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      50 Years Later, the Rothko Chapel Meets a New Musical Match

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the chapel’s anniversary, is a tribute to the first music performed in the space.Before Tyshawn Sorey composed a note of his latest work, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, he spent hours inside its octagonal temple containing more than a dozen dark canvases.Immersing himself in Mark Rothko’s fields of seeming black, Sorey noticed that the paintings shifted subtly over time — and that time itself appeared to dissolve. The colors changed to match the sun coming through the chapel’s skylight. When he would go outside and return, his adjusting eyes made it feel as though the works were coming to life.Few people can give Rothko the time or space to perceive what Sorey saw. But “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” something of a sonic distillation of what he experienced, might give them an idea. Written for the chapel’s 50th anniversary — and delayed a year because of the pandemic — his new work will premiere there on Saturday, ahead of a staged presentation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this fall.The piece is in part a tribute to one of Sorey’s heroes, the composer Morton Feldman, whose “Rothko Chapel” was written in 1971 for the building, a project by the arts philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil. Feldman’s piece — scored for percussion, celesta, viola, choir and soprano — was an abstract analogue to Rothko’s canvases. Deceptively formless, it is music to be inhabited. But near the end, the viola plays what Feldman called a “quasi-Hebraic melody” that he composed as a teenager, an invocation of and memorial to his (and Rothko’s) heritage.The Feldman is “a special piece,” said Sarah Rothenberg, the artistic director of the presenting organization DaCamera, which, with the chapel, commissioned Sorey’s premiere. “It’s a remarkable synergy between space and music that has become a kind of ambassador.”In conceiving a 50th-anniversary commission, a new ambassador was desired. Sorey came to mind, Rothenberg said, because of how he engages with the history of Black Americans — a parallel to the chapel’s civil rights-minded mission. And his style, she knew, had been shaped by Feldman.Sorey, 41, was first exposed to Feldman’s music in college, when he heard his teacher Anton Vishio practicing “Piano.” “It was just beautiful,” Sorey said, adding that the music, its sonorities and its patience “really spoke to me more than anything else I was listening to at the time. Pretty much any composition I’ve written is in some ways inspired by Morton Feldman. It’s hard to shake off such an influence.”Maurice Peress conducting the premiere of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” in 1972.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Hickey-Roberston, via Rothko Chapel ArchivesAlong with other influences, including Roscoe Mitchell, Feldman taught Sorey the goal of reaching a place in music where time no longer seems to exist and a listener can become truly present in the moment. “Every sound has its own world at that point,” Sorey said. “You could talk about the technical parts, but the quality that I want to get out of it is presentness.”For “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” he chose virtually the same instrumentation as “Rothko Chapel” — in a way that the director Peter Sellars, who will stage the piece at the Armory, said reflects lineage in music, “how your granddaughter has your grandmother’s eyes.” But in lieu of the quasi-Hebraic melody, Sorey quotes, in his refracted style, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” He added a piano (played by Rothenberg, doubling on celesta) and changed the soprano soloist to a bass, which he felt better matched the tone of the paintings.Sellars recalled that when he went over the score with Sorey for the first time, they looked at the part and, more or less at the same time, said who they wanted to sing it: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Sorey has contributed treatments of spirituals to Tines’s “Mass” recital program, a collaboration that began after Tines first heard what would become “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” Sorey’s evening-length work inspired by the life of Josephine Baker, written for the soprano Julia Bullock.“I realized he was able to open meaning in text by recreating it in his voice,” Tines said. Together he and Sorey have revisited the catalog of spirituals, because, Tines said, “Tyshawn is able to reveal the truer psychology of what those songs mean.”The Rothko canvases, Sorey said, change color with the sun coming through the skylight.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFeldman referred to “Rothko Chapel” as a “secular service.” While Sorey emphasized that Feldman is just one of the influences on “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” the idea of a secular service is what he aims for; it’s why he prefers to call his performances rituals. And it permeates this work, beginning with the first measure: Lasting indefinitely, it is a dissolution of time in which tubular bells resonate at near silence, with pitches of two chords struck at random as the other performers enter the space.“It’s kind of a similar feeling to when I first walked into the chapel,” Sorey said. “It’s almost this cathartic sort of emotion, the moment you get when you walk in there; it’s like a religious experience. So by having the resonant sound happening, and you’re not sure what to make of it — it’s almost a ceremonial, spiritual thing going on. You’re eliminating any sort of external obstacles, for that type of clarity that I think Rothko was always going for in his art.”Once the choir joins later, its members sing without vibrato, staggering their breaths to create seamlessly suspended streams of sound that, Sorey said, are not unlike the paintings surrounding them.