Music

Paul Jacobs has completed his survey of the major solo organ works of César Franck, whose birthday year is passing with scattered observances.It has not been the happiest 200th birthday year for César Franck. “What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?” this newspaper asked a few months ago — the headline to an account of how Franck’s Symphony in D minor, once a standard, largely vanished from concert programs.That symphony has not been widely revived even for this anniversary year, and Franck’s most often heard piece is probably his lush, musing Violin Sonata. But he spent decades at the organ console of Ste.-Clotilde in Paris and as a professor of that instrument at the Paris Conservatory; in his lifetime, he was best known as an organist and a teacher.So it is fitting that among the most prominent 2022 celebrations — indeed, one of the few 2022 celebrations — has come from Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day. Jacobs played six of Franck’s pieces at a concert in March, and on Tuesday another six, completing the set of this composer’s 12 major organ works.Both recitals took place at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown Manhattan, known informally as “Smoky Mary’s” for what is said to be lingering hints of incense in the air. Its organ, built by the Aeolian-Skinner company, was installed in 1932 and has been lovingly kept since then; it is one of the major instruments of New York, capable of filling a space whose reverberation gives music both clarity and room to breathe.Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn March, Jacobs played the three pieces Franck wrote in the late 1870s, and the three sprawling, pensive chorales that were the great product of 1890, the year he died. The 75-minute, intermissionless program on Tuesday pushed further back in time, to the “Six Pièces pour Grand Orgue” that were written soon after Franck took up his position at Ste.-Clotilde, in 1858, and published in 1868.These are Romantic outpourings, their structures grand, if improvisatory in feel. Yet Jacobs kept them from turning turgid — his tempos flowing while conveying the weight and depth of the music. He began the “Fantaisie” with mysterious, almost meterless delicacy, like the prelude to “Parsifal”; in the “Pastorale,” his palette extended to spicy burnt umber and milky pale blue, mellow oboe and sweetly piercing flute.Jacobs’s textures were also beautifully varied in the “Prière,” the trumpet mellowed by the vast space without losing its focus; the “Prélude, Fugue et Variation” was a wistful nocturne, sensitively controlled and never overblown. The “Final” moved from roaring lows to shimmering highs, its dotted-rhythm motif bounding before its pile-on conclusion.Jacobs played the “Final” third. His even apter finale to the concert was the “Grand Pièce Symphonique,” which lasts nearly half an hour and influenced a generation of large-scale solo organ works. Here it was clear in its hovering veils of sound, its quietly lyrical serenity and its toccata flurries, before a steady, triumphal ending.If Franck is to have such scattered tributes this year, at least Jacobs has done him justice.Paul JacobsPerformed on Tuesday at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Manhattan. More

For Amartuvshin Enkhbat, a Mongolian singer, bringing the role of the cursed court jester to La Scala’s modern production is a personal milestone.In that quarrelsome family of Italian tragic operas, “Rigoletto” is like the odd but lovable cousin: His story is so complicated and messy that you are drawn to him time and again despite his serious anger issues.It is also considered a masterpiece of Verdi’s middle period, just before the composer began a prolific stretch toward old age with the grit of a marathon runner. So, a new and modern production at La Scala, replacing a lavish 28-year-old one, is a major event. It is also a seismic career moment for many of the artists involved, including a bold new approach to Verdi’s intricate score by a conductor who has pored over Verdi’s early notes on the opera, as well as a production designer and director inspired by the South Korean film “Parasite.”At the center of all of this is the Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat, who returns to La Scala in the title role less than two years after his debut there in “Aida” in October 2020. Bringing the role of the cursed court jester to La Scala is a personal milestone for Mr. Enkhbat, 36. It is also a signature role, but never an easy one, especially at an opera house as prestigious as La Scala.“I’ve sung the role of Rigoletto about 60 times, but this time at La Scala is a little bit intimidating and exciting,” Mr. Enkhbat said in a phone interview from Milan last month, the day before rehearsals began. “It’s a difficult role to sing in terms of acting, singing and artistic expression, and requires a lot of concentration and ability. For me, the character of Rigoletto brings out everything in me.”After this “Rigoletto,” which runs from June 20 to July 11, Mr. Enkhbat will sing in no fewer than five other Verdi operas in the coming months: “Nabucco” and “Aida,” in Verona this summer, followed this fall by “La Forza del Destino” in Parma, “Il Trovatore” in Florence and “La Traviata” in Vienna. He will repeat “La Traviata” for his Metropolitan Opera debut in January. It is the kind of schedule befitting in-demand opera singers who book engagements months or years in advance.