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      Meghan Stabile, Who Linked Jazz and Hip-Hop, Dies at 39

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      Shows that she produced on a shoestring sought to energize the jazz scene by connecting with younger audiences accustomed to D.J.s and turntables.Meghan Stabile, who saw jazz and hip-hop as genres that could cross-pollinate and who, hoping to bring jazz to younger audiences, started a shoestring business producing concerts that explored the intersection of the two, died on June 12 in Valrico, Fla. She was 39.Maureen Freeman, her grandmother, said the cause was suicide. She said that Ms. Stabile had recently relocated to Valrico hoping that might help in her struggles with depression.Ms. Stabile began producing shows while still a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She took to calling them Revive Da Live, a name that, at a time when turntablists were dominant, captured her interest in backing hip-hop artists with jazz musicians performing live.“It’s an organic hybrid,” she told The Boston Globe in 2012. “Jazz is in hip-hop’s DNA.”Once she relocated to New York in 2006, she continued to organize Revive Da Live events and formed the Revive Music Group, which produced shows, created an online forum called the Revivalist and released several albums in partnership with Blue Note Records, the noted jazz label.Ms. Stabile generally worked outside the jazz mainstream, booking shows in small clubs, but she gradually became something of a force in New York.“In the last year and a half,” The New York Times wrote in 2013, “she has emerged as a presence around the city — booking, promoting, cajoling, advising and herding young musicians, many of whom are still finding their way.”Don Was, now the president of Blue Note Records, told The Times then that he had first encountered Ms. Stabile two years earlier, when he joined the label as chief creative officer and went looking for the hot new things in jazz.“I started going online, four or five hours a night,” he said.“And invariably,” he continued, “every thread I was following led back to Meghan’s site. So night after night, she appeared to be at the center of the energy.”She was also producing shows in Boston and elsewhere. The goal, as she explained to The Globe, was to energize the jazz scene and connect it to audiences schooled on hip-hop. A Revive Music show at Berklee in 2012, for instance, was called “Hip Hop 1942” and featured ensembles playing jazz tunes, then showing how they had been sampled by hip-hop artists.“It’s important to honor the tradition of the music, and we still have shows that do that,” she told The Globe. “But we also have to honor the music of today and make it more relevant.”Blue Note posted a tribute to her on Twitter.“Beloved by the musicians she worked so hard for,” the post said, “she was a passionate advocate for jazz who built a vibrant scene around the music & gave a platform to so many deserving artists.”Ms. Stabile at the Village Underground in Greenwich Village in 2013. “It’s important to honor the tradition of the music,” she said. “But we also have to honor the music of today and make it more relevant.”Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesMeghan Erin Stabile was born on July 26, 1982, in Grand Prairie, Texas, to Gina Marie Skidds. Her father was not part of her upbringing, and she was raised largely by Ms. Freeman and an aunt in Dover, N.H. Her relationship with her mother, who died last year, was difficult, she told The Times in 2013, and that gave her a certain irascible quality.“I got kicked out of four schools — three high schools and a middle school,” she said. “For fighting. I went through a lot, and I made it through. It didn’t break me. So always having that strength has been able to pull me through any type of situation.”She entered Berklee as a singer and guitarist, but, Ms. Freeman said in a phone interview, she could not overcome stage fright and soon focused on the business of music. She also got a bartending job at Wally’s Cafe, a jazz club in Boston, and began absorbing the jazz scene.She started producing, her grandmother said, “with nothing except her brain and pencil,” adding that she especially liked to help up-and-coming musicians, even though she never had much money.“She did everything she did,” Ms. Freeman said, “but it was always a scramble.”As Ms. Stabile’s reputation grew, some of her shows were in good-sized venues. In 2013, for instance, she booked the 19-piece Revive Big Band into the Highland Ballroom in Manhattan and lined up the dancer Savion Glover to appear with it. But an event like that belied her staff-of-one operation.“The outside illusion is great,” she told The Times. “Everyone thinks we’re this huge business. But look — it’s me sitting right here.”In 2013 Ms. Stabile struck a deal to produce and curate records for Blue Note, resulting in “Revive Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1,” released in 2015.“The idea of a strain of modern jazz that’s conversant with hip-hop — as a matter of course, rather than calculation — holds sway over much of this music,” Nate Chinen wrote in reviewing that record in The Times.Ms. Stabile had reduced her producing activities in recent years, focusing on her own health. But in a 2017 interview with the website CQP, she said that she thought her work over the years had helped connect two disparate worlds.“When I first started promoting shows, I had to learn how to promote specifically to the jazz heads and specifically to the hip-hop heads,” she said. “I had to find ways to lure them in. If I called it a jazz show, then the hip-hop heads wouldn’t buy tickets. If I called it a hip-hop show, jazz heads wouldn’t buy tickets.“So I had to create a new narrative early on. Once we got them in the room, once they heard the music, there was just no denying how fresh it was.”In addition to her grandmother, Ms. Stabile is survived by a brother, Michael Skidds, and a sister, Caitlyn Chaloux.Ms. Freeman said that though Ms. Stabile had reduced her producing activities, she had a long-term goal inspired by her own difficulties.“She wanted to promote a wellness center for jazz musicians,” she said, “so when they didn’t have a gig and they were struggling, they could go to her center.” More

