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      William Hart, Driving Force Behind the Delfonics, Dies at 77

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      With hits like “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” his group pioneered the soulful Philadelphia sound.William Hart, who as the lead singer and chief lyricist of the soul trio the Delfonics helped pioneer the romantic lyrics, falsetto vocals and velvety string arrangements that defined the Philadelphia sound of the 1960s and ’70s, died on July 14 in Philadelphia. He was 77.His son Hadi said the death, at Temple University Hospital, was caused by complications during surgery.The Delfonics combined the harmonies of doo-wop, the sweep of orchestral pop and the crispness of funk to churn out a string of hits, 20 of which reached the Billboard Hot 100. (Two made the Top 10.)Almost all of them were written by Mr. Hart in conjunction with the producer Thom Bell, including “La-La (Means I Love You),” “I’m Sorry” and “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” all released in 1968, and, a year later, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” which won a Grammy for best R&B vocal by a duo or group.Alongside Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, the Philadelphia sound was a pillar of soul and R&B music in the 1960s and ’70s. More relaxed than Motown and less edgy than Stax, it drew on both the doo-wop wave of the late 1950s — especially groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Little Anthony and the Imperials — and a slowed-down version of the funk perfected by James Brown.Mr. Hart looked to all those artists, along with songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, as inspiration. He preferred to write lyrics after the melodies were in place, working around the strictures they imposed to weave stories about heartbreak, jealousy and old-fashioned romance.“I could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I found I could just write about it. It’s like imagining what it’s like to jump off a cliff — you can write about it, but you don’t have to actually jump off that cliff.”In Philadelphia, the Delfonics became mainstays of the frequent “battles of the bands” held at the Uptown Theater, the white-hot center of the city’s soul scene, going toe to toe in satin lapels to see who could be the night’s smoothest crooners.Their reach went far beyond 1960s Philadelphia. Mr. Hart’s songs have a timeless, dreamy quality, at once emotion-laden and urbane. That’s one reason they have had second and third lives: Singers have remade them, rappers have sampled them, and filmmakers have featured them on soundtracks.The New Kids on the Block remade “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in 1989, taking it to No. 8 on the Billboard pop chart. Prince covered “La-La (Means I Love You)” in 1996, the same year the Fugees released a reinterpreted version of “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” titled simply “Ready or Not.”The next year the Delfonics and Mr. Hart experienced an even bigger resurgence when Quentin Tarantino featured “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” on the soundtrack of his film “Jackie Brown” and as a plot point, using the songs’ smooth, nostalgic sound to draw together characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster.“I think the fact that our music is clean helps us make the crossover into the next generation,” Mr. Hart told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2008. “We sing songs that everyone of every age can enjoy. I write most of the songs, and that’s one thing I’ve always tried to do.”William Alexander Hart was born on Jan. 17, 1945, in Washington and moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was a few months old. His father, Wilson, worked in a factory, and his mother, Iretha (Battle) Hart, was a homemaker.His father gave him the nickname Poogie, which stuck with him long into adulthood.Along with his son, he is survived by his wife, Pamela; his brothers, Wilbert and Hurt; his sisters, Niecy and Peaches; his sons, William Jr., Yusuf and Champ; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.William began writing songs when he was about 11 and immediately latched onto the themes of love lost and regained that would dominate his lyrics for decades.He joined his brother Wilbert and a friend from high school, Randy Cain, in a group they at first called the Orphonics, a variation on “aurophonic,” a term William saw on a stereo box. They tweaked the name to Delfonics at the suggestion of their manager, Stan Watson.Mr. Hart was still working a day job in a barbershop when a friend put him in touch with Mr. Bell, who was already well known around Philadelphia for the lush, sensual arrangements he had done for a local label.They became a hit-making duo, the Lennon and McCartney of West Philadelphia: Mr. Bell wrote the music and Mr. Hart supplied the lyrics, often almost simultaneously. Mr. Hart claimed they wrote “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in two hours.The original Delfonics split up in 1975, but Mr. Hart continued to perform under the name, with lineups that might or might not include members of the original group. Wilbert Hart went on to tour with his own Delfonics, even after his brother won an injunction against him in 2000.In 2002 Wilbert Hart and Mr. Cain successfully sued William Hart for back royalties. The courtroom clash didn’t prevent the three of them from occasionally reuniting, at least until Mr. Cain’s death in 2009.Mr. Hart continued to tour using the Delfonics name, his falsetto a bit weaker but his presence still commanding. He also released a number of side projects, including “Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics” (2013), with Mr. Younge producing and Mr. Hart singing and sliding effortlessly back into the lyricist’s chair.“It’s like a blank canvas,” he said in a 2013 interview for the music magazine Wax Poetics. “I’m an artist; just give me the canvas, and I’ll paint the painting.” More

