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      Review: Beethoven Returns for the Age of Black Lives Matter

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      Heartbeat Opera’s powerful take on “Fidelio,” as an indictment of mass incarceration, has been revived and revised for a post-2020 world.Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” is hardly a fixed text. He wrote several possible overtures for it and reworked the score substantially over the course of a decade. But its meaning never changed: the heroism to be found in devotion, love and freedom in the face of injustice.In 2018, the daring and imaginative Heartbeat Opera — an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies — took the malleable history of “Fidelio” one step further, adapting the work as a moving indictment of mass incarceration.That production has now been revised for a revival that opened at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last weekend, ahead of a tour that continues through the end of the month. Already inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this “Fidelio” is now permeated with it, and the adaptation is even more powerful.Bannister, left, as Stan, an imprisoned Black Lives Matter activist, and Griffin as Leah, his wife, who plots to free him.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIn Beethoven’s original singspiel — a music theater form in which sung numbers are set up by spoken scenes — a woman named Leonore disguises herself as a man, Fidelio, to infiltrate the prison where her husband, Florestan, is being held for political reasons. She aims to free him from execution while exposing the crimes of his captor, Pizarro.Ethan Heard, a founder of Heartbeat, adapted “Fidelio” for the company and collaborated with the playwright Marcus Scott on the new book. Their revision tells the story of a Black Lives Matter activist named Stan — sung by Curtis Bannister, a tenor of impressive stamina — who has been imprisoned for nearly a year, and whose wife, Leah, given an affectingly agonized lower range by the soprano Kelly Griffin, is at a breaking point as she struggles to free him.She gets a job as a guard at the prison; her strategy to reach Stan in solitary confinement (much as in Beethoven’s original) is to ingratiate herself with a senior guard (here Roc, sung with both charm and dramatic complexity by the bass-baritone Derrell Acon) and court his daughter (here Marcy, smooth-voiced yet strong in the soprano Victoria Lawal’s portrayal). In this telling, there is no need for the cross-dressing: Marcy and Leah are both queer. And, crucially, all of these characters are Black, a fact that looms before guiding the awakenings of Marcy and her father as they face their complicity in a racist system that, Leah says, is designed to punish “people whose only mistake was being poor and Black.”Corey McKern, who plays a Trump-like Pizarro, with Acon, a senior prison guard.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe spoken text is in English throughout, while the arias remain in their original German — a testament to the timelessness of Beethoven, though the production’s surtitles take some liberties with the translation. (As an excuse for briefly letting the prisoners out into the sun, Roc sings that it’s the king’s name day, but the titles say that it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day.)Radically transformed, too, is the score, arranged by Daniel Schlosberg for two pianos, two horns, two cellos and percussion, with the multitasking (and nearly scene-stealing) Schlosberg onstage, conducting from the keyboard. Expressive cellos reveal the characters’ thoughts, and the horns add an aura of muscularity and honor. The most substantial interventions are in the percussion, with drum hits deployed to dramatic effect and a whiplike slap adding terror to Pizarro’s murder-plotting “Ha, welch’ ein Augenblick.”The soprano Victoria Lawal as Marcy, who awakens to her complicity in a racist system of mass incarceration.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNot all the changes from 2018 were necessary, or wise. Starting with the venue: This production originated in a black box space at Baruch Performing Arts Center, which fit the chamber scale of the music and emphasized the cinder-block claustrophobia of Reid Thompson’s set. At the Met, the show floats on an expansive stage and struggles with poor acoustics.And the text has lost some of its grace, with pandering references to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and President Donald J. Trump’s infamous call for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” A casualty of these lapses is the baritone Corey McKern’s Pizarro, who is something of a Trump stand-in, a caricature among nuanced, human characters.You could almost forgive that at “O welche Lust,” the famous prisoners’ chorus, still the emotional high point of the production and now a coup de théâtre. For the stirring number, Leah unlocks a chest — a metaphor for the prison gates — to release a white screen, on which a video is projected, featuring 100 incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles. The camera often lingers on individual faces, to an effect not unlike that of Barry Jenkins’s filmmaking, the way his sustained close-ups invite intimacy and, above all, sympathy.A hundred incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles, recorded and projected onstage, sing the famous prisoners’ chorus “O welche Lust.”Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFor curious audience members, Heartbeat has shared letters from some of the participants. They range from endearing — Michael “Black” Powell II’s “German was hard!!” — to profound, such as this from Douglass Elliott: “Most of us are victims of our circumstances who when faced with adversities chose the wrong direction with our actions. This choir makes us feel that ‘normal’ feeling for a short time every week. We are accepted as humans, not looked at as numbers.”Beethoven’s triumphant finale could have been an insult to the contemporary reality Heartbeat’s production aims to conjure. So after Stan is freed and Pizarro defeated, Leah awakes at the same desk where, in the opening, she has had a frustrating phone call with a lawyer. This twist, that it was all a dream, is of course a tired trope, but what follows isn’t.After a moment of despair — her happiness felt so real — she stands, steps to a spotlight at center stage and holds up her phone, assuming the pose of her husband’s activism, with which the production began. An ambivalent closing scene, it is an honest reflection of our time: of the mixed successes of Black Lives Matter, yes, and of the only possible way forward.FidelioPerformed at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Manhattan, and touring through Feb. 27; heartbeatopera.org. More