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      James Rado, Co-Creator of the Musical ‘Hair,’ Is Dead at 90

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      Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but rather New York stage regulars with growing résumés.They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni let their short hair grow long.A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.A moment from the original production of “Hair,” at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1967.DagmarWhat happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. The search yielded the Canadian-born Galt MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older than his colleagues and a straight arrow with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — a hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.“Hair” — an impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War — ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative.A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move the show, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.Mr. Rado, second from left, with, from left, the actor Paul Nicholas, Mr. Ragni, the actor Oliver Tobias and the director Tom O’Horgan in London shortly after “Hair” opened there in 1968.Getty“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large — though there were naysayers, who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable. It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)The score generated ubiquitous cover versions. In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”James Alexander Radomski was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Los Angeles to Alexander and Blanche (Bukowski) Radomski. His father was a sociologist who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Mr. Rado grew up in a Rochester suburb, Irondequoit, and then in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland, where he majored in speech and drama. A lover of Broadway musicals since childhood, he began writing songs in college and co-wrote two musicals that were produced on campus, “Interlude” and “Interlude II.”After serving two years in the Navy, he returned to pursue graduate theater studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, writing both music and lyrics for a revue there called “Cross Your Fingers.” After moving to New York, he wrote pop songs; recorded with his band, James Alexander and the Argyles; performed in summer stock; and did office work while studying method acting with Lee Strasberg.He landed his first Broadway job in 1963 in the ensemble of “Marathon ’33,” written by the actress June Havoc and produced by the Actors Studio. Following their initial encounter in 1964, he and Mr. Ragni were cast by Mike Nichols in his 1965 Chicago production of Ann Jellicoe’s comedy “The Knack.”In 1966, Mr. Rado appeared on Broadway in James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” originating the role of Richard Lionheart, the oldest son of Henry II of England. His mainstream theatrical focus, however, was being redirected to the downtown avant-garde by Mr. Ragni, who, through his involvement with the Open Theater and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., introduced Mr. Rado to the experimental aesthetic that became central to the experience of “Hair” onstage.“The truth is, we unlocked each other,” Mr. Rado wrote in a foreword to the book “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (2010), by Eric Grode. “He was my creative catalyst, I probably his. We were great friends. It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity, into writing, into creating this piece. We put the drama between us onstage.”Mr. Rado in 2017 at a Jazz at Lincoln Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Off Broadway opening of “Hair.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of “Hair,” Mr. Rado’s fellowship with Mr. Ragni fractured. “We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,” he recalled. Mr. Rado wrote the music, lyrics and book (with his brother, Ted) for a “Hair” sequel he called “The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow,” which ran Off Broadway in 1972, just as Mr. Ragni and Mr. MacDermot were suffering an ignominious Broadway flop with their post-“Hair” musical, “Dude.” Mr. Rado then reunited with Mr. Ragni to write “Sun (Audio Movie),” an environmental musical, with the composer Steve Margoshes, and “Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom,” also with Mr. Margoshes.Mr. Ragni died in 1991. Mr. MacDermot died in 2018.In 2008, Mr. Rado confirmed in an interview with The Advocate what had long been an open secret among his “Hair” castmates and collaborators: that he and Mr. Ragni had been lovers.“It was a deep, lifelong friendship and a love of my life,” Mr. Rado stated simply. “Looking back,” he later elaborated about “Hair,” “what was really underlying the whole thing was the new way men were relating to each other. They were very openly embracing each other as brothers. It wasn’t gay; it wasn’t repressed… We suddenly realized this was a musical about love in the larger sense.”Mr. Rado, whose brother is his only immediate survivor, never married and did not identify as gay, but rather as “omnisexual.” Asked before the 2009 “Hair” revival opened if the show was based on his relationship with Mr. Ragni, Mr. Rado answered yes.“We were in a love mode,” he said, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. ‘Hair’ was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      Drake Hits the Nightclub