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      Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder Suffers Throat Damage From Europe’s Wildfires

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      The band Pearl Jam canceled its show in Vienna on Wednesday, saying that heat, dust and smoke from the wildfires across Europe had damaged the throat of its lead singer, Eddie Vedder, at an outdoor show in Paris.“He has seen doctors and had treatment, but, as of yet, his vocal cords have not recovered,” the band said of Mr. Vedder, 57, in a statement posted to its official website and Twitter account. “This is brutal news and horrible timing.”Pearl Jam performed at Lollapalooza Paris on Sunday, amid a deadly heat wave that has set records across Europe. Wildfires in southwestern France have forced 37,000 people to evacuate and ravaged nearly 80 square miles of forests.Fans with tickets for Wednesday night’s show in Vienna will receive refunds, the band said. Its next scheduled show is in Prague on Friday; there was no word on whether that would also be canceled. The band is set to play two more shows in Amsterdam on Sunday and Monday to wrap up its European tour. Shows in North America are scheduled to start in September.Above-average temperatures are forecast to continue this week in the southern and eastern portions of Europe, said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at the private forecasting firm AccuWeather. More

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      R&B That Sweats, Emotionally and Physically

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      New releases from Brent Faiyaz and Muni Long show how the genre has evolved in recent years.There’s a beautiful, crabby song in the middle of “Wasteland,” the new album by the singer and songwriter Brent Faiyaz, called “Rolling Stone.” The synthesizers are operating at full throb, what sounds like a meandering flute wanders in and out, and there are no discernible drums. Faiyaz opens with a lamentation: “I’m a rolling stone/I’m too wild for you to own,” then turns defensive, complaining, “First I’m exciting, then I’m gaslighting/Make up your mind.”He has an earnest, sturdy voice, sometimes deploying an anxious yelp that casually recalls Raphael Saadiq. But unlike that classicist singer, Faiyaz is more of an impressionist, alternating between vocal tones, delivering some lines with power and some from a distance. “Rolling Stone” is spacious and ethereal but not directionless — it is R&B that privileges mood over structure, soft daubs of feeling over authoritative belting.“I’m sorry in advance if I let you down,” Faiyaz sings, with an energy that sounds less like regret than resignation. He knows that he absolutely did.“Wasteland” is an album about failure performed by someone currently at the peak of his success. It just debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, reflecting the stored-up anticipation for the R&B singer since his last release in 2020.But Faiyaz’s ambient approach also encapsulates something about the state of mainstream R&B, which has had a challenging decade, and has only in the last couple of years found a new creative sweet spot. That hasn’t always been reflected commercially, however. There has been almost no turnover on the Billboard R&B albums chart — of the current Top 25, only seven were released in the last year, and many are several years old.This stagnation is in no small part a result of how Drake and his informal cache of protégés took the melodies and emotional gestures of R&B and seamlessly melded them into hip-hop at the turn of the 2010s, leaving a generation of pure singers interested in older modes of R&B in the lurch. Faiyaz is part of a newish wave — see also Bryson Tiller — that has reverse engineered Drake’s alchemy and applied it to R&B. For Faiyaz, that means soul music that’s trippy, fitful and attitudinal; there are almost no classic soul arrangements, nor even the hard swing of 1990s hip-hop soul.