“To me, the voices are like these panels,” he added. “The sonorities are expressive, expressing a certain type of emotion, like tragedy or grief. So like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience. And I’m seeing the listener being surrounded by these ever-changing emotions.”“Like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience.”Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFew people — about 300 people over two performances — will get to experience the premiere this weekend. But there are plans to release an album of the work on the ECM label, as a follow-up to its 2015 release of “Rothko Chapel,” which featured artists, including Rothenberg, who return for “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Then, in late September, the piece will travel to the Armory, where the audience will be immersed in panels by Julie Mehretu, an artist whose abstractions share preoccupations with Sorey and Rothko. On the surface, this cavernous space could not be more different from the intimate chapel. But, Sellars said, “what’s beautiful about the Armory is, it can create the occasion for something.”He continued: “What Tyshawn is creating is memorial space. Rothko and Feldman created memorial space from silence, from grief, from darkness, where you could feel the presence of erased histories and erased lives that are nonetheless present and moving and speaking within these fields of darkness. ­Feldman and Rothko brought their histories to that space. And I think this group of artists will, too.”Details are still being worked out — such as whether to hide the choir — but at the very least, Sorey said, it will “become more intensified” than the presentation in Houston.“How can we make it more of a ritualistic or ceremonial event?” he added. “How can we intensify the spiritual, metaphysical matter in which the piece is received? That’s what I want: to really magnify that experience.” More

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      Review: Another Week, Another Philharmonic Podium Candidate

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the latest potential music director to lead the orchestra, in a program of Zibuokle Martinaityte, Strauss and Tchaikovsky.Jakub Hrusa and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, two of the world’s most respected rising maestros, keep ending up in close proximity. In 2017 they were simultaneously named the principal guest conductors of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. (Rouvali was elevated to that ensemble’s top post two years later.)When Rouvali made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in fall 2019, it was a week before Hrusa appeared there. And now they have returned to the orchestra, once again in tandem: Hrusa, 40, last week, and Rouvali, 36, on Thursday.Their appearances — and those of other Philharmonic guest conductors this season — are being closely watched since the announcement in September that Jaap van Zweden would be stepping down as music director in 2024. These two young, talented artists are among the prominent candidates to succeed him.Hrusa’s recent concert was, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times, “rich with novelty and spirited throughout.” Rouvali’s was, too — if not in its main offering, Tchaikovsky’s all too often played Fifth Symphony. But the program on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center began with the American premiere of a recent work by Zibuokle Martinaityte, and continued with a rare account of the full set of Strauss’s six Op. 68 songs, the “Brentano-Lieder.”Martinaityte’s dense, moody “Saudade” (2019) begins with a ceaselessly rocking motif and a quality of awakening, which is swiftly obscured by strange oscillations in the cellos and oozy, sliding dissonances in the violins.A passage of grumbling darkness becomes almost palpable, as in the unsettlingly visceral music of Ash Fure, before gradually expanding into a wailing full-orchestra crescendo. That climax comes about halfway through the 17-minute piece, which loses some urgency after, with droning tidal motions continuing to rise and fall, even if the colors in Martinaityte’s orchestral writing remain intriguingly agitated.Making her Philharmonic debut in the Strauss songs, the soprano Golda Schultz was — as in “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Metropolitan Opera last month — serene and confident, her voice silky and immaculate. You got a sense of why these pieces are not often performed as a group; a voice light and agile enough for the middle four songs can struggle with the grander ones that frame them.And Schultz, whose slender instrument sweetly penetrates but doesn’t exactly bloom, was not in her element for the rapturous opening “An die Nacht.” But with Rouvali softening the orchestra into intimacy, she brought characterful wit and zestful German to “Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden” and “Säus’le, liebe Myrte!” and Zerbinetta-esque dexterity to “Amor.”The closing “Lied der Frauen” wants tone a bit more majestic, but Schultz attacked it with gusto and brought gentle ambivalence to the end. And in “Als mir dein Lied erklang,” she was superb, singing with the combination of purity and humanity that characterizes the best Strauss ingénues.Throughout the evening, Rouvali stepped around the podium with a kind of cheery calm, like a genial general directing troop movements. He kept a precise beat, his left hand often clenched but for a pinpointing index finger.His Tchaikovsky was logical, restrained and orderly — and also relaxed and natural in its phrasing, as opposed to the mannered, manicured style that van Zweden often brings to the standard repertory. But the straightforwardness of this Fifth sometimes tipped into plainness, as when the strings in the first movement covered rebellious passages in the winds. It was a brisk account, neither particularly grand nor intense.