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      New York Artists in Need Can Apply for $1,000 a Month

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      A $125 million program offering guaranteed income to 2,400 artists across New York State who can demonstrate financial need is now accepting applications.The offers promise to appeal to struggling artists. One would provide $1,000 a month for 18 months, no strings attached, to make it easier to spend time on creative work. The other is for a $65,000-a-year job with a community-based organization or a municipality.Artists who live in New York State and can demonstrate financial need are being invited to apply for either beginning Monday as part of a new $125 million initiative called Creatives Rebuild New York that is being supported by several major foundations.The new initiative — which will provide monthly stipends to 2,400 New York artists, and jobs to another 300 — is the latest in a series of efforts around the country to give guaranteed income to artists. Programs are already underway in San Francisco, St. Paul, Minn., and elsewhere. The idea gained support during the pandemic, when live performances ground to a halt, galleries were closed, art fairs were canceled, and many art and music lessons were paused, leaving artists to suffer some of the worst job losses in the nation.“There are guaranteed income programs that have been launching across the country, many of them pilots to understand if this work has been working,” Sarah Calderon, the executive director of the program said in an interview. “Creatives Rebuild New York has seen that data and really believes that it does work.”The intention, Calderon said, is not just to generate guaranteed income for artists, but to make sure that any broader guaranteed income programs that are being considered take into account the needs of artists and the importance and value of their work.The program is supported with $115 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $5 million from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and $5 million from the Ford Foundation. Funds for the program are overseen by the Tides Center.Who can apply? The program’s definition of an artist is fairly broad, describing it as “someone who regularly engages in artistic or cultural practice” to express themselves, pass on traditional knowledge, offer cultural resources to their communities or work with communities toward social impacts. Disciplines that fall within its definition include crafts, dance, design, film, literary arts, media arts, music, oral tradition, social practice, theater, performance art, traditional arts, visual arts and interdisciplinary arts.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said that the idea stemmed from her work on a state panel, the Reimagine New York Commission, which brought together people from a wide array of fields to consider how the state should rebuild from the pandemic and become more equitable.“As we continue to envision and work towards our post-pandemic reality,” she said in a statement, “it’s critical that we not overlook the artist workers whose labor is an essential part of our economy and whose continued work sustains us.”Emil J. Kang, who directs the Mellon Foundation’s program for arts and culture, noted that many artists have to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet. With these programs, he said, hopefully they could devote more time to their art.“We need to actually value the hours and the labor that artists have put into their work that extends beyond what we see on these stages and gallery walls,” Kang said in an interview. “We need to understand that there is labor that goes into all these things that ultimately the public sees.”The program, which will accept applications through March 25, will attempt to reach communities that are historically underserved by philanthropy. The application process will include accommodations for non-English speakers, people with disabilities and those without internet access.“This isn’t just about the pandemic,” said Calderon, who added that the goal was to find new, better ways to support artists.“Often funding is merit-based, often funding involves rather burdensome processes to get the funds,” she said. “And often there’s not enough to go around.” More

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      Kodak Black Is Shot in Los Angeles

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      The rapper, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was shot in the leg while assisting another person after an “unprovoked attack,” his lawyer said.The rapper Kodak Black was among four people shot outside a party in Los Angeles early Saturday after what his lawyer said was an “unprovoked attack” on a person he was with at the time.The injuries were not life-threatening and no arrests have been made, the Los Angeles Police Department said on Sunday.Black, who was born Dieuson Octave and whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was sentenced in 2019 to nearly four years in prison on federal weapons charges. President Donald J. Trump commuted his sentence in January 2021, in his final hours in office.His lawyer, Brad Cohen, confirmed that Black was one of the shooting victims in a statement on Instagram on Sunday.There was “an unprovoked attack on an individual Kodak was with,” Cohen wrote. Black came to this person’s aid, Cohen said, and “several shots were fired at them by an unidentified assailant.”He added: “Kodak was struck in the leg. It was not life threatening, he will make a full recovery and he is in stable condition.”Cohen’s message on Instagram included a screen shot of an article from TMZ that said the shooting took place “right in front of a slew of celebs” who were attending a party after a Justin Bieber concert.TMZ said the party was at the Nice Guy, a bar and restaurant that describes its aesthetic as paying “homage to a decadent era of Mafia bars and restaurants.” The guests included Drake, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Kendall Jenner and Khloe Kardashian, TMZ reported.Cohen did not respond to questions about the shooting, and the police have released few details.The episode began around 2:45 a.m. local time when “a physical altercation between several individuals” erupted and gunshots were fired on the 400 block of North La Cienega Boulevard, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement.Two gunshot victims were taken to a hospital, the police said.At some point the police learned that there were two additional gunshot victims who had “self-transported to local hospitals,” according to the statement. “All four victims are listed in stable condition,” the police said.A police spokesman on Sunday said no information about the other victims was available.Black did not respond to a direct message on Instagram seeking comment on Sunday, but he did post a brief message about the Super Bowl to his more than four million followers on Twitter.Black, who is from Pompano Beach, Fla., topped the Billboard album charts in December 2018 with his album “Dying to Live” and has a new album scheduled for release on Feb. 25.In November 2019, he was sentenced to 46 months in prison after he admitted that he had lied on background check forms while buying firearms that year.Federal prosecutors in Miami said two of the guns were later found by the police at crime scenes, including one — with Black’s fingerprints and a live round in the chamber — that had been used to fire at a “rival rap artist.”Prosecutors had asked for him to be sentenced to 46 to 57 months in prison. In court, Black apologized and told the judge, “I do take full responsibility for my mishap,” The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported.U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno told the rapper: “Young people do stupid things. But the problem is that you’ve been doing stupid things since you were 15.” More