“Wasteland” demonstrates the limitations of that approach as often as its strengths. The album describes, in often discomfiting detail, the wages of fame, juggling boasting and self-loathing in equal measure. Faiyaz sings with conviction, but he’s rarely grounded. Instead, he lives somewhere out in space — a man regarding his experiences from afar.Its production, which zigzags, wheezes and soothes, rarely feeling steady, sometimes tells the story more effectively than he does. “All Mine” sounds like it’s being delivered through a shower of static, and “Price of Fame” rests on a bed of resonant plinks that feel bulbous and slippery. There are urgent punches of strings on “Loose Change” and new wave shimmers on “Jackie Brown.” (Faiyaz is a producer on most of the songs here, along with some regular collaborators including Jordan Waré. Intriguingly, Saadiq is also a producer on two songs.)But even as the production moves in various directions, Faiyaz’s story remains constant: He is a cad, made worse by success, and a disappointment to women he’s pledged to love. “I’m probably faded when you see me on the TV, I can’t help that/I’m just playing cards I was dealt bad,” he croons on “Ghetto Gatsby,” one of the album’s best songs (if you can ignore the Alicia Keys guest rap). Here he leans past Drake-like emotional reckoning and into the depravity that characterized the early mixtapes from the Weeknd.That continues on the series of skits that span the album, which catalog a desperately broken relationship between Faiyaz and a woman who is pregnant with his child. They’re uncomfortable, cruel and end with an awful cliffhanger; taken together, they’re almost as unsettling as “We Cry Together,” the aggrieved tête-à-tête from Kendrick Lamar’s latest album.There is sex on this album, but not much pleasure — mostly it’s a tool of ego. Even though Faiyaz boasts abstractly of his prodigious conquests, little is explicitly carnal — aggressive flirting on “All Mine,” and an allusion to leaving “love stains” in the back of an Uber on “Ghetto Gatsby.” Faiyaz’s in-and-out-of-focus mode doesn’t leave much room for ecstasy.That slack, though, has lately been taken up by female singers, who are revivifying the erotic in R&B. The frankness of Summer Walker and SZA, perhaps taking a page from the brashness of the recent class of female rap stars, including Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, has been one of the most thrilling movements in pop music over the past couple of years.When it broke out on TikTok late last year, Muni Long’s “Hrs & Hrs” felt like a logical continuation of that phenomenon. With languorous sensuality, Long sings about how time becomes elastic when you’re enthralled. “Order shrimp and lobster towers/But it’s me that gets devoured,” she sings, patiently and desperately, as if buckling under unrepressed humidity.That song originally appeared on Long’s self-released 2021 album “Public Displays of Affection,” the third she’d released under that artist name. (She formerly put out music as Priscilla Renea.) It was one of several songs of hers — “Thot Thoughts, “Bodies” — that underscored the importance of desire.Her new EP, “Public Displays of Affection Too,” is concise and tart. Her songs are crisply structured in the 1990s vein, sauntering head-nodders with pointed vocal emphasis. There is one up-tempo song, “Baby Boo,” which nods to the Atlanta bass classic “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJ’s as she and the rapper Saweetie engage in indulgent praise of their partners.But skepticism suits Long better, and the remainder of the songs thrive on the tension of craving the person that’s pulling away from you. On “Another,” she’s adamant about telling her partner someone else “bought me roses, you wasn’t focused.” “Cartier” links generosity and arousal: “If you tryna cuff/Wanna see the diamonds in your eyes while we’re making love.”The rawest track is “Crack,” by far the most explicit song Long has released: “If I let you take off my dress/What’s between my legs/You didn’t know that it could get you hooked like that.” It’s also her most relaxed moment, the sound of someone secure in her desire, and who doesn’t have time to be anxious. More

