Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Sid Mark, Disc Jockey Devoted to Sinatra for Six Decades, Dies at 88

      by

      He hosted four radio shows that focused on the singer, who at one concert singled him out in the audience and said, “I love him.”Sid Mark, a longtime disc jockey in Philadelphia who made Frank Sinatra’s songs the center of his musical universe for more than six decades, died on April 18 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 88.His daughter, Stacey Mark, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not cite the cause.Mr. Mark brought a warm, conversational style to his broadcasts. Between selections from his trove of vinyl albums and CDs, he offered bits of his aficionado’s knowledge, told stories about hanging out with Sinatra and played snippets of interviews with him.He hosted three shows on various Philadelphia radio stations: “Friday With Frank,” “Sunday With Sinatra” and the syndicated “The Sounds of Sinatra,” which has run for 43 years and at its height was heard on 100 stations. He also hosted a fourth, “Saturday With Sinatra,” on stations in New York.In 1966, Sinatra’s office invited Mr. Mark to Las Vegas to see him perform as a reward for helping to stoke sales in Philadelphia of the singer’s newly released live album, “Sinatra at the Sands,” by playing it nonstop for a week.While there, he dined with Sinatra and a group of other stars, including Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. Afterward, Mr. Mark recalled, Sinatra told him, “I’ll see you at the show,” but Mr. Mark said that he and his wife, Loretta, did not have tickets.“He thought that was pretty funny, as did everyone at the table,” Mr. Mark told Vice.com in 2009, “and he gave me a little pinch on the cheek and said, ‘No, you’re sitting at our table.’ I walked in with all these celebrities and everyone knew who everyone was, but they had no idea who we were. Like ‘Who’s that with the pope?’”It was the start of a friendship that lasted until Sinatra’s death in 1998. Mr. Mark attended many of Sinatra’s performances and would sometimes visit him at his suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan. At times, during a concert, Sinatra would single him out from the audience.“I love him, and I say that publicly, I love him,” Sinatra said in 1991 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. “He’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life.”Mr. Mark in a recent photo hosting “Sunday With Sinatra,” which was on the air for more than 40 years.Family photoSidney Mark Fliegelman was born on May 30, 1933, in Camden, N.J. His father, Aaron, and his mother, Sylvia (Pfeffer) Fliegelman, owned a variety store in Camden. The family lived above the store, where Sid got his first taste of Sinatra’s music by listening to his sister Norma’s records. He hoped to one day get a job in radio.He entered the Army in 1953 and served at Camp Polk (now Fort Polk) in Louisiana. His admiration for Sinatra’s music swelled when he listened to his records on the radio at night in the barracks. “Somehow his voice got to me and I realized he knew exactly what he was singing about,” he told Vice. “If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about.”Mr. Mark stopped using his surname early in his career but never changed it legally.After his discharge in 1955, Mr. Mark got a job at the Red Hill Inn, a jazz club in Pennsauken, N.J., as a talent coordinator. His responsibilities included driving artists like Count Basie and Duke Ellington to and from their hotels. They would often talk about Sinatra, further stoking Mr. Mark’s interest in his music. More important, he was hired around that time as a disc jockey at WHAT-AM, a jazz station in Philadelphia. He hosted a one-hour show called “Sounds in the Night.”One night in 1955, when the station’s overnight D.J. did not show up, Mr. Mark was asked to fill in.“It was a show called ‘Rock and Roll Kingdom,’ and I wasn’t going to do that,” he told The New Yorker in 2021. He asked his audience what they wanted to hear, and one fan suggested playing an hour of Sinatra’s music. “The all-night guy got fired for not coming in, and they kept me on.” Several months later, in 1956, the show formally began its run as “Friday With Frank.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Mark’s popularity in Philadelphia was growing. He was hosting “Friday With Frank” and a daily six-hour jazz show, “Mark of Jazz,” which would run for nearly two decades, on WHAT. He also had a weekly jazz program on local public television.Mr. Mark hosted “Friday With Frank” for 54 years, “Saturday With Sinatra” for about 17 and “Sunday With Sinatra” for more than 40. “The Sounds of Sinatra” will remain on the air and present archival shows, said his son Brian Mark, the executive producer.In addition to his daughter and his son Brian, Mr. Mark is survived by his wife, Judy (Avery) Mark; two other sons, Eric and Andy Fliegelman; and two grandchildren. His marriage to Loretta Katz ended in divorce.The playlists of Mr. Mark’s Sinatra shows did not consist entirely of solo recordings by Sinatra. He also played duets Sinatra recorded with singers like Liza Minnelli, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as records by Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Davis.There have been other Sinatra devotees on the radio over the years. William B. Williams emphasized Sinatra’s music on his “Make Believe Ballroom” on WNEW-AM in New York (and gave him his nickname Chairman of the Board). Jonathan Schwartz was known for his loyalty to Sinatra on several New York stations. But with four Sinatra shows, Mr. Mark was probably singular in his commitment.“D.J.s can often be disappointing in person, which was not the case with Sid,” James Kaplan, the author of a two-volume biography of Sinatra — “Frank: The Voice” (2010) and “Sinatra: The Chairman” (2015) — said in a phone interview. “He was physically impressive, a tall, striking-looking guy who had a real warmth. He didn’t have a phony atom in his body, and he had a true love of Sinatra and everything about Sinatra. His enthusiasm was real.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Dispatch Has Rereleased ‘The General’ in Russian to Support Ukraine