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Romeo Santos’s Melodramatic Return, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jack Harlow, Flock of Dimes, Tame Impala and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Romeo Santos, ‘Sus Huellas’“Sus Huellas,” the first single from Romeo Santos’s forthcoming fifth solo album, “Formula, Vol. 3,” finds him reprising the bleeding-heart theatrics he’s known for, recalling the kind of cortavenas (roughly, “wrist cutting”) torment of bachata classics. This time, the genre’s white-pants-wearing, antics-obsessed lover boy is trying to recover from the despair of a lost love, and the melodrama is in overdrive: “Come, pull out my veins/Because the plasma inside of me has the poison of her love,” he sings. “And take this lighter, I want you to burn my lips/Eliminate the taste of her tongue, which did me harm.” It’s not all tradition though; Santos drops in an EDM interlude that will have uptown clubs losing it. ISABELIA HERRERAJack Harlow, ‘Nail Tech’Last year Jack Harlow went to No. 1 as the guest on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby,” and he’s learned something from that experience. “Nail Tech” has echoes of that song’s horns, and Harlow approaches the beat similarly, with imagistic rapping — “You ain’t one of my dogs, why do you hound us?” — and a confidence that makes this song sound like a victory lap. JON CARAMANICAC. Tangana, Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and Canelita, ‘La Culpa’The Spanish singer-rapper C. Tangana gets top billing on “La Culpa” (“The Blame”), a song added to the deluxe version of his 2021 Latin Grammy-winning album “El Madrileño.” But except for a brief, vulnerable bridge, he spends most of the song merged in harmony with three other singers who are more robust and closer to flamenco — Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and the especially gutsy Canelita — while rock drums and electric guitars join flamenco handclaps to pace the song. While the lyrics profess guilt and regret, they’re delivered with jolly camaraderie, suggesting that male bonding can easily overcome pangs of conscience. JON PARELESTame Impala, ‘The Boat I Row’Kevin Parker, a.k.a. the one-man studio band Tame Impala, took so long to release his 2020 album, “The Slow Rush,” that of course he had outtakes. “The Boat I Row” is from his collection “The Slow Rush B-Sides and Remixes.” It shares the album’s stately, logy, time-warped sound — psychedelically phased drums playing a hip-hop beat, multitracked vocal harmonies suggesting both the Beatles and ELO — and its thoughts about dogged persistence. “Even if it takes a hundred thousand goes/The way’s in front of me ’cause that’s the one I chose,” Parker sings, at once diffident and determined. PARELESFlock of Dimes, ‘Pure Love’Jenn Wasner, who records as Flock of Dimes, ponders unsatisfied desire — material and emotional — in “Pure Love,” recorded with the producer Nick Sanborn from Sylvan Esso: “I keep dreaming of a better moment,” she sings. She’s surrounded by looped voices and instruments, with ricocheting programmed beats that hit like 1980s drums; she sounds like she’ll persist. PARELESAsa, ‘Ocean’The songwriter Asa has forged a long career in Nigeria, singing about adversity and conflict as well as romance. But “Ocean” is pure affection. Asa is about to release her fifth studio album, “V,” and “Ocean” distills the ways Nigerian Afrobeats exalts Minimalism. The percussion is just a few syncopated taps, the bass lines are only two or three notes and Asa’s breathy voice floats with professions of pure devotion: “Boy, you are the ocean,” she coos, and everything about the song promises bliss. PARELESYeat featuring Young Thug, ‘Outsidë’Two generations of surrealists in one liquid pool of syllables. Yeat is still swooning over abstraction, and Young Thug, several years older, has learned how to form word-like shapes while still seeming to melt in real time. CARAMANICASigurd Hole, ‘The Presentation Dance’Like so many, the Norwegian bassist Sigurd Hole — a nimble-fingered player and a composer of sonically expansive, thoughtfully paced music — has been overcome with dismay at the fast-worsening climate crisis. Like too few, in the face of it he’s sought out wisdom and theory from non-industrialized societies. “The Presentation Dance” comes from his newest album, “Roraima,” which he made after reading “The Falling Sky,” a book by the Yanomami shaman and mouthpiece Davi Kopenawa. The rain-like pitter-patter of a marimba interacts with a small corps of strings, playing fluid and intertwined melodies that sometimes fall into a pizzicato repartee with the marimba’s mallets. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOEd Sheeran featuring Bring Me the Horizon, ‘Bad Habits’Last week Ed Sheeran released a new version of his song “The Joker and the Queen,” accompanied by Taylor Swift. Pfft. Predictably pretty. Plain. This is more like it. “Bad Habits” is maybe Sheeran’s most anodyne pop hit, and this version, which is theatrically stomped all over by the British metalcore band Bring Me the Horizon, rescues it, recalling the essential and overlooked “Punk Goes Pop” compilation series. CARAMANICAFrontperson, ‘Parade’Frontperson is the indie-rock duo of Kathryn Calder, from the New Pornographers, and Mark Hamilton, from Woodpigeon. Blooping, calliope-like keyboard arpeggios and layers of nonsense-syllable vocals give “Parade” a blithe, circusy tone as Calder and Hamilton sing about anticipation, connection and disconnection, accepting it all: “Sometimes you’re left/Sometimes you leave.” PARELESAmbar Lucid, ‘Dead Leaves’Ambar Lucid’s music bottles youthful longing. The 21-year-old, whose debut album, “Garden of Lucid,” collected stories about escape and radical self-acceptance, seems to know exactly how to stir the soul. “Should I even bother letting anybody know