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      Classical Music Has a Hazy Future in Lincoln Center’s Summers

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      The day had been hot and muggy. But a mild breeze was blowing at Lincoln Center by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday evening.The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly unruffled Mozart concerto and a daydreamy “Rhapsody in Blue.” Apart from a sprinkling of small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t been assembled since 2019, but it sounded comfortable and spirited.In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival whose name it bears — Lincoln Center’s premier summertime event before the pandemic — is no more. The center’s summer, once a messy assortment of competing series and festivals, has finally been streamlined under a single label: “Summer for the City.”Planned by Lincoln Center’s president, Henry Timms, and its artistic chief since last year, Shanta Thake, Summer for the City has hoisted a 10-foot disco ball over the plaza fountain and includes outdoor film screenings, spoken word, social dance, comedy shows and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”Five of New York’s dance companies will come together next month for a few days of performances. And starting on Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, led the performance on Tuesday.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut despite that packed little orchestral season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that flows out of the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.Up in the air is the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart orchestra, a high-quality, carefully built and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on its podium since 2002. Though Thake told the orchestra on Friday that it would be a part of the summer next year, things get hazier beyond that. And while her vision for the season is still developing, this first iteration seems to have intentionally moved away from swaths of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.Which is not to say that Lincoln Center’s summers have been just one thing. As Joseph W. Polisi, a longtime president of the Juilliard School, describes in “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” recently published by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming would happen primarily in the summertime, so as not to compete in fall and spring with the constituent organizations for which it serves as a landlord, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic.As the campus was being conceived, summer was imagined to be a good time for folk-ish operas and musicals, like “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land,” or perhaps a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.The pianist Conrad Tao was the soloist in several works on the program, including a Mozart concerto and “Rhapsody in Blue.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe flutist Jasmine Choi played in William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThough Summer for the City is taking place largely outdoors, the novelty in those early years was being inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart Festival, which started in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned hall.The campus’s Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s morphed, a few years later, into Lincoln Center Out of Doors, a free, outdoor, eclectic mélange: Ballet Hispánico and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and eventually a helping of social dance as Midsummer Night’s Swing.Mostly Mozart grew to be perceived as stodgy and listless in this company. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a hire from outside classical music — became the center’s artistic leader in the early 1990s, it was believed that part of her brief was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival, which hosted ambitious international touring productions, was founded in the mid-90s, Mostly Mozart, which had once lasted up to nine weeks, dwindled from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.But instead of spiking Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand with the programming, hired Langrée as a partner, and broadened the offerings — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival folded and Mostly Mozart was set to expand by up to 50 percent to partly compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the lauded New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was renewed through 2023.During the center’s pandemic silence in 2020, though, Moss decided to step down. And here we are: Mostly Mozart, instead of being expanded, has been eliminated.In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said that this year’s Summer for the City should not necessarily be seen as the model for all to come. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We’re coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”Starting on Friday, the orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesReferring to the center’s Restart Stages initiative from 2021, she added: “There had been some proven success in experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is a continued explosion of form, and putting it all under one umbrella.”Summer for the City has the spunky feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives like Under the Radar and Public Works, before she was hired by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a throwback to the Community/Street Theater Festival and Out of Doors tradition from the early ’70s.That can yield wonderful programming, and much civic good. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing — with its tango-ing, salsa-ing crowd — exciting and glamorous, the definition of a New York summer night.But those offerings existed in an ecosystem in which classical music — broadly construed as far as style, period and form — was another pillar, not a fringe.Thake insisted in the interview that classical programming has found its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood drives and a mass wedding ceremony, and in the form of music-and-meditation sessions in the David Rubenstein Atrium.Timms added: “In terms of volume, probably, the amount of classical music being presented hasn’t changed much. The nature of it has changed, to some degree, though not fundamentally.”Uh-huh.The two leaders implied that the reconception of the summer is pulling the center more toward the role of host, welcoming as many people as it can onto campus, while the constituent organizations handle or at least share the presenting — especially in the classical sphere. The idea, for example, is that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s small set of Summer Evenings concerts can basically take care of what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as its other solo and chamber events.Other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and new music.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe danger, of course, is that in reducing redundancies and internal competition, the city simply ends up with less.It’s true that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s compressed season — which began with a week of mentoring and performing alongside student musicians — promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On Aug. 5 and 6, Langrée leads Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s arrangement of that work is the score for Kyle Abraham’s recent dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” — the kind of artistic cross-pollination that should be the center’s stock in trade.Even more important, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are choose-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should be a model for the center’s whole year. A range of excellent music, painstakingly prepared and performed at the highest level for affordable prices: That is true populism.Instead, classical music, even in its ever-struggling nonprofit form, gets cast as the elitist hegemon for which scrappier alternatives must be found — certainly if much-vaunted “new audiences” are going to be attracted.But classical programming should not be considered a chore, or a bone thrown to a dwindling audience — a familiar one rather than “new.” No, serious performance is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few remaining supreme presenters. Conrad Tao playing Mozart with a superb orchestra for free or cheap: That is the core of the center’s mission. Its job is to cultivate audiences for and increase access to that.Which is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed music director the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Perhaps not. But is there a way of programming such an orchestra so that it could be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be joined to opera, recitals, new music and guest ensembles in broadening what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: to foster inexpensive interactions with great performance? Absolutely.“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And seeing again, how can we continue to be responsive? How can we move through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t work, what’s next for all of us?” More

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      Ukrainian D.J. Spins Rare Music in N.Y.C.

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      Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“Support Ukraine means listen to some Ukrainian songs, buy some Ukrainian brands, talk about Ukraine one minute a day, just in conversation.” Recently, Daria played her music at Le Bain, a club in The Standard, High Line hotel. More

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      A Behind-the-Scenes Eminence Shapes a Festival’s Future

