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      Radu Lupu, Pianist Who Awed Listeners, Is Dead at 76

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      Preferring the stage (and an office chair) to the recording studio, he enthralled audiences with ruminative performances that evoked the otherworldly.Radu Lupu, a pianist of rare refinement whose ruminative, enigmatic performances and recordings wove spells over his listeners, induced awe among his colleagues and confirmed him as one of the finest musicians ever to have graced his instrument, died on Sunday at his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was 76.His manager, Jenny Vogel, confirmed the death. She did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Lupu had struggled with a series of prolonged illnesses.The Romanian-born Mr. Lupu was no ordinary virtuoso. He was a conjurer of sounds, a spontaneous and sometimes eccentric player of patient lyricism and hypnotic tone, distinguished as much by his control over the ebbing of notes as by his fastidious initial touch.Uninterested in showmanship, with a wary stage presence and an allergy to public relations, Mr. Lupu shone in the music of the twilight, his rapt poetic sensibility working wonders in the shadowy ambiguities of Schubert and, above all, Brahms. The critic Fiona Maddocks once wrote that he appeared to take “aural dictation from the ether.”Quickly abandoning the dazzle of the Prokofiev Second Concerto with which he won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as a young musician in 1966, Mr. Lupu reportedly said that he would have liked to have made a career playing “nothing but slow movements.” He settled on a repertoire of the more reflective music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, with Debussy, Franck, Janacek and Bartok among the few other composers he added in concert.“The decision has nothing to do with music I like, but rather music that likes me,” Mr. Lupu explained to The Chicago Tribune in a rare interview in 1994. “I love Chopin, but when I play it, it has always sounded like Brahms or something. I play it more for myself.”Mr. Lupu in concert at Carnegie Hall in 2008. His fellow pianist Daniel Barenboim noted Mr. Lupu’s “ability to improvise as if he was discovering what he is doing at the spur of the moment.” G. Paul Burnett/The New York TimesWhatever Mr. Lupu played, he evoked the mystical, the otherworldly. He sat on an office chair rather than a piano bench, and he leaned ever so slightly back; he seemed less to produce his sound than to elicit it, though thunder was always available for him to summon when necessary.Critics marveled at the intimacy this apparently diffident figure could create. Writing in The New York Times in 1974, Allen Hughes called it “alchemy” — “that mysterious something that goes beyond technique, erudition and general musicality to reach into the sensibilities of listeners.”Mr. Lupu’s performances did not always come off, but his was playing of such an exalted quality that it intoxicated fellow pianists: Daniel Barenboim noted Mr. Lupu’s “ability to improvise as if he was discovering what he is doing at the spur of the moment.” Mitsuko Uchida called him “the most talented guy I have ever met.”For the pianist Kirill Gerstein, hearing Mr. Lupu was an experience that approached transcendence. “The instrument, the craftsmanship, even the compositions themselves recede into the background,” Mr. Gerstein wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2015, “and there remains a lone figure communicating not just music, but something deeply humane.”Radu Lupu was born on Nov. 30, 1945, in Galati, a city on the Danube near Romania’s border with the Soviet Union. He was the only child of Meyer Lupu, a lawyer, and Ana (Gabor) Lupu, who taught French.Radu barely spoke a word until he was almost 3; as he tended to sing rather than speak to express himself, his parents gave him a piano when he was 5. He took lessons from the age of 6.“But I did not really play the piano as an end in itself,” Mr. Lupu told The Christian Science Monitor in 1970. “I made tunes on it, and from the very beginning I regarded myself as a composer. I was sure, and everybody else was sure, that one day I would become a famous composer.”He gave up composing only when he was 16, four years after his professional debut as a pianist in Brasov, Romania. He trained at the Bucharest Conservatory with Florica Musicescu, who had previously taught another cultivated Romanian, Dinu Lipatti, to whom Mr. Lupu was sometimes compared. Mr. Lupu attended the Moscow Conservatory for much of the 1960s; his professors there included Heinrich Neuhaus, tutor to two temperamentally different artists, Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels.“I found even the most elementary rudiments of piano technique very difficult,” he confessed to The Monitor, “because this needed great self-discipline, and as for years I had imagined that I would one day become a composer, I had always felt that this sort of perfection wasn’t going to be needed.”Even so, Mr. Lupu placed fifth at the International Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna in 1965 before sweeping to victory at the Cliburn finals in Fort Worth the next year. “I really do not like competition at all,” he told the press then; he nonetheless shared first prize at the George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest in 1967 and triumphed at the Leeds International Piano Competition in England in 1969.Fanny Waterman, the founder of the Leeds, recalled Mr. Lupu inviting the jury to tell him which of the Beethoven concertos to play; they declined, and he won with the first movement of the Third. He recorded that Beethoven with Lawrence Foster and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970 — a prelude to his later complete survey of the five concertos with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic.Despite such successes, he already struck listeners as anything but a standard-issue product of the competition circuit. “He is somewhat different from the regulation contest winner, in that he is not primarily a brilliant and impeccable technician,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The Times of Mr. Lupu’s Carnegie Hall debut in April 1967. Harold Schonberg, also in The Times, thought the Brahms First Concerto, with which Mr. Lupu returned to the hall in 1972, “willful, episodic and mannered,” but allowed that it at least had “the virtue of not being stamped from the same old cookie cutter.”Mr. Lupu, who retired in 2019, made few recordings for a pianist of his stature; he admitted to tensing up in the presence of studio and even radio microphones. A boxed set of his solo releases on Decca runs to a mere 10 discs, the last from the mid-1990s. As well as further concertos, including Mozart, Schumann and Grieg, Mr. Lupu recorded duets with the violinists Szymon Goldberg and Kyung Wha Chung, and two-piano or four-hand works with Mr. Barenboim and Murray Perahia.If Mr. Lupu’s solo records capture only a hint of the aura he exhibited in concert, his ethereality is made close to tangible on several of them, including one of Schubert’s Impromptus from 1982 that draws impossible tension from the natural flow of its singing lines; a pair of Schubert sonatas that won a Grammy Award in 1996; and a collection of late Brahms from the 1970s that is suffused with such understanding, such light and shade, that the result, as the critic Alex Ross put it, comes “as close to musical perfection as you could ask.”Mr. Lupu married the cellist Elizabeth Wilson, a fellow student in Moscow, in 1971; their marriage ended in divorce. He was married to Delia Bugarin, a violinist, for 32 years. She survives him, along with a son, Daniel, and two grandchildren.Mr. Lupu’s critics sometimes accused him of looking aloof onstage, such was his focus on the music at hand. But speaking to The Chicago Tribune in 1994, he denied that he was playing only for himself.