Stallings, who has performed since the early 1960s, concurs. “Smoke is home,” she said in an interview in early July. “It’s got that real jazz room feeling that’s hard to describe. It reminds me of when I was a kid and how the clubs used to be.” Stallings, who will perform at Smoke from Aug. 11-14, added, “In a setting like that, when you’re making music, you feel like you can do anything.”Stache and Frank Christopher founded Smoke in 1999 in the space at 2751 Broadway that had been Augie’s Jazz Bar, where the Berlin-born Stache had tended bar and waited tables upon moving to New York. “The inspiration at the time was to build a club that could fit a grand piano for Harold Mabern to play,” Stache said, referring to the bandleader and composer who would come to be associated with the club. Mabern died in 2019.Smoke didn’t just give Mabern a place to play but also a place to record his final half-dozen albums for Smoke Sessions, the label Stache and Christopher founded in 2014. “It was really at the urging of the cats who play here,” Stache said. He always had recorded the music in his club, sharing it with the musicians.Eventually, the sound quality was high enough that some of the musicians wanted to release the recordings. Smoke Sessions put out several of those live releases, recorded and produced by Stache, including Hazeltine’s 2014 “For All We Know” album (“a work worthy of high praise,” said The New York City Jazz Record).But, in the usual Smoke fashion, the enterprise soon became increasingly ambitious, as the label started booking studio time at Sear Sound in Hell’s Kitchen to document the work of several generations of top-tier musicians, including Renee Rosnes, Orrin Evans, Jimmy Cobb, Vincent Herring and Eddie Henderson. At a time when major labels tend to overlook mid- and late-career jazz players, Smoke Sessions has gone all in, with eight albums slated for 2023 release, including LPs from Al Foster, Wayne Escoffery and Nicholas Payton.Independent jazz labels, like neighborhood jazz clubs, aren’t exactly a growth industry in 2022. While venues like Smalls and Zinc Bar have weathered the pandemic, scene mainstays like the Jazz Standard and 55 Bar have shuttered. At the same time, many enterprising musicians have increasingly taken to performing outside of the world of clubs with drink minimums, in restaurants, homes and venues like the Downtown Music Gallery, a record store, or pass-the-tip-jar bars like Brooklyn’s Bar Bayeux. The moment suggests the early days of the 1970s loft scene, which led to a vital creative flowering but offered legacy musicians like the ones booked at Smoke fewer opportunities for well-paying gigs.Stache and Sparrow Johnson, who are married as well as being business partners, acknowledge that for the club and label to thrive, and for the players to get paid, the bar and restaurant must thrive, too. Hence the expansion.The old Smoke was tight, so intimate that during a ballad, audiences might overhear more than they would wish of what was happening in the bathroom. During the pandemic shutdown, while Smoke experimented with sidewalk concerts and livestreaming, the co-owners finalized a deal with their landlord to take over the leases of two vacant spaces next door, a former law office and dry cleaner’s. Now, the bar and the bathrooms have been moved into a fully separate lounge area. The revamped music room offers audiences more personal space than many jazz clubs, and boasts sightlines clean enough that someone sitting at a back-row table can still see the pianist’s fingers.Geoffrey Haggray for The New York TimesSparrow Johnson is excited about the lounge, a welcoming space designed to invite in people — like the many passers-by who peek into the storefront windows during a performance — who just want a drink or conversation but might feel intimidated by a jazz club or cover charges. She’s also moved by signs of Smoke’s established place in the neighborhood vibe of a club where it’s not unusual to see children in the audience. She said, “I had someone come to interview as a server recently, and he said, ‘I have really formative memories of my parents bringing me here.’ That’s what it’s all about. People have these memories, and also it’s an ongoing living thing that’s still happening.”Those memories now stretch back decades — and are still works in progress. The act that Stache and Christopher booked for Smoke’s first opening, back in 1999, was the saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master George Coleman, who will also be headlining this week’s official reopening. This will be the third time that Coleman, now 87, has kicked off a new era for the club; in 2001, a Coleman group played the first Smoke sets after 9/11. “People were sitting there kind of broken, and he went up there and soothed people,” Stache recalled. “He wasn’t trying to cheer people up. It was more about we’re here together, and I’m going to play what I can for you.”That night Coleman and company did what musicians always do at Smoke: They played the room in its moment. Hazeltine and his trio did the same two Fridays back, offering an ebullient set of standards and originals. Stache has heard these musicians countless times over the years, at the club or in the studio, but still, near the end of the first set, he stood in the back of the club, filming a Hazeltine solo on his phone. Surely, as the co-owner, he could just catch it again on the livestream recording. But in the room, in that moment, he couldn’t help himself. More

