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      On a Stage 5,000 Miles Away, He Sings for His Family in Ukraine

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      At the Metropolitan Opera, the bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi has become a symbol of his country’s struggles.Sometimes lately, when he hasn’t been rehearsing Verdi or Tchaikovsky at the Metropolitan Opera, or practicing Italian with a diction coach on Zoom, the bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi takes out his phone and sends a one-word text message: “Mama.”The message is meant for Buialskyi’s mother, who is more than 5,000 miles away in his hometown, Berdyansk, a small port city in Ukraine that has been under siege since the Russian invasion began last month. His mother has been unable to flee because she is caring for his grandmother, who is 88 and has difficulty walking. Anxious about his mother’s safety, Buialskyi sends her messages around the clock, awaiting the replies that confirm she remains safe and reachable.“It’s a huge nightmare,” said Buialskyi, 24, who is enrolled in the Met’s prestigious young artists program. “You wake up each day hoping it’s not real, but it’s still happening.”Since the start of the invasion, Buialskyi has become a symbol at the Met of his country’s struggles. On Monday, when the Met hosts a concert in support of Ukraine, he will be featured in a rendition of its national anthem. He played a similar role last month, at the outset of the invasion, when the chorus and orchestra performed the anthem before a performance of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.” Buialskyi — who was making his debut with the company in a small role that evening — stood center stage, his hand over his heart. Ukrainian news outlets later aired clips of the performance.Buialskyi, center, singing the Ukrainian national anthem with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and chorus on Feb. 28.Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan Opera, via Associated Press“It was incredibly moving, because you could see how much it meant to him,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “The fact that it was such an emotional experience for him made it even more emotional for me and the other members of the company.”Gelb said he hoped the performance of the anthem on Monday would “show the world and our audiences that we are in solidarity with Ukraine.”Buialskyi said he was uneasy about the attention. But he said he wants to use his platform to help his friends and family back home.“I hope it inspires people not to give up,” he said. “Even though I’m far away, I want to be doing what I can.”Buialskyi grew up in eastern Ukraine, along the Sea of Azov, in a city known for its beaches and its port, a hub for coal and grain exports. The only child of an accountant and a driver, he showed an early interest in singing. As a two-year-old, he mimicked jingles on television and sang Ukrainian folk songs.His mother initially had visions of sending him to a college specializing in automotive studies, worried about the career prospects for an artist. But she soon recognized his gift, and at 17 he began conservatory studies, practicing standards of the repertoire like “Largo al factotum,” from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” His idol was Muslim Magomayev, a pop and classical singer from Azerbaijan.He came to the Met in 2020 as part of its Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. The program’s participants take up tiny parts in Met productions, and this season Buialskyi is playing the role of a Flemish deputy in “Don Carlos” and a captain in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”Buialskyi rehearsing “Eugene Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne evening last month, on his way back to his apartment in Washington Heights after finishing up meetings at the Met, he got a call from his mother, who said she was hearing explosions. He checked news sites and soon realized that Moscow had begun invading Ukraine. Berdyansk is near the Russian border and was one of the first cities to be seized by Russian forces. Some citizens tried to resist the invasion by singing the Ukrainian national anthem, according to news reports.“I was just so scared,” Buialskyi said. “People who are not there right now still can’t believe that war is actually happening in our day and age.”His Met colleagues have rallied behind him, asking for updates on his family and donating to a crowdfunding effort he started to support Ukrainian families and soldiers. Russian artists at the Met have also reached out, he said, checking on his family’s safety.Melissa Wegner, the executive director of the Lindemann program, said she had been impressed with Buialskyi’s resolve in the face of trying circumstances.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 5Anna Netrebko. More

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      Unsuk Chin on the Violin Concerto She Swore She’d Never Write