      by

      The band members Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan said they hope that Russian soldiers will hear the antiwar song and discontinue their invasion.The roots rock band Dispatch on Tuesday rereleased its popular antiwar anthem, “The General,” after recording it in Russian in hopes, the band said, that Russian soldiers might hear the song and its message and “question their role” in the Ukrainian invasion.The song, originally released in 1998, tells the story of a “decorated general with a heart of gold” who has a dream about the opposing soldiers (and their affected mothers) on the eve of battle and wakes up to tell his men about a change of heart.“He said, ‘I have seen the others, and I have discovered that this fight is not worth fighting,’” the band sings in the chorus. “‘And I’ve seen their mothers, and I will no other to follow me where I’m going.’”“‘So take your shower, shine your shoes, you got no time to lose; you are young and you must be living,’” the original chorus continues. “‘Go now, you are forgiven.’”Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan, two of the founding members of the band, said in a statement that they realized how relevant the lyrics were to the war in Ukraine. Stokes then recorded the whole song in Russian, working with Olga Berg, who acted as a translator and language coach.“I would say, ‘There’s too many syllables in this line; I just can’t fit it in,’” Stokes said in a video interview. “And in other places, I’d say, ‘I need more syllables for it to work.’ It was a lot of jigsaw puzzling.”The duo also tweaked much of the wording, as literary translations are rarely direct. “I’ve seen their mothers,” in English, for example, became “I’ve seen the eyes of their mothers.” In the second line, the “stories” that the general told were replaced with a Russian expression that roughly translates to “wealth of stories.”Berg, who was born in Zaporizhzhia in Southeastern Ukraine, is working with several nonprofit organizations to support Ukraine, including the Polish Institute for Emergency Medicine.“This song, it’s an effort toward unity, toward humanity,” Berg said in the same interview. “We all speak the same language, we all have mothers, we all have children, and we want them to stay alive.”All proceeds from streaming the song will go toward the Leleka Foundation, which provides first aid kits for fighters and emergency medical responders in Ukraine. Founded in 2014 after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, the foundation says it has now raised almost $2 million since the war began in February.Dispatch, formed in 1996, has crafted eight studio albums and five live albums. On hiatus since 2002, the band reunited in 2011 for a national tour. This summer, Dispatch will tour North America with the rock band O.A.R.The idea for the Russian version came from social media comments, including one on a Ukrainian flag graphic that Dispatch posted to the band’s Instagram account.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2022-23 Season