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      What to See, Eat and Do in San Francisco

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      The city’s neighborhoods, from the Mission to Russian Hill and the Outer Sunset, are vibrant with packed restaurants and bars, and many are home to new parks and the return of in-person events.Lately, it seems like the news headlines from San Francisco have been negative, from the city’s homelessness crisis and highly publicized recall elections to the area’s astronomical cost-of-living and worsening fire seasons.But San Francisco is still San Francisco. The fog still rolls in from the Pacific to blanket the city’s jumbled hills, the sunset still flames crimson behind the Golden Gate Bridge and the smell of salt and eucalyptus still hits the moment you step outside of San Francisco International Airport. Always a city for lovers of the outdoors, pandemic restrictions led to the near-universal embrace of an indoor-outdoor city life. And at its core, the city’s spirit, a heady brew of creativity, progressivism and experimentation, remains unbreakable.San Francisco’s pandemic recovery has been slower than other major metropolitan areas in the United States; according to data from the San Francisco Travel Association, forecasts for 2022 estimate 80 percent of 2019’s visitor volume. While the Downtown and Union Square neighborhoods remain quieter than prepandemic times, the city’s singular neighborhoods, from the Mission to Russian Hill and the Outer Sunset, are vibrant with packed restaurants and bars, and many boast of new parks and in-person events. San Francisco no longer imposes a mask mandate, but some businesses will require or request masks; masks are recommended but not required on MUNI and BART, the city’s public transportation systems. Many indoor events, including concerts and theater productions, require proof of vaccination to enter.San Francisco has become more walkable and bikeable with the Slow Streets program, which limits or prohibits car traffic on streets and includes the Great Highway alongside Ocean Beach.Jason Henry for The New York TimesNew parks and slow streetsSan Francisco’s wealth of green spaces has increased thanks to a trio of new parks, including the Presidio Tunnel Tops, 14 acres of new national park land hugging the city’s north coast that opened this month. Boasting panoramic views of the Bay, the park was designed by the same group behind New York’s High Line and is home to a changing roster of food trucks, art installations and performances. For more views, check out Francisco Park in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood, which opened in April on the site of San Francisco’s first reservoir. In the southeastern Mission Bay neighborhood, largely protected from the city’s frequent westerly winds, Crane Cove Park has become a warm, sunny destination for stand-up paddle-boarding, kayaking and lounging since it opened in 2020.Always a home for lovers of the outdoors, San Francisco during the pandemic saw a near-universal embrace of an indoor-outdoor city life. Francisco Park in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood opened in April.Jason Henry for The New York TimesIn addition to new parks, San Francisco has become more walkable and bikeable with the pandemic-driven development of the Slow Streets program, which limits or prohibits car traffic on streets throughout the city. Destination-worthy ones include the Great Highway, which runs alongside Ocean Beach on the city’s western shore (it’s currently closed to car traffic on weekends and often, on windy days) and JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, which could be made permanently car-free in November. The one-and-a-half-mile stretch of JFK takes you past destinations like the Conservatory of Flowers and the Rose Garden, plus the Skatin’ Place, where you’ll often find a rocking roller disco.A return to in-person music eventsGolden Gate Park is also playing host to a number of major in-person events this year, including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a free, three-day music festival being held Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. This year’s lineup will feature Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Buddy Miller, with more artists to be announced next week. The Outside Lands Music Festival is taking place Aug. 5 to 7 with artists including Green Day, Post Malone and Lil Uzi Vert (single-day tickets from $195; three-day passes from $409). Find even more music in the Sunset District at the Stern Grove Festival, now in its 85th year. The series of free weekly concerts, happening on Sundays through Aug. 14, has acts ranging from the San Francisco Symphony to Phil Lesh.The Portola Music Festival (single-day tickets from $200, two-day passes from $400), a new music festival is coming to San Francisco from the team behind Coachella, takes place on Sept. 24 to 25 at Pier 80, and will showcase electronic acts including Flume, James Blake, The Avalanches and M.I.A.Jonathan Carver Moore, director of donor relations, partnerships and programming, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, which will opens this fall.