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      Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, is coming into his own as the leader of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — On a recent Monday afternoon, the Grand Théâtre de Provence here was almost empty, a few hours before a concert performance of Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo.”An organ was being tuned onstage, letting out a fluteish wheeze. In the wings, someone was warming up with the dashing brass fanfares at the start of the score.And Pierre Audi, the general director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, which runs this year through Saturday and presented the Monteverdi, was painstakingly adjusting the lighting.“Warmer; it’s very dead,” he said to members of the festival’s technical staff as he stared at the glow on the back wall of the stage. The first act of “L’Orfeo” takes place in a meadow, which the performance would suggest with some treelike blurs of green behind the musicians. Audi wanted the color to be ever so slightly subtler, paler, more delicate.As the ensemble started to rehearse, he stood and watched, hands intertwined across his belly. The playing was spirited, but some of the singers’ bits of acting felt a tad awkward.“I haven’t done the staging,” Audi, 64, said under his breath in an accent not quite British and not quite French, with a sly smirk and an apologetic shrug. “I’m just doing the lights.”For the production “Resurrection” this year, Audi pushed for the abandoned Stadium de Vitrolles to be refurbished.Monika RittershausTaking it upon himself to do the lights for a mere concert wasn’t out of character for Audi — also the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the founder of the Almeida Theater in London, for decades the head of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, and altogether one of the most eminent behind-the-scenes figures on the global performing arts scene.An experienced stage director as well as a renowned administrator, Audi doesn’t just work on grand strategy and schmooze with donors. He also gets into the details of craft, closely overseeing rehearsals. (The chatter this summer was that he particularly needed to help shape Satoshi Miyagi’s vaguely Kabuki production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”) Directors respect him because he’s one of them.After succeeding Bernard Foccroulle, who stepped down after 11 successful years at Aix, Audi was able to present just one iteration of this annual festival before the pandemic hit. But last summer, and this one, he delivered tenure-defining coups.In 2020, when all of Aix’s performances were canceled because of the pandemic, Audi managed to hold rehearsals for “Innocence,” a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021, when it was acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century.This year, he opened the season at a new venue, which was also an old one: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a hilltop in an Aix suburb for over two decades.“When I arrived as director, I said to the technical people, ‘I want to see it,’” Audi recalled. “They kind of said it wasn’t possible — for a year and a half. And I had to be really tough: ‘If you don’t show it to me, I’ll stop being the director.’ It was the last day of my first festival, in 2019, and we went in with one lamp.”The premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in 2021 was one of Audi’s tenure-defining coups at Aix.Jean-Louis Fernandez, via Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThe graffiti-strewn building was in sad shape, but Audi, who had transformed a former Salvation Army hall into the Almeida in 1980 and was used to programming a vast raw space in New York, realized its potential.“I saw the height of it,” he said, “and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.”For two years, he courted the local government in Vitrolles, which would have to shoulder much of the cost of the refurbishment. Audi began to plan a daring premiere production for the stadium — “Resurrection,” Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave — without knowing whether the renovation would be ready in time, and without doing an acoustic test in the space.“He called me,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, “and I think he thought he would have to make a case, to somehow justify it to me: ‘We have a sort of outré idea that Castellucci will stage Mahler 2 in a half-derelict old building.’ And I just said, ‘Yeah, I’m in.’ I think he was disappointed it was so easy.”It wasn’t until last July that Vitrolles formally greenlighted the project. But Audi’s bet paid off: Work was completed on schedule, and while some debated Castellucci’s concept, “Resurrection” was generally applauded, a proof of concept at the start of a series of productions exploring the possibilities of the memorable, malleable space.“The stadium is the signature of Pierre Audi’s term,” said Timothée Picard, the festival’s dramaturg. “And it’s absolutely connected to everything he’s done from the beginning of his career. To imagine new relationships between works, space, stage directing, audience. Projects we couldn’t do in traditional venues.”Speaking to a small group of young artists during this year’s festival, Audi said, “I never looked at opera as something that had to deal with my trauma or my origins.” But he has linked his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.At the Park Avenue Armory, Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly” was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” the Armory’s president said.Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times“Opening the stadium, for me, it felt natural,” he said. “You have to take any building and make it a space.”Born into a wealthy family in Beirut, Audi was raised there and in Paris and was educated at Oxford University in Britain. He was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, turning it into a center of experimental theater and music. Starting in 1988, he served for 30 years as the leader of Dutch National Opera, a period during which he spent 10 years also in charge of the Holland Festival.“The thing about Pierre was, it wasn’t going to be traditional old-fashioned opera,” said the administrator and coach Matthew Epstein, who advised Audi during that early period. “It was the expanding of the repertoire — both backward, toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for, and forward, toward so much contemporary opera. He’s a real impresario.”As the Foccroulle era moves further into the past, Audi’s Aix is coming into its own. He has added more productions to the three-week schedule and a denser lineup of concerts, expanding the budget to 27.5 million euros ($28.1 million) this year from 21.4 million euros in 2018, with plans for more, while maintaining the size of the staff; the increase is going into the art-making.He is presenting more Italian opera than had been the case here — “Tosca” in 2019; Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” and a concert “Norma” this year; “Madama Butterfly” to come — and also more French works, including Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” next year. Aix’s vibrant commissioning program will continue, setting it apart from the Salzburg Festival, the grandest of European summer opera events, which has focused recently on revivals of rarely seen 20th-century pieces rather than new ones.Audi has “a never-ending curiosity,” said Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader.Violette Franchi for The New York TimesA sustained relationship with Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will begin in a few summers. And Audi would like to convert the Château du Grand-Saint-Jean, just outside Aix, into a theater and a home for the festival’s young-artist program — but that project, unlike the Stadium de Vitrolles, would require an immense fund-raising effort, especially as public subsidies are a gradually ebbing percentage of the budget.As for the stadium, next summer it will be used for another ambitious project, but something completely different than “Resurrection”: a trio of films that will accompany Stravinsky’s epochal early ballets, played live by the Orchestre de Paris under Klaus Makela.“The important thing,” Audi said, “is not to imitate what we did this year.”This is in keeping with his general resistance to resting on his laurels, to doing what is expected of him. Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader, said, “What I admire most about Pierre is he has a never-ending curiosity.” Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly,” which Audi presented at the Armory earlier this year, was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” said Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president.But along with the curiosity comes a pragmatic side, a commitment to seeing those visions through. “He’s always anchored in some kind of technical reality,” Salonen said, adding, of “Resurrection”: “If he thought it could be done, I immediately thought this was something interesting.”“Honestly, this idea, coming from almost anyone, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Salonen said. “But when it came from him, I listened.” More