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      Unsuk Chin was inspired by Leonidas Kavakos to return to the genre, and the result comes to Carnegie Hall on Monday.The 21st century has been a strong one for violin concertos. Think Jennifer Higdon, whose neo-Romantic showpiece for Hilary Hahn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. And Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Jörg Widmann (twice) and John Adams (the same).And also Unsuk Chin, whose exceptionally difficult, alluringly colorful 2001 concerto brought her prominence and won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004.That work, which still enchants, now has a successor, the Violin Concerto No. 2, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”). Despite the South Korean-born, Ligeti-taught Chin’s reluctance to write a second concerto for any instrument, she decided to make an exception for the violinist Leonidas Kavakos — who had met her but barely knew her music before she asked to write for him.After having its premiere delayed by the pandemic, the work was unveiled by the London Symphony Orchestra in January. It arrived in the United States last week for performances with another of its commissioners, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which joins Kavakos to perform the work under Andris Nelsons at Carnegie Hall on Monday, alongside Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” (That ensemble gives a concert performance of Berg’s “Wozzeck” at Carnegie the following night.)Pages from the manuscript of the new concerto, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”).Unsuk ChinHeard in Boston on March 4, Chin’s concerto is striking in the intensity of its demands on Kavakos and the novel breadth of the palette it invites the orchestra to play with, both of which are typical traits of her works. Also impressive is the sense of narrative it creates over half an hour as it builds out a motif of just five notes: a flourish of three harmonics that settles down to two more tones.It’s entirely different from Chin’s earlier violin concerto, but equally powerful, and another worthy addition to the growing list of contemporary contributions to its genre.Speaking by phone from Berlin, Chin spoke about the inspiration behind the work, and particularly about its opening page. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Since your first violin concerto, you have written several concertos for other instruments. Has your thinking about the concerto as a genre changed at all, in these intervening two decades?Before my first violin concerto I wrote my piano concerto, which for me is also a very important work. They were not written for a certain soloist; they were very abstract, written for the instrument, rather than a person. Then I wrote my cello concerto for Alban Gerhardt and “Su,” my sheng concerto, for Wu Wei. I also wrote a clarinet concerto for Kari Kriikku.So my musical thinking changed a little bit because I became interested in musical personalities. Before that I didn’t have so much contact with musicians. I thought about my musical ideas in my mind in a very abstract way and then wrote the pieces.But this second violin concerto is again another turning point for me, because I was really enthusiastic about Leonidas’s playing, and it was something I’d never heard before. He plays music at an absolute level.How does what you admire in his playing translate into the concerto?I know all Leonidas’s repertoire, but especially his Beethoven concerto and all the sonatas. For me, it was a completely new kind of interpretation, really convincing and really strong. Through Leonidas’s playing, I rediscovered Beethoven’s music. Very often Beethoven’s materials and themes are banal, very simple, not very interesting, but he made huge artworks out of these small cells, small motifs. Then I thought, OK, I will take some very small material and try to go deeper.The music is quite different from all my other concertos. In my other pieces I have lots of ideas and a lot of colors and many movements, but this piece is just one movement, the longest one-movement piece I’ve written. The basic material is also extremely small.The first page of the published score of the concerto, which begins with a five-note motif for the solo violin, alone.Boosey & HawkesWe hear that material right at the start of the piece, for violin alone. Where does this motif go over the course of the work?The cell in total is five notes, but the first three notes are a kind of grace note; the main notes are the two after that. At the beginning they are the same note, but soon after, it changes. A semitone comes from the first cell.This small cell, or fragment, is permanently repeated through the whole piece, but every time with a different face. Sometimes it’s very melodic, Romantic; sometimes it sounds tragic; sometimes it sounds like abstract architecture. It is always the same thing, but in different layers, with different faces. It goes from beginning to end, but there is also abrupt change.A lot of concertos pit the orchestra against the soloist, but I didn’t get the sense that is what you were aiming for here.In this concerto the most important thing is the solo violin. The orchestra sometimes gives the violinist different colors, but it is mostly supporting the violin — except in one section near the middle, where everyone is doing their own thing and the soloist does not get any support from the orchestra. That is a huge fight between him and the orchestra.Previously you had banned yourself from writing more than one concerto for a given instrument. You have now broken that rule once; can we expect you to return to the piano or cello?I don’t think so. This is a very special, exceptional case. I don’t think I will be able to write a second piano concerto, even a second cello concerto. But you never know. Maybe in 20 years. More

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      Traci Braxton, Television Personality and Singer, Dies at 50