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn the past, Drake has been focused on rewiring hip-hop with melody. But his seventh solo studio album, “Honestly, Nevermind” — which arrived as a surprise, with an elaborate nine-and-a-half-minute video for the track “Falling Back” — is an unanticipated pivot toward the dance floor. Drake has long included moments like this on his albums, but they rarely shaped the narrative. But now, for the first time, production that is hard-knocking and up-tempo is reshaping his sound.Is this just a logical turn for a pop star who has typically made pop from different component parts? Is it a reaction to the growth of drill music, the prevailing gritty hip-hop subculture? Or is it an acceptance of the exuberant freedoms of midcareer middle age?On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s evolution and production choices, the ways in which he toys with the expectations of his listeners and the dance music subcultures he’s experimenting with.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLawrence Burney, arts and culture editor at The Baltimore Banner and the founder of True LaurelsConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Muna’s Fresh Start

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      The indie-pop band was dropped by its major label early in the pandemic, then scored a TikTok hit with “Silk Chiffon,” featuring a verse from its new label boss: Phoebe Bridgers.The members of Muna kept calling themselves “impenetrable.” They were sorry about this, they insisted, as each lurched into the frame of a video call from a backyard in Los Angeles, ping-ponging inside jokes and rearranging themselves into different configurations.The indie-pop trio of Katie Gavin, 29, Naomi McPherson, 29, and Josette Maskin, 28, operate on a frenetic frequency and have easy access to their emotions. By the end of the call to discuss their new album, out Friday, all three had teared up and begged themselves out loud to stop crying. The constant churn of promotion was adding up: “That’s why we’re chaos vibes,” McPherson said, dangling a whorl of curly hair over the screen.Any album release brings some chaos. For Muna, though, sending its third, self-titled album into the world means starting all over again. The group played at Lollapalooza and appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s show before its debut album, “About U,” came out in 2017, then opened for Harry Styles and followed up with a 2019 LP called “Saves the World.” But its label, RCA, dropped the band months into the pandemic, citing cost-cutting necessities.Muna was devastated. Then it went back to work. A friend of a friend, someone the members knew through what Gavin called “the lesbian Los Angeles support group,” rented them a studio in her basement for next to nothing, and the band started showing up every day. The songs it worked on there would become its most pop-oriented and propulsive yet. One of them became something the band had never had before: a viral hit.“Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” Gavin lilts on “Silk Chiffon,” which features Phoebe Bridgers and has caromed across TikTok, soundtracking cookie dough tutorials, hangovers and odes to crushes. The rest of “Muna” is filled with fizzy songs about twirling through gay bars and rollerblading through the night that barrel over slick, sputtering synths. Buoyed by the success of “Silk Chiffon,” the band is now on the verge of breaking out of its cult following and bringing its anthems about queer joy to a wider audience. But joy isn’t straightforward for Muna, either in its music or in its members’ lives.“Obviously, everything is going really well,” McPherson, who is nonbinary, said, prodding a toothpick between their teeth. “Which is when the demon wants to punish you.”Muna got its start at the University of Southern California, where McPherson spied Gavin biking through campus and murmured to their friend, “That girl is cool.” The feeling was mutual; they bonded, and Gavin introduced McPherson to Maskin at a party. Almost immediately, they started making music, workshopping guitar chords between classes. Gavin sings lead vocals, plays guitar and helps produce; Maskin (guitar) and McPherson (guitar and keys) work on production.Nearly a decade later, one part of their songwriting process is the same: Muna knows when to stop. The band likes to put in what McPherson calls “princess work”; they tinker with songs for a few hours each day, and quit just when a track starts to click into place. “You try to retain the magic,” Maskin said.The group spends the rest of its time hanging out — watching YouTube, doing bits. The easy intimacy, the way they finish each other’s sentences or can communicate with an eyebrow raise, is central to their process. It also takes work. Gavin and McPherson dated for years, and when they broke up, Maskin threatened to quit the band if they didn’t go to therapy. (The trio has also gone to what they call “band therapy.”)“The connective tissue is self-definition and agency and identity and interrogating those things,” McPherson said of the new album. “And also knowing that nothing is fixed.”Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesRecording can be stressful. “I would record all my vocals alone in a closet if I could,” Gavin said, after the band relayed that it had to redo the song “Solid” five or six times because she kept cooing the lyric, “My baby’s so solid,” in a way that sounded like, “My baby’s a salad.” But Muna has learned to hype one another up and not overwork the music.“At some point, you’re going to have song dysmorphia where you’re like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to sound good, you guys,’” McPherson said.