Music

Musicians often talk about seeking the divine in their work. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter went to Harvard to study it as she made her second major-label album, “Surrender.”“I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” Maggie Rogers said of her detour to Harvard Divinity School during the pandemic.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLike a lot of artists during the early days of the pandemic, Maggie Rogers was living a sequestered, solitary life. She had retreated to coastal Maine, trying to alleviate the burnout of touring for her 2019 major-label debut “Heard It In a Past Life,” with little plan to write. “I was hiding out,” she said. “At a complete loss for words.”But Rogers, who had earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist with that album, which merged her folky singer-songwriter roots with dance-tent momentum, didn’t stay cloistered for long. Remembering that “making beats is fun,” she joined a virtual song-a-day accountability group with the likes of Feist, Damien Rice and Mac DeMarco. “I would go for a walk and then listen to all my favorite artists make some [expletive] in our kitchens,” she said. “It was so sick.” The demos she produced in her own home studio sounded joyful, which surprised her.She thought the tumult and rage of the moment would lead her elsewhere. And then it did.“I talk so much about the artist’s job being to feel,” she said recently. “Feeling through the last couple of years — there’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world. It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”So Rogers, while she was busy concocting sick beats in her kitchen, enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. “I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” she said.Rogers was an undergraduate at New York University when her track “Alaska” drew a viral bit of adulation from Pharrell Williams, and she tried to recapture the city’s energy on her new album.OK McCausland for The New York TimesShe graduated in May with a master’s degree in religion and public life, a new program for mostly secular professionals “whose work is focused on having a positive social impact,” according to the university. In Rogers’s case, it included her struttingly confident performance at Coachella this past spring. “I feel super religious, if music is a religion,” she said. “When I’m in the crowd of fans or onstage, that’s when I felt the most connected to something greater than myself.”As she was studying, she was also completing “Surrender,” her second album for Capitol, a hypnotically danceable ode to ecstatic abandon, making leaps and navigating worry. Co-produced by Rogers and Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine) and embracing distortion — a new sound for her — it’s due out Friday.“Right now, the joy on the record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” Rogers, 28, said. It’s a hard-won hope, which — politically, culturally, environmentally — might be the vibe of the moment. “Surrender” was also part of her thesis, which examined cultural consciousness, the spirituality of public gathering and the ethics of pop power. The album, she told me, is “joy with teeth.”Terry Tempest Williams, an essayist, naturalist and writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School, taught Rogers in a class called “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” Her fans may know her as “a rock star,” Williams wrote in an email. “But I know her as a writer. Her words are lean, staccato, unadorned, visceral. She writes through the full range of emotion that she inhabits. ”Williams added that Rogers “is mindful of the responsibility that comes especially as a musician with a large stage.”“The bridge between a public life and private life is stillness, having time to remember who you are and who you are not,” Williams wrote. “She dances between motion and stillness.”On a drizzly June weekday, Rogers and I met at an Upper East Side corner diner, to wait out the rain before making a pilgrimage to one of her sacred spots in the city, Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. She wore a chopped-off white undershirt, a cozy black thrifted sweater (all hail the Portland, Maine, Goodwill) and her once long, Laurel Canyon songwriter-esque hair shorn into a pixie — a development that was covered by Teen Vogue, though she’s sported that cut for most of her life. An angular Ferragamo mini-purse and square metal-capped boots were the only hints of major label star.Freckle-faced and warm, she was eloquent about her musical choices, with an undercurrent of goofball (like when she shoved a tampon up her nose to stanch a nosebleed while dancing at Coachella — and then used the video clip to advertise her set).Rogers had just moved out of her grad school apartment in Cambridge, Mass., a few weeks before — “my hot take on Boston: great food, bad lighting” — and was still determining where she would set up her new artistic life. “I feel like I’m in post-grad for the next year or something,” she said. “I’m doing field research.”She grew up in rural Easton, Md.; the Los Angeles apartment where she now stores her stuff has never quite felt like home. While she was an undergraduate at New York University studying music production and engineering, her track “Alaska” drew a viral bit of adulation from Pharrell Williams, and she felt a pull to the city as the place where she learned “what kind of artist I wanted to be.” “Surrender” seemed to her like a punky New York album; she missed what she called “the raw human energy, and community — that claustrophobic, someone sweating on you in the subway” connectedness.