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      ‘A form of hope’: As air-raid sirens sound, a Lviv orchestra opens a summer festival with Mozart’s Requiem.

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      Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesThe audience members took their seats among boxes of medicine, first-aid kits and intravenous tubes. The orchestra was missing four men who are now fighting on the war’s front lines. A handful of guest singers who had fled bombings and bloodshed stood onstage with the choir.The war in Ukraine has upended the meticulous planning that has gone into the Lviv Philharmonic’s annual summer music festival for four decades. But for musicians and the audience, the show must go on.Even as the space — a Baroque, pastel-colored chamber in western Ukraine — has became a coordination site for humanitarian supplies during the war, it has remained a home to musicians and choirs. This spring, instead of playing upbeat music at the festival’s first performance, the orchestra decided to open with Mozart’s Requiem.The concert, performed on Friday night, was a tribute to the Ukrainians lost in three months of war.“This is a place now for medicine — for the body and the soul,” said Liliia Svystovych, a teacher in the audience. “We understand that a requiem is about mourning, that it is sad music. But it is like a prayer. And a prayer is always a form of hope.”About an hour before the concert started, air-raid sirens began to wail.Iolanta Pryshlyak, the director of Lviv’s International Symphony Orchestra, was preparing to delay the concert until the all-clear sounded. As she waited in a back room where doctors were packing up medical supplies, she took phone calls from volunteers who were driving aid to Ukraine’s embattled east.Ms. Pryshlyak, 59, is not only the orchestra director now. Since the invasion began, she has also directed the flow of supplies that pass through the theater on their way to the war’s front lines. It is her base for both jobs.She had been up since 4 a.m., and she was tired: “I’m just running on autopilot.”Still, she was looking forward to a night of music. “War makes your heart like a stone,” she said. “But music can soften it again.”Downstairs, the orchestra’s conductor, Volodymyr Syvokhip, put on a suit in his office as a baritone soloist sang arpeggios in a nearby room.For weeks, performers had rehearsed amid towers of humanitarian aid boxes as volunteers and doctors organized supplies all around them. Sometimes the musicians would help the aid workers. And sometimes the medics would stop their work to listen to them play.“We are supporting each other through this, in some way,” Mr. Syvokhip said with a smile.As he went onstage, Mr. Syvokhip told the audience that as air-raid sirens sounded in Lviv, a bomb in the eastern Kharkiv region had reduced a cultural center to rubble, and with it, the local theater.When the requiem ended, members of the orchestra and their audience were in tears.“The sound of those alarms and sirens combined in our heads with the words of the conductor, and we understood why musicians must not keep silent,” said Natalia Dub, a headmistress at a local academy.She had put as much care into her appearance this year as she had for summer festivals before it, with red lipstick and a string of pearls.“We need to come here,” she said. “This is the place we need to be most of all.” More

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      Review: Grammy-Winning ‘Akhnaten’ Returns to the Met Opera

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      Philip Glass’s portrait of a pathbreaking pharaoh returns to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since its hit debut there in 2019.It wasn’t so long ago this season — just January — that the Metropolitan Opera’s programming was about as classic as it gets: tried-and-true works by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart.But scan the coming weeks, and you’ll find what looks like a better, more adventurous company. On Thursday, Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” returned for the first time since its Met debut, in 2019, joining the American premiere last week of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Next to open, on May 30, is a revival of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” in a staging by Jonathan Miller that is older but more stylish than many at the house. By June, “Rigoletto” will stand alone as a holdout of the core repertory.While a break from the Met’s standard programming, “Akhnaten” — the final installment, from 1984, in Glass’s trilogy of “portrait” operas, after the pathbreaking “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha,” a meditation on Gandhi’s nonviolent movement — may be a surer bet than, say, “Tosca.” When “Akhnaten” belatedly arrived there a few years ago, it was a critical and box office success, one that attracted a visibly younger audience.That run eventually made its way onto a recording that recently won a Grammy Award. This revival is something of a victory lap, with the same conductor and nearly the same cast. Even Thursday’s audience seemed transported from those earlier days. With artists like Erin Markey and Justin Vivian Bond mingling on the theater’s promenade, the scene was more Joe’s Pub than Lincoln Center.There were, though, some crucial differences from 2019. Phelim McDermott’s production, now more lived-in, unfolded with elegant inevitability rather than effort; the score was executed with a clarity and drive absent on the often slack album. And while “Akhnaten” may be one of Glass’s tributes to great men who changed the world — through science, politics and faith — Thursday’s performance of it made a persuasive argument for where the real power lies: with the women.For example, the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, the cast’s newcomer, as Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife. Long presented at the Met in operas from the 18th and 19th centuries, she was singing a new kind of role on Thursday, one she seized with assurance and ringing might. As a partner for Anthony Roth Costanzo, the countertenor who has a virtual monopoly on the title role in this production, her lush, vibrato-rich sound was a productive contrast to his ethereal purity — she grounded and he celestial, they met somewhere in the middle for their long, hypnotically sensual love duet.More powerful yet was the soprano Disella Larusdottir as Queen Tye, Akhnaten’s mother. Penetrating and resonant, she shot out burst-like phrases with nearly mechanical exactitude and endurance, but was also expressive within the discipline. It’s Akhnaten, pioneering a kind of monotheism in his worship of