“Muna” is a shift for the band, a step further into glitzy, shimmering pop. “At RCA, we were like, ‘We’re staying true to ourselves, we’re going to make interesting, indie-pop music, we’re not here to make hits,’” McPherson said. “And then the moment we leave, we’re at an indie label and we’re like, ‘Here’s our poppiest song ever.’”The small label is Saddest Factory Records, which is run by Bridgers, the indie-rock breakout star. The band refers to her as “Papa,” and she sings a giddy verse about straggling stoned through the aisles of CVS on “Silk Chiffon.”Another indie powerhouse, Mitski, left fingerprints on the album, too. She had first met the band at a festival. “We just started chatting, which is rare for me, because I’m very introverted and don’t just ‘start chatting’ with people,” Mitski wrote in an email. “It’s a testament to how friendly and kind they are.”Mitski came to McPherson and Maskin’s apartment in Highland Park and made them tea while they listened to disco. (Their downstairs neighbor kept texting them to be quiet.) “You have no idea/the things I think about you when you aren’t here,” Gavin sings on “No Idea,” the gradually building song that emerged from that session. “Mitski is the sexiest songwriter that I know,” she said.Like most songs on the record, “No Idea” toys with the gap between perception and projection, the clarity and confinement that come with claiming a label. “She is not a mirror in which you reflect,” Gavin coos over a thrash of guitar on “Solid.” On the slower, Shania Twain-indebted “Kind of Girl,” she gets more explicit: “I’m a girl who’s learning everything I say isn’t definitive,” Gavin sings.The album oscillates between dance-floor anthems and lyrics about meditation, coruscating synths and twinges of twang. “The album is kind of disparate sonically, disparate in terms of what the songs are saying, but the connective tissue is self-definition and agency and identity and interrogating those things,” McPherson said. “And also knowing that nothing is fixed.”“We are who we are,” Gavin said, “but it’s the compassion we have for ourselves, the awareness we have.”Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesWhile the band’s circumstances have changed, Gavin isn’t letting go of its past. “I don’t want this era to be, ‘Oh, we used to be one way, and now we’re another way, and everything’s great now,’” she said. “We are who we are, but it’s the compassion we have for ourselves, the awareness we have.” Earlier this month, the trio returned to “The Tonight Show,” and Gavin felt some of the panic she had experienced when the band first played there in 2016. The band members spent the cab ride to the hotel after the taping processing their performance. They talked about the significance of doing the show, how Gavin was feeling, what they hoped the album could do for them, if it could help them keep making music for as long as possible “and not have as much existential stress as we have now,” McPherson said.The driver eventually chimed in. “He said, ‘In my 20 years of driving, I’ve never heard people be so kind to each other,’” Gavin recalled. She and McPherson were wedged onto a bed in their hotel, beaming at a laptop screen; Maskin was in her room down the hall, packing and peeling a banana. “It just felt like the cheesy thing where — it’s a feat to do these big moments, but I do think that, like, the bigger thing —.” She paused. “I’m such a cheese ball.”“Do it!” McPherson shouted.Gavin rolled her eyes. “I do think that the bigger feat is having these friendships with each other.”All three went quiet for a second. Then they started giggling, faintly and then furiously. More

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      The Netrebko Question

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      MONTE CARLO — Anna Netrebko, the superstar Russian soprano, stood on the steps of the ornate Casino de Monte-Carlo, taking photos with friends and watching Aston Martins and Ferraris zoom through the night.“It feels quiet and peaceful here,” she said in a brief interview outside the casino shortly before midnight. “And everybody loves each other, which is very rare.”It was late April, and Netrebko had just finished a performance of Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” at Opéra de Monte-Carlo. It was not how she had planned to spend the evening: She was supposed to be nearly 4,000 miles away, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, headlining in another Puccini opera, “Turandot.”After Russia invaded Ukraine, Netrebko announced that she opposed the war but declined to criticize President Vladimir V. Putin, whom she has long supported. Almost overnight she was transformed from one of classical music’s most popular and bankable stars into something of a pariah. Appearances at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Zurich Opera and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, were called off. The Met Opera, where she has been the reigning prima donna for years, canceled her contracts for two seasons and warned that she might never return.The Monte Carlo engagement, her first in more than two months, was the start of an effort to rebuild her imperiled career. It was perhaps an unusual setting to stage a comeback: Its 517-seat jewel box of an opera house is attached to the famous casino, with slot machines near the lobby. Netrebko, whose seasons are usually booked years in advance, was invited at the last minute, when a singer contracted the coronavirus and efforts to bring in two other replacements were unsuccessful.But Netrebko was warmly received, winning ovations and shouts of “Brava!” at her final performance. (That same night in New York, Liudmyla Monastyrska, the Ukrainian soprano who replaced her at the Met, was cheered when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag for her curtain calls.)After the performance, as Netrebko walked back to the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo with her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, who had starred with her in “Manon Lescaut,” she said she felt a reprieve from the scrutiny of critics in the United States and Europe, as well as in Russia, where she had recently come under fire for speaking out against the war.