“I’m getting used to it,” he said. “This is a new normal for me.”Mr. Amartuvshin said he has performed in “Rigoletto” about 60 times, including here in 2018 at Teatro Regio di Parma in Italy.Roberto RicciAnd normal — or at least natural — is something he can relate to when it comes to music. Mongolia may not be known for producing opera singers, but it has an ancient culture steeped in music. The main city, Ulaanbaatar, has an opera house and a music academy, the State University of Arts and Culture, from which Mr. Enkhbat graduated in 2009. It was there that he got his first taste of singing opera. But from an earlier age, he sang Mongolian folk songs and urtyn duu, the traditional “long songs” of Mongolia. These lyrical chants, requiring an enormous range, are thought to be more than 2,000 years old. They could even be called operatic because of their vocal demands.“As a child, around age 3 or 4, I had no problem singing these songs in front of my family,” he said through an interpreter. “But my first stage appearance was in the fifth grade, and I asked my classmates to turn the other way when I sang. But they all applauded, and I became the star.”Mr. Enkhbat certainly has become that. He began singing opera professionally after graduation — including “Prince Igor” and “Rigoletto” in Mongolia. He was a winner in the Operalia competition in 2012 and won the audience award at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 2015. He has had steady work since, to say the least, mostly with Verdi’s baritone roles with what one critic called “a lavishly upholstered voice, dark and velvety and simply enormous.”For the Italian conductor Michele Gamba, that is exactly what “Rigoletto” should capture: a darkness, or what he calls a more nuanced effect that Verdi intended for the opera, one that he feels has been lost in the last 170 years.“It’s a big challenge balancing out what I think is a coherent and cohesive dramatic vision of ‘Rigoletto’ these days and the gravitas of ‘Rigoletto’ in Italy,” said Mr. Gamba, who is making his La Scala debut. “Show business has taken over the specificity of the opera. My approach is aiming for something more intimate and not as showy.”A trip to the archives at La Fenice, Venice’s beloved opera house where “Rigoletto” premiered in 1851, revealed what Mr. Gamba says is a different concept for a popular opera.Production drawing of the set for the new production of “Rigoletto” at La Scala. The production designer and director were inspired by the South Korean film “Parasite.”Teatro alla Scala“I wanted to see with my own eyes what Verdi wrote down to try to be as close as possible to what he wanted,” he said. “It’s a constant examination of the sources and thinking through it. I’m looking for the dark whispered sounds that Verdi wrote about and a huge amount of pianissimo.”A new approach is also behind the production itself. Margherita Palli, the designer, and the director, Mario Martone, who also directs movies, drew inspiration for this “Rigoletto” from the Oscar-winning South Korean film “Parasite” to show how worlds — and socioeconomic classes — can collide with tragic results. It could be seen as a fitting parallel to the story of “Rigoletto,” a humiliated court jester who seeks revenge on a wealthy playboy duke, with a curse, a murder or two and a few mistaken identities thrown in to complicate matters.“It’s about two different populations living very close to each other but from very different worlds,” Ms. Palli,explained. “There will be a great door at the center connecting the world where the peasants live and the house of the duke. In a way, Rigoletto is that door. He is the one who is part of two worlds.”Mr. Enkhbat knows something about two worlds.Despite his ascent in the world of Italian (and some Russian) opera, he is drawn back to the opera “Genghis Khan” by the Mongolian composer Byambasuren Sharav, which Mr. Enkhbat has performed five times in his home country. He hopes to bring it to a wider audience.“We Mongolians love this opera because it’s in our language and in our blood,” he said. “I love singing ‘Rigoletto’ and so many other baritone roles, but I also want to bring Mongolian music to the world, too.” More