“The audience element is the most important element in the concert,” he said. “But it is also true that if I can make music for myself, even while practicing, and be moved by it, then that will project to the audience. So it may seem I am playing for myself, but it’s not quite like that.“Why should I make a big show of the whole thing?” More

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      DJ Kay Slay, Fiery Radio Star and Rap Mixtape Innovator, Dies at 55

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      The onetime graffiti artist and New York D.J. for Hot 97 was known for breaking artists and stoking beefs that gave fuel to the careers of Nas, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and more.DJ Kay Slay, who served as a crucial bridge between hip-hop generations, developing from a teenage B-boy and graffiti writer into an innovative New York radio personality known for his pugnacious mixtapes that stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business, died on Sunday in New York. He was 55.Slay had faced “a four-month battle with Covid-19,” his family said in a statement confirming his death.Few figures in hip-hop could trace their continued presence from the genre’s earliest days to the digital present like he could. In late-1970s New York, Slay was a young street artist known as Dez, plastering his spray-painted tag on building walls and subway cars, as chronicled in the cult documentaries “Wild Style” and “Style Wars.”Then he was the Drama King, a.k.a. Slap Your Favorite DJ, hosting the late-night “Drama Hour” on the influential radio station Hot 97 (WQHT 97.1 FM) for more than two decades before his illness took him off the air.“Cats know it’s no holds barred with me,” Slay told The New York Times in 2003, when the paper dubbed him “Hip-Hop’s One-Man Ministry of Insults.” In addition to providing a ring and roaring encouragement for battles between Jay-Z and Nas, 50 Cent and Ja Rule, Slay gave an early platform to local artists and crews like the Diplomats, G-Unit, Terror Squad and the rapper Papoose, both on his show and on the mixtapes that made his name as much as theirs.As mixtapes evolved from homemade D.J. blends on actual cassettes to a semiofficial promotional tool and underground economy of CDs sold on street corners, in flea markets, record stores, bodegas and barber shops, Slay advanced with the times, eventually releasing his own compilation albums on Columbia Records. Once illicit and unsanctioned, mixtapes now represent a vital piece of the music streaming economy, with artists and major labels releasing their own album-like official showcases that top the Billboard charts.“You were really the first to bring the personality to the mixtape,” Funkmaster Flex, a fellow Hot 97 D.J., once said to Slay during a radio interview. “That was very unusual. We were just used to the music and the exclusives.”Slay, who became immersed in drugs and spent time behind bars before making it in music, responded, “I had to find an angle and run with it.”He was born Keith Grayson in New York on Aug. 14, 1966, and raised in East Harlem. As a child, he was drawn to disco, dancing the Hustle; when early hip-hop D.J.s began turning breakbeats from those songs into proto-rap music, he traveled to the Bronx to observe and participate in the rising culture.“I had to see what was going on and bring it back to my borough,” he told Spin magazine in 2003. “So I used to hop on the 6 train and go up to the Bronx River Center [projects] to see Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation rock.”He soon took up the affiliated art forms of breakdancing and graffiti, even casually rapping with his friends. “Every element of the game, I participated in,” Slay told Flex. But street art became his chief passion, first under the tag Spade 429 and later Dez TFA, which he shortened to Dez.“I wanted a nice small name that I could get up everywhere and do it quick without getting grabbed,” he said at the time. “You’re telling the world something — like, I am somebody. I’m an artist.”Amid the city’s crackdown on graffiti, Dez took on the name Kay Slay (“After a while you get tired of writing the same name,” he said of his street-art days) and developed a fascination with turntables. “Boy, you better turntable those books,” he recalled his disappointed parents saying. But in need of money and with little interest in school, he soon turned to drugs and stickups.Kay Slay at MTV Studios in 2007. “The game was boring until I came around,” he said. Brian Ach/WireImageIn 1989, Slay was arrested and served a year in jail for drug possession with intent to sell. On getting out, he told Spin, “I started noticing Brucie B, Kid Capri, Ron G. They were doing mixtapes, doing parties and getting paid lovely.” He sold T-shirts, socks and jeans to buy D.J. equipment and worked at a Bronx facility that assisted people with H.I.V. and AIDS.“I can’t count the number of people I saw die,” he told The Times of that period. “Working there really made me begin to appreciate life.”In the mid-1990s, Slay found the professional music business still unwelcoming, and he began to call out, in colorful language on his releases, those label executives he thought of as useless. “I told myself I would be so big that one day the same people I was begging for records would be begging me to play their records,” he said.It was that irascible spirit that helped endear him to rappers who had their own scores to settle. In 2001, Slay had a breakthrough when he premiered “Ether,” the blistering Nas dis of Jay-Z that revitalized headline hip-hop beef following the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. His radio slots and mixtapes became a proving ground, and he later started a magazine called Straight Stuntin’.“He’s like the Jerry Springer of rap,” one D.J. told The Times. “All the fights happen on his show.”Slay’s gruff manner and mid-song shouts would go on to influence his contemporaries, like DJ Clue, a onetime rival, and those who followed, like DJ Whoo Kid and DJ Drama. Alberto Martinez, the Harlem drug dealer known as Alpo, who was killed last year while in witness protection, even hosted a Slay tape from prison.“The game was boring until I came around,” Slay said.He is survived by his mother, Sheila Grayson, along with his best friend and business manager Jarrod Whitaker.In Slay’s on-air conversation with Funkmaster Flex, the other D.J. marveled at the creativity of Slay’s boasts and threats — “If you stop the bank, then I’m gonna rob the bank!” — and asked his colleague if he ever regretted the shocking things he’d bellowed.“I said some foul things, man, on some mixtapes when I was not in full touch with myself,” Slay replied. “But I’m not angry at myself for doing it, because the boy that I was made the man I am today.” More