the sun god Aten, who banishes the priests from the temple in Act II. On Thursday, though, the attack seemed to come from Queen Tye, so frightening and forceful was Larusdottir in her delivery.The conductor Karen Kamensek held together what can be an unwieldy production and led a Met Orchestra much more reliably capable than in 2019. She and the ensemble set the tone with the opera’s mood-altering, time-bending prelude. On the recording, propulsive, shifting arpeggios come off as sluggish, with lapses of legato phrasing. Returned to with more experience, along with noticeably more control, the score moved along with crisp transparency and a tense momentum that didn’t let up in the first act. The instrumentalists still have work to do, though. As the show went on, the strings occasionally slid into soft articulation; and the brasses suffered from clumsiness and imprecision, mistakes that can’t be hidden in music that lives or dies on accuracy.McDermott’s production similarly exposes its performers: not only the singers but also a dozen jugglers in catsuits, including Sean Gandini, the show’s choreographer. As scrappy as it is ornate, the staging — with imaginative, thrift-store-find costumes by Kevin Pollard and sets to match by Tom Pye, and artful lighting by Bruno Poet — demands the patience and steadiness of yoga in its movement, as well as an active eye for anyone watching. (At one point, one of Gandini’s people balances atop a large rolling wheel while, on scaffolding above, jugglers toss balls as the chorus does a version of the same thing; playing out amid the spectacle is the funeral of Akhnaten’s father.)It can be a lot to take in, and the metaphor of juggling — its spheres redolent of Akhnaten’s precious sun, their constant and unpredictable motion as precarious as his reign — proves its point too quickly to go on for as long as it does. As ritual, it doesn’t achieve the transcendence of McDermott’s “Satyagraha,” one of the Met’s finest productions, a staging whose visual diversity and inventiveness give way to sublime austerity.Zachary James, left, with Costanzo and members of the juggling ensemble led by Sean Gandini.Ken HowardThe choreography, though, does have its awe-inspiring moments, such as when juggling pins fly around Aaron Blake, as the High Priest of Amon, who — despite the risk of being hit by one — doesn’t even suggest a flinch while singing with a full-bodied tenor sound. Blake’s character is joined by Aye (the bass Richard Bernstein) and General Horemhab (the baritone Will Liverman) to form a tripartite resistance to Akhnaten’s rule, inciting the revolt that ends it and restores the old religious order. The arc of the pharaoh’s reign is recounted in spoken passages by Zachary James, whose towering presence and booming declamations feel thrillingly neither of this time nor world.James assumes the role of a lecturing professor near the opera’s ending, while Costanzo’s Akhnaten appears as a museum display. This is how we remember, McDermott is saying: through history, through exhibition, through the pageantry of opera performance. Glass makes his own version of that point with the centerpiece aria, “Hymn to the Sun,” a setting of a prayer to Aten that ends with an offstage chorus singing the text of Psalm 104 — tracing a direct line from Akhnaten to the monotheism that dominates today.As if that weren’t enough to place Akhnaten in the pantheon of great innovators, the final scene’s music introduces a subtle quotation from “Einstein on the Beach.” Here, Glass doesn’t tidily package his “portraits” trilogy as much as acknowledge it. On Thursday, though, that intrusion was also a reminder: After the triumphs of “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” when will the Met and McDermott give Einstein his due with a production of his own?AkhnatenThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      ‘Pistol’ Mini-Series Captures the Anarchy in the Sex Pistols

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      ‘Pistol,’ a new mini-series directed by Danny Boyle, is based on a memoir by the punk band’s bassist and founder, Steve Jones.LONDON — “Are we doing any spitting?” asked a man in the crowd at the 100 Club, a small, red-walled underground space, redolent of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and a thousand lost nights, just off London’s Oxford Street.Yes, there would be spitting. The club was the setting for an early Sex Pistols gig, which last June was being recreated for “Pistol,” a six-part series about the British band, directed by Danny Boyle and streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in other territories, starting May 31.The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code” of the punk revolution, said Boyle, who seemed to be everywhere on set, talking to the extras about crowd behavior, checking cameras and peering intently at monitors as the actors performed the song “Bodies” and the audience went wild.“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” Boyle said in a recent interview. That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to do.”Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, with virtuosic panache, said Boyle’s approach was unlike anything he had previously experienced on a set. “You felt, this could go wrong, but you could trust in Danny and dive in and experiment — very Sex Pistols!”Before filming began, the actors playing the members of the Sex Pistols spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Miya Mizuno/FXThe result is a charged, visceral, Cubist portrait of the flamboyant rise and explosive fall of the Sex Pistols, whose brief existence from 1975 to 1978 made punk rock a worldwide phenomenon and whose anarchic songs (“God Save the Queen,” “Pretty Vacant”) became anthems for the disaffected.The series, written by Craig Pearce, is based on the memoir “Tales of a Lonely Boy” by Steve Jones, the band’s guitarist. But Boyle said that although Jones’s story was “a wonderful way in,” he and Pearce had tried to paint a composite picture of the entire group, and the ’70s world from which it emerged. (The band originally comprised Jones, the singer John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten, the drummer Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock on bass, replaced in 1977 by Sid Vicious.)The first episode opens with a montage of archival footage: The Queen waving politely to the crowd; a scene from the slapstick “Carry On” movies; David Bowie performing; striking workers and garbage piled in the streets. When we meet Steve (Toby Wallace), he is busy stealing sound equipment from a Bowie gig. (The singer’s lipstick is still on the microphone.)Steve and his bandmates are angry, bored, and “trying to scrape enough together for another pint,” he tells them as they discuss what their group should wear. “So, no suits?” asks the hapless Wally, who soon gets booted from the band.