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      Review: An Audition Season Begins at the Philharmonic

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      Jakub Hrusa is the first of several guest conductors appearing with the orchestra in the coming weeks as it searches for its next music director.It’s audition season at the New York Philharmonic.Well, not officially. But ever since the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, announced that he would step down in 2024, every guest conductor’s appearance has carried the weight of speculation. When an outsider takes the podium these days, it’s hard to get through the concert without thinking: Could this be our future?And, for the next six weeks, the Philharmonic’s calendar is filled with nothing but guests.It began Thursday with Jakub Hrusa, a conductor with an ear for rarities and the skill to make persuasive cases for them. Next up are Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a charismatic and promising young talent; Manfred Honeck, a master of the standard repertory; Herbert Blomstedt, an elder statesman who, now in his mid-90s, is unlikely to be a music director again; and Gustavo Dudamel, who is being given substantial real estate with a Schumann festival in March. (That’s an awful lot of Y chromosomes, though other notable appearances in recent months have included Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young and Susanna Mälkki.)Hrusa last led the Philharmonic in 2019 — as it happens, at the end of another stretch of guest programs. Beyond bringing out a dynamic sound often absent from van Zweden’s indelicate style, Hrusa had a subtle gift then of giving the audience something it would enjoy but not necessarily ask for: Dvorak, say, but the underrated Sixth Symphony.That happened again with this week’s concerts at Alice Tully Hall. (I attended the one on Friday.) The evening had the surface-level same-old of dead European dudes — Central Europeans, to be exact — but was rich with novelty and spirited throughout, enough to inspire applause in the middle of a symphony. Two of the three works had never been played by the Philharmonic, and the centerpiece concerto, featuring the pianist Yuja Wang, hadn’t been on a subscription program since the 1980s.Even among those rarities were names you should but don’t see here often: Zoltan Kodaly and Bohuslav Martinu.Kodaly was represented by his Concerto for Orchestra, which premiered in 1941 — ahead of the more famous work of the same name by his Hungarian compatriot Bela Bartok. The piece harkens back to Bach, in its “Brandenburgs”-like treatment of the ensemble and contrapuntal writing, but with a folk flavor.Under Hrusa’s baton it had the feel of a festive opener, and the Philharmonic players responded accordingly: a big sound delivered at a breakneck pace, yet crisply articulated (which helps at Tully, whose acoustics tend to punish grandeur with muddle). The score is not without its swerves, though, and Hrusa navigated them by dropping to a whisper in an instant for lyrical, chamber-size passages and making space for intriguing sonorities that arose from, for example, the doubling of cello pizzicato in the bassoon.Martinu’s Symphony No. 1, from 1942, was comparatively quiet — at least at first, because Hrusa took a long, almost theatrical view of the piece, building toward a climax and threading the four discrete movements. With a soft approach, his opening, of upward chromatic scales passed around the orchestra, was a garden of strangely beautiful flowers in bloom.Those scales recur later, but Hrusa didn’t overemphasize them. Rather, they arose gracefully amid the work’s shifting character: the unsteady and rapidly escalating second movement, with strings given fleeting fragments of a phrase that could just as easily soar, the shards of a Dvorak melody; the thick textures of the darker third movement; and the dancing finale, in which even dolce passages sprint as if sprung.Yuja Wang performed Liszt’s First Piano Concerto wearing chunky white sunglasses — doctor’s orders, but readily accepted by an audience familiar with her blend of glamour and thoughtful artistry.Chris LeeIt was heartening to see that nearly all of the audience had stayed after intermission for the Martinu, given that the evening’s clearer selling point had come earlier: Wang playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat.Wang has Liszt’s storied star power as a performer: easily able to command a stage and entertainingly showy, yet sensitive and never excessively emotive. Her glamour is so established, she came out wearing chunky sunglasses — doctor’s orders as she recovers from a recent procedure — and the audience simply greeted it, with cheers, as a fashion statement.She played the opening with muscularity and precision, matched by the orchestra’s vigorous reading of the first movement’s theme. But later, in a nocturne-like solo, Wang exquisitely flipped the piece’s scale to that of an intimate recital. She made the concerto sound better than it actually is.In the spirit of Liszt, she returned with an encore of crowd-pleasing, breathless athleticism: the Toccatina from Kapustin’s Opus 40 Concert Etudes. But then she came back — still virtuosic, yet expressive and absolutely lovely — for Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” (Op. 67, No. 2). As she played, Hrusa listened from the conductor’s podium, his eyes closed and his head nodding in bliss, a stand-in for all of us there.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Shape-Shifting Opera Singer, With a Debut to Match