      by

      The presenter is planning a return to full-scale programming for its 2022-23 season. Our critics and writers chose 15 highlights.After scaling back its current season as it grappled with disruptions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Carnegie Hall announced on Tuesday that it would return to full programming next season with a slate of more than 150 concerts.The 2022-23 season, which is scheduled to run from September to June, will feature the presenter’s typical variety of soloists and ensembles, but with an earnest focus on female musicians and composers.“We wanted to show that in every area of music, whether it’s jazz, classical or world music, there are truly extraordinary women who are recognized as such on the world platform,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview.The season’s lineup includes the eminent pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, who each will organize a series of Perspectives concerts; the flutist Claire Chase, as artist in residence; and appearances by conductors including Marin Alsop, who will lead the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in its Carnegie debut, and Susanna Mälkki, who will lead the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, which is traveling to Carnegie for the first time in more than a half-century.The enterprising flute player Claire Chase will perform as Carnegie’s artist in residence.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesProgramming has also been inspired by the war in Ukraine. In February, the hall will host the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine, whose performance will include Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, featuring the Ukrainian American pianist Stanislav Khristenko.“This is a turning point in history,” Gillinson said. “It’s really, really important that a dictator does not win. We felt we needed to very overtly support Ukraine.”Carnegie had originally planned to open the season with a three-concert engagement by the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, Gillinson said. But the hall abandoned those plans after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, when Gergiev, a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, became the target of widespread condemnation.Instead, the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will take the stage on opening night, Sept. 29, performing Ravel’s “La Valse”; Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Chasqui” from “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout”; Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8; and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring the Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov. (The Philadelphians rescheduled their own opening night to accommodate Carnegie, in one of multiple appearances at the hall next season; it’s not the first time during the war in Ukraine that Nézet-Séguin has come to the hall’s rescue.)Gillinson said that he was optimistic about audiences turning out. Attendance since the hall reopened in October has been relatively strong, around 88 percent, compared with 91 percent before the pandemic, though there have been fewer concerts over all.Among the offerings, here are 15 highlights chosen by New York Times critics and writers.The pianist Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesMaurizio Pollini, Oct. 16Pollini turned 80 this year, so take what opportunity you can to hear this most stimulating of pianists, especially in the repertoire that he has made distinctive across the six decades of his career. He plays Schumann’s “Arabeske” and the Fantasy in C, before a second half of Chopin, including the Ballade No. 4 and the Scherzo No. 1. DAVID ALLENCity of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Oct. 22While this ensemble’s outgoing music director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, doesn’t plan to take up the podium of another orchestra any time soon, she is at least taking up the baton for this tour stop that features Elgar’s Cello Concerto, with the charismatic Sheku Kanneh-Mason; Debussy’s “La Mer”; and, most notably, the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” Symphony. JOSHUA BARONELos Angeles Philharmonic, Oct. 25-26Absent from Carnegie for more than three decades, the Philharmonic has instead been more likely to perform at Lincoln Center. Now, the orchestra will give the New York premieres of Gabriela Ortiz’s “Kauyumari” and Violin Concerto, with María Dueñas as soloist, as well as Arturo Márquez’s “Fandango for Violin and Orchestra,” featuring Anne Akiko Meyers. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZJean Rondeau, Oct. 27This harpsichordist’s recent recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations is meditative, sensuous even when sprightly, and, at an hour and 45 minutes, long. The variations become worlds to lose oneself in, less taut dramas than engulfing studies in texture and sound, an effect that may well be amplified when he plays the work in the intimate Weill Recital Hall. ZACHARY WOOLFEBeatrice Rana, Oct. 28Praise be to Beatrice Rana, a sensitive, perceptive pianist who is starting to do the hard work of challenging the biases of the inherited repertoire. She will play Clara Schumann’s youthful Piano Concerto with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Rana returns for a comparatively traditional recital of Bach, Debussy and Beethoven on April 20. ALLENThe bass-baritone Davóne Tines at Carnegie last year.Jennifer TaylorDavóne Tines, Nov. 3His voice and presence both serene yet simmering, this bass-baritone, a creative programmer as well as a gifted singer, has been touring with his reinvention of the traditional Mass, which incorporates music past and present, including works by Caroline Shaw, Bach, Margaret Bonds and Julius Eastman, and spirituals reimagined by Moses Hogan and Tyshawn Sorey. WOOLFEBerlin Philharmonic, Nov. 10-12When this eminent orchestra last appeared at Carnegie, in 2016, it played Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. Performing there for the first time under its current chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, it brings back the Seventh, then does it again two nights later. In between is a program of Andrew Norman, Mozart and Korngold — the grand Symphony in F sharp, which Petrenko has lately championed. WOOLFECleveland Orchestra, Jan. 18America’s finest orchestra makes just a single appearance next season, but with a program that draws fascinating parallels between the two favorite composers of its music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Berg’s “Lyric Suite” weaves its way around Schubert’s darkly unfinished Symphony No. 8, before a rare performance of Schubert’s late, reflective Mass in E flat. ALLENThird Coast Percussion, Jan. 20In a collaboration with the dance organization Movement Art Is, this reliably innovative percussion quartet will continue to refresh its repertory. Already adept at works by John Cage, Steve Reich and Dev Hynes, at Carnegie the group will perform Tyondai Braxton’s “Sunny X,” Jlin’s “Perspective” and its own arrangements of selections from Philip Glass’s “Aguas da Amazonia.” SETH COLTER WALLSPhiladelphia Orchestra, Jan. 28One Rachmaninoff piano concerto is daunting. But all four of them in a single evening, and his “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini”? That herculean task has never been attempted at Carnegie, but Yuja Wang will take it up the keyboard, with Nézet-Séguin conducting, in a program to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday. HERNÁNDEZYannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie earlier this year.Chris LeeLviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine, Feb. 15Since the Russian invasion, many members of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine have been separated — some staying in the country, others fleeing as refugees. At Carnegie, they will be united to play Brahms’s “Tragic Overture,” the Tchaikovsky concerto with Khristenko and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as part of a tour led by the Ukrainian American conductor Theodore Kuchar. HERNÁNDEZMitsuko Uchida, Feb. 24The most recent Carnegie appearances by Uchida, one of our reigning and most sensitive pianists, have been in works by Schubert and Mozart, two composers on which she built her reputation. More underrated, but no less accomplished, are her Beethoven interpretations, a sampling of which comes in a program of his cosmic final piano sonatas. BARONEEnsemble Intercontemporain, March 25This group’s music director, Matthias Pintscher, will lead Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, Op. 16, and Pintscher’s “Sonic Eclipse.” But the real succulent on offer is “Derive 2,” a grand (and long-revised) work by Pierre Boulez, the avant-gardist who founded Ensemble Intercontemporain. WALLSPhiladelphia Orchestra, March 31As in recent months, Nézet-Séguin and this ensemble — one of the three he leads, including the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, another Carnegie fixture — are virtually in residency next season. Their most intriguing program is this contrast between John Luther Adams’s climate meditation “The Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” featuring the choral group the Crossing, and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” WALLSClaire Chase, May 25Chase’s “Density 2036” — a multi-decade initiative to commission a new flute repertory leading to the centennial of Varèse’s “Density 21.5” — has thus far not been fare for the Carnegie crowd. But the project is moving uptown from the Kitchen, with Parts I and II on May 18, followed a week later by Part X: a world premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. BARONE More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Chris Bailey, Who Gave Australia Punk Rock, Dies at 65