“It’s hard to overestimate how class-ridden and moribund British society was for these guys,” said Pearce, who met Jones, Cook and other figures close to the band before writing most of the script in his native Australia during the first months of the pandemic.“The promise of the Swinging Sixties didn’t deliver; rock ’n’ roll freedom didn’t happen for most kids,” Pearce said. “There was a feeling that if you were born into a certain class, you couldn’t escape. You had to accept what had been handed to you.”Then, he said, came “this group of kids who said, you are sleepwalking through life.”“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” said Danny Boyle, who directed “Pistol.”Miya Mizuno/FXBoyle, he added, was always his “dream director” for the series. “We couldn’t believe it when he immediately said he wanted to do it.”It turned out that Boyle couldn’t quite believe it either. “I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.” But after reading Pearce’s script, Boyle immediately said yes.“Which was ridiculous,” he said with a laugh, “since I didn’t even know if we would have the music, the most important thing.”Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and the series itself, but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.Boyle said that while he did extensive reading and research, talking to everyone he could find who had been involved with the band, he ultimately trusted his intuition in formulating an approach to the series.“I grew up in a similar working-class environment to Steve and these guys,” he said. “We are exactly the same age and I am a music obsessive. I had to explain to the actors what the 1970s were like; they just don’t recognize how little stimulation there was, how you waited all week for the lifeline of the New Musical Express to appear on a Thursday!”Before filming began, the actors playing the band members spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Sometimes Boyle would talk to them about the ’70s and show them footage. Then, led by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from the British electronic music group Underworld, they would spend hours playing together.Boyle said he had mostly avoided casting trained musicians. “I didn’t want anyone locked into an expertise,” he said, adding that Jacob Slater, who plays Cook, was an excellent guitarist, but had to learn drumming.Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), left, and Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) are two of the memorable female characters in the series. Miya Mizuno/FXHe also decided not to do any postproduction work on the music. “Like the Pistols, we just had to get up and, however imperfect we were, go for it,” said Sydney Chandler, who plays the American singer Chrissie Hynde. Chandler’s character is one of several memorable women in the series, alongside the designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton) and the punk icon Jordan (Maisie Williams).When it came to the band members, “we didn’t want to be tributes or caricatures,” said Anson Boon, who plays Lydon and, like his character, had never sung before. “The Pistols produced a raw, angry wall of sound and we wanted to capture that essence without trying to do an impression.”Playing a character who is also a real person was intimidating but fascinating, said Wallace, who spent time with Jones before filming began. “We talked a lot about his family, then he gave me the first guitar lesson I really had.”The series shows Steve’s unhappy childhood, which Wallace saw as central to Jones’s “anger and frustration,” he said, and led him to create “a band that represents the unrepresented.Working on the series, Boyle said, had made him aware of the Pistols’ importance beyond music. “They were a bunch of working class guys who broke the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he said. “It was especially resonant in the U.K., where the way you were expected to behave was so entrenched.”The Pistols, he added, gave their fans permission to do whatever they wanted, to waste their time however they wanted, to shape their own lives in a singular way.“They gave a sense of purpose to purposelessness,” he said. More

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      Rina Sawayama Flips Damnation Into a Dance Party, and 15 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Burna Boy, Metric, Sudan Archives and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Rina Sawayama, ‘This Hell’Ever the pop maximalist, Rina Sawayama’s first single from her upcoming album, “Hold the Girl,” has it all: a fiery chorus, cheeky humor, devil puns for days and even a gloriously cheesy hair-metal guitar solo. “This hell is better with you, we’re burning up together/Baby that makes two,” she sings on the towering hook, making eternal damnation sound like an exclusive VIP party. Both the glammy intensity and be-yourself messaging feel like a throwback to “Born This Way”-era Lady Gaga, but it’s all remixed through Rina’s signature, neo-Y2K-pop sensibility. LINDSAY ZOLADZmxmtoon, ‘Frown’If the California singer-songwriter mxmtoon has a mission statement, it’s something like catchy, smiley self-help. “Frown” is from her new album, “Rising,” and it presents itself as an antidote to being “stuck in a loop overthinking all our pain.” She musters four-chord pop optimism, multitracked vocals and a pop-reggae backbeat to insist, “It’s OK to frown/smile upside-down.” JON PARELESDiana Ross and Tame Impala, ‘Turn Up the Sunshine’Nothing screams “Minions” like a collaboration between … Tame Impala and Diana Ross? Yet their styles blend surprisingly well on “Turn Up the Sunshine,” the first single from the Jack Antonoff-produced soundtrack for the animated summer movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” (Yes, the man is so ubiquitous, he’s even producing for the Minions now.) A sleek, seamless and lovingly conjured disco throwback, “Turn Up the Sunshine” allows Kevin Parker an opportunity to go fully retro in his arrangement and saves Ross ample space for ecstatic vocals and some groovy spoken-word vamping. ZOLADZCarrie Underwood, ‘She Don’t Know’Infidelity gets a fierce retaliation in “She Don’t Know,” a canny country revenge song from Carrie Underwood and her collaborators, David Garcia and Hillary Lindsay. A foot-tapping beat and country instruments like mandolin and fiddle back her as she sings, with the vindictive glee of someone escaping a very bad situation, “What she don’t know is she can have him.” PARELESKatzù Oso, ‘Conchitas’A good dream-pop song