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      Marlis Petersen, one of the greatest acting talents in opera, prepares for Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case” in Berlin.BERLIN — You might know her as the world-famous diva Emilia Marty. Or as Ellian MacGregor — maybe even Eugenia Montez or Elsa Müller. It’s an open question in Janacek’s operatic thriller “The Makropulos Case,” about the twilight of a woman who has adopted an assortment of identities throughout her unnaturally long life.Her real name is Elina Makropulos, born 337 years ago on Crete and still going, thanks to an elixir her father tested on her as a teenager. She’s not so different from Marlis Petersen, the soprano playing the part in a new production that premieres at the Berlin State Opera on Sunday.OK, Petersen is a mere 54. But like Emilia, she comes from Greece, and is currently inhabiting just the latest in a long line of personas. There are few singers with Petersen’s dramatic ferocity and intelligence — who understand that opera is, fundamentally, theater.“In the beginning of my career, the singing was most important,” she said in a recent interview at the Berlin opera house. “Then the music became as important as the text, and then came playing the role. And I wouldn’t say it’s 33-33-33. It’s three times 100.”She loves, she added, to linger in and study the psychologies of women. It’s what has made her, despite a voice on the slender side, one of today’s greatest singer-actors — a small club with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Asmik Grigorian and Karita Mattila — and a director’s dream.“She’s in this extra class of singer,” said Claus Guth, who is directing the new “Makropulos Case.” “This is to a certain degree people with an energy and a little craziness, in a positive way. I would tell Marlis, ‘We do everything upside down and on the moon,’ and she would say, ‘Let’s go for it.’”Petersen playing the changeable diva Emilia Marty in the Berlin State Opera’s new production of Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case.”Monika RittershausPerhaps surprisingly, Petersen never studied acting beyond basic movement in school. “It’s like a gift from nature that I have,” she said. “It came to me by God.”Opera, too, was more of a random discovery than a deliberate plan. Born in Southern Germany, Petersen said music was “a big nothingness” in her house while she was growing up. She learned piano and flute, but didn’t hear much classical music; she listened to pop, but her parents considered a lot of it dirty, like her treasured ABBA cassette tape.Still, they were supportive, and Petersen’s piano teacher exposed her, she recalled, to “everything from Bach to Hindemith.” In a school music class, her voice was noticed, which led to singing in a church choir and learning the sacred repertory of Schubert, Mozart and more. When she was 15, her parents took her to her first opera, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” She fell asleep.“I didn’t understand anything,” Petersen said. “I came late to opera, actually.”That happened when she studied voice in Stuttgart, financing her education in part by performing in a cover band called Square on weekends. Petersen played keyboard and sang hits like Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love” and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” With a keyboardist colleague, she would do gigs that included performing “Starlight Express” on roller skates.“It was good training, because the nights were long and there was a bit of toughness involved,” Petersen said. She imitated the voices of the original singers, a skill that paid off later when she entered a competition with categories for classical repertory, then chansons and musical theater. She won the top prize in both, channeling Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” for her show tune.But once she turned 25, she focused entirely on opera. She joined the ensembles of houses in Nuremberg and Düsseldorf. As a light coloratura soprano she sang roles like Ännchen in “Der Freischütz” and Oscar in “Un Ballo in Maschera.” Then, in 2003, she went freelance.Petersen began to develop a more personal repertory, and signature roles. There was Susanna in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” whom she saw as a “quick, funny and inventive” kindred spirit. And the title antiheroine of Berg’s “Lulu,” which she sang in about 10 runs before retiring it at the Metropolitan Opera in 2015. That role, notorious for the complexity and extremity of its music and psychology, was, she said, “the big thing in my life.”There is a little of Lulu in Petersen’s Emilia Marty — the chilly pragmatism and canny manipulation — but she said that this debut has been a challenge. Her colleague Ludovit Ludha, however, who is singing Albert Gregor, Emilia’s pawn, in the production, said that when he first rehearsed with her, he asked her whether she was sure she had no Czech in her blood, she navigated the language so well.“In each rehearsal I was crying,” he added. “It’s basically unprofessional from my side, but she’s so impressive.”Guth’s staging is also tailored, in part, to Petersen. Handsomely designed and stylized, the production has a crucial intervention: a white void, occupied by Emilia in the opening and between acts.Claus Guth’s “Makropulos Case” staging includes a white space that Emilia Marty inhabits between the acts.Monika Rittershaus“There is no single moment where Emilia is alone,” Guth said, “She’s always playing a role. So I invented a special room for her, where we see the emptiness of someone who is going for 300 years through life.”Without music or text, these interludes depend entirely on Petersen’s silent acting. Dressed in a slip and mostly bald, with patches of wiry white hair, she wears Emilia’s true age on her face and throughout her body as she wearily dons the costume for the coming act. The scenes that follow are long decrescendos; always, by the end, her energy is depleted.“This,” Guth said, “is a very specific quality that only Marlis can give me.”Barrie Kosky, who directed her role debut as the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera last season — a production she returns to this spring — said that in the rehearsal room, “there’s never anything less than 100 percent,” adding: “There may be marking high notes, but there’s no marking with acting.”He recalled that in preparing the first act of “Der Rosenkavalier,” she began to eagerly eat a croissant when it was brought into the scene. She told him that if her character had been having sex all night, she would be starving.“I thought,” he said, “there is a God in the theater, and he’s given us Marlis Petersen.”Many of Petersen’s latest triumphs have been at the Bavarian State Opera, where last summer she was named Kammersängerin, designating a special relationship with the company — “an old title, but a lovely surprise,” she said. There, she found a partner in the conductor Kirill Petrenko, the house’s former music director, with whom she sang in “Lulu,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Strauss’s “Salome.”Around the time she was learning that opera, she bought a Harley-Davidson, which she named Salome. “I wanted to give her — yes, her — a fiery name,” Petersen said. The motorcycle is in Munich right now, but she otherwise keeps it with her in Greece, where she has lived since 2009: first in Athens, then in a house she built on land she has long owned in the Peloponnese.“I cry when I come home,” she said. “Whenever I board the plane, the tears begin. I need the sun as an inspiration.”Home is where she also keeps busy with her second calling: olive oil. Her region, she said, produces olives that are second only to those on Crete, and with the harvest on her property she makes oil that she sells, and gives away to friends. (Kosky has a small collection at his apartment in Berlin.)The label? In a coincidence that might remind you of “The Makropulos Case,” it’s called “Diva’s Elixir.” More