      by

      He and the Saints introduced the country (and later the world) to their own raw sound just as the Sex Pistols were emerging in London and the Ramones in New York.Chris Bailey, an Australian singer who with his band, the Saints, introduced their country to the raw, fast-tempo sounds of punk rock in the mid-1970s, just as the Sex Pistols were spiking their hair in London and the Ramones were donning their leather jackets in New York City, died on April 9 in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He was 65.His wife, Elisabet Corlin, confirmed the death, of natural causes, but did not provide details.Mr. Bailey and the Saints did not borrow from the sounds emanating out of Britain and the United States. Rather, in a case of parallel evolution, they emerged simultaneously, shaped in their native Brisbane by some of the same forces at work in the Northern Hemisphere: high unemployment, stifling social conservatism and grungy political radicalism.They released their first hit, “(I’m) Stranded,” in September 1976, two months before the Sex Pistols debuted with “Anarchy in the U.K.” and one month before the Damned released “New Rose,” widely considered Britain’s first punk single.“(I’m) Stranded,” which the Saints produced themselves, is as pure a punk anthem as one can find, with buzz saw guitar and driving rhythms punctuating Mr. Bailey’s fast-paced snarl of a voice, singing about youthful ennui and failed romance.That single shot the Saints to national and then global attention among the underground cognoscenti, even though it caused only the shallowest ripple in the charts. Until then, no label was interested in the stringy-haired foursome from Queensland; suddenly, everyone was.The Saints — with Mr. Bailey on vocals, Ed Kuepper on guitar, Ivor Hay on drums and Kym Bradshaw on bass — signed with EMI and moved to London in 1977, just as punk was hitting its stride.They were a part of the scene there and separate from it, both sonically — they incorporated horns, for one thing — and ideologically: To them, punk, ostensibly a cri de coeur against consumer society, was already a commodified part of it. Mr. Bailey called it a “marketing gimmick.”Unlike the typical pointy-haired British punks, the Saints kept their look low-key, more like a 1990s American grunge band (and, not coincidentally, many a latter-day Seattle band noted the Saints as an inspiration).Nevertheless, they thrived. Their single “This Perfect Day” reached No. 34 on the U.K. charts, and their first two albums, “(I’m) Stranded” (1977) and “Eternally Yours” (1978), are considered punk classics. The second album included “Know Your Product,” an anti-consumer, anti-punk song that sent fans raving.But like punk itself, the Saints had a short shelf life, though by their third album, the R&B-spiked “Prehistoric Sounds,” they were starting to transcend the genre. Released in late 1978, it fizzled, EMI dropped them and a few months later Mr. Kuepper and Mr. Hay left the band.The Saints’ legacy cannot be measured by record sales; they influenced generations of Australian rockers, as well as bands emerging from the early 1980s metal scene along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, like Guns N’ Roses.Nick Cave, another Australian musician who came up in the punkish underground of the 1970s, said in a memorial statement on the website Red Hand Files, “I can only simply repeat, for the record, that, in my opinion, the Saints were Australia’s greatest band, and that Chris Bailey was my favorite singer.”Christopher James Mannix Bailey was born on Nov. 29, 1956, in Nanyuki, Kenya, where his father, Robert Bailey, was stationed with the British Army. His mother, Bridget (O’Hare) Bailey, was a homemaker.The family returned to the Baileys’ native Belfast, Northern Ireland, when Christopher was young. But with political unrest brewing and Australia opening its doors to immigrants, the family soon moved to Brisbane, where Robert found work as a night watchman in a factory.Along with his wife, Mr. Bailey is survived by his brother, Michael, and his sisters, Mary, Carol and Margaret Bailey and Maureen Schull.Mr. Bailey onstage during the 2012 Homebake Music Festival in Sydney.Don Arnold/WireImageAfter the Saints’ original lineup split up, Mr. Bailey reconstituted the band and recorded a series of albums under the same name and later as a solo act. He moved away from punk toward roots-driven rock, folk and austere instrumentation that showed off his room-filling rich voice.He moved to Sweden in the 1990s, and then to the Netherlands in 1994, where he continued to write and record. Bruce Springsteen covered one of his songs, “Just Like Fire Would,” on his 2014 album “High Hopes.”While the musician Bob Geldof reportedly said that “rock music of the ’70s was changed by three bands: the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Saints,” Mr. Bailey was unbothered by the Saints’ name recognition relative to those others.“This is the world in which we live,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Bitter and twisted is something I don’t see any advantage in being.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Denouncing War, Ukrainian Musicians Unite for a World Tour

      by

      The newly formed Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra will perform in Europe and the United States this summer, using music to oppose the Russian invasion.The Russian invasion has devastated cultural life in Ukraine, forcing renowned musical ensembles to disband and leading to an exodus of conductors, composers and players.Now some of Ukraine’s leading artists, with the help of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, are uniting to use music to express opposition to Russia’s continuing attacks. They will form a new ensemble, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, and make an 11-city tour of Europe and the United States in July and August, the orchestra announced on Monday.“This is something we can do for our country and for our people,” Marko Komonko, a Ukrainian violinist who will serve as the orchestra’s concertmaster, said in an interview. “It’s not much, but this is our job.”The 75-member orchestra, which will be made up of Ukrainian refugees as well as musicians still in the country, will appear at several European festivals, including the BBC Proms in London for a televised performance on July 31. It will make stops in Germany, France, Scotland and the Netherlands, before heading to the United States to perform at Lincoln Center and at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Proceeds from the concerts will benefit Ukrainian artists.The orchestra will be led by the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who came up with the idea for the ensemble, eager to find a way to help musicians and others in Ukraine.“We want to show the embattled citizens of Ukraine that a free and democratic world supports them,” Wilson said in an interview. “We are fighting as artistic soldiers, soldiers of music. This gives the musicians a voice and the emotional strength to get through this.”Marko Komonko, the orchestra’s concertmaster, said: “This is something we can do for our country and for our people. It’s not much, but this is our job.”via Marko KomonkoWilson pitched the idea to her husband, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who offered the company’s support and persuaded the Polish National Opera to assist as well. The orchestra will assemble in mid-July in Warsaw for rehearsals and hold an opening concert at the Wielki Theater, home to the Polish National Opera.Gelb said it was important that artistic groups spoke out against the Russian invasion. Shortly after the invasion began, the Met announced it would not engage performers or institutions that supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Last month, the Met staged a concert in support of Ukraine; banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights.“This is a world situation that is far beyond politics,” Gelb said in an interview. “It’s about saving humanity. The Met, as the largest performing arts company in the United States and one of the leading companies in the world, clearly has a role to play and we’ve been playing it.”The Freedom Orchestra will perform a variety of works, including the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Seventh Symphony; Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring the Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova; Brahms’s Fourth Symphony; and Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Tyler, the Creator’s ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’ LP Hits No. 1