In a new staging at La Scala, “La Gioconda” will capture the full range of human emotion in a dreamlike Venice, with dashes of Kubrick and Fellini.“La Gioconda,” by Amilcare Ponchielli, established the composer as a creator of operas on par with Verdi after its 1876 premiere at La Scala in Milan. Yet while individual numbers such as the “Dance of the Hours” and the aria “Cielo e mar” (“The Sky and the Sea”) have achieved lasting fame, the lyric drama in four acts only occasionally receives new productions.This month, La Scala is mounting one by Davide Livermore, an Italian director. The last performances of “La Gioconda” at the house took place in 1997, in a revival of the staging by Nicola Benois from the 1950s, which had starred none other than Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano.The sopranos Saioa Hernández and Irina Churilova will take over performances as the title character from Sonya Yoncheva, who fell ill with the flu during rehearsals. The cast, under the baton of Frédéric Chaslin, also includes Daniela Barcellona as Laura, Anna Maria Chiuri as La Cieca and Roberto Frontali as Barnaba.The libretto by Arrigo Boito, based loosely on the Victor Hugo play “Angélo, Tyran de Padoue,” takes place in 17th-century Venice. La Gioconda, a ballad singer, fights off the advances of Barnaba, a spy of the Venetian State Inquisition. She is in love with a Genoese nobleman, Enzo, who is disguised as a sea captain; he in turn loves Laura, who has been forced to marry a leader of the Inquisition. After saving Laura’s life and allowing her to escape with Enzo, La Gioconda stabs herself to death; Barnaba bends over her body and screams that he has drowned her mother, La Cieca.Mr. Livermore’s staging envisions Venice as a dreamscape, filled with fog and ghosts wandering the lagoon.Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaIn Mr. Livermore’s staging, Venice becomes a dreamscape where ghosts wander along the lagoon. The city can disappear at any moment, recreating both the sensory perceptions of La Cieca, who is blind, and the fog that frequently envelopes its buildings. Inspirations for the sets, by Mr. Livermore’s production team Giò Forma, include the French cartoonist known as Moebius — in particular his book “Venise Celeste” — and the Fellini film “Casanova.”Mr. Livermore emphasized the importance of mounting operas that helped shape national values in the aftermath of Italian unification in the 19th century. “It was a period in which art educated society about solidarity, loyalty,” he said. Today, he continued, “it is up to the director to show things to society which it doesn’t see.”He considers La Cieca a “profoundly mystic” character who is stigmatized much in the way that “haters” mob people on social media. In this reading, when Barnaba and his constituents claim that she can see despite being blind and declare her a witch, they are in fact expressing fear of her spiritual powers.Mr. Livermore points to the genius of the librettist Boito for capturing a full range of human emotion within three hours of opera. “It could make for a great television series,” he said by video conference from Milan. “Boito wanted to tell of love, sex, hatred, betrayal, the desire for revenge — the sky.”Boito wrote under the pen name of Tobia Gorrio as a member of the Scapigliatura, an anti-bourgeois movement of artists and intellectuals in 1860s Milan. Mr. Livermore considers the group “the true avant-garde of its time,” pointing to moments in the opera that shock the audience in thriller-like fashion.Inspirations for the sets include the French cartoonist known as Moebius — in particular his book “Venise Celeste” — and the Fellini film “Casanova.”Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaMr. Chaslin, the conductor of the production at La Scala, believes that “La Gioconda” drew essential impulses from Verdi while opening the door for his final operas, “Otello” and “Falstaff,” for which Boito provided the librettos (he also helped revise “Simon Boccanegra”). Verdi had stopped producing operas for 16 years after the 1871 premiere of “Aida.”For both Mr. Livermore and Mr. Chaslin, the sinister character of Barnaba is a kind of prototype for Iago, Otello’s scheming officer. Further down the line, “La Gioconda” was an important steppingstone toward the “verismo” operas at the turn of the 20th century — for which Puccini, a student of Ponchielli, is the best-known representative.Mr. Chaslin draws a parallel between the title characters of “La Gioconda” and “Tosca,” both stories “of a woman who prefers to die than cede to a man who wants to possess her.” He also points to modern elements in Ponchielli’s score such as Barnaba’s final utterance: Rather than sing a high note, as per convention, he exclaims “Ah!” in what is indicated in the libretto as a “suffocated scream,” while the orchestra races with a rising chromatic scale to the chilling close.The composer’s vocal writing is, meanwhile, a tour de force for the soloists. Mr. Chaslin calls it a “vicious cycle” that since the opera is not regularly performed, it requires singers who are both fit for the task and willing to invest the time in learning the music.The opera also requires choristers ranging from monks to shipwrights (La Scala’s production features a chorus of over 120). Mr. Chaslin noted the “gigantic” proportion of the ensemble numbers, in particular the third-act finale, which comes right after the “Dance of the Hours.”