“They shoot you from both sides,” she said, forming her hand into the shape of a gun.Anna Netrebko and her husband, Yusif Eyvazov, performing “Manon Lescaut” in Monte Carlo, part of an effort to rebuild her career.Alain Hanel – OMCClassical music’s answer to BeyoncéAfter the invasion of Ukraine, cultural institutions in the United States and Europe denounced Moscow. And they were confronted with difficult decisions about how to deal with Russian artists.Many cut ties with close associates of Putin — especially the conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime friend and prominent supporter of the Russian president. Gergiev, who leads the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he nurtured Netrebko’s career, has conducted concerts over the years that were freighted with political meaning, including one in a breakaway region of Georgia and another in Palmyra, after it was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces.Other Western institutions, though, were criticized for overreach after they canceled performances by Russian artists who were not closely identified with politics, and even with some who had spoken out against the invasion.Now many cultural organizations face an uncomfortable question: What to do about Netrebko?Her ties to Putin are not as deep as Gergiev’s, but they are substantial, according to a New York Times review of news reports in Russian and English and public records.Her name appeared on a list endorsing Putin’s election in 2012, and she has spoken glowingly of him over the years, describing him as “a very attractive man” and praising his “strong, male energy.” In 2017, in the run-up to Putin’s re-election, she told a Russian state news agency that it was “impossible to think of a better president for Russia.” She has also occasionally lent support to his policies; she once circulated a statement by Putin on Instagram alongside flexed biceps emojis. In 2014, she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists, and was photographed holding a separatist flag.Putin, in turn, has showered Netrebko with praise and awards over the years. She was invited to sing at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and other state celebrations. Last September, on her 50th birthday, he sent a telegram calling her the pride of Russia, and describing her as an “open, charming and friendly person, with an uplifting personality and a clear-cut civic stance.” At a concert celebrating her birthday at the State Kremlin Palace, the president’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, read Putin’s message from the stage.Before the invasion, Netrebko was at the height of her career. With a larger-than-life personality and a taste for extravagance, she built a loyal fan base and was sometimes called classical music’s answer to Beyoncé.Now she hopes to persuade the cultural world to look beyond her ties to Putin. She has hired a crisis communications firm, lobbied opera houses and concert halls for engagements and filed a labor grievance against the Met.Netrebko with Putin when he awarded her the title of People’s Artist of Russia in 2008 at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated PressPeter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said it would be “immoral” to engage her during the war. The Met has worked to rally support for Ukraine, hosting a benefit concert and helping form an orchestra of Ukrainians, to be led by Gelb’s wife, the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson. The company recently cut ties with another Russian singer, Hibla Gerzmava, who had also spoken in support of Putin.“She is inextricably associated with Putin,” Gelb said of Netrebko. “She has ideologically and in action demonstrated that over a period of years. I don’t see any way that we could possibly do a back flip.”Netrebko has declined repeated requests for an interview from The New York Times over the past several months.Elsewhere, Netrebko’s comeback is gaining momentum. Several European institutions that had sought distance from her have recently announced plans to engage her, some as soon as next year. In late May, she sang recitals before enthusiastic crowds in Paris and Milan, where her concert at Teatro alla Scala sold out. Italian news outlets declared it a “triumph,” writing, “Anna Netrebko retakes La Scala: flowers and applause after her break for the war.”In other theaters, she has faced boycotts, protests and persistent questions about her ties to Putin.At a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris last month, about 50 Ukrainian activists staged a die-in outside the theater. They played a soundtrack that mixed the music of Tchaikovsky with gunshots and sirens meant to evoke the war. A woman dressed as Netrebko, with fake bloodstains on her dress, danced as the protesters lie still on the ground.