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      Jazz Freed Keith LaMar’s Soul. Can It Help Him Get Off Death Row?

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      With concerts and a new album, musicians are trying to draw attention to the case of an inmate, convicted in the death of five other prisoners, who they believe deserves a new trial.Keith LaMar has spent 33 years in prison, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. He is scheduled to be executed in Ohio next year, after being convicted in the 1993 killing of five fellow inmates during a prison riot.But a cadre of jazz musicians led by Albert Marquès, a pianist, composer and New York City schoolteacher, is convinced he is not guilty. And they’ve decided to put music to work as a tool to help LaMar, who they say was denied a fair trial in the inmate deaths and should be granted a new one.“I believe he’s innocent,” Marquès said in an interview. “But if you don’t believe that he’s innocent? Cool. Agree, at least, to judge him again. Reopen the case. Let him prove that what he tried to say, but he was not ever able to say, is false or true. Give him another chance.”For more than a year, Marquès has organized concerts to draw attention to LaMar’s case. He is part of a wider group of civic activists and lawyers — the “Justice for Keith LaMar” campaign — that argues the government illegally withheld inmate statements that could have helped LaMar at trial and offered inmates who testified against him leniency and special deals.LaMar, who was convicted in the 1993 deaths of five fellow inmates, has maintained his innocence through multiple appeals.  An impressive roster of jazz professionals, including Salim Washington, Brian Jackson, Arturo O’Farrill and Caroline Davis, have played at the Freedom First concerts, which began on a broiling afternoon in August 2020 at the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, where some 25 musicians performed in the middle of a pandemic. There had not been a single rehearsal. They had no permit. The sound equipment was cobbled together. The budget nonexistent.Three concerts later, Marquès and the others are producing an album this month in conjunction with LaMar. A year in the making, it will feature remarks and poetry by LaMar, a 10th grade dropout who has educated himself in prison by reading Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Cornel West, as well as jazz from sympathetic musicians who’ve recorded covers and fresh compositions from locations including Spain and Oregon.“To meet someone like Keith LaMar, who’s not only incarcerated, but on death row, unfairly, unjustly, it’s a heavy thing,” said Washington, a tenor saxophonist and jazz educator with a doctorate from Harvard. “But the warmth that he has as a human, and the elegance and eloquence that he has as a scholar, and just the charge that he has for himself, and that he’s able to exude to the rest of us, is a thing of beauty.”Beyond music’s primal power to sooth, energize and inspire, it has helped focus attention on the pleas of those incarcerated for crimes they say they did not commit. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer convicted of murder, spent almost a decade in prison before Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” raised the profile of his case. He was ultimately freed years later.Bob Dylan played “Hurricane” at a 1975 benefit concert for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter at Madison Square Garden.Larry Morris/The New York TimesCarter spent 19 years in prison. In 1985, a judge voided his conviction and ordered his release.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesMarquès, who by day leads the music department at the Institute for Collaborative Education in Manhattan, is not Bob Dylan. Still, his efforts drew nearly 100 people last November to the most recent Freedom First concert inside a black box theater at Northwestern University.When the prison riot erupted in 1993, LaMar, a former drug dealer, was serving an 18-years-to-life sentence after pleading guilty in 1989 to fatally shooting a man, a drug user and childhood friend, who he said had attempted to rob him.Authorities said that during the riot, LaMar became an enforcer and used the chaos of a cellblock takeover by other prisoners to kill inmates who some viewed as “snitches.”LaMar is adamant that he had no role in the killing of the inmates during what became known as the Lucasville prison uprising, an 11-day siege during which some inmates seized hostages and a cell block to protest conditions.Ten people, nine inmates and a guard, died.LaMar suggests he was a convenient scapegoat for officials, an inmate who loudly objected to prison conditions and who had refused to cooperate in the riot investigation.“I think they came to me under the impression that I would plead guilty,” LaMar said in an interview. “And I think that that was a way for them to really kind of sweep these cases under the table.”But multiple appeals court decisions have gone against him, and the prosecutors who handled the case, Bill Anderson and Seth Tieger, remain unswayed.“To Bill and I, he is extremely guilty, he is where he belongs: on death row,” Tieger said in an interview. “But all of this was brought out at the trial and in all of his different appeals, and nobody has believed that anything was done wrong at all, and that this death sentence has been upheld consistently all the way through this.”The riot at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility was triggered by the warden’s demand that inmates submit to tuberculosis testing that Sunni Muslim inmates objected to on religious grounds. LaMar was in a recreation yard, waiting to re-enter his cell block, when inmates inside overpowered the guards and took control. He said he briefly went in, intending to grab some personal belongings, but was told by one of the riot leaders that if he didn’t want to be involved in the takeover, he had to leave.The Freedom First concerts to benefit LaMar have been organized by Albert Marquès, a pianist and music teacher in New York.Danielle A. Scruggs for The New York Times“And so I came back out onto the yard without retrieving my property,” LaMar said. He said he remained there until two or three in the morning.Prosecutors said LaMar actually stayed inside the cell block, killing or ordering the killing of four inmates there, and a fifth inmate the next day after being placed in a separate cell block with other prisoners as the riot continued.In the aftermath of the chaos, the crime scenes were too contaminated for investigators to find forensic evidence, such as DNA, to help identify the killers. So witness statements became critical.But before the trial, when it came time to review who had identified LaMar in the killings, prosecutors balked at turning over the statements. All of the inmates had been promised confidentiality, they said.The prosecutors asked the judge to decide what information to give the defendant. The judge ruled that the names of 43 inmates who had been interviewed by investigators should be turned over to the defense. Separately, prosecutors were to turn over 11 pages of brief summaries, without any names attached.It was the defense’s job to figure out who had said what — a nearly impossible task, even with the additional time and funds the judge offered, said Herman Carson, one of LaMar’s trial lawyers.