      by

      The long-delayed arrival of “Call Me if You Get Lost” on vinyl sold 49,500 copies, bringing the rapper back to the top of the Billboard 200.Forty-three weeks ago, in June 2021, the rapper, singer and Baudelaire-referencing cultural omnivore Tyler, the Creator released “Call Me if You Get Lost,” his sixth studio album.Critics were fascinated by its high-concept throwback to the style of mid-2000s mixtapes, and fans embraced Tyler’s return to straight-up rap after a detour into neo-soul on “Igor,” his previous album. “Call Me” opened at No. 1, appeared on numerous year-end critics’ lists, and this month took home the Grammy Award for best rap album — just as “Igor” did two years ago.But something had been missing since the initial rollout of “Call Me”: its vinyl edition. As early as August of last year, Tyler had hinted at his frustration with the delay. “Call Me,” like so many other pandemic-era albums, had seen its vinyl version pushed back by many months. The reason for Tyler’s delay was unclear, but many other artists found their LPs held up by supply-chain chokeholds and the limited production capacity of the overtaxed vinyl industrial complex.Now “Call Me” has finally been released on vinyl — and returned to No. 1.The album tops the latest Billboard album chart with the equivalent of 59,000 sales in the United States. Of those, 49,500 were for the vinyl version of “Call Me” — on two LPs — which were sold only through Tyler’s website. It is the biggest week for a hip-hop album on vinyl since 1991, when reliable data used to track music sales began by SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, the name of the data service that now powers Billboard’s charts.The total sales figure for “Call Me” also incorporates 11.5 million streams and about 1,500 other sales of CDs, cassettes and album downloads, according to Luminate.Also this week, Morgan Wallen holds at No. 2 with “Dangerous: The Double Album,” while Lil Durk’s “7220,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 3. The “Encanto” soundtrack is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5.Album sales have been slow lately, with “7220” last week notching the lowest sales for a No. 1 album in three years. But that may change soon, with a string of high-profile new releases expected in coming weeks by Jack Harlow (due May 6), Kendrick Lamar (May 13), Harry Styles (May 20) and BTS (June 10). More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: Joyce DiDonat’s ‘Eden’ Comes to Carnegie Hall