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      Citing Ukraine War, an American Resigns From Russia’s Mariinsky

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      “There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening,” said the conductor Gavriel Heine, a fixture at the prestigious Russian theater.The American conductor Gavriel Heine has been a fixture at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, for 15 years. He has led hundreds of performances of classics like “Swan Lake” and “The Rite of Spring.” And he has done so as a protégé of the company’s leader: Valery Gergiev.On Saturday, Mr. Heine went yet again to the Mariinsky, but not for an evening at the podium. He was there to inform Mr. Gergiev — a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that he was resigning from his post as one of the state-run theater’s resident conductors. Mr. Heine gathered his possessions, including a few white bow ties and scores for “La Bohème” and “The Turn of the Screw,” and prepared to leave the country.Mr. Heine, 47, had been increasingly disturbed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening in Ukraine,” he said during a series of interviews over the past week. “Russia is not a place where I want to raise my son. It’s not a place where I want my wife to be anymore. It’s not a place I want to be anymore.”His resignation comes as the war continues to upend performing arts. Cultural institutions in Europe and North America, vowing not to hire performers who support Mr. Putin, have severed ties with some artists — most notably Mr. Gergiev — as well as orchestras, theaters and ballet companies. Many artists, citing the invasion, have canceled appearances in Russia.Mr. Gergiev, the theater’s general and artistic director, was once one of the world’s busiest conductors, but his international career has crumbled. Carnegie Hall, for example, canceled a pair of concerts of the Mariinsky Orchestra under his baton that had been planned for May, after he had been dropped from a series of Vienna Philharmonic performances in February. He has returned in recent weeks to St. Petersburg to focus on that company and his domestic cultural empire, which encompasses several stages, thousands of employees and tens of millions of dollars in state financing.Valery Gergiev, a mentor of Mr. Heine’s and a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.James Hill for The New York TimesMr. Heine found Mr. Gergiev at the Mariinsky on Saturday, where he was leading rehearsals and performances of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” and Verdi’s “Attila.” He described repeatedly trying to catch his mentor backstage to inform him of his resignation, finally cornering him in an elevator.It was a quick conversation: five minutes while Mr. Gergiev was rushing to a meeting. Mr. Heine said that Mr. Gergiev seemed surprised but accepted his decision.“He was very nice to me,” Mr. Heine said. “He gave me a handshake and a hug and wished me well. And of course I thanked him for giving me such a huge chance pretty early in my career.”The two conductors also spoke about recent tensions between Russia and the West. Mr. Gergiev — who was fired from engagements in the United States and Europe, as well as from the podium of the Munich Philharmonic, over his refusal to publicly condemn the war — defended his decision, saying that he was not a child, Mr. Heine recalled.The Mariinsky declined to comment on Monday, and said it could not yet confirm Mr. Heine’s resignation. However, the company removed Mr. Heine’s biography from its website Monday evening.Mr. Heine’s departure from the Mariinsky is an unexpected conclusion to his three-decade career in Russia, where he studied with renowned teachers and rose to become a conductor at one of the country’s most prestigious houses. And his exit is another blow to Russian cultural institutions, which are grappling with boycotts and cancellations by foreign groups as the country’s arts increasingly turn inward under Mr. Putin. Mr. Gergiev remains a critical figure in Mr. Putin’s campaign. Mr. Putin, during a televised meeting last month, asked Mr. Gergiev whether he was interested in the idea of uniting the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the Mariinsky, an arrangement that would take Russia back to the days of the czars.“Russia is just going to be more and more closed,” said Simon Morrison, a music professor at Princeton University. “It’s going to revert more and more to its own true self, harsh as that might seem — a sealed-off, angry, paranoid and resentful feudal realm.”Mr. Heine, who grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., became interested in Russian culture as a teenager. He accompanied his mother, a pianist, to a performance in Moscow, and while there took cello lessons with a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.After high school, he returned to Russia for language and cultural studies. In 1998, he became one of the Moscow Conservatory’s first American graduates, then began to study with the eminent Russian conductor Ilya Musin, who also taught Mr. Gergiev.Mr. Heine leading the Mariinsky’s orchestra in 2017.Irina TumineneHis break came in 2007, when Mr. Heine approached Mr. Gergiev during a rehearsal in Philadelphia and asked him whether the Mariinsky had any openings. Mr. Heine was invited to make his debut at the theater later that year with Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and soon began to lead performances there regularly. In 2009, he was named a resident conductor.During his time at the Mariinsky, Mr. Heine was at the podium for over 850 performances and watched as the company grew in power and size under Mr. Gergiev. The arts and the state, Mr. Heine said he came to understand, were inexorably linked in Russia. He was in the theater on two occasions when Mr. Putin, the house’s main benefactor, appeared for awards ceremonies and other events.“I just assumed that culture is a priority for this government, for whatever reason,” he said. “And they feel very strongly about it, and that’s the relationship.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Harrison Birtwistle, Fiercely Modernist Composer, Dies at 87