“That list of names and statements, it was like, ‘Judge, you could give me another five years; these guys aren’t going to talk if we just walk in there cold and say, ‘Hey, which one of these 43 statements did you make?’” Carson said.Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, and Justin Murray, an associate professor at New York Law School who researches disclosure disputes in criminal proceedings, called the judge’s decision unusual, one that unfairly handicapped LaMar’s lawyers.“People have tried to reopen the Lucasville cases, and it seems like the courts are just like, ‘Oh, this is that black hole called Lucasville,’” Godsey said. “‘We’re not going to look at it.’”Given the death of the prison guard, LaMar’s trial in 1995 was moved to avoid any prejudicial climate to the adjoining county, just 30 miles away and also overwhelmingly white. Prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove the only two Black potential jurors, so LaMar’s case was heard by an all-white jury.Eight inmates testified that LaMar was involved in the killings. Six, including Stacey Gordon, said LaMar had led the “death squad.” But a year earlier, Gordon had given a sworn statement to investigators in which he said he had not seen LaMar in the cell block, and that he did not know who LaMar was.That statement was never turned over to the defense, one of a number that defense lawyers have argued would have helped LaMar, but were withheld. Initially charged with attempted murder and seven counts of assault in connection with the riot, Gordon testified after reaching a plea agreement for only two assaults.Ten people died during the uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which lasted 11 days.  Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDana Hansen Chavis, a lawyer for LaMar, said Gordon’s statement could have been used to impeach his credibility and should have been turned over under the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.“Before we, as a society, actually go through with taking the life of another human being,” Chavis said in an interview, “I believe that we need to be absolutely sure that society has followed all of the rules in posing the punishment and is absolutely sure that that person is guilty of the crime.”The prosecutors said that they had not withheld any evidence that was exculpatory from LaMar’s lawyers.“They were very, very aggressive attorneys,” Tieger said. “And we turned over everything that we were required to under the rules of discovery.”LaMar took the stand at trial and testified that he had not been involved in the killings. Five inmates testified for the defense, four of whom said they had seen LaMar in the recreation yard shortly after the riot started. Two said they saw him in the yard throughout the day.But the jury ultimately convicted LaMar in the murders and sentenced him to death, a decision that has been upheld through several appeals.In ruling against LaMar, some appellate panels found that, even if the withheld evidence had been exculpatory, it would not have outweighed other evidence and led to a different verdict. Several found that any withheld evidence was not “material” to his defense because they said statements from inmates who implicated themselves or others in the killings did not preclude LaMar from having had a role, since so many prisoners had taken part.Dwayne Svette, the son of one of the inmates LaMar was convicted of killing, said those trying to help LaMar are misguided.“I understand,” Svette said, “that there’s been people on death row before and they’ve got released because some evidence came up where they was actually not the people who did the crime. But that’s not the case in this man.”The cover of the “Freedom First” album features LaMar, Marquès and the names of other musicians who contributed music as part of an effort to block the execution next year.For those who have taken up LaMar’s cause, the evidence that he has been treated unjustly appears quite substantial and they have been equally impressed by his drive to overturn the verdict. In 2013, he spent eight months writing “Condemned,” an autobiographical book that details his experience from the day of the uprising through his time on death row. LaMar wrote the memoir on a typewriter, then dictated the story over the phone to a friend who transcribed each word.During his time in prison, LaMar became a student of jazz, and credits the music — especially “A Love Supreme,” the jazz journey by John Coltrane — with teaching him to improvise, to avoid being engulfed by his own anger. The Coltrane work is often played at the Freedom First concerts.LaMar came to the attention of the musicians after talking to Mother Jones about his case and his experience in making the best use of his time while in solitary confinement. Brian Jackson, a jazz musician who frequently collaborated with Gil Scott-Heron, then reached out to LaMar and they created a podcast about music and justice that attracted additional interest.LaMar typically calls in to the Freedom First concerts from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown to say hello, offer remarks and poetry and listen to the music, his words at times interrupted by a tinny voice.“This call,” the voice says, “is originating from an Ohio correctional facility, and may be recorded and monitored.”On a bitterly cold Saturday in mid-November, LaMar called into the Northwestern theater outside Chicago for the most recent concert. He read poetry, both others’ and his own, like his poem “Tell ’Em the Truth.”Salim Washington performs at the Freedom First concert last November at the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center on the campus of Northwestern University. Danielle A. Scruggs for The New York Times“Children of slaves who braved the worst of it, so we, their children and grandchildren, could make the most of it,” LaMar read. “To shield us from the pain of knowing the truth, they never explained what kind of society we were born into.”The concert had opened with a Coltrane piece: “Alabama,” which some believe the jazz great wrote in response to the killing of four African American girls in a 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Later, the composer and alto saxophonist Caroline Davis blew the first haunting notes of “A Love Supreme” — the music that LaMar says freed him, at least internally.“This music was born out of suffering, I think,” Davis, a former composer-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, said in an interview. “That essence of it is what, in its musical form, people can feel. People can sense that suffering. But there’s also a lot of joy in the music.”Marquès said he is hopeful about the ability of the music to broaden support for LaMar’s case. But, he said, he had already benefited personally: LaMar, who he met in person last summer, has become one of his best friends.“There is a human connection,” he said, “that goes beyond those walls that are between us. And it’s very powerful. All of this comes from love.”Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Illinois. Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      For Three Avant-Garde Musicians, It’s Time for Pop