“La Gioconda” is in fact the only opera-ballo (or opera with dance, roughly in the vein of the grand opera tradition) besides “Aida” to remain in repertoire. The score will be performed in full, as is tradition at La Scala.Costumes by Mariana Fracasso travel freely between the centuries. Barnaba and his assassins evoke both the commedia dell’arte stock character Pulcinella (a burlesque figure who wears baggy white clothing and a tall white hat), as depicted by the 18th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and the killers from the Stanley Kubrick film “A Clockwork Orange.”Meanwhile, the theme of the Inquisition will be stripped of any allusions to the Roman Catholic Church and rather be depicted as a secret, oppressive power. Within this reading, the rosary of La Cieca that is passed to Laura is merely a symbol of mystical spirituality.The final scene draws inspiration from Alejandro Aménabar’s horror film “The Others.” “We discover that Barnaba is the only one still alive,” Mr. Livermore said. “And he still desires blood and sex in a horrendous manner.”After La Gioconda takes her own life, her spirit is reunited with that of La Cieca. And she will, Mr. Livermore said, “probably remain suspended on the lagoon of Venice for eternity.” More

Like so many cultural institutions, opera houses need to instill passion in the ticket holders of the future.Even an iconic opera house like La Scala must create programming to build the audience of tomorrow. One-third of today’s audience is under 55 years old. But Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive, is determined to make the house even younger.Since 2009, the theater has offered operagoers under 30 the possibility of attending previews of performances, which are usually reserved for private audiences, and a pass, which gives access to backstage tours, workshops and more. The subscription package, Under30, grants four performances for the price of one and the opportunity to meet artists at a happy hour.Mr. Meyer credited the efforts of his predecessors Stéphane Lissner and Alexander Pereira for their efforts, noting that the subscribers are “very faithful.” He wants to make sure, however, that they remain so: The house’s internal surveys have revealed that audience members between 30 and 40 are the hardest to retain.“It is not as if one’s salary suddenly becomes three times as big when you turn 30,” he explained. “All of a sudden, they have to pay full price, and the tickets are not as good as before.”As such, starting next season, the house will offer loges to those 35 and under at 50 percent of the normal price (370 euros to 920 euros, or $396 to $986, for a four-person loge). There will also be weekly performances offering half-priced tickets — including the opportunity to enjoy free drinks and socialize in specially reserved areas. (Tickets at normal price run up to €150 euros for ballet and €250 for opera.)“Every opera lover has made friends during a performance,” said Mr. Meyer. “We want to support this kind of communal environment.”He also hopes to “open the theater’s doors” to new potential audience members. Last July, the house orchestra, chorus and ballet toured different parts of the city as part of the initiative La Scala in Città (La Scala in the City), offering free tickets. On one occasion, in the Porta Romana District, dancers performed at Mysterious Baths, the swimming pool and cultural event center, in a program of excerpts from works by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Léo Delibes, Ólafur Arnalds and more.Dominique Meyer, La Scala’s artistic director and chief executive, in the theater next to a statue dedicated to the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMr. Meyer recalled that the only problem were the mosquitoes, which pestered the dancers, especially when they had to hold still. La Scala in Città will be repeated this September on a larger scale, including the young singers of the opera house’s academy, ballet school and children’s choir.This season also saw the launch of the subscription package Un palco in famiglia (A loge for the family), for which adults pay full price and can bring their children for €10 to €15 a head. Materials designed especially for minors are distributed at performances.Meanwhile, since 2014, the theater has mounted productions made for children, welcoming more than 200,000 visitors. This season featured a children’s version of Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (“Cinderella”), which was also streamed on La Scala’s website.Next season will, for the first time, feature a newly commissioned work, “Il Piccolo Principe” (“The Little Prince”), based on the classic French children’s novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. All productions are under one hour so that young visitors don’t grow bored, and they include child performers to further stimulate interest in the art form.The house has welcomed back most of another audience sector: tourists. They now make up 22 percent of total listeners, down from 30 percent before the pandemic.Mr. Meyer says that while visitors from Asia and Russia have not returned, the Europeans — and the Americans — are back. Of this group, the largest fraction (18 percent) is from Switzerland, followed by France (14 percent) and the United States (13 percent). The cities best represented are Vienna, Paris, London and New York.“If we are diligent and continue,” said Mr. Meyer, “we are certain to win a new audience.” More

EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn TiffanyOne Direction was a British boy band that was cynically assembled for the reality television competition “The X Factor” in 2010, and went on to release five albums of catchy if unremarkable pop songs before going on indefinite hiatus in 2016. (For reasons that are somewhat mysterious even to myself, I love the band.) As the internet culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany charts in “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It,” the band’s cultural impact might have been unexceptional were it not for its fans, who built a bizarrely powerful online community featuring subversive fan-fiction narratives, absurdly funny memes and occasionally distressing coordinated campaigns that grew so influential they managed to destabilize “1D” itself.Tiffany counts herself as a fan (she is the same age as Harry Styles, the band’s youngest member), though she approaches her subject with a wry critical distance — which is actually, she argues, an underappreciated but common fan characteristic. It is a persistent sexist attitude that flattens the fangirl’s perspective into inarticulate shrieking. “Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded,” Tiffany writes, “the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.” She argues that One Direction’s blandly corporate beginnings formed an inviting blank canvas for the band’s fans, who marshaled their generative powers to challenge the music industry’s scripts about what women and girls want — or simply to amuse themselves. Following internecine fandom battles, Tiffany writes, can be “vicious and exhilarating, like college football except interesting.” She tracks down one fan who was ridiculed on television for creating a “shrine” to a spot on the 101 freeway where Styles once vomited and finds the young woman perplexed at the media freakout over “a comedy routine she was performing, primarily with herself as the audience.”Through data points like these, Tiffany traces the shifting status of fangirls in the culture at large — once dismissed as hysterical teeny-boppers, they were later rehabilitated by the empowering winds of poptimism before stan culture complicated their role yet again, establishing pop music fans as among the internet’s most powerful and feared operators. The 1D fandom would eventually splinter along two lines — those who believe that Styles and his bandmate Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love and who are obsessed with “proving” the truth; and those who believe that is an inappropriate thing to aggressively insist on a story line about real people in a band you ostensibly love. The conflict culminated in a 2016 conspiracy that Tomlinson’s newborn baby was, preposterously, fake.The Dreamy World of Harry StylesThe British pop star and former member of the boy-band One Direction has grown into a magnetic and provocative performer.New Album: The record-breaking album “Harry’s House” is a testament to Harry Styles’ sense of generosity and devotion to the female subject.Styler Fashion: Stylers, as the pop star’s fans are called, love to dress in homage to their idol. Here are some of the best looks seen at a concert.Solo Debut: Styles’ self-titled first solo album was almost bold in its resistance to pop music aesthetics, our critic wrote in 2017.Opening Up: For his solo debut, the singer agreed to a Times interview. He was slippery in conversation, deflecting questions with politeness.But the fandom taketh away, and the fandom giveth: Tiffany is at the height of her powers when she is describing, with touching specificity, why it might make sense for a person to invest serious time and money into a bunch of cute boys singing silly love songs. She contextualizes fandom as a culturewide coping mechanism and creative outlet; it can be a lifeline for a lonely and powerless teenager, a site of reflection for a middle-aged mom or a wonderful excuse for anyone to scream into the void. Ten years after she discovered the band, Tiffany’s favorite 1D inside joke — “We took a chonce”; if you know you know — still “smacks me with a lingering hit of dopamine,” she writes, “like a gumball-machine-sticky-hand landing on a windowpane.”On the internet, fandom can be a route toward cyberbullying a baby, or it can be a way of figuring some things out about yourself. Sometimes, it can even forge a writer as funny and perceptive as Kaitlyn Tiffany.EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn Tiffany | 304 pp. | MCD x FSG Originals | Paper, $18 More