sparkles, like sunlight refracting through water. On the lustrous “Conchitas,” from Katzù Oso’s debut album, “Tmí,” the Los Angeles-based artist Paul Hernandez bathes in ’90s nostalgia, soaking in shimmering synths, buzzing guitar riffs and a breathy falsetto. The result harnesses Cocteau Twins’ most tender, romantic qualities, but Hernandez glazes the track in his own special gloss, too: Much of “Tmí” was written in Boyle Heights, and as sweet as the pan dulce treats of its namesake, “Conchitas” embraces the spirit of that neighborhood, casting it into the soundtrack for a saccharine, lovesick daydream. ISABELIA HERRERASudan Archives, ‘Selfish Soul’It might not seem like the impish charm of a playground rhyme and a jagged violin hook would seamlessly coalesce, but Sudan Archives has always taken risks. On her new single “Selfish Soul,” the artist born Brittney Parks reprises her irreverent boho whimsy, crashing together reverbed vocals, a rapped verse and wild visuals with a razor-sharp message: a promise to love and embrace every kind of Black hair texture. “If I wear it straight will they like me more?/Like those girls on front covers,” Parks sings. The video oozes euphoria, too; Parks climbs a chrome stripper pole, plays the violin upside down and twerks in a mud pit with her girlfriends. What did you ever do? HERRERAMetric, ‘Doomscroller’Over 10 minutes long, Metric’s “Doomscroller” is a minisuite that proceeds from electronic dystopia to a plea for empathy to an offer of reassurance that’s cradled by physical instruments. The dystopia is convincing: a tireless mechanical thump and throbbing, blipping tones — racing like a gathering troll mob — behind Emily Haines’s calmly caustic observations about internet rabbit holes and entrenched inequality. “Salt of the earth underpaid to serve you,” she notes, and, “Scum of the earth overpaid to rob you.” The reassurance, though it builds up to a full-bodied rock-band march, is shakier; as the song ends, electronic blips reappear. PARELESSylvan Esso, ‘Sunburn’Sylvan Esso celebrates self-indulgence and rues its aftermath in “Sunburn”: “Sunburn blistering, the heat under your skin,” Amelia Meath sings. “Oh, but it felt so good.” The electronic backup is bouncy and pointillistic — nearly all staccato single notes, rarely a chord — and punctuated with the cheeriest of samples: a bicycle bell. PARELESBurna Boy, ‘Last Last’Burna Boy juggles heartache, accusations, self-medication and reminders of his success in “Last Last,” a post-breakup song about a roller coaster of feelings: “I put my life into my job and I know I’m in trouble/She manipulate my love,” he sulks. “Why you say I did nothing for you/When I for do anything you want me to do.” The video shows him surrounded by friends, possessions and awards, smoking and drinking. The title of the sample that provides the track’s nervous strummed rhythm and vocal hook suggests a very different scenario: It’s from Toni Braxton’s 2009 single “He Wasn’t Man Enough.” PARELESMeridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento, ‘Metamorfosis’Meridian Brothers, a high-concept Colombian band formed in 1998 by Eblis Álvarez, delights in twisting and time-warping the roots of salsa and other Latin American styles. “Metamorfosis” — from an album due Aug. 5 — borrows Kafka’s title for a song about a man waking up transformed into a robot, facing a futuristic world of drones and screens; he summons Yoruba deities to battle transhumanism. Blending brisk guaracha and montuno rhythms with eruptions of psychedelic reverb and jazzy piano, it’s a percussive romp. PARELESCalypso Rose featuring Carlos Santana and the Garifuna Collective, ‘Watina’The Garifuna people, an Afro-Caribbean culture that has maintained its own language and traditions primarily in Belize and Honduras, are descendants of Indigenous Arawaks and of West Africans who survived a 17th-century shipwreck to escape slavery. The Garifuna Collective, founded by Andy Palacio, revived and updated old Garifuna songs and “Watina” (“I Called Out”) was the title song of its 2007 album. This remake adds a horn section — pushing the arrangement a bit closer to ska — and has lead vocals from the Trinidadian icon Calypso Rose, 82, who has been an honorary citizen of Belize since 1982, along with stinging guitar from Carlos Santana and some lyrics translated into English: “Lord please help me, even if I’m alone.” PARELESOneida, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand’The long-running Brooklyn band Oneida loves repetition, layering and noise, and its catalog includes plenty of arty, elaborate structures. But “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand,” previewing an album due in August, recalls foundational punk-rock songs like “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers. It uses just two chords nearly all the way through (with one more for a bridge), a hurtling beat and terse lyrics: “So sure of ourselves/Who needs a plan?” But those two chords support a welter of guitar parts and drum salvos that just keeps getting more euphoric. PARELESFKJ featuring Toro y Moi, ‘A Moment of Mystery’Vincent Fenton, the French producer who bills himself as FKJ (for French Kiwi Juice), collaborated with Chaz Bundick, who records as Toro y Moi, and Toro’s keyboardist, Anthony Ferraro, on a track from FKJ’s album due in June, “Vincent.” It’s three minutes of lush, wistful uncertainty: serenely blurred vocals, hovering keyboard tones, ambiguous chords that stay unresolved. “I love the drama because I never know what the ending’s like,” Bundick sings, matching the music. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Formwela 12’“Our bodies are Music/You cannot play/Music/Without the body/Dancing.” The 91-year-old dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, a former Alvin Ailey star, opens Esperanza Spalding’s latest with those lines of poetry; in the ensuing 13 minutes, she brings them to life. She glides and tilts across the floor of an open studio, surrounded by four dancers and four musicians — including Spalding, who uses her upright bass and a quiet, cooing voice to coax and support de Lavallade. Early in the performance, de Lavallade sits down beside her, laying an ear and a hand on the bass while Spalding plays. As the piece carries on, the band’s lush flourishes and pointillism are clearly coming in response to the dancers, as much as their steps are responding to the music. Mostly, everyone is focused on the guidance and the unhurried elegance of de Lavallade. The audio of this piece is a bonus track on the newly released vinyl version of Spalding’s “Songwrights Apothecary Lab.