‘I’m still a Russian citizen’Netrebko was in Moscow with her husband, her frequent artistic collaborator, when the invasion began, on Feb. 24. The night before, the two had performed in Barvikha, a town of villas and luxury boutiques near Moscow, singing works by Verdi and Puccini before an audience of wealthy Russians. Tickets for the concert, sponsored by the Swiss jeweler Chopard, for which Netrebko serves as a brand ambassador, sold for as much as $2,000 apiece.The trouble for Netrebko started almost immediately. When she and her husband arrived for a concert in Denmark scheduled for the day after the invasion, she was forced to cancel amid an outcry from local politicians.In the days that followed she came under pressure to forcefully denounce the invasion. A diva for the digital age, with more than 700,000 followers on Instagram, she preferred to speak directly to her fans in English and Russian on social media.On Feb. 26, she posted a statement opposing the war. But she also seemed to resent the scrutiny, adding, “Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.” In another post, alongside heart and praying hands emojis, she shared a text that used an expletive to refer to her Western critics, saying they were “as evil as blind aggressors.”As her cancellations mounted, her behavior grew more unpredictable. In early March she sent a photo on WhatsApp to a senior executive at Deutsche Grammophon, her longtime label, who had been trying to reach her, according to a person briefed on the photo, who was granted anonymity to discuss private interactions. The photo showed what appeared to be Netrebko’s hand holding a bottle of tequila up to a television with Putin on the screen, the person said. Her decision to send the photo frustrated friends and advisers, who saw it as unprofessional and worried it could further damage her career, the person said. Netrebko’s representatives declined to comment on the photo.Netrebko has a history of courting controversy. When the Met tried to stop her from using makeup to darken her skin during a production of “Aida” in 2018, concerned that the practice recalled blackface, she went to a tanning salon instead. The next year, appearing with dark makeup in a production of “Aida” at the Mariinsky, she wrote on Instagram, “Black Face and Black Body for Ethiopian princess, for Verdi greatest opera! YES!”As the war intensified, the Met’s general manager, Gelb, called Netrebko’s representatives and asked her to denounce Putin. Netrebko demurred, and during their last conversation, Netrebko told Gelb she had to stand with her country, Gelb said. Gelb, who had made Netrebko a cornerstone of his efforts to rejuvenate the company, canceled her contracts and said she might never return to the Met.Netrebko, a citizen of Russia and Austria who lives in Vienna, has since made it clear that she would not criticize Putin. “No one in Russia can,” she said in an interview with Die Zeit, a German newspaper, published this month. “Putin is still the president of Russia. I’m still a Russian citizen, so you can’t do something like that. Do you understand? So I declined to make such a statement.”“Anna Netrebko retakes La Scala,” one Italian news outlet wrote after Netrebko performed a sold-out recital there in May.Brescia and Amisano, via Teatro alla Scala‘I am guilty of nothing!’Netrebko and Putin have crossed paths for decades, sharing a friendship with Gergiev, whom Netrebko has called her “godfather in music.” It was at the Mariinsky, run by Gergiev, that Netrebko made her career, rising from a promising vocal student who washed the theater’s floors as a part-time job to become one of the company’s biggest stars.From his perch in the royal box at the Mariinsky, Putin often saw Netrebko perform, going back to at least 2000, when she was 28 and starred as Natasha Rostova in Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. Netrebko was the “undisputed star of the performance,” the newspaper wrote.Netrebko became one of Russia’s most famous cultural ambassadors, and in 2008 Putin awarded her the title of People’s Artist, the country’s highest honor for performers, at a ceremony in St. Petersburg that also featured Gergiev.Netrebko, in turn, seemed to embrace Putin’s brand of nationalism. She has been photographed wearing the black-and-orange St. George ribbon, a symbol of the Russian military that has become popular among Putin supporters, and a T-shirt celebrating a victory in World War II.“I am always unambiguously for Russia and I perceive attacks on my country extremely negatively,” she said in a 2009 interview with a Russian state-owned newspaper, in which she denounced foreign news coverage of the war in Georgia.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      U.S. Orchestras Playing More Works by Women and Minorities, Report Says

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      The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

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      Review: ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ Saving Its Love (and Pain) for You

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      A revival of the Fats Waller musical revue emphasizes the blues in its blueprints.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I don’t know whether the creators of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” were sending a deliberate message of ambivalence by front-loading the 1978 revue, after its delightful title number, with a song called “Lookin’ Good but Feelin’ Bad.”In any case, the team behind the rousing Barrington Stage Company revival, playing through July 9 in this becalmed Berkshires city, sure are. The up-tempo zing of that song’s melody, by Thomas Waller, better known as Fats, never completely undoes the sting of a lyric, by Lester A. Santly, that speaks of “weary days and lonely nights” spent “grievin’ over you.”That’s because the double message in this “Fats Waller Musical Show,” as the subtitle puts it, is more than intentional: It’s emblematic. Leaving intact the original plotless structure — which Richard Maltby Jr. hammered together from 30 of the hundreds of songs Waller wrote or recorded — the director and choreographer Jeffrey L. Page has subtly shaped the show to push the “grievin’” further past romance and into the sphere of Black identity.That’s true even in the breezy first act, as five skilled performers sail through insanely catchy and often risqué songs like “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” (which Waller recorded) and “Honeysuckle Rose” (which he wrote with Andy Razaf). These numbers are set in