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      His labyrinthine, theatrical works placed him in the first rank of 20th-century English composers, though his music was often tagged as “difficult.”Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England. He was 87.His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier.“I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999.What Mr. Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.”“This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.”Myth provided much of Mr. Birtwistle’s subject material. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene; it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008.“Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune.“One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.”Mr. Birtwistle’s interests were always primarily in drama and form, whether writing for the opera house or the concert hall. His compositions tended to be deeply ritualistic, as blocks of material were etched and etched again in sounds dominated by woodwind, brass and percussion.Orchestral players were sometimes treated as if they were akin to characters in a theater. In such works as “Verses for Ensembles” (1969), “Secret Theatre” (1984) and “Cortege” (2007), instrumentalists played musical and dramatic roles, moving between ensembles and around the stage. The moving “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (2009-10) engaged the soloist Christian Tetzlaff in a series of duets with individual players, dissecting and reforming the genre even while extending it.Mr. Birtwistle was inescapably an English composer, taking inspiration from distant predecessors, such as the Renaissance musician John Dowland, and incorporating even old techniques like the medieval hocket. He had no time for the pastorals of more recent forerunners like Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence on his earliest works was quickly abandoned.Mr. Birtwistle delved instead into the more harrowing side of nature, as in his unearthly “The Moth Requiem” (2012) for female voices, and the volcanic “Earth Dances” (1986), a vast score that divided the orchestra into six bubbling, geological “strata” of instruments, each erupting over separate time scales. It was often compared to Stravinsky’s classic “Rite of Spring.”“You can find Birtwistle’s music ‘difficult’ or not, or like one piece more than another,” the composer Oliver Knussen said in “Wild Tracks,” a diary of conversations between Mr. Birtwistle and the journalist Fiona Maddocks. “But it seems to me that you can’t be indifferent to it. And that’s the mark of a great artist, I think.”Mr. Birtwhistle, right, with the Hungarian conductor Péter Eötvös in London in 1988. Some performances of his work drew heckling.Neil Libbert/Camera Press LondonHarrison Birtwistle was born on July 15, 1934, in the mill town of Accrington, England, north of Manchester. He was the only child of Fred and Madge (Harrison) Birtwistle, who together ran a bakery.Harry, as Mr. Birtwistle was universally known, trained not as a composer but as a clarinetist, taking up the instrument at age 7 and first playing in the local military band and in small theaters. At the Royal Manchester College of Music, which he entered in 1952, he played clarinet in small contemporary music ensembles, some of the work written by his fellow students his fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who went onto significant careers of their own.The gritty urbanism and industrial brass of Mr. Birtwistle’s youth drew him to sounds he heard in avant-gardists like Stravinsky and Varèse, Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, who all became strong influences. (Mr. Boulez himself later conducted and recorded many of Birtwistle’s works.) But few of Mr. Birtwistle’s own early pieces survive, and his first published composition, “Refrains and Choruses,” was not given its premiere until 1959.After national service, for which he played in the band of the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957, Mr. Birtwistle took teaching jobs while continuing to compose. His breakthrough came in 1965, with the premiere of “Tragoedia” and the awarding of a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States. As a visiting fellow at Princeton University he completed “Punch and Judy,” a murderous operatic take on puppet shows that premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival in England. Britten, who died in 1976, reportedly left halfway through.Following spells teaching at Swarthmore and the State University of New York at Buffalo — the latter at the invitation of the composer Morton Feldman — Mr. Birtwistle was appointed the music director of the National Theater in London from 1975 to 1983. His scores for “Hamlet,” “Volpone” and Peter Hall’s production of the “Oresteia,” among other plays, were lost.Mr. Birtwistle cemented his reputation in the 1980s with an extraordinary series of scores that included the orchestral “Secret Theatre” and “Earth Dances” as well as “The Mask of Orpheus,” a four-hour masterpiece with a libretto by Peter Zinovieff. It was so elaborate that it took its composer more than a decade to write.“For Mr. Birtwistle, there is no ‘main action,’” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote after the premiere of “Orpheus” at the English National Opera in 1986. “He has deliberately thwarted the narrative flow, or even the epic progression, of normal opera in favor of a dizzying montage of flashbacks, repetitions, reconsiderations and parallel actions.”The music was “unrelentingly dense and driven” on a first hearing, Mr. Rockwell added. “But if one allows oneself to start accepting the opera’s gnomic conventions, its earnest search for the underlying truth behind our culture’s notions of music, poetry, sex, love and death take on an undeniable power.”Mr. Birtwistle’s work was always controversial. His “grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears,” as the critic Alex Ross wrote in 1995. For the 1994 revival of “Gawain” at Covent Garden, two antimodernist composers coordinated a heckling campaign against what one called Mr. Birtwistle’s “sonic sewage.”The following year, “Panic,” a raucous work for saxophone, drum kit and orchestra, was featured in the Last Night of the Proms. Its appearance in that traditionally jingoistic ceremony caused some in the press and the public to sputter with rage.“I was treading on a sacred cow and the attendant manure,” Mr. Birtwistle later joked. He denied that his music was all that difficult, and refused the premise of questions about the accessibility of his compositions. “Panic,” he laughed, was “the nearest piece I’ve got to fun!”Mr. Birtwistle, who was knighted in 1988, married Sheila Duff in 1959. She died in 2012. He is survived by three sons, Adam, Silas and Toby, and six grandchildren.Asked by Ms. Maddocks in 2013 whether there was a continuity in his life from his childhood to his years as a composer, Mr. Birtwistle, whose gruff public persona hid a warm and witty personality, said that he had “achieved much more than I ever imagined.”“I’ve never felt I had ambitions for myself, only for my idea, and for it materializing into something worthwhile,” he added, laughing.“But I’m still here, still trying. And I’m still exactly the same.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Lil Durk and Morgan Wallen Return to the Top of the Album Chart