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOShabaka, ‘Explore Inner Space’Shabaka Hutchings begins this track improvising on a lone wood flute, against a backdrop of silence. Soon analog synthesizers and loops are pooling around him, and an electric guitar adds dewy, flickering plucks. The music never fully crescendos, but its mysterious serenity might invite to take up the charge of the track’s title. The tune comes from “Afrikan Culture,” the first solo EP released by this famed U.K.-based saxophonist, who has begun performing simply under the name Shabaka. RUSSONELLOMary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena, ‘Hundred Dollar Hoagie’The harpist Mary Lattimore and the guitarist Paul Sukeena, two experimental musicians and Philly-area expats who occasionally collaborate, have teamed up to release the stirring ambient album “West Kensington,” out Friday on the indie label Three Lobed recordings. The opener “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” announces itself humbly, with its playful title nodding to the all-time greatest regional slang word for a submarine sandwich, which does not quite prepare you for the seven-and-a-half minutes of otherworldly sublimity that it contains. Lattimore’s synthesizer chords and Sukeena’s warping, weeping guitar lines layer to create an almost lunar soundscape, pleasantly reminiscent of Brian Eno’s awe-struck 1983 masterwork “Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.” ZOLADZ More

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      Combing the Beach, and the Archives, to Revive ‘The Wreckers’

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      In the early 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but her music fell out of the repertoire. Glyndebourne Festival Opera is bringing back her 1906 maritime opera.LEWES, England — Late last fall, there was an unusual sight on a beach in southern England: a team of staff members from Glyndebourne Festival Opera combing the shingle for flotsam and jetsam, then carting it off in wheelbarrows for use onstage.It is an unusually true-to-life approach for one of Glyndebourne’s productions this season — “The Wreckers,” by the British composer Ethel Smyth. The action is set among an impoverished seaside community in 18th-century England, whose inhabitants make their living from scavenging the wreckage of ships they have driven ashore (as many did, historically).Glyndebourne staff members have combed a nearby beach in southern England for flotsam and jetsam to use onstage.Sam StephensonGlyndebourne is lavishing a lot of effort on “The Wreckers,” which, despite premiering in 1906, has been staged professionally only a handful of times. For nearly three years, Glyndebourne’s archivist has been combing through documents and old musical scores to assemble a new performing edition that matches the composer’s intentions as closely as possible. A production of this news restored version, which runs Saturday through June 24, will be sung in French, as the original was.A chorus of over 50, a team of dancers and a 75-piece orchestra have been hired to give the production some oomph. And, as a mark of respect, “The Wreckers” has been placed in pole position as the summer festival’s opening show, displacing the operatic big-hitters that generally take up this spot.“We’re trying to do Ethel justice,” Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director, said in an interview. “Quite honestly, it’s about time someone did.”Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director. Ethel Smyth is “someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in,” he said, “and that comes through in the drama.”James BelloriniIn the first decades of the 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. She was championed by Mahler and by the conductor Thomas Beecham, who proclaimed “The Wreckers” a masterpiece and put it on at the Royal Opera House in London. In 1903, Smyth became the first woman to have a work staged at the Metropolitan Opera (and, astonishingly, remained the only one until 2016).Yet after her death in 1944, Smyth’s music gradually faded from the repertoire. There were fewer and fewer outings for her symphonies, choral works or chamber pieces, and even fewer stagings of her six operas. Only a handful of recordings exist: The sole version of “The Wreckers” currently available is from a 1994 live performance.Patient advocacy by the American conductor Leon Botstein yielded a production of “The Wreckers” at the Bard SummerScape Festival in 2015 at Bard College in New York, and there have been scattered performances of Smyth’s other works since. In November, the Houston Opera will also put on “The Wreckers” in its own new staging.Smyth might have arched an eyebrow: near nothing for decades, then two new shows at once.Leah Broad, a music historian at Oxford University who is writing a group biography that includes Smyth, said “gender prejudice” was one of the chief reasons Smyth’s music was so little performed.“There are other issues, but that’s a lot to do with it,” Broad said. “She’s a really significant historical composer.”Smyth in 1943. In the first decades of the 20th century, she was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. Kurt Hutton/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesSmyth also has one of the great life stories in musical history. Brought up in a military household, she was initially forbidden from studying music by her father, but she eventually won out and attended the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany in 1887.Although she dropped out after a year, unimpressed by the teaching, while she was there she met Dvorak, Grieg and Tchaikovsky — who wrote in his diary that Smyth was “one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable.”A formidable networker, Symth later befriended many well-known people, including George Bernard Shaw and Empress Eugenie of France, and she had much-gossiped-about romantic affairs with both men and women.Smyth got many of her works performed and won a degree of acceptance, but always battled the assumption that what she was doing was essentially second-rate. Writing in The Times of London in 1893, a critic praised her “virile” compositions and commended “the entire absence of the qualities that are usually associated with feminine productions.”More humiliatingly, Smyth was often treated as the butt of a joke — as famous for her forceful personality, many dogs and penchant for wearing men’s suits as anything she had written. Virginia Woolf, who carried on an intimate correspondence with the much-older Smyth, nonetheless complained in her diary that becoming the subject of Smyth’s affections was like being “caught by a giant crab.”In 1910, Smyth became involved with the women’s suffrage movement. Two years later, she was sent to Holloway prison in London for several months after throwing a rock through the window of a government office. When Beecham visited her in jail, he later recalled, he was astonished to see Smyth conducting an exercise-yard performance of her rousing “March of the Women” from a cell window “in almost Bacchic frenzy, with a toothbrush.”