how I feel?” she wonders on “Dead Leaves.” It’s soft winter balladry that contains all the pain and promise of the change of seasons. HERRERAHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Jupiter’s Dance’“Jupiter’s Dance” is from the newly released “Life on Earth,” the seventh album Alynda Segarra has made as Hurray for the Riff Raff. The new songs contemplate the natural world and humanity’s toll on it. “Jupiter’s Dance” is a quasi-mystical reassurance — “Celestial children coming through/You never know who you’ll become” — with a glimmering bell tones and an undercurrent of Puerto Rican bomba, a brief benediction. PARELESJavon Jackson featuring Nikki Giovanni, ‘Night Song’The poet Nikki Giovanni selected the repertoire for “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni,” a new album by the strapping tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson that explores the lineage of Black American spirituals and hymns. But her voice appears on only one track, and it’s the one that’s not a church melody: “Night Song.” Rather that recite her own poetry, Giovanni sings this ode to unbelonging — a favorite of her old friend Nina Simone — with wistful conviction, picking up where Jackson’s gentle treatment of the melody leaves off. Her voice crinkles up on the high notes but loses none of its gravitas or tenderness as she sings: “Music, by the lonely sung/When you can’t help wondering:/Where do I belong?” RUSSONELLOChris Dingman, ‘Silently Beneath the Waves’For the vibraphonist Chris Dingman, solo playing was becoming central to his practice even before the pandemic hit. Since then, it’s been his primary mode, and he’s increasingly sought to use the big, chiming instrument as a vehicle for transcendence. That pursuit has guided him into a close study of a far tinier instrument: the mbira, a thumb piano with spiritual applications across southern Africa. On “Silently Beneath the Waves” — the opener to a new album of solo performances, “Journeys Vol. 1” — you can hear evidence of that research, as he repeats fetching, hypnotizing patterns that pull you into their force field before gradually giving way to a different shape. RUSSONELLO More

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      Spotify's Joe Rogan Deal Is Said to Be Worth Over $200 Million

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      It was the deal that helped make Spotify a podcasting giant, but has now put the company at the center of a fiery debate about misinformation and free speech.Spotify was already the king of music streaming. But to help propel the company into its next phase as an all-purpose audio juggernaut, and further challenge Apple and Google, it wanted a superstar podcaster, much as Howard Stern helped put satellite radio on the map in 2006. Spotify executives came to view Joe Rogan — a comedian and sports commentator whose no-holds-barred podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” was already a monster hit on YouTube — as that transformative star.In May 2020, after an intense courtship, Spotify announced a licensing agreement to host Mr. Rogan’s show exclusively. Although reported then to be worth more than $100 million, the true value of the deal that was negotiated at the time, which covered three and a half years, was at least $200 million, with the possibility of more, according to two people familiar with the details of the transaction who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it.But in recent weeks the show that helped Spotify catapult into a market leader for podcasts has also placed it at the center of the sort of cultural storm that has long engulfed Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, over questions about the responsibility tech behemoths have for the content on their platforms.It began when several prominent artists, led by Neil Young, took their music off the service to protest what they described as Covid vaccine misinformation on Mr. Rogan’s show. Then clips from old “Joe Rogan Experience” episodes caught fire on social media, showing him using a racial slur repeatedly and chuckling at jokes about sexual exploitation, prompting Mr. Rogan to apologize for his past use of the slur. A #DeleteSpotify social media campaign began calling for a boycott. And some Spotify podcasters publicly criticized Mr. Rogan and the platform.Spotify declined to make company executives available for interviews. Dustee Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to comment on the terms of Mr. Rogan’s deal. Representatives of Mr. Rogan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Even in the frothy podcast market, the deal for “The Joe Rogan Experience” was extraordinary. Spotify had purchased entire content companies, Gimlet Media and The Ringer, for slightly less than $200 million each, according to company filings.With tens of millions of listeners for its buzziest episodes, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is Spotify’s biggest podcast not only in the United States but in 92 other markets, with a following that hangs on every word of his hourslong shows. In its financial reports, Spotify cites podcasts — and Mr. Rogan’s show in particular — as a factor in the long-sought growth of its advertising business. At a recent company meeting, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, told employees that exclusive content like Mr. Rogan’s show is vital ammunition in Spotify’s competition against tech Goliaths like Apple and Google.