      by

      The star mezzo-soprano’s new concert program seeks to restore humanity’s connection to the natural world.It’s hard to imagine what New Yorkers are supposed to do with the seeds of an eastern red cedar tree, given how narrow our window sills are, but they were slipped into the program books of Joyce DiDonato’s concert at Carnegie Hall anyway.That performance, on Saturday night, was a stop on a global tour to accompany her new album, “Eden,” which seeks to restore our connection with, in her words, “the awe-inducing majesty” of the natural world.“I’m a problem solver, a dreamer, and — yes — I am a belligerent optimist,” DiDonato, a star mezzo-soprano, writes in the album’s liner notes (which were reprinted in the program), implicitly acknowledging the project’s potential naïveté.DiDonato isn’t the only singer preoccupied with climate change. In October, the soprano Renée Fleming released “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” an album with a geologically minded title but a beautifully focused program. Contrasting Romantic-era songs that exalt nature and contemporary works that feel alienated from it, she charted an unfortunate decline in humanity’s relationship with the environment through music.In “Eden,” DiDonato picks up that strain, with an attempt to return listeners to the weakened but still-welcoming arms of Mother Earth. The album’s track list, echoed in the lineup at Carnegie, teleports listeners among different eras — touching on Ives, Mahler, Handel, Cavalli and Gluck — but never really recovers its pace after a detour to a pre-Romantic age.DiDonato’s vibrato, which oscillates so quickly it seems to effervesce, is built for highly ornamented Baroque melodies. But her lively interpretations and imaginative use of straight tone broaden her palette of vocal colors and allow her to inhabit other eras. Whether her varied programming can tell a focused story is another question.On tour, DiDonato has turned “Eden” into a semi-theatrical production — directed by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan and with lighting design by John Torres — that goes some way toward unifying the material. Many of the selections were strung together without pauses, which, without opportunities for applause, made for a grippingly immediate, fitfully inspiring evening.The program began with Ives’s cosmic and mysterious “The Unanswered Question.” As smoke filled the darkened hall, the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, bathed in light, coaxed a shivering sound from the strings of Il Pomo d’Oro. (Emelyanychev leads the group on the album as well.) DiDonato walked the perimeter of the audience, singing the trumpet’s part as a wordless incantation.Rachel Portman’s “The First Morning of the World,” a song commissioned for “Eden,” used flowing woodwinds to conjure bird song in a gorgeous evocation of humanity’s origins. As the lights went up, the delicate pleasures of Mahler’s “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” followed. A 17th-century sinfonia, played with quicksilver energy by the ensemble, created a bridge to the past. That’s when things got weird.DiDonato assumed the role of a terrifying angel of justice singing from Josef Myslivecek’s oratorio “Adamo ed Eva.”Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesDiDonato launched with gusto into a slight, strophic song by the Italian Baroque composer Biagio Marini. Its stepwise melody and fervent strumming was accompanied by the instrumentalists stomping their feet to the beat. Emelyanychev leaped from his seat at the harpsichord and broke out a recorder for a solo.Then DiDonato assumed the role of a terrifying angel of justice with an aria from Josef Myslivecek’s “Adamo ed Eva,” an oratorio about the biblical expulsion from Eden. As the orchestra lent Baroque jauntiness to Myslivecek’s proto-Mozartean style, DiDonato channeled the text’s threats of plagues, fire and bloodshed. Blinding red light flooded the auditorium.The concert began to lose its plot, but as that happened, DiDonato became freer to entertain. For Gluck’s “Ah! non son io che parlo,” an aria barely related to the evening’s themes, she tapped into an impressive chest voice and negotiated the aria’s leaps with full-throated relish. Teetering tantalizingly close to extremes of color, speed and volume, she drew raucous applause.After that barnburner, she lost steam. DiDonato’s voice was patchy in the long lines of Handel’s “As with rosy steps the morn,” from “Theodora.” The orchestra, seemingly overwhelmed by the stylistic pastiche, clumsily negotiated the dynamics of Mahler’s soul-cracking “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.”During encores, DiDonato introduced young people from the educational program Salute to Music and the All-City High School Chorus for an original song, performed with passionate directness and pieced together by a music teacher in Britain from the melodies and lyrics of his students. (DiDonato’s tour has entailed working with youth choirs at each stop.) “Look how powerful it is when we make something together,” said DiDonato, who sang Handel’s enchanting “Ombra mai fù” with the children huddled around her.DiDonato has referred to “Eden” as a “wild garden.” And at Carnegie Hall it was: colorful, fecund and perhaps in need of pruning.Joyce DiDonatoPerformed at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      One Night, Several String Quartet Premieres