“The Wreckers” stage at Glyndebourne. The show starts on Saturday and runs through late June.James BelloriniLike much of Smyth’s music, “The Wreckers” is an intense experience. Inspired by visits the composer made to remote coastal villages in Cornwall, in southwest England, it centers on a local preacher’s wife, Thirza, who is torn between her sense of duty to her puritanical husband and her love for a kindhearted fisherman.Not incidentally, Smyth was herself involved in a romantic triangle with the opera’s librettist, the married American poet Henry Brewster, and his wife, Julia. “There’s such passion in the love music,” said Karis Tucker, who sings Thirza at Glyndebourne. “She knew what she was writing about.”Ticciati said the score had both power and remarkable range, sounding “sometimes like Brahms, then Mendelssohn, then French exoticism, even late Debussy.” He added: “You think: ‘What is this?’ And then you realize that this is Ethel Smyth; this is what she sounds like.”As well as conjuring a fogbound maritime atmosphere, infused with snatches of folk song and sea shanties, Smyth seems to find particular relish in crowd scenes, as her supposedly God-fearing villagers prepare to lynch shipwrecked sailors before turning on each other.Tucker and the chorus of “The Wreckers” rehearsing last month.Richard Hubert SmithThere’s more than a hint of “The Crucible” about “The Wreckers,” and as Broad, the music historian, pointed out, the pre-echoes of another seafaring work, Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” (1945), are even stronger. “Britten owned a score of ‘The Wreckers’; it’s right there in his library,” Broad said. “He was never polite about Ethel Smyth’s music, but he was clearly influenced by it.”Finally, more of us will get the opportunity to make up our own minds. In addition to the Houston production, Glyndebourne will take a semistaged version of its “Wreckers” to the BBC Proms festival this July. The Proms is making Smyth a major focus and spotlighting other works of hers, including Mass in D and Concerto for Violin and Horn.“She’s so overdue her moment,” Broad said. “When you hear her, it’s like a gap in music suddenly gets filled.”Fearlessly inventive, sensuous and sometimes shocking, “The Wreckers” is a fine testament to the woman who created it, Ticciati said. “She’s someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in, and that comes through in the drama,” he argued.“I don’t want to say Ethel was larger than life,” Ticciati added, “because I think that was her life.”The WreckersMay 21 through June 24 at the Glyndebourne Festival in Lewes, England; glyndebourne.com. More

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      Rosmarie Trapp, of the ‘Sound of Music’ Family, Dies at 93

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      She was the last surviving daughter of the baron and the would-be nun depicted in the stage musical and 1965 film.Rosmarie Trapp, a member of the singing family made famous by the stage musical and film “The Sound of Music” and the last surviving daughter of Baron Georg Johannes von Trapp, the family patriarch, died on May 13 at a nursing home in Morrisville, Vt. She was 93.The Trapp Family Lodge, the family business in Stowe, Vt., announced her death on Tuesday.Ms. Trapp (who dropped the “von” from her name years ago) was the daughter of Georg and Maria Augusta (Kutschera) von Trapp, the would-be nun who became a governess with the family and ultimately married the baron.Rosmarie is not depicted in “The Sound of Music,” which focused on the seven children Georg von Trapp had with his first wife, although she was in fact almost 10 when the family fled Austria in 1938 after that country came under Nazi rule. Among the many liberties “The Sound of Music” took with the family’s story was the timeline — Georg and Maria actually married in 1927, not a decade later.In any case, Rosmarie did travel and perform with the Trapp Family Singers for years and was a presence at the lodge in Stowe, where she would hold singalongs for the guests. She acknowledged, though, that it took her some time to embrace the fame that the musical thrust upon her after it debuted on Broadway in 1959, beginning a three-year run, and then was adapted into a 1965 movie, which won the best picture Oscar.“I used to think I was a museum,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997, when she was evangelizing on behalf of the Community of the Crucified One, a Pennsylvania-based church, “but I can’t escape it.”“Now I’m using it as a tool,” she added. “I’m not a victim of it anymore.”Some of the children of Baron Georg von Trapp singing during a Mass in his honor in 1997 in Stowe, Vt., where the family runs a lodge. From left, Maria von Trapp, Eleonore Campbell, Werner von Trapp, Rosmarie Trapp and Agathe von TrappAssociated PressRosmarie Agathe Erentrudis von Trapp was born on Feb. 8, 1929, in the Aigen area of Salzburg, Austria. (She adopted Barbara as a middle name when she applied for her Social Security card.) The family began singing publicly in the 1930s in Europe, but the baron had no interest in cooperating with Hitler once the Nazis took control, and so the family left Austria, taking a train to Italy. (The “Sound of Music” depiction of the departure was fictionalized.)The family gave its first New York concert, at Town Hall, in December 1938 and soon settled in the United States, first in Pennsylvania, then in Vermont.“We chose America because it was the furthest away from Hitler,” Ms. Trapp told The Palm Beach Post of Florida in 2007, when she spoke to students from the musical theater program and Holocaust studies classes at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens.The family singing group continued to perform into the 1950s. Late in the decade, Ms. Trapp and other family members went to New Guinea to do missionary work for several years. Ms. Trapp’s father died in 1947, and her mother died in 1987.Ms. Trapp’s brother, Johannes von Trapp, is the last living member of the original family singers and her only immediate survivor.The Trapp Family Singers repertory, of course, included none of the songs later composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for “The Sound of Music,” but when Ms. Trapp gave talks like the one at the Florida high school, she would gladly take requests for a number or two from the musical. What did she think of the film?“It was a nice movie,” she told The Post in 2007. “But it wasn’t like my life.” More