Teamed with Dash Crofts, he hit it big with “Summer Breeze” in 1972. The two went on to have chart success with “Diamond Girl” and other songs.Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday evening at his home in Nashville. He was 79.His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly in 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon.”The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of chorus that sticks in the brain:“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a follow-up, “Hummingbird,” made the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached No. 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached No. 6.But the duo’s run of success basically ended when the decade did, and they called it quits for a time.“Around 1980, we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts,” Mr. Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”Six years earlier, though, the pair had begun to fall out of favor with some listeners and critics because of their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 not long after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights. The title track urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duo’s career.“It completely killed it for a while,” he said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, although there were also hundreds of letters of support. In the 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the pair never intended the song to be a lightning rod.“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue,” he said. “On one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other people were literally throwing rocks at us.“If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity,” he continued, “we might have thought twice about doing it. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.”James Eugene Seals was born on Oct. 17, 1942, in Sidney, Texas, to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields, and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a boomtown in southwest Texas.“There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”His father played a little guitar and his mother played the dobro, so informal jam sessions were a common way to pass the time in the household. When a fiddler came by one evening, young Jim was taken with the instrument, and his father ordered him one from a Sears catalog.Later he took up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called the Crew Cats that played at dances and in local clubs. The band’s drummer quit right before a show at a junior college, and the drummer from another band on the bill sat in — Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.The two became friends and played with the Champs for several years out of Los Angeles. Both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they hit it big as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter that they had pulled out of a previous European engagement.“We were going to tour there earlier, but we had a last-minute change of mind when we found out that we’d be playing with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a fine band, but I’m not sure that the audience would be quite right for us.”Mr. Seals, left, and Mr. Crofts in an undated promotional photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by their two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive him. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who had success in the late 1970s as a member of another soft-rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals’s death, with Jim Seals’s two sons sometimes playing with them.Maia Coleman More

“Twelve Carat Toothache,” the new album from the post-genre star, continues to collapse several styles into one, and hones a template adopted by a new generation, including Tate McRae.For a stretch in the mid-to-late 2010s, Post Malone found a way to make every kind of music, all at once. His songs were rooted in the attitude of hip-hop while helping underscore the genre’s sing-rap evolution. He had a penchant for lightly plangent country, and lived in the long shadow of what was once called alternative rock. Every now and then, he dialed up his tempo ever so slightly, turning his wails into bright pop. And his voice, a heavily processed sweet gargle, sounded completely modern, yet also like a deeply imprinted memory.On his fourth album, “Twelve Carat Toothache,” the 26-year-old musician returns with more sorrowful yodels from the basement of the gilded mansion. Success hasn’t sated him, nor has it challenged him. He remains a calm synthesizer of styles for an era in which old borders matter less than ever. At times, he is relentlessly effective, but just as often, his music has an air of indifferent inevitability — it sounds both like the template for what’s still to come and also the logical endpoint of pop specificity as we once knew it.What makes Post Malone particular are songs in which ecstasy and misery are indistinguishable: antagonists are saviors, surrender is freedom. “I was born to raise hell/I was born to take pills/I was born to chase mills,” he moans on “Reputation,” never shifting his tone. On “Euthanasia,” he can’t decide what form celebration should take: “Behold! A sober moment/Too short, and far between/I should crack one open to celebrate being clean.”The real narcotic is Post Malone’s voice, though — it contains unanimity. Whether boasting about stealing someone’s girlfriend (“Insane”), excavating the anxiety associated with hyperfame (“Wasting Angels”) or delivering the odd deeply moving koan (“Everything done for the dead after they’re dead is for the living”), he sounds the same: bereft, lonely, removed.That consistency goes a long way in the streaming ecosystem, when songs have no incentive to ever come to a conclusion, or resolution. TikTok may reward the choppy