“We’re not in the business of dictating the discourse that these creators want to have on their shows,” Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, told employees. But dozens of episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” were recently taken down.Lucas Jackson/ReutersAs Mr. Rogan faced growing public criticism, Spotify responded by reaffirming its commitment to free speech, even as dozens of Mr. Rogan’s past episodes have been removed. It also made its content guidelines public for the first time, said that it would add “content advisory” notices to episodes discussing the coronavirus and promised to contribute $100 million for work by creators “from historically marginalized groups.”The moves came as Spotify faced growing dissension among high-profile creators. This month Ava DuVernay, the film director who announced a podcast deal with Spotify a year ago but has yet to produce any content under it, severed her ties with Spotify, according to a statement from her production company, Array. And Jemele Hill, the former ESPN commentator, said that Spotify’s defense of Mr. Rogan had created problems with her audience, and raised questions about the sincerity of the company’s dedication to minority talent.“What I would like to see,” Ms. Hill said in an interview, “is for them to hand $100 million to somebody who is Black.”A Pivot to PodcastingFor Spotify, the move into podcasting is the culmination of years of strategy to find a business that is more profitable than hosting music, for which it must pay about two-thirds of every dollar to rights holders.The company dipped its toe into video around 2015, but little came of it. By 2018, the year Spotify listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, it was forming plans to pursue Mr. Rogan, hoping to supercharge its market position in non-music audio and to chip away at the dominance of Apple and Google’s YouTube.To make Spotify a player in podcasting, Mr. Ek and his deputies, including Dawn Ostroff, a former television and magazine publishing executive, and Courtney Holt, formerly of Maker Studios, an online video network, set out on a multipart strategy. Spotify would buy audio studios, like Gimlet, and acquire exclusive rights to existing shows. With Spotify Originals, the company would also create buzzy new programs in partnership with creators like Ms. DuVernay’s Array and Higher Ground, the production company of former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.Developing a portfolio of podcasts unique to Spotify, as Netflix had built a walled garden for video, was a key aim, according to several employees involved in the strategy discussions.“All music streaming services are offering the same plain vanilla ice cream at the same price,” said Will Page, Spotify’s former top economist, who was not involved in the Rogan deal but is a frequent commentator on the digital media business. “The overarching issue is how do you make your customer proposition distinct.”Growth StrategySpotify has greatly increased its podcast offerings in the last four years — a period of rapid growth in both users and revenue for the company. More

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      Rokia Koné, From Mali, Sings for the World. Especially Women.

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      Her international debut album, “Bamanan,” enlists an Irish producer, Jacknife Lee, for songs infused with African history and feminism.African musicians don’t need outside help. Lately, Nigerian Afrobeats, South African amapiano and other sleek, high-tech, thoroughly danceable styles have reached listeners worldwide without Western mediators. But the proof of a collaboration is in its sound, not its pedigree, and the album “Bamanan” is a transcontinental alliance that finds its own synergy.“Bamanan” pairs Rokia Koné — a songwriter and singer from Mali who was a core member of the West African collective Les Amazones d’Afrique on their 2017 album “Republique Amazone” — with Garret “Jacknife” Lee, an Irish producer who has worked with U2 and Taylor Swift and is now based in California.Koné’s voice rightfully leaps out of every song. Drawing on West African griot style, she sings with gritty insistence, building up to a sandpapery rasp when her melodies hit their peaks. Her Malian band provides percussion, backup vocals and barbed, modal lead guitar parts that hint at traditional African instruments. Lee adds keyboards, guitars and drumbeats, placing the songs in a swirling, spacious digital realm.It’s an equal partnership that’s clearly enacted in the opening song, “Bi Ye Tulonba Ye” (“Today Is a Great Party”), a call for unity and an end to disagreements. At the beginning, Koné’s vocals are an urgent incantation amid reverent, hovering synthesizer tones, with a steady beat that slowly reveals itself. But the song lifts off as her band joins in, surrounding her with rhythmic and melodic crosscurrents of percussion and guitars.“Bamanan” was constructed gradually and remotely; Koné and Lee never met in person while making the album. During the pandemic, sessions that Koné and her band had recorded in 2016 and 2018 — vocals in Paris, instruments in Mali — were sent to Lee after he heard Les Amazones when judging a remix contest. In 2020, Lee added instrumental parts and production to Koné’s sessions, and he collaborated on a new song with Koné, “N’yanyan.”Koné sang the vocals for “N’yanyan” in Mali in August 2020, on the day a coup toppled Mali’s government. Her melody is based on an ancient song; Lee’s production provides simple, sustained electric-piano chords. On a day of political upheaval, Koné thoughtfully counseled taking a long view while reflecting on mortality: “This life is passing/It’s only a moment in time,” she sang in Bambara, the language she uses throughout the album.Lee adds keyboards, guitars and drumbeats to Koné’s music, placing the songs in a swirling digital realm.Jackie RadinskyThe sweep of history and a sense of indignation both course through “Bamanan.” Although she does not come from a hereditary griot family, Koné writes like a griot: a cultural guardian recalling history and speaking as a community conscience. “Bamanan” is named after the Bamana Empire, two centuries when Bambara leaders ruled much of what is now Mali. “Anw Tile (It’s Our Time)” meshes modal guitar curlicues and glimmering synthesizers as Koné and her