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      Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82

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      He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.Bob Neuwirth, who had credentials as a painter, recording artist, songwriter and filmmaker, but who also had an impact as a member of Bob Dylan’s inner circle and as a conduit for two of Janis Joplin’s best-known songs, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.His partner, Paula Batson, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Neuwirth had a modest, eclectic string of albums to his credit, including his debut, simply titled “Bob Neuwirth,” in 1974, as well as a 1994 collaboration with John Cale called “Last Day on Earth” and a 2000 collaboration with the Cuban composer and pianist José María Vitier, “Havana Midnight.” But he was perhaps better known for the roles he played in the careers of others, beginning with Mr. Dylan.Mr. Neuwirth said that he first encountered Mr. Dylan at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Connecticut in 1961. Mr. Dylan was still largely unknown but, Mr. Neuwirth said years later, the singer caught his eye “because he was the only other guy with a harmonica holder around his neck.”The two hit it off, and Mr. Neuwirth became a central figure in the circle that coalesced around Mr. Dylan as his fame grew. When Mr. Dylan held court at the Kettle of Fish bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Mr. Neuwirth was there. When Mr. Dylan toured England in 1965, Mr. Neuwirth went along. A decade later, when Mr. Dylan embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Mr. Dylan’s contemporaries and biographers have described Mr. Neuwirth’s role in various ways.“Neuwirth was the eye of the storm, the center, the catalyst, the instigator,” Eric Von Schmidt, another folk singer active at the time, once said. “Wherever something important was happening, he was there, or he was on his way to it, or rumored to have been nearby enough to have had an effect on whatever it was that was in the works.”From left, Bob Dylan, Mick Ronson and Mr. Neuwirth performing in Toronto in 1975 as part of Mr. Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, for which Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Frank Lennon/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesIt has often been suggested that as Mr. Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak, from Mr. Neuwirth.“The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,” Bob Spitz wrote in “Dylan: A Biography” (1989). “So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.”Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame.“Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,” he wrote, “a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.”Mr. Dylan, in his book “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth.“Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth,” he wrote. “He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.”Ms. Joplin, too, benefited from Mr. Neuwirth’s influence. Holly George-Warren, whose books include “Janis: Her Life and Music” (2019), said that Mr. Neuwirth and Ms. Joplin met in 1963 and became fast friends.Mr. Neuwirth performing in Brooklyn in 1999. Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images“In 1969, he taught her Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ after he heard Gordon Lightfoot play the then-unknown song at manager Albert Grossman’s office,” Ms. George-Warren said by email. “He quickly learned it and took it to Janis at the Chelsea Hotel.”Her recording of the song hit No. 1 in 1971, but Ms. Joplin was not around to enjoy the success; she had died of a drug overdose the previous year.Mr. Neuwirth was also involved in “Mercedes Benz,” another well-known Joplin song that, like “Bobby McGee,” appeared on her 1971 album, “Pearl.” He was at a bar with her before a show she was doing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., in August 1970 when Ms. Joplin began riffing on a ditty that the poet Michael McClure would sing at gatherings with friends. Mr. Neuwirth began writing the lyrics the two of them came up with on a napkin.She sang the song at the show that night, and she later recorded it a cappella. She, Mr. McClure and Mr. Neuwirth are jointly credited as the writers of the song, which on the album is less than two minutes long.Ms. George-Warren said that this anecdote was revelatory: Mr. Neuwirth nudged along the careers of artists he admired, including Patti Smith, in whatever ways came to mind.“Though Bob was renowned for his acerbic wit — from his days as aide-de-camp to Dylan and Janis — when I met him 25 years ago, he epitomized kindness, mentorship and curiosity,” she said. “That is the unsung story of Bob Neuwirth.”Robert John Neuwirth was born on June 20, 1939, in Akron, Ohio. His father, also named Robert, was an engineer, and his mother, Clara Irene (Fischer) Neuwirth, was a design engineer.He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and dabbled in painting over the decades; in 2011 the Track 16 gallery in Santa Monica presented “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth, 1964-2009.”After two years at art school, he spent time in Paris before returning to the Boston area, where he began performing in coffee houses, singing and playing banjo and guitar.He appeared in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary, “Dont Look Back,” as well as in “Eat the Document” (1972), a documentary of a later tour that was shot by Mr. Pennebaker and later edited by Mr. Dylan, who is credited as the director, and Mr. Dylan’s “Renaldo & Clara” (1978), most of which was filmed during the Rolling Thunder tour. He also appeared in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” the 2019 Martin Scorsese film.Mr. Neuwirth was a producer of “Down From the Mountain” (2000), a documentary, directed in part by Mr. Pennebaker, about a concert featuring the musical artists heard in the Coen Brothers’ movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”“It’s all about the same to me,” he said, “whether it’s writing a song or making a painting or doing a film. It’s all just storytelling.”Mr. Neuwirth, who lived in Santa Monica, is survived by Ms. Batson.Mr. Neuwirth could be self-deprecating about his own musical efforts. He called his collaboration with Mr. Vitier, the Cuban pianist, “Cubilly music.” But his music was often serious. The Cale collaboration was a sort of song cycle that, as Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times when the two performed selections in concert in 1990, “added up to a shrug of the shoulders in the face of impending doom.”“Instead of breast-beating or simply wisecracking,” Mr. Pareles wrote of the work, “it found an emotional territory somewhere between fatalism and denial — still uneasy but not quite resigned.” More