      by

      The JACK Quartet and the Danish String Quartet presented new works that nodded to the past and spoke to the present.On Thursday evening, two eminent string quartets presented premieres in New York. At Merkin Hall, the JACK Quartet unveiled Patricia Alessandrini’s “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” Khyam Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in” and George Lewis’s “String Quartet 4.5.” Not far away, at Zankel Hall, the Danish String Quartet paired Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” with Lotta Wennäkoski’s new “Pige.” Our critics were at both events.JACK QuartetYou always remember your first.The first live concert you attended after the initial pandemic lockdown, that is. So the JACK Quartet will always hold a place in my heart. But after that outdoor performance, at the Morris Museum in New Jersey in August 2020, it was back to a long digital-streaming relationship for me and the group. So seeing them in person again on Thursday evening, almost two years later, felt like another of this era’s many happy reunions.Appearing at Merkin at the tail end of “Bridges,” a series presented by the Kaufman Music Center and the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, the JACK — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello — now had optimal indoor acoustics to show off their uncanny clarity and agility in these three premieres.In the cheekily titled, 12-minute “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” the quartet’s skittering, airy playing is translated, through electronic processing, into fragments of recordings of works from the classical canon, which seem to mistily surround the live sounds.The results might have been clearer over the super-sophisticated speaker system at Empac, the experimental arts center in upstate New York where the piece was workshopped earlier this month. At Merkin, you could make out a chorus in the first section — heard faintly, as if from a distant room. In the final section, “Appendix 2” (there is no “Appendix 1”), the electronics were still very quiet, and impossible to identify, but had a certain density, a soft sumptuousness.A trembling motif passes around the four instruments in Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in,” gradually overlapping in waves for a kind of dusky, shaggy old-school Minimalism. The piece feels shorter than its 19 minutes, the music receding and rebuilding with a carefully wrought naturalness, and ending in a serene coda of slow, hazy unison chords.Before the JACK played his “String Quartet 4.5,” Lewis — the eminent composer and scholar recently named the next artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — said from the stage that he wrote the piece “against complacency,” as a reminder for audiences to “stay alert.” This is a political posture, but it’s also a declaration of Barnum-style showmanship, and the 17-minute work richly delivered, commanding attention like a ringmaster conjuring acrobats.The acts included sudden slides; a long unison squeal; a tiny, precious duet of little scratches between the first violin and the cello; and a passage of nearly lilting, Mendelssohnian delicacy. The other players twinklingly twittered as Campbell’s hand slid up and down the neck of his cello, for a woozy ondes Martenot effect. Near the end, crunchy grinding gave way to balletic glassiness. It was a spectacularly varied circus — and serious fun. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe JACK Quartet, from left: Austin Wulliman, Christopher Otto, Jay Campbell and John Pickford Richards on Thursday at Merkin Hall.Joan JastrebskiDanish String QuartetThe men of the Danish String Quartet — the violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and the cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin — are masters of juxtaposition.Their enlightening “Prism” albums trace lines from Bach’s fugues to late Beethoven and works of the 20th century. Another series, “Doppelgänger,” pairs Schubert’s final quartets (and his finest piece of chamber music, the String Quintet in C) with premieres that respond to them.“Doppelgänger” has had a delayed start in New York. Because of the pandemic, Part I will arrive here last; on Thursday, the second installment came first, featuring the famous “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) and Wennäkoski’s “Pige.”Nørgaard introduced “Death and the Maiden” as “almost the definition of the Romantic string quartet,” though you wouldn’t have guessed that at first in the group’s interpretation — a controlled accumulation that built toward a sprinting and desperate tarantella.This work’s nickname comes from Schubert’s earlier song “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” whose funereal opening serves as the theme for the second movement. Sørensen, as the first violin, was a stand-in for the Maiden, his articulation at the start delicate, even reticent. As the music becomes more animated, it lashes out and retreats, torn between fury and woe; the Danish players opted for restraint, their command of the score absolute but their passion understated.In the second movement, they revealed the power in Schubert’s pauses, particularly with a patient ending, like an attempt to prolong its moment of peace. That couldn’t last forever, though: At the coda of that tarantella finale, here impressively cohesive amid increasingly frantic chorales and unstable runs, Death arrives in a sudden minor-key turn, delivered in grandly Romantic fashion.“Pige” (Danish for “Girl”) shifts the focus from Death to the Maiden. As response pieces go, this one reflects less on the quartet — though nods to it abound, as in a version of Schubert’s long-short-short rhythm — and more on the original song. Schubert’s quartet never quotes the Maiden’s verse, which gets its due in the first movement of “Pige,” a series of phrases that start and disintegrate in wispy fragments and fading arpeggios.Throughout, Wennäkoski balances extended technique and expressive lyricism, sometimes layering the two, but bringing the instruments together for affecting silences. Then comes the bright, episodic finale, “The Girl and the Scrapbook,” which takes flight with up-bow flourishes and a casual reference to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In the final measure, the cellist (Schubert’s voice for Death in the quartet) tears a sheet of paper — “slowly and continuously,” the score says, at a forte.The group followed “Pige” with a transcription of “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” a straightforward treatment with a touch of frostiness in trilled harmonics. That could have been a baked-in encore, but the Danish players returned with another arrangement: of “Der Doppelgänger,” the series’s namesake.They referred to it as “one of Schubert’s best songs.” I’d agree, and add that it’s also one of his most terrifying, which they teased out by building on its harmonic ambiguity for a tension almost as discomfiting as the thought of death itself. JOSHUA BARONE More