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      The country star’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” has had tremendous staying power, landing at No. 2 in its 66th week out.The Chicago rap mainstay Lil Durk returns to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with his latest LP, “7220,” beating out new releases by Jack White and Fivio Foreign after its debut a month ago.But the greater accomplishment this week may be the continued staying power of Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which is No. 2 in its 66th week out.Released in January 2021, “Dangerous” held the No. 1 spot for its first 10 weeks, and has remained in the Top 10 every week but one, last December, when it was pushed out by holiday albums. Incredibly, 49 of its 66 weeks have been in the Top 5; quite a few of those were spent while Wallen was in a form of industry purgatory — removed from many radio playlists, ignored by the Grammy Awards — after he was caught on video using a racial slur. He apologized (more than once), though Wallen’s fans never gave up on him, and he has largely returned to the mainstream with a major tour.For its latest week, “Dangerous” had the equivalent of 46,500 sales in the United States, according to Luminate, the tracking service behind the Billboard charts. That means Wallen came within about 500 copies of retaking No. 1: Lil Durk’s “7220” was credited with 47,000. (Luminate’s publicly reported numbers are rounded.) Wallen may even have contributed to holding himself at second place: he is featured on “Broadway Girls,” the most popular cut on “7220.”In a slow sales week, however, neither total is impressive. The 47,000 equivalent sales figure for “7220” — which incorporates its 69 million streams and about 1,000 copies sold as a complete package — is the lowest for a No. 1 album in more than three years, since “Hoodie SZN” by the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie notched its third time at the top in February 2019 with similar numbers.Also this week, White’s “Fear of the Dawn” opens at No. 4 with 42,000 equivalents, including 24,000 copies sold on vinyl.The “Encanto” soundtrack is No. 3 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Two hip-hop albums open in the lower half of the Top 10: 42 Dugg and EST Gee’s “Last Ones Left” is No. 7, and Fivio Foreign’s debut studio album, “B.I.B.L.E.,” starts at No. 9. More

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      She Never Stopped Loving Otis Redding. Her City Never Stopped Needing Him.

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      The soul singer has been gone for more than half a century. Zelma Redding’s love affair with him — and his with Macon, Ga. — has never ended.MACON, Ga. — Zelma Redding is involved in one of those complicated long-term relationships — fueled by passion, pain and habit — that her husband, Otis Redding Jr., once sang about with the singular mix of combustibility and tenderness that made him a global star.Mrs. Redding, 79, still lives on the sprawling ranch outside of Macon, Ga., that Mr. Redding bought for his family in 1965, two years before his small private plane nose-dived into a Wisconsin lake on the way to a concert. She had him laid to rest next to her driveway by a stand of tall pine trees. Her name is carved into the empty tomb next to his.She likes the fact that she can see the graves from her living room window. In the 54 years since his death, she has not remarried.“Never will,” she said. “I love being Mrs. Otis Redding. I’m the only one.”When Zelma Redding looks out the living room window, she can see her husband’s grave. Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesSuch are the contours of Macon’s greatest contemporary love story. But for decades, it has also fallen to Mrs. Redding to manage another love story, this one involving her husband and Macon itself. Beset by poverty and bedeviled by the ghosts of segregation, Mr. Redding’s hometown, an old cotton hub 85 miles southeast of Atlanta, has long looked to the soul singer as a symbol of unity, holding up his tale of African American success as the best of what the city might be. For years, a portrait of the musician has been prominently displayed at Macon City Hall, as if the singer of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” were a founding father.Today, Mrs. Redding is preparing what is likely to be her life’s crowning project: a 9,000-square-foot educational complex that the family nonprofit, the Otis Redding Foundation, is planning to build downtown. Mrs. Redding has donated $1 million to buy the property. The new home of the Otis Redding Center for the Arts will be a place for children to learn, practice and perform, with scholarships for poor students — a machine, if such a thing is even possible, for turning out more Otis Reddings.After her husband’s death in December 1967, Mrs. Redding found herself, at age 25, terrified and grieving, without a high school diploma and responsible for raising the couple’s three small children. These days, locals refer to her as the Queen. The honorific suits her in many ways — not least because of her calculation, over the decades, that the Redding family should be deeply involved in Macon’s civic life yet somehow float above its politics and petty grievances, in keeping with her husband’s music, which was both apolitical and universally beloved.In a recent interview, Mrs. Redding, a diminutive woman with a quick wit and occasionally salty tongue, noted with pride that the new arts center would be on Cotton Avenue, in the heart of the city’s historic Black business district. A bronze statue of Mr. Redding at the center will stand three blocks from a towering Confederate statue.If Mrs. Redding sees her husband’s statue as a rejoinder to the Confederate monument, she does not let on. She can also be evasive when asked what it is like to miss him. To hold the grief at bay, she said, she keeps his memory close with a sea of mementos — at the couple’s old ranch house, and at the Otis Redding Foundation offices — though sometimes she imagines him alive and growing old with her.Otis Redding performing on stage, circa 1960.RB/Redferns“I tell my daughter all the time, I say, ‘Oh, Karla, I just wonder what Otis would look like. I’m almost 80. I got gray hair. I wonder would he have gray hair?’