“There’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world,” Rogers said. “It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe video for the propulsive, synthy first single “That’s Where I Am,” with a bed of glitches and handclaps underneath Rogers’s clarion vocals about desire, pays tribute to that, as she catwalks through downtown Manhattan in a green boa, and piles into a cab with a New York crosscurrent — club kids and office workers. (The guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, the photographer Quil Lemons and David Byrne, who she cold-called to collaborate, show up too.)Her musical process starts with making a mood board. “In production, I always think of records as world building — if I understand that, what the world is, it’s way easier for me to understand what the bass should sound like,” she said.Kid Harpoon, the British producer, with whom she co-wrote her 2018 single “Light On,” remembered that the images for “Surrender” included black-and-white grittiness and ’70s New York — “Someone on their knees in a club with their top off, sweat all down them. Up-close teeth.” Rogers insisted on recording in the city too, a choice he didn’t necessarily understand until they set up shop last summer at Electric Lady, the storied West Village studio. “I’ve seen her just completely uncompromising on some of her ideas — quite brutally sometimes,” he said. “It’s a real strength. She knows what she wants.”They used the location to bring in other musicians, like Florence Welch, who was upstairs recording with Jack Antonoff and played tambourine on the jagged power anthem “Shatter,” and Jon Batiste, who was “just reacting” with so much delight, Kid Harpoon said, that they sometimes had to reset the take for his keyboards because the Grammy-winning bandleader was laughing.And Rogers, after years of performing — she had self-released two albums by the time she was 20 — found other shades in her own already protean vocals. “I learned how to use my lower register,” she said, “to just sing with my whole body.”“Right now, the joy on the record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” Rogers said.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Heard It in a Past Life” was suffused with nature samples; “Surrender” uses distortion, which Rogers had hardly worked with previously. But she found an audio plug-in and flew with it. “The world was collapsing and my life in Maine was incredibly quiet,” she said. “Noise felt so therapeutic.”In a video introducing the album, she called it “chaos I could control.”When the skies cleared, Rogers and I meandered to Bethesda Fountain. Along with St. Mark’s Church in the East Village — where Patti Smith had her first poetry-and-electric-guitar gig — it’s a place she often detours to, for inspiration. She was drawn in by its history, too: “Angel of the Waters,” the 8-foot tall bronze sculpture at the center of the fountain, was designed by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to be commissioned for a major public artwork in New York, and unveiled in 1873.“This feels hopeful to me,” Rogers said, as tourists snapped pictures by the fountain and dozens of turtles dozed and lapped in the lake beyond. “The angel represents peace and temperance. She holds a lily. People still come here.”Once she even saw Joan Didion, a hero, being wheeled around by an attendant for an afternoon constitutional. Rogers was too awed to approach her, but did notice she was sockless. “I remember seeing her ankles,” she said, “and being like, whoa, that’s so intimate.” Rogers has a fine radar for the vulnerable points; Didion, the master modernist writer, died not long after. “I might cry talking about it,” she said.She is still working out how to apply what she learned in the last year to her creative life. But one way is just to pay close attention. “I always think about performance as a practice of presence,” she said. “It’s just this moment that is slipping through your fingers as it’s happening, and it can never be created again. And that’s what feels so sacred about it.”The rain started up again, but she went without an umbrella — she liked the patter of the summer drops. The album’s closing song is full of fret about “the state of the world,” and Rogers sought out education to respond to that feeling. Her music gets her there too; the song ends on a wishful note — with banger percussion — about togetherness. “I think part of creating anything is having hope that there is something else that’s possible,” she said. “I feel like I don’t have any other choice.”OK McCausland for The New York Times More

Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera, composed amid the Nazis’ rise to power.ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — “Ha! A silent woman?,” sings the basso buffo Morosus in Richard Strauss’s “Die Schweigsame Frau.” “You’ll only find her in a churchyard under a stone cross.”The casual misogyny of Strauss’s only opera buffa — a work that unfolds like a love letter to Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti — was hardly a point of controversy when it premiered in Dresden in 1935. But controversy there was: The opera’s libretto was written by Stefan Zweig, a Jew, who submitted it two weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933.On Friday night, Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of “The Silent Woman” at Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College that went some way toward reconciling the featherlight subject and its fraught historical context. The witty staging, engaging cast and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.Much has been written about Strauss’s miscalculations with regards to the Nazi regime, his attempts to stay out of politics while currying favor and protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons.He accepted the presidency of the Reich Chamber of Music, a post he later described as a “tiresome honorary office” in a letter that got him into hot water. In his notebooks, he called Nazi antisemitism “a disgrace to German honor.” Ultimately, he underestimated the National Socialist dictatorship as a political fashion, a nuisance affecting his work with Zweig, who was forced to flee the country.Strauss, who once thought his creativity wouldn’t survive the sudden death of his beloved librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, wrote to Zweig: “If you abandon me, too, I’ll have to lead from now on the life of an ailing, unemployed retiree.”According to a letter from Strauss, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler, presumably finding nothing subversive in “Frau,” approved it. After Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name appear on the program book, the propagandist and his boss skipped the premiere. It was only after Strauss expressed his dim view of Nazism in a letter intercepted by the Gestapo that the opera was banned.In 1942, Zweig, under pain of exile in Brazil, took his own life. Strauss, defeated by the bombing of Germany’s opera houses and the collapse of its culture, nonetheless had music left in him, including his Horn Concerto No. 2 and the “Four Last Songs.”From left, Matthew Anchel, Federico DeMichelis, Anya Matanovic, Edward Nelson, David Portillo, Chrystal E. Williams, and members of the Bard Festival Chorale.Stephanie BergerAgainst this backdrop we have “Die Schweigsame Frau,” an opera about the retired admiral Morosus, whose tinnitus makes him a world-class grouch who can’t bear the tolling of church bells or the idea of a nagging spouse. Zweig supplied an Italianate comedy without psychological underpinning, and Strauss was delighted.When Morosus’s nephew Henry shows up with his theater troupe, Morosus, appalled at Henry’s chosen career, disinherits him and insults his wife, Aminta. The troupe teaches him a lesson recognizable from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”: Aminta, disguised as a demure ingénue, marries Morosus in a sham ceremony and proceeds to throw tantrums and turn his life upside-down until he begs for mercy.For Bard’s delightful production, the director and set designer Christian Räth stages “Frau” as an opera about putting on an opera. Stagehands execute scene changes in full view of the audience, and Morosus’s single-word mantra, “Ruhe” (quiet), glows like an exit sign above the doors of his orderly home.The deception of Morosus becomes a show itself. The theater troupe riffles through clothing racks from other Strauss productions for their costumes. Morosus auditions his three potential brides-to-be on a mini-replica of the stage where “Frau” had its 1935 premiere, presenting the winner with a silver rose straight out of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” (and “The Bachelor”).The troupe — and the cast — fully commits to its roles. Harold Wilson commands a sonorous bass as the proud, endearing Morosus. Jana McIntyre (Aminta) and David Portillo (Henry) sing with bright, earnest lyric voices that hint at stridency under Strauss’s demands. Edward Nelson, sounding handsome and polished, turns the Barber into an unusually compelling factotum. Matthew Anchel, a riot as the impresario Vanuzzi, shows an appealingly compact bass with depth of tone. Ariana Lucas (Housekeeper), Chrystal E. Williams (Carlotta) and Anya Matanovic (Isotta) delve zestfully into their characters.Mattie Ullrich’s funny, dazzling costumes transformed the cast, including a male corps de ballet that never missed a chance to shake their platter tutus.Strauss underscored spoken dialogue with arch instrumental commentary, but the orchestra, at times hamstrung by his sumptuous style and parlando vocal lines, shifts its weight like an elephant in ballet shoes. At Bard, the conductor Leon Botstein, deprioritizing tonal grandeur, showed the opera to be light on its feet. The overture’s quirky doodling emerged fast and clean, and the magical duet-turned-trio that ends Act II lilted, with Straussian wafts of pungent woodwinds.Räth, injecting resistance into a work that was politicized despite itself, turned the chaotic wedding scene into a nightmare sequence: Choristers and dancers swarmed the stage with large face masks of real-life personages (including Mozart, Bach, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Maria Cebotari, the first Aminta). Ominously, the masks of Hitler and Goebbels flanked a mask of Strauss and carted him off by the elbows.The opera closes with a reflection far removed from the prevailing mayhem, not unlike the glorious final monologue from Strauss’s last opera, “Capriccio.”As the strings swelled, Wilson’s Morosus stepped forward, offering a glimpse of peace, sung with touching restraint, from an ailing, unemployed retiree at the end of his life. In his hands he held the masks of Strauss and Zweig, forced apart by murderous bigotry, reunited at last.The Silent WomanThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. More

He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”Mr. Henderson with Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. One critic said that Mr. Henderson, who did not have a jazz background, had “made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic.”David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMichael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.” More

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

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

“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

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 [email protected] 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

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