Harlem between the world wars, specifically at the Savoy Ballroom, as Black artists perform for Black audiences.And though it’s hard to have deep thoughts while watching people jitterbug — or while listening to “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” the exuberant first act finale — you keep noticing phrases and attitudes that have been slightly retuned. If Maltby’s brilliant original production favored a perfect coat of Broadway gloss, the Barrington version, which he approved, looks for cracks in the show’s composure.Spangled, feathered and zooted: Jarvis B. Manning Jr., from left, Allison Blackwell, Anastacia McClesky, Maiesha McQueen and Arnold Harper II in Oana Botez’s playful costumes.Daniel RaderSometimes, it’s a matter of design. Oana Botez’s exaggerated costumes — the three women profusely spangled and feathered and the two men wearing the zootiest zoot suits ever — suggest that even the playfulness of self-advertisement amounts to a form of disguise. Hidden in the proscenium of Raul Abrego’s black-and-gold Art Deco set are images of African masks.But in the second act, the meaning of the masking changes, as the uptown artists grow more popular among the downtown, mostly white crowds cartooned in “Lounging at the Waldorf.” (“They like jazz but in small doses,” goes a Maltby lyric for a Waller instrumental. “Bop and you could cause thrombosis.”) Soon the trade-off of authenticity for popularity becomes more disfiguring, as songs like “Your Feet’s Too Big,” “Find Out What They Like,” “The Viper’s Drag” and the devastating “Mean to Me” offer a performative version of Blackness that exaggerates stereotypes of belligerence, concupiscence, addiction and abandonment.Eventually, after an egregious bit of minstrelsy called “Fat and Greasy,” when the high spirits become impossible to maintain, the show takes a silent, sour pause. This puts “Black and Blue,” the climactic number, in a new context, or perhaps a clearer version of the original one. Its lover’s complaint of a lyric — “Browns and yellers, all have fellers/Gentlemen prefer them light” — moves outward to a consideration of injustice, in which the value of Black skin (“my only sin”) is set by white beholders.You wouldn’t think a show that trades in virtuosic swing could drop so deep and keep its balance, but then an ambivalence about appropriation is clearly part of Waller’s blueprint. (The tricky piano runs aren’t running from nothing.) Yet Page never goes so far as to strip the songs of their ticklish pleasures while stripping them of their varnish. More varnish might actually help; opening after just three days of previews, the production needs more shine. The sound is still muddy and the lighting still awkward. The performers, at first, are a bit of both, acting the lyrics too insistently, with a gesture for every word.Soon, though, they settle down, each delivering a specialty number that recalls (and then lets you put aside) the stellar original cast. Maiesha McQueen, singing Nell Carter’s songs, delivers a heartbreaking “Mean to Me”; Jarvis B. Manning Jr., taking on André De Shields’s track, is especially compelling in “The Viper’s Drag,” a song about smoking weed in which his body seems to become smoke itself. The others — Allison Blackwell, Arnold Harper II and Anastacia McClesky — all have great moments; the seven-person band, led by Kwinton Gray, has nothing but.Back in 1978, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” celebrated songs and performers from an era — the 1920s and ’30s — within many people’s living memory. Now, more than 40 years later, it’s important to replenish the context that time has drained. Even a show so universally admired benefits from thoughtful reconsideration. I don’t mean updating but something more like what happens in this production when we hear Luther Henderson’s stunning arrangement of “Black and Blue,” largely unchanged. It’s then that a deco drop flies up to reveal the back wall of the theater, as if what Waller swung and sang the blues about were happening now. It is.Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical ShowThrough July 9 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Black Country, New Road, a Breakout Band, Starts Over (Again)

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      The group lost its lead singer just as it was gaining widespread acclaim. Its members have come up with an unusual solution.MANCHESTER, England — Last month, the six members of Black Country, New Road were joking around in a cramped rehearsal room about to try something new: everyone singing lead vocals.First, Tyler Hyde, the group’s bassist, sat forward and sang — her voice jumping between a smooth pop cry and a raucous shout. Next May Kershaw, usually on piano, took over, her voice gentle and brittle like a folk singer’s. Then Lewis Evans, the saxophonist, crooned two songs.“Dope as hell,” Charlie Wayne, the band’s drummer, said as Evans finished. Evans didn’t seem too sure. “I was a bit too slow!” he said, sounding frustrated.Just six months ago, Black Country, New Road, one of Britain’s rising rock acts, was a very different proposition. Back then, lead vocals were the domain of just one frontman: Isaac Wood, an intense and sometimes anxious-sounding singer, whose lovelorn lyrics helped Black Country, New Road win fan and critical devotion. The group’s debut album, “For the First Time,” was nominated last year for a Mercury Prize, Britain’s most important music award. Its second, “Ants From Up There,” was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick.But just before New Year’s Eve, Wood sent his bandmates a Facebook message. He couldn’t be in the public eye anymore, he said. The stress of pouring his heart out onstage was too much. He was leaving.Wayne said that when that message arrived, the band’s first thought was “the safety of our friend.” But once that was assured — Wood is in a much better place now, Evans said, happily working in a cake shop — the remaining members had to decide what to do next.Several of the bandmates gathered to discuss that moment in a sunny yard after the rehearsal last month. Splitting up was never an option, Kershaw said, since “playing together is so important to us.”The bandmates seemed to disagree on how hard restarting had been, though. When Evans said that beginning again after Wood’s departure “didn’t feel like a big deal,” Hyde and Kershaw gave each other confused looks, and laughed nervously. But his departure did make everyone appreciate more fully just how much pressure a band’s lead singer can be under. So they found a solution: share the load.A crowd gathers for Black Country, New Road’s first Manchester gig with its new lineup.