“Karla says, ‘Mama, what are you talking about?’”Mrs. Redding can still talk about him almost as if he were still alive, recreating their verbal sparring, the old push-pull tension of men and women bound together — the arguing, loving and working things out that was at the heart of so many songs in the blues and R&B canon.Their relationship was not perfect. According to a 2017 biography by Jonathan Gould, Mrs. Redding endured her husband’s infidelities as he ground out an incessant touring schedule. She knew what it was like to miss him long before he died; she once expressed her longing with a poem she gave him after he returned from a tour of Europe.“You ain’t no songwriter,” she recalled Mr. Redding saying as he took the poem. Eventually, he used it as the basis for “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” one of his most stirring ballads.Mrs. Redding noted that she received a writing credit for the song, which she did not know he had recorded until after he died. “Oh yeah,” she said, chuckling. “And I get paid.”Mr. Redding’s posthumous release “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1968. The next year, Mrs. Redding flew to Los Angeles and accepted two Grammy Awards on his behalf, self-conscious all the while about her Southern accent.But her vulnerability had always come with an independent streak: “I’m not your baby,” she told Mr. Redding when they first met, after he had dared to call her baby.Soon after his death, Mrs. Redding earned a high school equivalency degree, enrolled in business classes and went to work at a booking agency owned by Phil Walden, Mr. Redding’s former manager. She eventually opened her own booking business, then a record store, then a nightclub. Making sure her family was receiving the royalties and other payments due to them became a major preoccupation. She studied the sharks of the music business, and learned to swim with them.Zelma Redding at the Zelma Redding Theatrical Agency offices in the late 1970s.Family photoKarla Redding, Dexter Redding, Zelma Redding, and Otis Redding III at the Big O Ranch in the 1970s.Family photoRacial tensions, meanwhile, flared in Macon in the late 1960s and early ’70s, exacerbated at times by Mayor Ronnie Thompson. A flamboyant white gospel singer, Mr. Thompson once issued “shoot to kill” orders against Black activists and earned the nickname “Machine Gun” after firing on a suspected sniper during a particularly tense moment in July 1971, after declaring a state of emergency. But by 1974, on the seventh anniversary of Mr. Redding’s death, Mr. Thompson had invited Mrs. Redding to a ceremony in which he renamed a bridge across the Ocmulgee River in her husband’s honor.“Mayor Ronnie Thompson, according to most people in the community, was a stout racist,” said Karla Redding-Andrews, Mrs. Redding’s daughter. “But he loved Otis Redding.”After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, protesters in Macon demanded the removal of their city’s Confederate statuary. Mayor Lester Miller raised the possibility of having the Otis Redding statue replace the Confederate statue on Cotton Avenue, which was once the site of a major slave market.The family, which owns the Redding statue, said that was not its decision to make. Mrs. Redding said she did not want people in Macon to think the family “was pushing everything on them.”A Confederate statue stands next to the Otis Redding Foundation offices, the light tan building at right.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesThe Macon-Bibb County Commission voted to relocate the Confederate monument, although that plan has been postponed by a lawsuit filed by a group called the Military Order of the Stars and Bars.But it is the Otis Redding Foundation, and Mrs. Redding’s family, that has been more influential in setting the tone in modern Macon. Mrs. Redding’s children and her grandson Justin Andrews have been regulars on boards and commissions, addressing issues from downtown redevelopment to food insecurity. Since 2007, the foundation has offered music classes and arts camps to thousands of children.Mrs. Redding sees this as an extension of her husband’s loyalty to Macon, a sentiment that puzzled his pop-music contemporaries: In the 1960s there were certainly easier places for a famous Black man to settle down and raise a family. Mr. Gould, the biographer, noted that another hometown hero, Little Richard, was banned from the city stemming from a 1955 arrest on a “lewd conduct” charge. But Mr. Redding, who died at age 26, had co-founded a record label in the city and had dreamed of it becoming a hub of Southern musical creativity, a mini-Memphis in the heart of middle Georgia.The dream flourished, for a while, though in a curious way. In 1969, Mr. Walden co-founded Capricorn Records, promoting the Allman Brothers and a number of mostly white “Southern Rock” acts that were influenced by Black performers like Mr. Redding, but were sometimes marketed with Old South imagery like the Confederate battle flag. Today, a small downtown museum dedicated to Capricorn notes, in a wall display, that such imagery “complicates the legacy of an otherwise progressive label.”In addition to Mr. Redding’s commercial ambitions, Mrs. Redding said, her husband — who was, like her, a high school dropout — had also begun thinking hard before his death about philanthropic efforts geared toward children and education. In his absence, Mrs. Redding and her family have allowed themselves to to be creative about what it might mean to produce the next Otis Redding.Memorabilia adorns the Redding home and helps to hold Zelma Redding’s grief at bay.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesIn 2005, they learned that a local high school student of modest means named Roderick Cox was dreaming of studying French horn in college but did not own an instrument. Word got to Mrs. Redding. Mr. Cox got his horn. In November 2018, the Redding family was at Walt Disney Concert Hall to watch Mr. Cox, the recipient of that year’s Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic as it performed Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto and Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3.“I knew his mind, the way he thought,” Mrs. Redding said of her husband. “And if you love somebody, you’re going to always keep that in your mind — you know, ‘Otis did it this way, and I’m going to do it this way.’ And it worked.” More

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      Paul Siebel, Singer Whose Career Was Notable but Brief, Dies at 84