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      Hayley Kiyoko Revs Up With Arcade Fire and Chills Out to ‘Friends’

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      The pop singer and songwriter has been doing some emotional spring cleaning as she prepares to release her second full-length album, “Panorama.”The pop singer and songwriter Hayley Kiyoko’s fans call her “lesbian Jesus,” and she’s become known for boldly and unapologetically putting every facet of herself into her artistry. That wasn’t always the case, however.“Growing up I would write music in my bedroom with a guitar on my bed, or in my journal,” she said, “and I would use he/him pronouns, and it took a long time for me to obviously speak my truth, lyrically.”Kiyoko, 31, was born and raised in Los Angeles, and expressed her interest in music and performing at a very young age, acting in commercials, then in films and on TV. In 2007, she joined a girl group called the Stunners that also included the R&B singer Tinashe. After its 2011 split, she started carving out a solo career. Her 2015 EP “This Side of Paradise” provided a breakthrough moment with the electro-pop track “Girls Like Girls,” which was also a coming out of sorts. Kiyoko directed its video, a queer teen love story depicting a girl with a boyfriend falling for her best friend, which has 147 million views on YouTube.For her second album, “Panorama” (due July 29), Kiyoko said she’s presenting a more refined version of herself sonically, melodically and lyrically — the result of some crucial emotional spring cleaning. “You have a lot of stuff in your room and it’s like, do you really need all of that?” she explained. Part of the process involved taking down the walls she’d built as a young songwriter who was trying to mask what she was actually trying to say. “Hey, I’m comfortable with myself,” she said she realized. “I love myself and I’m at a place in my life where I don’t need you anymore.”For “Panorama,” Kiyoko brought back a few collaborators from her first album, “Expectations,” (the writers Nikki Flores and Brandon Colbein) and introduced some new ones (the producers Danja, Patrick Morrissey and Kill Dave). The album’s first single, “For the Girls,” is a bass-boosted anthem of empowerment that arrived with a queer “Bachelorette” parody music video, featuring a cameo from the real-life “Bachelor” contestant Becca Tilley. (Kiyoko and Tilley have been dating for four years.) On the mid-tempo thumper “Deep in the Woods,” Kiyoko softens her voice to describe meeting someone and feeling like you’ve known them forever. And on “Luna,” a love letter to a crush, Kiyoko jumps octaves as she sings, “You get me wild you know/I’ll chase your shadow.”“We spent a lot of time making sure that everything that you hear and experience is as close to and true to my experience,” she said.On a phone call from her studio at home in Los Angeles, Kiyoko shared a list of the things that continue to inspire her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Voice of Knowledge” by Don Miguel Ruiz I recently started reading and I’m not going to be ashamed to say that, because it’s just the truth. I fell in love with this book. It really supports you and helps you find a way to navigate those voices in your head, what is reality and what is your 5-year-old self afraid of, or your past trauma, or fears. It’s really helped my mental health a lot.2. Arcade Fire’s “Ready to Start” If I’m having a hard day or not feeling inspired I’ll go for a walk and listen to “Ready to Start” and it is like what that title is: It’s a reset for me. It invigorates me and inspires me to keep going. It validates my fears and my sadness. Arcade Fire is one of my favorite bands and I listened to them a lot growing up, so I think I find a lot of comfort and nostalgia listening to Arcade Fire, but then that song specifically, I really resonate with the lyrics.3. Her own fragrance, Hue Growing up as a queer kid in the closet, I had a really hard time having conversations with cute girls. My only way of having conversations with cute girls was when I smelled good. I would put on perfume and go to school and they’d be like, “Hey, you