backup singers chronicle the empire’s leaders and geography: “This time is golden,” women’s voices declare in unison. “Those who missed it, it was a great time.”The album also extends the forthright feminism Koné shared with Les Amazones. “Mayougouba” (“Move, Dance”) joyfully tells women worldwide, “You’re perfect as you are.” The album’s most kinetic song, “Kurunba,” paces its call-and-response vocals with galloping percussion and quick synthesizer ripples, as Koné’s narrator rails at being cast aside by her husband after raising their child: “Now my child is of age/Suddenly the door is shut on me,” she reproaches.Koné also remade a song she brought to Les Amazones: “Mansa Soyari,” which celebrates female role models and insists, “A country isn’t great without women.” With Les Amazones, the song was swaggering, distorted, psychedelic rock; with Lee, it’s lighter, more syncopated and more transparent, invoking the kora (harp-guitar) patterns of griot songs, but also hinting at funk and flaunting some otherworldly digital manipulations. With its deep Bambara foundations, the song is certain of where it comes from; it’s just as certain that its passion will be understood anywhere.Rokia Koné & Jacknife Lee“Bamanan”(Real World) More

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      Leslie Parnas, Celebrated Cellist and Musical Diplomat, Dies at 90

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      His success at a competition in Moscow in 1962 earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.Leslie Parnas, a renowned cellist and teacher whose second-place award at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War helped propel him to a storied career, died on Feb. 1 at a rehabilitation facility in Venice, Fla. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his eldest son, Marcel, said.Mr. Parnas, who hailed from a family of musicians in St. Louis, was 30 when he won the silver medal at the second Tchaikovsky competition in 1962, the first time it included a cello category. His success in Moscow, where he performed for Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.He was the only American cellist to win a top award that year — the other winners were Russian — and his success came only four years after the pianist Van Cliburn clinched the gold medal at the first Tchaikovsky competition, which was viewed as an American triumph.Mr. Parnas, known for his lyrical playing, returned regularly to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s for concerts before large crowds. He studied Russian, offered advice to aspiring performers there and lobbied Soviet officials to send musicians to study in the United States. He later served as a juror for the Tchaikovsky competition.“When I play music,” he told The New York Times in 1978 during a visit to Leningrad, “it is not only an example of emotional freedom, but it is also a message for peace and for the right of each individual to express himself.”Mr. Parnas received the silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow from the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.via Parnas FamilyLeslie Parnas was born on Nov. 11, 1931, the son of Eli Parnas, who worked at a paper box factory and played the clarinet, and Etta (Engel) Parnas, a piano teacher.He began studying cello at a young age and made his debut at 14 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, playing Édouard Lalo’s cello concerto at a children’s concert. Two years later he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. He graduated in 1951.After a stint in the U.S. Navy Band, he returned to Missouri to serve as principal cellist in the St. Louis Symphony, a position he held from 1954 to 1962. From the outset, his talents were on display. When a soloist was late for a performance of the Brahms double concerto for violin and cello, Mr. Parnas stepped in at the last minute, dazzling the audience.He also caught the attention of the eminent cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, who presented him an award at an international cello competition in Paris in 1957.It was the beginning of a long friendship. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Casals collaborated in a variety of venues, including the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont and Mr. Casals’s festival in Puerto Rico.Mr. Casals, one of the most revered musicians of the 20th century, could be an intimidating figure. But he had a rapport with Mr. Parnas. During a class in 1961, Mr. Casals chastised Mr. Parnas for playing with too much vibrato. Without missing a beat, Mr. Parnas offered to sell him some.“None of us would ever have dared say something like that,” said Jaime Laredo, a violinist and conductor who often played with Mr. Parnas. “Leslie could get away with things like that. They had a mutual respect.”When Mr. Casals died in 1973, Mr. Parnas was a pallbearer at his funeral.The renowned musician Pablo Casals became a friend of Mr. Parnas, who was a pallbearer at his funeral.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesMr. Parnas honed a soaring sound in repertoire that ranged from Brahms to Shostakovich. He won praise for a 1964 recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with Mr. Laredo and the pianist Rudolf Serkin.He could be headstrong, changing tempos on a whim and instructing colleagues to play quietly during his solos.“He was a very instinctive player,” Mr. Laredo said. “He wasn’t that particular about following the score to the nth degree. He just played naturally.”He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1965, playing Schumann’s cello concerto. In his review, the Times music critic Howard Klein called him a “fiery and romantic cellist.”