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe bassist Hyde’s vocals fall between a smooth pop cry and a raucous shout.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesWhen Evans, center, opened a song with a jaunty saxophone melody, he was greeted by whoops from the audience. Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAt Wood’s urging, they kept the band name but decided to stop playing the tracks he had sung (Wood did not respond to requests for comment for this story). This meant that, before the rehearsal, the musicians had spent five intense, fun, but occasionally stressful, months writing nine songs to fulfill European festival dates this summer. Without the income from those appearances, Evans said, they would have had to get jobs, so they would have hardly been able to play together at all.The growing financial and emotional pressures on musicians have long been the focus of media attention in Britain. In 2017, Help Musicians, a nonprofit, set up a 24-hour help line to offer support for those with mental health issues or financial anxieties. Such worries only grew when the pandemic shut live venues, while the cost of living crisis has caused further concerns.Wood’s departure illustrated those pressures, said John Doran, a music journalist who has long championed Black Country, New Road. Being in a successful indie band could once lead to a good lifestyle. Now, Doran said in a telephone interview, acts exhaust themselves “to maybe one day have a mortgage and not need a side job.” It’s “no wonder musicians are under so much stress,” Doran added. “I do not envy them that at all.”This is, in fact, the second time the members of Black Country, New Road — all still in their early 20s — have had to restart.Four years ago, almost all of them were playing in another act, called Nervous Conditions, which was on the verge of breaking through in Britain’s competitive indie music scene. With only a couple of tracks online, taste-making websites declared the group one of the country’s “most exciting propositions,” and representatives from record labels flocked to its shows. But then its frontman, Connor Browne, facing anonymous accusations of sexual assault, issued a statement apologizing for the hurt caused, and the group disbanded.Hyde said that the bandmates had learned lessons from that moment. After the split, “the whole ethos became, ‘We’re doing this for us and because we want to,’” she said. Since then, the band has rewritten songs and changed lyrics whenever they’ve become bored of them, she added.When asked how they managed to keep reinventing themselves, the musicians said that having so many band members with different interests helped. But for the group’s fans, other factors were more important. Geordie Greep of black midi, a London-based band that is touring the United States with Black Country, New Road in September, said in a telephone interview that the group’s members were virtuosic musicians. That gave them the ingenuity to keep changing their style, he said.The members of Black Country, New Road — most of whom have known each other since they were in high school — also clearly had a strong communal bond, Greep added. “These guys genuinely go out of their way to just hang out as friends,” he said, sounding a little bemused. Most bands, including his own, don’t do that, he noted.Splitting up was never an option, said Kershaw, second from left, since “playing together is so important to us.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesEven for such a close group of musicians, the process of stepping up to lead vocals has not always been easy. Evans said that he “got shakes” the first time he sang a track he’d written to his bandmates. Kershaw said that she had found it “nerve-racking,” and told everyone “not to worry” if they thought her tracks weren’t “the right vibe.” She squirmed on her seat as she recalled the memory.But with shows looming, the band members had to overcome their nerves again to sing in front of paying audiences. A few days later, the band walked onstage at the Pink Room, a music venue in Manchester, northern England, filled with 250 people (the group canceled a sold-out 1,800-capacity show in the city shortly after Wood left).If Evans was still nervous, he did not need to be. As soon as he started playing a jaunty saxophone melody to open the track “Up Song,” he was greeted by whoops from the audience. When the band got to the raucous chorus, the crowd started jumping up and down and chanting along, as if they’d heard the song hundreds of times. “Look at what we did together,” the band sang in unison, “BC, NR/Friends forever.”A few tracks later, even the bar staff fell silent as Kershaw sang “Turbines/Pigs,” an eight-minute song in which she plays a gentle piano melody while singing, “Don’t waste your pearls on me/I’m only a pig.”After 45 minutes, the band walked offstage with a few polite waves goodbye. Some fans shouted for more, until they realized that Black Country, New Road couldn’t come back for an encore even if they wanted to. The new incarnation had played all the songs it had. More