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      He arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-1960s and drew comparisons to Dylan. But he left the music business not long after.Paul Siebel, a folk singer and songwriter who drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in the 1960s and ’70s but dropped out of the music business, hindered by stage fright and disappointed by the lack of attention his work received, died on April 5 in hospice care in Centreville, Md. He was 84.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his nephew, Robert Woods, said. Mr. Siebel had lived in nearby Wye Mills.In the mid-1960s, Mr. Siebel (pronounced SEE-bel) moved from the folk music scene in Buffalo to the more thriving one in Greenwich Village.“He knocked me out,” the folk singer and multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg, who backed Mr. Siebel in performances and remained his friend for decades, said by phone. “He was a great singer and songwriter. But he had the worst stage fright of anyone I ever met. If not for the stage fright, he would have continued.”Mr. Siebel, whose music was infused with a country sound, sang in a nasal voice and wrote evocative songs with strong narratives. In “Louise,” his best-known composition, he sang about the death of a truck-stop prostitute:Well, they all said Louise was not half badIt was written on the walls and window shadesAnd how she’d act the little girlA deceiver, don’t believe her, that’s her tradeLinda Ronstadt, in her book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” (2013), recalled seeing Mr. Siebel at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1969.“We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise,” Ms. Ronstadt wrote.She recorded “Louise” and included it on her album “Silk Purse” (1970). It was subsequently covered by Bonnie Raitt, Leo Kottke and at least 20 other artists. Another of Mr. Siebel’s songs, “Spanish Johnny,” was recorded by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings and by Mr. Bromberg.Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra Records after Mr. Bromberg set up a concert for him at the Folklore Center, in Greenwich Village, so that Peter Siegel, a producer for the label, could hear him.When Mr. Siebel’s first album, “Woodsmoke & Oranges,” was released in 1970, Gregory McDonald, a critic for The Boston Globe, wrote that it “justifies his currently being compared with Bob Dylan.” He called Mr. Siebel “the big new name in folk music.”But “Woodsmoke & Oranges” did not sell well and neither did his follow-up album, “Jack-Knife Gypsy,” released the next year.There would be only one more, a live album recorded with Mr. Bromberg and the singer-songwriter Gary White in 1978 and released in 1981.“He was very critical of himself,” Mr. Bromberg said. “After those two albums, he wrote another bunch of songs, but he destroyed them. He said they weren’t as good as the ones on the albums.”By the early 1980s, he had left the business altogether.“I started drinking, things started coming apart,” he told the magazine American Songwriter in 2011. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted, and without that, how can you write? And then after a while I just couldn’t go out and do those same songs again and again. I soured. It soured.”Mr. Siebel in the 1970s. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted,” he said of his decision to leave the music business, “and without that, how can you write?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesPaul Karl Siebel was born on Sept. 19, 1937, in Buffalo. His father, Karl, was a farmer and restaurateur. His mother, Dorothy (Hosmer) Siebel, was a homemaker and seamstress.Paul studied classical violin as a child and later became proficient at the guitar. After attending what is now the University at Buffalo, he served in the Army in Europe before beginning to perform on the folk circuit in Buffalo. When he moved to New York City, he supported himself by working in a baby carriage factory in Brooklyn.Robert Zachary Jr., his manager, told Dirty Linen, a folk and world music magazine, in 1996 that, before Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra, he didn’t have a telephone. “I used to have to send him telegrams, you know, to get him to come uptown and see us and talk to us or sign a contract,” he said.After Mr. Siebel walked away from the music business, he became a bread baker for a restaurant and a county park worker in Maryland.He leaves no immediate survivors.Asked in 1996 how he thought he would be remembered, Mr. Siebel said: “He was a guy who wrote a couple of pretty good songs. What ever happened to him?” More

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      Art Rupe, Who Brought Rhythm and Blues to the Mainstream, Dies at 104

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      As the founder of the independent label Specialty Records, he helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era by signing performers like Little Richard.Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records, an innovative independent label based in Los Angeles that brought rhythm and blues into the mainstream and helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era with singers like Little Richard and Lloyd Price, died on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 104.His death was announced by his daughter, Beverly Rupe Schwarz.Mr. Rupe created Specialty in 1946 with a niche audience in mind (hence the name). The major labels of the time, focused on mass-market pop hits, ignored the urbanized, blues-based music that appealed to Black audiences in the big cities. Mr. Rupe hoped to capitalize on this oversight by showcasing acts with “a big-band sound expressed in a churchy way,” as he put it to Arnold Shaw, the author of “Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues” (1978).In the late 1940s and early ’50s, artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and Joe Liggins consistently put Specialty in the Top 10 of what were known as the “race record” charts until Billboard magazine began using the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949. In 1952, on a scouting trip to New Orleans, Mr. Rupe recorded Lloyd Price, then 19, singing his own composition, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” That record, which featured Fats Domino on piano, became the top-selling R&B record of the year and broke through to white listeners, too.Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. SpecialtyThree years later, Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. During a lunch break at a recording session in New Orleans, Little Richard sat down at the piano and shouted out a risqué song he used in his nightclub act: “Tutti Frutti.” With hastily rewritten lyrics, the song became one of rock’s early classics, and the first in a string of Little Richard hits that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille,” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”“Art Rupe had a tremendous impact on rock ’n’ roll,” said John Broven, the author of “Record Makers and Breakers” (2009), a history of early rock ’n’ roll’s independent record producers. “‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ was really the first record to cross over and reach a teenage white audience, and then came Little Richard with ‘Tutti-Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally.’ These were monumental records that almost created rock ’n’ roll in themselves.”Art Rupe was born Arthur Newton Goldberg on Sept. 5, 1917, in Greensburg, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McKeesport, where his father, David, was a salesman at a secondhand furniture store and his mother, Anna, was a music lover. After attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Miami University in Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939.He enrolled in business courses at U.C.L.A. with the idea of entering the film business; he also changed his last name to Rupe after being told by a relative that it had been the family’s original surname in Europe. After World War II broke out, he worked at a local shipyard on an engineering crew that tested Liberty ships.The movie business, he found, was tough to enter, and he shifted his attention to the recording industry. Responding to a newspaper ad, he invested $2,500 in a new label, Atlas Records, which lost most of his money and failed to produce hits by its two main artists, Nat King Cole and Frankie Laine.Roy Milton and His Solid Senders in a publicity photo. Mr. Milton, standing, a jump-blues singer, recorded numerous Top 10 R&B hits for Specialty.Courtesy of Colin EscottAfter selling his interest in Atlas for $600, Mr. Rupe created his own company, Juke Box Records, in 1944. “I called it Juke Box because the jukebox was the medium then for plugging records,” he told Arnold Shaw. “If you got a record into the boxes, it was tantamount to getting it on the top stations today.”Mr. Rupe was methodical. He bought $200 worth of race records and, stopwatch in hand, began analyzing musical structure, tempo and even titles to identify the common characteristics of the best-selling releases. Since the word “boogie” appeared in a disproportionate number of hit songs, Juke Box’s first record, an instrumental by the Sepia Tones, was given the title “Boogie No. 1.” It sold a more than respectable 70,000 copies, and Mr. Rupe was on his way.The jump-blues singer Roy Milton and his band, the Solid Senders, gave Juke Box its first big hit: “R.M. Blues,” released in 1945, which was said to have sold a million copies. Mr. Milton went on to record nearly 20 Top 10 R&B hits after following Mr. Rupe to Specialty, which he founded the next year after breaking with his Juke Box partners.In 1950 the pianist and bandleader Joe Liggins gave Specialty its first No. 1 hit, “Pink Champagne,” which became the top-selling R&B record of the year. Percy Mayfield, a singer and songwriter with a relaxed, swinging style who would later contribute “Hit the Road, Jack” and other songs to Ray Charles’s repertoire, topped the charts a year later with “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” Guitar Slim gave the label yet another No. 1 hit in 1954 with “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the earliest records to put the electric guitar front and center.“Specialty was a little like the Blue Note label in jazz,” said the singer and music historian Billy Vera, who produced “The Specialty Story,” a boxed set of the label’s best sides released in 1994, and wrote “Rip It Up: The Specialty Records Story,” published in 2019. “Art was dollar conscious, but he did not let that stop him from going into the better studios and taking the time to rehearse. He took great pride and care to make quality records with quality musicians.”Specialty exerted a powerful influence on the British invasion bands of the 1960s, and even its second-tier acts had a ripple effect. Larry Williams, a New Orleans singer groomed by Specialty to fill the void when Little Richard left the music business in 1957, had solid hits with “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie,” but even his lesser singles made an impression overseas. His single “She Said Yeah” was covered by the Rolling Stones and the Animals. The Beatles recorded three of his songs: “Bad Boy,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Slow Down.” Don and Dewey, another Specialty act, never had a hit, but their sound greatly influenced the Righteous Brothers and Sam and Dave.Mr. Rupe, a longtime fan of gospel music, quickly made Specialty’s gospel division an industry leader, signing the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, Alex Bradford, Brother Joe May and Sister Wynona Carr. Two of the label’s most famous gospel groups generated crossover stars for other labels: Sam Cooke became a pop star after leaving the Soul Stirrers, as did Lou Rawls, who recorded with the Chosen Gospel Singers.Mr. Cooke was the one that got away. In 1956, he recorded a pop tune, “Lovable,” produced by Specialty’s Bumps Blackwell with a lush background chorus and released with the singer’s name thinly disguised as Dale Cook. Mr. Rupe disliked the smooth pop treatment and let Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Cooke leave the label with the other recordings from that session in hand. One song, “You Send Me,” became a chart-topping hit and ignited Mr. Cooke’s remarkable career.“In all candor, I did not think ‘You Send Me’ was that great,” Mr. Rupe told an interviewer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. “I never dreamed it would be a multimillion seller.”Mr. Rupe in 2019. He sold Specialty’s catalog in 1990 and created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation in 1991.Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History CenterBy 1960, Mr. Rupe was growing disenchanted with the record business, particularly with the widespread system of payola, which required record companies to pay off disc jockeys and distributors to get their records heard.Increasingly, he let assistants like Harold Battiste, in New Orleans, and Sonny Bono, in Los Angeles, produce and market the label’s records. In 1990, he sold Specialty’s catalog to Fantasy RecordsWhile still at Specialty, Mr. Rupe invested successfully in oil and real estate and started his own oil company. In 1991 he created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, whose stated goals include “achieving positive social change by shining the light of truth on critical and controversial issues” and providing support for caregivers of people with dementia.In addition to his daughter — from the second of his three marriages, to Lee Apostoleris, which ended in divorce — Mr. Rupe is survived by a granddaughter; a step-grandson; and two step-great-granddaughters. His third wife, Dorothy Rupe, and three siblings died before him.In 2011, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame gave Mr. Rupe the Ahmet Ertegun Award for Lifetime Achievement, an honor given to record-company executives.“When I got into the business, few white people fooled around with this kind of music,” Mr. Rupe told Arnold Shaw. “I had no idea that it would ever appeal to so many white people.” More