“Mr. Parnas did not play so much as he sang the work,” Mr. Klein wrote. “The daring way he dug into those high position passages added a gambler’s excitement.”Mr. Parnas became a fixture on the chamber music scene, including at Marlboro, where he performed for many years. He joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1969 as a founding member, helping cement its reputation as a magnet for top artists. From 1975 to 1984 he was artistic director of Kneisel Hall, a chamber music festival and school in Blue Hill, Maine.Ida Kavafian, a violinist and violist who played alongside Mr. Parnas in the early days of the Chamber Music Society, said his expressiveness was striking.“It was the kind of sound that would just wrap you up, envelop you, and you felt it was all around you,” she said. “It was an experience.”As his performance career waned, Mr. Parnas focused on teaching, including at Boston University, where he served as an adjunct associate professor of music from 1963 to 2013.Agnes Kim, a cellist who studied with him from 2004 to 2008, said he spoke often about the importance of not letting technique interfere with musical expression.“He was a legendary teacher, but to me he was never that faraway, mystical person,” she said. “He was just so friendly, so humble. He always had his playful grin every time I went to the classroom.”Along with his son Marcel, Mr. Parnas is survived by another son, Jean-Pierre, and four grandchildren, two of whom are professional musicians. He married Ingeburg Rathmann in 1961; she died of breast cancer in 2009.Marcel Parnas said that his father continued playing his 1698 Matteo Goffriller cello almost every day until late in life, and that he was especially fond of Bach’s cello suites.“For him, music was everything,” he said. “That was the way he lived: to play the cello.” More

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      His Conducting Wasn’t Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth.

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      Michael Gielen’s precise, intellectually charged work made him one of the most stimulating maestros of the 20th century. Now a set of 88 CDs offers the deepest insight yet.Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.“He looks like an academician,” Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielen’s New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. “His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.”A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler “was almost painfully literal.”“A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give,” he added.Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: “Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.”These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, “If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.”Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw” between its slow movement and its “Ode to Joy” finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.“Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth,” Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. “And that’s not always pleasant.”Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw”Gunter Reich, speaker; Stuttgart Radio Symphony (SWR Music)Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed “Michael Gielen Edition” from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductor’s work, from Bach to Zimmermann.Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 — and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 — in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found “eating well, or taking a good shower,” than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielen’s was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a répétiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Colón, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the “gigantomania” of Wilhelm Furtwängler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in 1950.Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.Lamentably little of Gielen’s operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater — or “director’s theater,” in which the director’s vision tends to dominate — hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could.Manfred Roth/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesFor Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Webern’s “Six Pieces” and Schubert’s “Rosamunde”; put Schoenberg’s more classically-inclined works next to Mozart’s more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenberg’s Expressionist monologue “Erwartung” before Beethoven’s “Eroica.”Gielen’s other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). “Putting on a wig doesn’t make me an 18th-century man,” he wrote in his memoirs.Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an “objective” interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahler’s Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielen’s conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielen’s predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music — one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. López’s astonishing “Dome Peak” and “Breath — Hammer — Lightning,” comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume — is a despairingly intense affair. Ligeti’s Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)But Gielen’s approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama” has never sounded so glorious.Gielen’s ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them — including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted — above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielen’s once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composer’s controversial metronome markings.That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethoven’s scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the “Eroica” was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a “new social existence” around individual dignity in its finale — he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly — the Fifth Symphony he believed a “terrible awakening.” The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but “affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror.” If his 1997 recording does not fully convince — it sounds empty, even barren — you suspect it’s not supposed to.Beethoven’s Fifth SymphonySWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. “You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century,” he wrote near the end of his autobiography.All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer. More