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA new destination for contemporary artWith its opening in October, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco aims to provide a fresh approach to the ways in which contemporary art should be showcased and shared. Tied to its core tenets of equity and accessibility, ICASF will have free admission and plans to showcase local artists and artists of color in an environment that is welcoming to all. Opening programming includes a solo exhibition from Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee painter and sculptor, a group exhibit curated by Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon, Oakland-based members of the collective See Black Womxn, and work from the local artists Liz Hernández and Ryan Whelan.Sharing plates at Shuggie’s, a pop-art explosion which features “trash pizza” made from repurposed food waste.Jason Henry for The New York TimesEat and drinkSan Francisco’s restaurants have struggled from pandemic restrictions, but also the high operational costs and high costs of living limiting the workforce. Many storefronts remain empty, and a number of legacy businesses closed, including Alioto’s, an Italian seafood restaurant that held court in Fisherman’s Wharf for 97 years, and the Cliff House, an iconic destination hugging the jagged shoreline over the Pacific (a new restaurant may open there by the end of the year).While undoubtedly challenging, the past two years have had a silver lining: Outdoor dining and drinking cropped up everywhere, from long-established restaurants like Nopa to brand-new spots like Casements, a modern Irish bar in the Mission that opened in January 2020. The bar had originally planned to be a cozy, indoor-only affair, but instead it now serves stellar cocktails (from $12) on one of the best patios in the city, complete with an outdoor semi-private space, live music, D.J.s and colorful murals of Irish rock musicians including Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.San Ho Won is a Korean barbecue spot with classic dishes and riffs on tradition.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhile marquee openings are still a major part of the city’s food fabric — recent ones include the opulent Palm Court Restaurant in the new RH Gallery and a new Ghirardelli Chocolate Experience store — some of the most exciting developments center on low-key projects from high-end chefs. In the Mission, Corey Lee of three Michelin-starred Benu opened San Ho Won, a Korean barbecue spot with classic dishes and riffs on tradition, like a blood-sausage pancake and kimchi pozole (starters from $16, barbecue from $26). Matthew Kirk, a sous chef from Lazy Bear, opened Automat, a day-and-night destination in the Western Addition for baked goods, breakfast sandwiches and burgers (sandwiches from $9 to $16).Natural wine is nothing new in San Francisco, but low-intervention bottles — small-batch, often funky wines made utilizing organic ingredients, native yeast and usually, little to no sulfites — are dominating new restaurants and bars. Shuggie’s, a pop-art explosion with a lively bottle list from the West Coast and beyond, features two-dollar wine shots and a “trash pizza” made from repurposed food waste (wines from $15 for a glass or $51 for a bottle; pizzas from $19). Palm City Wines opened in the Outer Sunset in spring of 2020 as a takeaway-only natural wine bottle shop and deli; now, it also serves small plates, wines by the glass, Northern California beers and forearm-sized hoagies (starters from $8, sandwiches from $19). Upping the ante is Bar Part Time in the Mission, a natural wine-fueled disco with a rotating roster of D.J.s and wine producers.1 Hotel opened in San Francisco in June on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building. The space features reclaimed wood and native greenery.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhere to stay1 Hotel opened in San Francisco in June on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building. The striking space features reclaimed wood and native greenery, recyclable key cards and hangers in the 186 guest rooms and 14 suites (from $500 per night), plus a rooftop spa, chef’s garden and beehives. Terrene, the hotel’s restaurant, features a farm-to-table inspired menu and a wide selection of mezcal and tequila.With 299 rooms and a rooftop lounge, LUMA is the first hotel development in the Mission Bay neighborhood. Jason Henry for The New York TimesLUMA, which also opened in June, is the first hotel development in the Mission Bay neighborhood. With 299 rooms (from $329 per night) and a rooftop lounge opening later this summer, the hotel is close to Oracle Park and the Chase Center. And on June 30, the longstanding Sir Francis Drake Hotel in Union Square reopened as Beacon Grand with 418 renovated guest rooms (from $249 per night), a lobby bar and in 2023, will reopen a redesign of the famed top-floor bar, the Starlite Room.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More