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      She was perhaps best known for her appearances on the reality show “Braxton Family Values” with her siblings and their families.Traci Braxton, a television personality and singer, died on Saturday. She was 50.One of Ms. Braxton’s sisters, the singer Toni Braxton, confirmed her death in a statement from the Braxton family on Instagram. A cause of her death was not immediately available.“Needless to say, she was a bright light, a wonderful daughter, an amazing sister, a loving mother, wife, grandmother and a respected performer,” the statement said.The Braxton sisters, Toni, Traci, Tamar, Towanda and Trina, in “Braxton Family Values.”Chris Ragazzo/WE TVTraci Braxton was perhaps best known for her appearances on the reality television show “Braxton Family Values” with her sisters Tamar, Toni, Towanda and Trina and her brother, Michael, and their families.Ms. Braxton was referred to as the Wild Card on the show, which premiered on the WE tv network in 2011 and ran until late 2020. Ms. Braxton also appeared on “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars” with her husband, Kevin Surratt.Traci Renee Braxton was born on April 2, 1971, the third child of Michael and Evelyn.The Braxton children were raised in a religious household in Severn, Md. Their father was a part-time preacher who forbade the family to play secular music.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Braxton sang with her sisters as a teenager and a young adult, and the five together formed the Braxtons and released the single “Good Life” in 1990.Toni Braxton was plucked from the group to become a solo artist, and her debut album was met with acclaim when it was released in 1993.The other sisters continued as a group, except for Traci Braxton, who stepped away from the music industry in the 1990s to raise her son. She worked as a social worker before the sisters reunited for “Braxton Family Values.”On the show, she explored her decision to step away from music and the unresolved feelings she had about leaving it behind, setting her on a path to return to the industry. She released her solo debut album, “Crash & Burn,” in 2014, and a follow-up album, “On Earth,” in 2018.In February 2016, Ms. Braxton came forward as the voice behind a memorable moment in which a nameless person can be heard at a White House event yelling “Hey, Michelle,” at Michelle and Barack Obama.Mr. Obama responded, “We know it is Black History Month when you hear somebody say: ‘Hey, Michelle. Girl!’”Ms. Braxton acknowledged being the voice during an appearance on the talk show “The Real,” of which her sister, Tamar Braxton, was a host. More

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      Ron Miles, Understated Master of Jazz Cornet, Is Dead at 58