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      New albums by Jeff Tobias, Joseph White and Dave Ruder all have some experimental edges. But they also have catchy hooks.In his recent documentary about the Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes depicted both poles of that group’s creativity. There were moments featuring collaborations with experimental composers like La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, but also passages of fairly pure pop bliss.Subsequent generations of musicians in New York have demonstrated similarly diverse creative practices — take a trio of recent recordings produced by artists in their late 30s who are based in Brooklyn and Queens.Jeff Tobias’s “Recurring Dream,” Joseph White’s “The Wagging Craze” and Dave Ruder’s “not Great” all have some avant-garde edges. But they also have hooks — of the kind I’ve found myself humming on the subway in recent weeks. The new works don’t herald a total break with any of these composers’ past, noisier, more abrasive efforts. The present material is just what they happen to be up to right now.

      Recurring Dream by Jeff TobiasConsider “Our Very Recent Past,” the first track on Tobias’s set, which he released on his own label in January. Over a repeating, fuzzed-out keyboard figure, this multi-instrumentalist initially uses a mellow approach to vocals, suggestive of the gentler corners of indie rock. But the lilting melody is in productive tension with the grim lyrics, nearly every word drawn out as though it were a somber proclamation: “By the time we figured out who the real fascists were, it was too late.”And then within that same first minute, there’s an entrance worthy of stadium rock, as Tobias’s stentorian yet sumptuous bass clarinet tone joins the arrangement. (The drumming, by Nick Podgurski, also summons you from your seat.) If the lyrics’ probing political sobriety might come across as something of a bummer, the music’s rousing invention is a kind of reminder not to curdle into passive cynicism.The album only becomes more playful as it progresses, even as the tight focus on contemporary ills hangs around. A track like “Transparency” has a touch of piano-driven rock ’n’ roll swing to it, but also a brief section of scorching reed textures — a nod to Tobias’s experience working in punk and free-jazz outfits. (Tobias will a lead a full band in this material at Roulette on March 1.)In an interview, he described the song “We’re Here to Help” — which follows a series of characters suffering from “money sickness” — as an “expropriation anthem,” even as it offers a modicum of pity for the greedy. The subjects include a financial wizard who pays no taxes — “his money lived in museums / his money lived on a dot / somewhere in the ocean” — as well as a woman who intends to “work around human rights” but winds up a consultant instead. (“Incidentally she never helped a single person,” the singer dryly observes over an up-tempo beat.)“I work on music, I work odd jobs, and I drink coffee and read the news until my head explodes,” Tobias said with a laugh in the interview. “So the lyrics are what’s on my mind, really and truly.”But, he added, when it came the music, “I was just enjoying myself; I was having a blast.”A live performance of Joseph White’s “The Wagging Craze,” which has recently been released as a recording.Ben AronsA similar sense of delight permeates “The Wagging Craze,” a theatrical piece White performed as a one-man show at Ars Nova in 2019. On the recording, released in December on the Gold Bolus label, there’s joy to be had in listening for the steadily morphing electronic music underneath the narration. Its fictional story revolves around a male-bonding exercise at college fraternities in the 1960s — involving a “a very complicated system of pulleys and levers” — that manages to attract the critical scrutiny of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.Structured around a series of faux-redacted documents, what White calls a radio opera has some compelling tunes. As Lyndon B. Johnson shifts away from his typically hard-driving Congressional negotiations, he also starts to record his own pop songs, like “New Motion.” Here, the president muses about loosening his grip on political power: “Let the world spin / let Nixon win / ’cause I’m a man with a body / and no one can stop me / with my wagging gang of guys, no misfortune can top me.”