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      Alexander Toradze, Idiosyncratic Pianist, Dies at 69

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      A defector to the U.S., he was admired for his prowess in the Russian repertory, but his individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire.”Alexander Toradze, a Georgian American pianist and Soviet defector whose idiosyncratic and bravura performances of Russian composers were either loved or hated, died on May 11 at his home in South Bend, Ind. He was 69.The cause was heart failure, his health having been deteriorating since 2019, his manager, Ettore F. Volontieri, said.Mr. Toradze was also stricken with heart failure, as it was later diagnosed, on April 23 during a performance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. Though he had to be helped onstage at the start because of weakness, he completed the concert and was hospitalized afterward, Mr. Volontieri said.Mr. Toradze specialized in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers. His concerts this spring were to include a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic, scheduled for May 14.Mr. Toradze, whom friends and colleagues called Lexo, won the silver medal at the 1977 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, though members of the jury were divided, with some finding his playing disturbingly percussive.The critic Peter G. Davis, however, was among his fans: He wrote in The New York Times two years later that “his playing had the best sort of éclat and brilliance in that it stemmed directly from the character of the music rather than from a desire to show off.”“His tone,” he added, “was glittering but never clattery; the poise and precision of his interpretation had elegance as well as tremendous visceral excitement.”In a 1984 review, Donal Henahan of The Times wrote of Mr. Toradze’s playing, “It is the distinctive Russian style of an older generation, still alive in this era of stamped-out international virtuosos.”Mr. Toradze defected to the United States in 1983, presenting himself at the American Embassy in Madrid for asylum during a tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. According to the critic and author Joseph Horowitz, a close friend and artistic adviser to Mr. Toradze, it was a dramatic defection that involved highway chases in Spain and an attempted kidnapping by the K.G.B. in a restaurant.Mr. Toradze in 2001. His idiosyncratic performances tended to divide critics, with some loving his style and others finding it disturbing.Chris Lee for The New York TimesThree months later, Mr. Toradze embarked on an American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During his career he performed with major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others.In 1991, he was appointed to a newly endowed professorship in piano at Indiana University South Bend, where he created the Toradze Piano Studio, inspired by the intense, all-encompassing training of Soviet music schools. His studio consisted of former and current students, who presented mostly Russian repertory in marathon concerts in the United States and Europe.His students also played soccer, and the Toradze Studio team won the university championship three years in a row. “Soccer is not very good for the hands,” Mr. Toradze told The Times in 2002, “but it’s great for the brain.”A gregarious host, he enjoyed giving late-night dinners and boisterous parties for his students, many of whom he recruited from Russia and Georgia. He retired from the university in 2017.While he was widely admired, Mr. Toradze’s individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in an appreciation published after Mr. Toradze’s death. “Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught.”The Times critic Bernard Holland, reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1988, wrote that Mr. Toradze’s “customary extravagance would have ill fit this music’s classical restraint, so his tactic was to seek the other extreme.” The results, he said, “alternated between the weird and the inaudible.”Mr. Toradze acknowledged such responses. “I always anticipate outraged attacks,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1992.Alexander Davidovich Toradze was born on May 30, 1952, in Tbilisi, Georgia, to the composer David Toradze and the actress Liana Asatiani. He attended the Special Music School for Gifted Children in Tbilisi and the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1978.While he was a student in Moscow, Mr. Toradze listened to illicit broadcasts of the Voice of America program “Jazz Hour.” To him, he said, jazz represented artistic freedom. When performing in Portland, Ore., during a Soviet-sponsored tour in 1978, he learned that Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were to perform twice the next day. Much to the irritation of his manager, he decided to skip a rehearsal in Miami to attend the concerts. Ms. Fitzgerald invited him onstage, where he told her that she was a “goddess for people in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Toradze’s small catalog of recordings includes a 1998 disc of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, and Shostakovich piano concertos, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.Mr. Toradze, a practicing Orthodox Christian, advised young artists to get in the habit of praying before performances. Speaking about Liszt’s variations on a theme of Bach, he told The Times in 1986: “Bach’s cantata describes worrying, complaining, doubting and crying. Many of these feelings were part of my life. But the piece moves steadily and heavily toward a fantastic final chorale in major, with the words, ‘What God does is well done.’ That is my credo.”His marriage to the pianist Susan Blake ended in divorce in 2002. He is survived by his sons, David and Alex; a sister, Nino Toradze; and his longtime partner, the pianist Siwon Kim.After defecting to the United States, Mr. Toradze lamented the imposition of strict union rules regarding rehearsal times that could prevent an orchestra from practicing to the end of a concerto, even if the musicians were just a few bars short. But he appreciated the high-quality instruments on offer.“In Russia, I would play many times on pianos with broken strings or broken keys,” he told the radio host Bruce Duffie in 2002.But, he added, “there are times when the piano is not well, or you are not well, but you go on anyway.” More