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      He enjoyed the admiration of his fellow musicians for decades, but he had just been starting to find his place in the spotlight.Ron Miles, whose gleaming, generously understated cornet playing made him one of the most rewarding bandleaders in contemporary jazz, if also one of its most easily overlooked, died on Tuesday at his home in Denver. He was 58.His label, Blue Note Records, said in an announcement that the cause was complications of a rare blood disorder. Mr. Miles had only recently gained the wider attention that he had long deserved, and his death proved as wrenching as it was unexpected for a jazz world already reeling from a cavalcade of untimely deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.The pianist Jason Moran paid tribute to Mr. Miles in a Facebook post, praising the spirit that he poured into both his compositions and his contributions to other people’s bands. “He’d make a chart with so much soul and simplicity,” Mr. Moran wrote. “And he would imbue any other song with that soulfulness as well. Every turn was original.”For decades, Mr. Miles enjoyed the admiration of insiders and fellow musicians and was known as a munificent educator and standard-bearer on the Denver scene. But his retiring personality and his relative absence from New York conspired with the resolute unflashiness of his playing to keep him out of the brightest spotlight. In his bands, the accompanists were often more famous than the leader.Only with the 2017 release of “I Am a Man,” a collection of seven inspired originals played by an all-star quintet, did the scope of his creativity gain wider recognition. Three years later, Blue Note released the quintet’s second album, “Rainbow Sign,” a set of languorous, poignant tunes that he had written while caring for his ailing father, who died in 2018.The title had a few levels of meaning for Mr. Miles, all of them intertwined. Referring to a passage in the Book of Revelation, when Christ perceives that his skin is multihued, Mr. Miles said the rainbow was a symbol of humanity’s oneness. “The idea of a rainbow is that it’s this thing that takes us outside of our expectations and our limitations of what we can see,” he told the Denver-based publication Westword.While grieving, Mr. Miles had also been drawn to mythology that sees rainbows as a gateway connecting the living to their ancestors. “Those who have left us can come back when we see a rainbow and visit us,” he said, “and we can interact with them through this rainbow.”Ronald Glen Miles was born in Indianapolis on May 9, 1963, to Jane and Fay Dooney Miles. When he was 11, his parents moved the family to Denver, hoping that the mile-high climate would help Ron cope with his asthma, and took jobs as civil servants there.He started playing trumpet in middle school, at a summer music program, and grew devoted to the instrument as a student at East High School. Mr. Miles played in the jazz band alongside the future actor Don Cheadle, who played saxophone, and soon began an apprenticeship with the respected Denver saxophonist Fred Hess.Mr. Miles and Mr. Hess would become collaborators, making a number of recordings together and both serving on the faculty of Metropolitan State University of Denver, where Mr. Miles eventually became director of jazz studies.After graduating from high school, he enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Denver, but soon transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder to study music. He went on to graduate school at the Manhattan School of Music; this was the only period he spent living outside Denver, where he would spend the rest of his career mentoring a generation of musicians — both on the live scene and in classrooms at Metropolitan State.On his first album, “Distance for Safety,” released in 1987, he led a hard-driving trumpet-bass-drums trio infused with equal doses of rock and free jazz. He went on to release a string of consistently unorthodox albums on various small labels, conforming to no favored format or style, including “Witness,” a 1989 quintet date, and “Heaven,” a 2002 duo record with the guitarist Bill Frisell.As Mr. Miles’s career went on, an expansive Rocky Mountain sound seeped ever more indelibly into his compositions and his playing, which was rough around the edges but balanced and controlled at its core. In the 2000s he switched fully from the trumpet to the cornet, a slightly less glamorous instrument that seemed to suit him.Unlike a typical East Coast trumpeter, he rarely flitted or zipped around on the instrument. He approached notes as if to disarm them, sometimes allowing tones to fill themselves out gradually, becoming wide and full and bright. The melodies he traced felt designed to be followed, even when they went fiendishly askew.By his mid-50s, Mr. Miles had become the leading brass player in what can now be considered a legitimate subgenre in jazz: the blending of American folk, blues and country with cool jazz and spiritual influences. One of its originators was Mr. Frisell, a Denver native 12 years older than Mr. Miles. In the 1990s and 2000s, the drummer Brian Blade and his Fellowship Band were its biggest exponents. Mr. Miles worked closely with both musicians.Mr. Miles performing at the Stone in New York in 2006.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesHe began collaborating with Mr. Frisell in the 1990s, playing first in the guitarist’s unusual quartet (joined by trombone and violin); they went on to appear in a variety of each other’s ensembles. Mr. Blade joined them in a trio under Mr. Miles’s direction that recorded a pair of arresting albums, “Quiver” (2012) and “Circuit Rider” (2014), before expanding into a quintet.With Mr. Moran added on piano and Thomas Morgan on bass, Mr. Miles composed for the band with each individual musician in mind. And he gave his side musicians full scores, rather than just individual parts, so they would see how all their voices would move together.The band became a darling of the jazz world, and “I Am a Man,” released on Enja/Yellowbird Records, garnered widespread acclaim. Mr. Miles made his first appearance as a leader at the Village Vanguard last year, playing the storied club’s reopening week after it had been shut down for a year and a half because of the coronavirus.Mr. Miles is survived by his wife, Kari Miles; his daughter, Justice Miles; his son, Honor Miles; his mother; his brother, Johnathan Miles; his sisters, Shari Miles-Cohen and Kelly West; and his half sister, Vicki M. Brown.Mr. Miles was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2017; that same year, he joined the saxophonist Joshua Redman in recording “Still Dreaming,” a tribute to the band Old and New Dreams, with Mr. Miles filling the trumpeter Don Cherry’s chair. The album earned him his lone Grammy nomination.Mr. Miles had also been a member of the pianist Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, an acclaimed avant-garde quintet; the violinist Jenny Scheinman’s groups; and the blues musician Otis Taylor’s backing band.A decade before Mr. Miles put together his quintet, the New York Times critic Nate Chinen, reviewing a performance with a sextet, made note of how selflessly he led his band. “Mr. Miles, who wrote most of the material for the group, appeared flatly uninterested in solo heroics; he was more intent on submerging himself in a sound,” Mr. Chinen wrote. “The songs felt like internal monologues in open spaces: careful and contemplative but free.” More

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      Bobbie Nelson, Longtime Pianist for Brother Willie, Dies at 91