      The Wagging Craze – Original Cast Recording by Joseph WhiteThe president’s little aria has a finger-snapping charm, as well as flights of complexity. As Johnson starts to free associate about “boys smoking reefer, burning sage / naked girls shaking bells / indulging in strange smells,” White deviates from his established chord and rhythm patterns. In an email, he said, “My freewheeling approach to songwriting, and interest in looking under the hood of traditional masculinity, flow from the belief that we should have the freedom to crack open these formal structures and see if they’re really still necessary.”Ruder, a composer and performer who also runs the Gold Bolus label, said that his early looks at White’s songs have been useful for his own process, as he was working on his own new material. He released “not Great,” his latest collection of songs, late last fall. Humor and structural invention play crucial role here, too, though with more inward cast than the albums by Tobias and White.

      not Great by Dave RuderOn a track like “Pious Rious,” pop culture ephemera is collected and jettisoned over strings, keyboard, clarinet and some syncopated guitar: “We got erased while watching old movies / The heroes were stupid / Archetypes ever-present and unavoidable / So we taped them over / With reruns of ‘She-Ra’ / This time I’ll be Skeletor.”Ruder said in an interview that while he sometimes writes with the hopes of creating a pop megahit, he keeps finding that “things just can’t be simple. The verse has to have one extra bar the second time it happens, and the next time it’s just got to have one random bit of 2/4 in there.”That’s all to the good. We already have a Max Martin, after all. But Ruder’s songs — like those of Tobias and White — fill a niche in the experimental music realm. And they enhance a listener’s appreciation of these artists’ other pursuits: Tobias’s scabrous improvised saxophone duets with Patrick Shiroishi, Ruder’s writing for detuned guitars, White’s sound-walk collaborations with the singer Gelsey Bell.When I started listening to these records, I wasn’t aware of the extent of the cross-pollination among them. Ruder provides guest vocals on Tobias’s album, and released White’s on Gold Bolus. But the associations go deeper. In our interview, Tobias described how, early in his time studying at Brooklyn College, he saw a mysterious ad for a musical collective. It simply read: “Sweat Lodge thinks you’re cool.”When Tobias went to a Sweat Lodge performance, he found that the collective included Ruder and White. Both of them were engaged in the performance of an experimental Alvin Lucier piece, across multiple floors of a stairwell in the building.“These are my people,” Tobias recalled telling himself. “This is the crew doing the work that I want to be around.”That crew’s warm, welcoming approach is still an attractive proposition for new listeners. More

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      To Lure Back Audiences, Spoleto Festival Plans an Ambitious Season

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      The performing arts group in Charleston, S.C., will host 120 events in May and June, its first full season since the start of the pandemic.After two years of disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C, announced on Friday an ambitious season that it hopes will bring audiences back to live performances.The season, the first under Spoleto’s new general director, Mena Mark Hanna, will feature more than 120 opera, theater, dance and music performances across 17 days in May and June. The highlights include the world premiere of “Omar,” an opera by the musician Rhiannon Giddens about a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807.Hanna, the first person of color to lead Spoleto in its 45-year history, said the group hoped to offer a platform to overlooked artists.“We want art to be more than something that expresses received traditions, or something that is a reinforcement of a received canon,” Hanna, the son of Egyptian immigrants, said in an interview. “We want art to have this potential to bridge differences through its transformational power.”Other highlights include the premiere of “Unholy Wars,” an opera by Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese American tenor, which tells the story of the Crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective, drawing on music by early Baroque composers. “The Street,” a new work for harp by the composer Nico Muhly will have its American premiere at the festival, featuring text by the librettist Alice Goodman.The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Spoleto Festival in 2020. Last year, the festival returned with a pared-down season; ticket sales were down 70 percent compared with before the pandemic amid lingering concerns about the virus.Hanna said he was optimistic audiences would return in force this year as the Omicron variant recedes. The festival plans to require audience members to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, and to wear masks.“This is truly about us saying to the world, ‘We have wanted this, we have needed this,’” he said. “That sense of collective catharsis is something that we missed and, even more now than ever, need because of the virus.”He noted that one of the planned works this season is a new production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” led by the director Yuval Sharon, that unfolds in reverse, with one if its main characters, Mimì, dying of tuberculosis at the outset of the opera. The reordered opera ends with cheerier scenes of friendship and revelry from the first act.“The first act is really about renewal and love and youthfulness,” Hanna said. “I see that as a metaphor of moving away from the darkness of the pandemic.” More