smell really good” or “What are you wearing?” It was a conversation starter and also boosted my confidence when I felt really insecure, so I wanted to create a perfume that could give my fans confidence and was gender inclusive. I think I’ve always struggled with my femininity and masculinity and which box I fit in, so I wanted to create a perfume that kind of symbolized and represented both my masculine and feminine energy in one bottle. It has this really nice balance of fruity floral and musk.4. “Friends” I probably watch three episodes every single night. Jennifer Aniston is like my safe space. I can always laugh and just decompress watching that show. I remember going through a hard breakup and I was living alone and I would just turn on “Friends” and felt like I was with a bunch of friends. I feel like I can watch that show and see little bits and pieces of my friends and family in the characters, so it’s just ever-evolving.5. Monopoly Deal It’s basically like a more convenient Monopoly but you can play it faster and you get your properties at random. It’s one of my favorite games because each card is worth millions of dollars. I used to play it all the time during the pandemic. I love playing it with my friends because you can charge your friends $11 million and they have to give it to you. I bring it with me everywhere in my purse.6. Journaling I have so many journals. Growing up, aunts, uncles or random parental friends would gift me journals and I’d be like, “What am I going to do with this?” They would just sit on my desk and then I began to love writing in them. It’s so incredible just to have a dialogue with myself for therapy. I also like to go back and read my journals because it reminds me of the things that I’ve overcome, especially during the dark times. It helps me feel centered in where I’m at, that I can keep going and that I’m resilient and strong. If I’m on a plane for six hours I’m not watching the TV, I’m journaling.7. Fried eggplant Growing up, I hated Japanese nights because my mom would make this fried eggplant and we’d have spinach and rice and ginger and all these things. There were so many plates. The soy sauce plate, the ginger plate, the edamame plate. Every time after Japanese night, my mom and dad would be like, “OK, kids, you guys can do the dishes.” And I remember being like, “No, I don’t want to do the dishes!” Now looking back, it’s one of my favorite meals and it’s a meal that I probably have once a week to comfort myself. If I’m stressed or just needing to feel love I’ll make that meal and I don’t complain about the dishes anymore.8. Premiere Pro I’m going to shout out Premiere Pro because as an artist, I became a director out of necessity. Wanting to be a storyteller and learning how to edit and having to kind of do everything myself, I was really grateful for Premiere Pro because it was a way for me to be able to tell my stories and have my stories come to life visually. It gave me the courage to be like, “Hey, I can direct, and I can do this.”9. Acupuncture Acupuncture has been a huge part of my healing process: taking care of my body and making sure that my blood circulation is good. I think I struggled with meditation, and acupuncture helped me get to that point of being able to practice meditating because when I go to acupuncture I just lay and I’m able to just be. It’s such an incredible reset for my body and my mind.10. Claude Monet I have always been inspired by color and I want to say a lot of that has to do with really connecting to Claude Monet’s Impressionism. My mouse pad is the sunrise painting and I have big Claude Monet paintings all over my apartment. Color has just always created a sense of ease, calm and safety. I think that translates in my music videos and directing — wanting to create a world where the color palette feels inviting, warm, safe and nostalgic. When I write music, and when I was working on “Panorama,” I always see color. I listen to a song and I’m like, “OK, this is like dark purple or this is like purple and lime green.” More

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      Lizzo’s Empowerment Pop Gets Stuck in the Same Groove