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      Beverly Ross, Teenage Songwriter in Rock ’n’ Roll’s Youth, Dies at 87

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      With hits like “Lollipop,” she became a top woman songwriter in the early 1960s, but she quit the business in frustration over the theft of her work.Beverly Ross, who with hits like “Lollipop” became one of the top women songwriters in rock ’n’ roll’s early years, but who ended her career early after a work relationship turned sour, died on Jan. 15 in a hospital in Nashville. She was 87.The cause was dementia, said her nephew, Cliff Stieglitz.While in high school, Ms. Ross would ride the bus from her family’s home in New Jersey to hang around the Brill Building, then the center of New York music publishing. There she managed to strike up conversations with songwriters like Julius Dixon.In 1954, when Ms. Ross was only 19, she collaborated with Mr. Dixon on her breakout song, “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere).” A recording of it by Bill Haley & His Comets reached No. 11 on the Billboard singles chart, just months before the band’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock ’n’ roll song to reach No. 1.Rolling Stone would later describe “Dim, Dim the Lights” as “the first ‘white’ song to cross over to R&B.” It had bluesy electric guitar riffs, a jaunty walking bass and lyrics of come-hither flirtatiousness, even as it maintained an adolescent innocence, inspired by high school crushes and party games like spin the bottle: “I’m full of soda and potato chips/But now I wanna get a taste/Of your sweet lips.”That combination of upbeat rhythms and lightly romantic themes became Ms. Ross’s formula.She and Mr. Dixon scored another hit with “Lollipop,” a song as sweet and compact as the titular candy. A 1958 recording by the Chordettes reached No. 2 and became an enduring pop-culture earworm, with appearances on “The Simpsons” and in a commercial for Dell computers.The Chordettes’ 1958 recording of “Lollipop,” which Ms. Ross wrote with Julius Dixon, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart and became an enduring pop-culture earworm.Denver Post via Getty ImagesBy the early 1960s Ms. Ross had become, along with Carole King and a few others, one of the top women writers in rock, “one of only a sprinkling of female writers to make it in a vehemently male structure,” Mark Ribowsky wrote in “He’s a Rebel: Phil Spector, Rock and Roll’s Legendary Producer” (2000).In a memoir published in 2013, Ms. Ross explained why she walked away from the music business.Ms. Ross also co-wrote songs recorded by stars like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. But in just a few years, her career would abruptly unravel.By Ms. Ross’s telling, in 1960 she struck up a working friendship with a then-obscure aspiring songwriter who stood to benefit from her clout: Phil Spector. The two worked on song ideas, cut a demo tape and confided in each other about troubles in their families. Ms. Ross introduced him to players in the industry.While they were tinkering with a riff together one night, Ms. Ross recalled, Mr. Spector suddenly declared he had business to attend to and ran out the door.Soon, Ms. Ross was shocked to hear the riff, in the hit song “Spanish Harlem” by Ben E. King. Mr. Spector had used it without giving Ms. Ross credit (he and Jerry Leiber were the credited writers) — and he had also begun to ignore her.From then on, she declined to work if it would bring her into the orbit of Mr. Spector, but she was still determined to prove she could write hits and co-wrote several more in the early ’60s, including “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” which as recorded by Lesley Gore reached No. 5.Then she quit, spiraling into what she described to Mr. Ribowsky as “a suicidal depression.”“This strange move I made away from the enormous acceptance and potential I’d worked so diligently to achieve left me hanging in nowheresville,” she wrote in a dishy, score-settling memoir, “I Was the First Woman Phil Spector Killed” (2013), “but I may have saved my sanity by doing it.”Yet Ms. Ross also lived with regret. “I should have just bowed down and realized I’d been asked to write for the ‘royalty of rock ’n’ roll,’” she wrote.Beverly Ross was born on Sept. 5, 1934, in Brooklyn and grew up in Lakewood, N.J. Her father, Aron, worked as a cobbler with his brother in New York City and then as a chicken farmer in Lakewood. Her mother, Rachel (Frank) Ross, worked as a bookkeeper for the shoe business and helped out at the farm.Bev, as she was called, aspired from a young age to a career in music, but she did not know how to get started. She encountered musicians who were performing at a hotel where her sister worked in Lakewood, and she struck a deal with one of them: He would tell her how to break into the industry if she set him up on a date with her sister.All the man had to do, it turned out, was inform Bev of the existence of the Brill Building.Ms. Ross’s burst of songwriting success gave her an income in royalties that she lived on comfortably. She resided for many years in an apartment on the Upper West Side, but later bought a house in Nashville and began writing country music.She is survived by her companion, Ferris Butler, a comedy writer. They married in the mid-1970s and later divorced, but they reconnected and were together for the final years of her life. More