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      They grew up together playing music, and in 1973 she became a core member of the band that would take Mr. Nelson to worldwide fame.Bobbie Nelson, the longtime piano player in her brother Willie’s band and a grounding influence in his life and music, died on Thursday in Austin, Texas. She was 91.Mr. Nelson’s publicist, Elaine Schock, confirmed the death.Ms. Nelson and her brother, who is two years younger, had been playing music together since they were children; their grandparents, who were raising them, introduced them to instruments. Bobbie was the more able musician, Mr. Nelson noted in his 2015 autobiography, “It’s a Long Story” (written with David Ritz).“Sister Bobbie’s vast musical mind could deal with all those white and black keys on the piano,” Mr. Nelson wrote. “She knew what to do with them. Six strings was about all I could handle.”Both of them played in the band of Bud Fletcher, whom Ms. Nelson married when she was a teenager. For a time, their career and domestic paths took them in different directions. But in the early 1970s, they both found themselves living in Austin, where Ms. Nelson was teaching piano and playing in lounges.“Then Willie signed with Atlantic Records and asked me if I wanted to do this gospel record with him,” she recounted in a 2008 interview with The Reno Gazette-Journal in Nevada. “I took my first airplane flight then and flew to New York City, and we did ‘The Troublemaker’ and ‘Shotgun Willie,’ and we’ve been playing together from that time on.”She became a foundational member of the Family, Mr. Nelson’s backing band, which he formed in 1973. The band helped rejuvenate his career, which had hit a plateau after a decade of working and recording in Nashville. As Mr. Nelson began to tour extensively and record albums like “Red Headed Stranger” (1975) that branched out from traditional country music, Ms. Nelson was at his side.“She is the best piano player for me,” he wrote in “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road,” a 2012 collection of miscellany. “She rolls with whatever I throw at her, and it doesn’t matter where I run off to in music, she is always there when I get back.”Ms. Nelson was generally content to be in her brother’s shadow, but she would occasionally take a more out-front role, as in 2014 when, billed as Willie Nelson and Sister Bobbie, the two of them released “December Day: Willie’s Stash Vol. 1,” an album of 18 of their favorite songs. James Beaty, reviewing it for The McAlester News-Capital & Democrat in Oklahoma, called it “as smooth as lightly falling snow and warm as a glowing fireplace on a winter’s afternoon.”They released other albums together as well, including several gospel records, and in 2007 Ms. Nelson released a solo album, “Audiobiography.” In 2020, they collaborated on the book “Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band,” (with Mr. Ritz), in which they told their intertwined life stories, alternating chapters.“Without my sister,” Mr. Nelson wrote in that book, “I’d never be where I am today.”Bobbie Lee Nelson was born on Jan. 1, 1931, in Abbott, Texas, north of Waco, to Ira and Myrle Nelson. They had married when they were teenagers, and soon after Willie was born they divorced and went their separate ways, leaving the children in the care of their grandparents Alfred and Nancy Nelson.“I believe my brother’s happy-go-lucky personality stayed happy-go-lucky because he wasn’t traumatized by the shock of our parents’ departure,” Ms. Nelson wrote in “Me and Sister Bobbie.” “He was too young to understand what was going on. But the trauma got to me.”As a child, Ms. Nelson was mesmerized by the pianist she saw in church each week.“I loved watching her fingers fly over the keys,” she wrote. “I watched her form the clusters of notes that I’d later learn were chords. I watched her, in short, make magic.”When she started playing herself, she wrote, “the piano felt like a friend.”Ms. Nelson and her brother played at local functions before landing in the Fletcher band. After her marriage to Mr. Fletcher ended — she would marry twice more — Ms. Nelson and her three sons ended up in Austin, where she played at piano bars and shopping center openings to make ends meet. When Mr. Nelson’s house in Nashville burned down, she urged him to join her in Austin. They had not played together publicly for years.“If I did come down,” Mr. Nelson recalled saying in his autobiography, “what would you think about playing with my band, Sis?”She replied: “I wouldn’t be thinking, Willie. I’d be crying with joy.”In addition to her brother, Ms. Nelson’s survivors include a son, Freddy, and a granddaughter. More

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      The Songs That Get Us Through It

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      The Delicious Misery of the ‘Sad Banger’

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Mitski Is More Than TikTok

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More