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      “Special,” her second major-label album, gestures toward complexities that would broaden her image as the queen of the mirror pep talk, but retreats to her comfort zone.Since her charismatic breakout hit “Truth Hurts” dominated the Hot 100 in 2019, the music of the Houston-raised singer, rapper, songwriter and flutist Lizzo has been a pop cultural omnipresence — a glossy sonic lacquer ready to provide any humdrum moment with a hater-repellent sheen.That signature spirit of uplift is all over “Special,” Lizzo’s fourth album, and the follow-up to her 2019 major-label debut, “Cuz I Love You.” “In case nobody told you today, you’re special,” Lizzo sings on the title track, briefly abdicating her role as the rap game Mae West to become a millennial Mister Rogers. Later, on the bouncy, brassy “Birthday Girl,” she asks, “Is it your birthday, girl? ’Cause you looking like a present.” Another propulsive, synth-driven track succinctly captures Lizzo’s bawdily empowering ethos in its title: “I Love You Bitch.”As a self-described “big grrrl” preaching unapologetic sex positivity and self-love, Lizzo, 34, is a refreshingly radical personality, on red carpets and on social media, where she is candid and outspoken. But the cultural ubiquity of her recent music emphasizes its general agreeability and attests to its political limitations: Now many Lizzo songs have come to signify the treat-yourself mood major corporations wish to capture when they want you to buy something. In the past few years, Lizzo’s music has appeared in advertisements for several competing technology companies, alcoholic beverages and soft drinks, a food-delivery app and the rebranded Weight Watchers (for which she was criticized by some fans and semi-apologized, stating, fairly, “I deserve the space to learn from my actions”). The “Cuz I Love You” diversity anthem “Better in Color” accompanied a 2021 commercial introducing the many hues of iMacs.In 2022, there’s no such thing as selling out — everyone is entitled to make money in a challenging music industry — but artists run the risk of diluting their message. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that on “Special” Lizzo often sounds caught between the personal and the personal brand. Occasionally, on songs that chronicle her less-than-ecstatic feelings, she gestures toward complexities that challenge the one-dimensional image of her as the high priestess of the mirror pep talk — only to retreat back to the anodyne comfort zone of songs like “Special” (which debuted as part of a Logitech ad campaign early this year) and “Birthday Girl,” which features a spoken-word segment of people gleefully shouting out their astrological signs.Like her irresistibly fun 2019 single “Juice,” many of Lizzo’s best songs cruise in the same lane that Bruno Mars skillfully dominates: uncannily reproduced ’70s-funk and ’80s-pop simulacra, updated for the present moment with slangy, winking vocals. Her current hit, the disco-lite summer jam “About Damn Time” (produced by her “Truth Hurts” collaborator Ricky Reed and Blake Slatkin) is a bit Lizzo-by-Numbers: a showy flute solo, relentlessly vampy delivery, lyrics that could double as Instagram captions. But the bass line’s gummy groove holds all the disparate parts together, allowing Lizzo to glide elegantly from arch, semi-rapped verses to a belted-out bridge that shows off the full range of her vocals. When it works, it works.And when it doesn’t, well … you get a song like overzealous-ally anthem “Everybody’s Gay,” which aims for Paradise Garage euphoria but lands closer to Target’s collection of Pride month apparel. The energy of the opening track, “The Sign,” somehow manages to be both relentless and listless, Lizzo’s usual cheeky wit blunted by generic lines like, “I live inside his head and pay no rent, yeah/It’s lit, yeah.” The best thing about the abrasive, Beastie Boys-sampling “Grrrls” is that it is the shortest song on the album.“Grrrls” is one of several tracks on “Special” centered around an interpolation of another older and more famous song, which, repeated often on a relatively short pop album, starts to feel less like homage and more like an overreliance on other people’s hooks. The soulful, midtempo “Break Up Twice,” produced by Mark Ronson, draws out a melodic line from Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” to address a disappointing partner, but after the dueling “Ex-Factor” samples in Drake’s “Nice for What” and Cardi B’s “Be Careful” in summer 2018, interpolating the untouchable Hill has come to feel like an overused trope. “Coldplay” features a sped-up and ill-fitting sample of “Yellow,” which Lizzo later shouts out as her go-to soundtrack for nursing a broken heart: “It made me sad, I cried,” she sings over a skittish, jazzy beat, “Singin’ Coldplay in the night.”“Coldplay,” the album’s final track, concludes the loose thematic arc of “Special,” which finds Lizzo wondering if all this work on her self-confidence has made it more difficult to let her guard down and allow herself to be swept away by romantic love. “I’ve learned to love me as myself,” she sings on the searching ballad “If You Love Me,” “But when I’m with somebody else/I question everything I know.” On the energetic “2 B Loved (Am I Ready),” which has a bright, synth-driven chorus reminiscent of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the antic butterflies of a new romance make Lizzo question her hard-won identity as an independent single woman. “I’m good with my friends, I don’t want a man, girl,” she sings, before the ringing of her phone upends that stability: “And now he callin’ me, why do I feel like this? What’s happenin’ to me?”What happens when the woman who proclaimed she would “put the sing in single” finds herself in a monogamous relationship? Or when the queen of empowerment pop wakes up feeling something less than good as hell? In its more tantalizing moments, “Special” articulates these questions but falls short of committing to an answer. On her major-label albums, Lizzo has yet to risk traveling to a depth from which she cannot immediately pull herself up, with triumphant fanfare, on the very next song.Lizzo“Special”(Nice Life Recording Company/Atlantic) More