and the bristling, but Spotify privileges the tuneful and the atmospheric.This album’s production leans in to that, even as it includes some of Post Malone’s brightest sounds to date: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” has 1950s sweetness and 1980s syntheticness, and “I Cannot Be (a Sadder Song)” has a bubbly undertow that recalls some of the squeakiest K-pop. “One Right Now,” with the Weeknd, is more zippy dyspepsia.But even the chirpy moments don’t detract from the album’s tonal consistency — Louis Bell, a longtime collaborator and architect of Post Malone’s sound, is an executive producer on “Twelve Carat Toothache,” and has a production credit on each track. Mostly, he’s conducting a gloomy mood that’s tactile — “Insane” is ominous, “Cooped Up” is lavishly empty, and the production on “Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol” sounds like Foley artists recreating storm sounds for a disaster film. It’s ignorable but inescapable music that operates at gut level, not ear level — call it “Ambient 2: Music for AirPods.”The album’s guest roster captures the potency of this approach as well: Mostly, Post Malone seeks out like-voiced performers who blend singing and rapping — Gunna, the Kid Laroi, Doja Cat, Roddy Ricch. He even recruits Fleet Foxes, who more than a decade ago brought a keening shimmer to roots-friendly indie rock, making music that was epiphanic and smudgy, and a little grating. This gathering of performers feels pointed: a seamless bridge between generations of stars in Post Malone’s image, even as the man himself remains blurry.Strikingly, though, this tactic is even spilling over to more straightforward pop singer-songwriters, who are finding the audience for crispness narrower than it might once have been.It’s hovering over “I Used to Think I Could Fly,” the astute and piercing debut album from the 18-year-old Canadian Tate McRae. McRae has found some success on TikTok, mostly as a lightly puckish (or even punky) pop singer in the Olivia Rodrigo vein. Her recent hit “She’s All I Wanna Be” is a taut mix of self-laceration and eye-rolling. And some of the finest moments on this album follow a similar pattern, like “What Would You Do?,” with its sock-hop sass, or the exceptional “What’s Your Problem?,” which renders romantic gut punch with curiously ecstatic production.But more often, McRae’s sharp vocals are coated in layers of production — the melancholy “Hate Myself” is thick with theatrical reverb, and “Go Away” pulses with a muscular throb. There’s the faintest hint of R&B on “I’m So Gone” and “Don’t Come Back.” And the smeared production and vocal effects on “Chaotic” start somewhere near Billie Eilish but then become something more synthetic, touching on the anodyne joy of Christian pop and Post Malone’s aquatic pain. For good measure, Bell produced a track on McRae’s album, “You’re So Cool,” which echoes some of the more optimistic moments on “Twelve Carat Toothache.”It is a savvy decision, but also something of a hedge — in an era in which styles are all melting into one, it can seem like the way to stand out is to fit in. But maybe not forever.Post Malone“Twelve Carat Toothache”(Mercury/Republic)Tate McRae“I Used to Think I Could Fly”(RCA) More

The war in Ukraine looms over the prestigious contest named for the pianist Van Cliburn, who was a symbol for art transcending global politics.FORT WORTH, Texas — On a sultry recent morning, 30 young pianists from around the world gathered in an auditorium at Texas Christian University here for the start of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious contests in classical music.The mood was celebratory. But politics also loomed. The Cliburn, defying pressure to ban Russian competitors after the invasion of Ukraine, had invited six Russians to take part, as well as two pianists from Belarus, which has supported the Russian invasion. A Ukrainian also made the cut.As they signed posters outside the auditorium and were fitted for cowboy boots, a Cliburn tradition, several competitors from those countries said that they found it difficult to think beyond the war.“It’s a tragedy, what’s happening now,” said Dmytro Choni, a 28-year-old pianist from Kyiv. “I’m trying to stay focused on the music.”Dmytro Choni, from Kyiv, is the sole competitor from Ukraine. “I’m trying to stay focused on the music,” he said.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesIlya Shmukler, 27, a competitor from Russia, said he at times felt guilty about the invasion. “The key words for me,” he said, “are shame and responsibility.”The politics surrounding the Cliburn competition show the depths to which the war has upended the performing arts. Largely unaccustomed to grappling with geopolitical concerns, arts organizations are now being forced to resolve difficult questions about the rights of Russian and Ukrainian artists, the morality of cultural boycotts and the limits of free expression. Many institutions have cut ties with artists closely associated with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, while continuing to welcome Russians with less public political leanings.Competitions like the Cliburn, which help determine who rises in the field, have come under intense scrutiny. Some contests, responding to pressure from board members and activists, have banned Russians altogether. Others have announced plans to disinvite Russians, only to face a backlash and reverse course weeks later.The debate over Russian artists echoes similar discussions playing out in the athletic sphere, with Wimbledon saying that it would not allow players from Russia and Belarus this summer, and FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, kicking out all Russian teams from global competition.The Cliburn, named for Van Cliburn, an American whose victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, during the Cold War, was seen as a sign that art could transcend politics, said that it had an obligation to defend Russian artists, who have long been a prominent force in classical music.Audience members at a performance by the Russian pianist Geniushene. The decision to include Russians has alienated some Ukrainian activists and Texas residents.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesThe Cliburn has also taken steps to ensure some degree of political conformity, warning competitors that any statements in support of Putin or the invasion of Ukraine could result in disqualification or the revocation of awards.“I don’t think sanctioning a young pianist who is 22 years old will have an effect on the Russian government,” said Jacques Marquis, the Cliburn’s president and chief executive. “That will play exactly into the playbook of Putin, if we isolate the Russian people.”While the Cliburn was widely applauded in the arts world for allowing Russians to compete, the decision has alienated some Ukrainian activists and Texas residents. Some argued that the only way to put pressure on Moscow to end the invasion is to cut political, economic and cultural ties.“It’s a shame that the Cliburn is not paying attention to human suffering and public opinion,” said the Rev. Pavlo Popov, the leader of a Ukrainian church in suburban Dallas. “How do you influence Russia? It has to come from the people. If they don’t like the war, if they want to be a part of the civilized world, if they want to be part of these competitions, they have to stand for the same values.”Many of the Russian competitors now live outside Russia and have said that they are fiercely opposed to the invasion. Some have taken part in protests and signed petitions demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces.Geniushene at her host family’s home in Fort Worth. To summon the proper character for a series of Brahms Ballades, she said, she thought of suffering in Ukraine.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesAnna Geniushene, a 31-year-old pianist from Moscow, said she felt a duty as an artist to show solidarity with Ukraine. When she tried to summon the right character for a series of Brahms Ballades in the quarterfinal round of the competition, she said, she thought about the grief and suffering in Ukraine.“I have a lot of chats with different people who are really surprised to know that the entire population, the whole nation, is not supporting and rooting for Putin,” said Geniushene, who lives in Lithuania. “Being an artist doesn’t mean that you are a kind of freelancer, that you’re living in a completely different world, and that you forget about politics and everything that you are not involved in. You must speak up and spread the word.”Even as they have denounced the war, many Russian competitors said they were distraught by the scrutiny of Russian artists in the United States and Europe. Some Western cultural institutions have demanded that artists condemn Putin as a condition for performing. Others have removed works by Russian composers in an effort to show solidarity with Ukraine.“The fact that you’re Russian doesn’t mean you’re a bad person,” said Sergey Tanin, 26, a pianist from Siberia who added that he had lost engagements and invitations to competitions since the start of the war. “We shouldn’t be forced to have political discussions before concerts or competitions.”Arseniy Gusev, who grew up in St. Petersburg, says he feels connected to Russia’s past and musical heritage.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesSergey Tanin, from Siberia, said he had lost engagements since the war started.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesRussian participants said they felt that the Cliburn offered a platform to remind the world of a side of Russia distinct from Putin’s bellicosity.Arseniy Gusev, a Russian pianist who grew up in St. Petersburg, said that as an artist, he had grown distant from contemporary Russia but felt intimately tied to its history, and particularly to the music of composers like Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.“I cannot say I belong to this contemporary Russia anymore, but I feel I’m connected to some parts of its past culture,” said Gusev, 23, who will begin a graduate program at the Yale School of Music in fall. “And I think in this way that unites many of us here.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. 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