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      Philip Glass Quartet to Be Performed at AIDS Memorial as Tribute to Brian Buczak

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      Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, written after the death of the artist Brian Buczak, will be performed at the New York City AIDS Memorial.The night Brian Buczak died, fireworks lit up the sky.It was July 4, 1987, and his bed at New York University’s hospital on the East River overlooked the holiday celebrations. Buczak’s partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, a prolific painter of clouds, was struck by the beauty of what he saw outside the window: bursts of color, brightening a dark expanse.Buczak was just 32, but he had already made more than 400 paintings, founded a small printing press for artists and settled down with Hendricks, the love of his life, with whom he had restored a Federal-style house on Greenwich Street. But all that was cut off when Buczak, like many thousands of New Yorkers before and since, died of complications from AIDS.As Hendricks grieved, he turned to a friend, the composer Philip Glass, to write a tribute to Buczak. The result was Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, nicknamed Buczak, which he has described as “a musical impression.” It premiered on the second anniversary of Buczak’s death at the Hauser Gallery; now it is returning with a free performance by the Mivos Quartet on Sunday at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village.This weekend’s concert is the latest event in a resurgence of Buczak’s story and work. Last winter, there was a solo exhibition of his art, “Man Looks at the World,” at the Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects galleries, his first since 1989, the year Glass’s quartet premiered. Hendricks, who died in 2018, has a show opening on Friday at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.“It’s such a relief,” Bracken Hendricks, Hendricks’s son and something like a stepson to Buczak, said of the fresh attention on Buczak. “It feels really earned by Brian’s just really deep and thoughtful work. His creative output was well conceived and conceptualized, and beautifully realized, but it was also forged by the grief of knowing he was dying.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On ‘The Great Impersonator,’ Halsey Channels Pop’s Past

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      The singer and songwriter’s fifth album processes intense pain through a high-concept homage to role models including Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen and Britney Spears.Pop stars start out as pop fans. Like countless other listeners, they find songs that move them, sounds they enjoy and public personas they identify with. Then, if they are talented and determined and lucky enough, they forge their own artistic identities and inspire new fans.“The Great Impersonator,” the high-concept new album from Halsey (who uses she/they pronouns), openly pays homage to her role models. On her Instagram, she specifies an influence for each song, among them Kate Bush, David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Björk and Aaliyah. She poses in photos like each one, with wigs and costumes, somewhere between Cindy Sherman and a songwriter’s mood board. And in one song, “Lucky,” she adapts both the title and the chorus of Britney Spears’s “Lucky” to apply to her own time as a pop celebrity. “I told everybody I was fine for a whole damn year,” she sings. “And that’s the biggest lie of my career.”“The Great Impersonator” lets Halsey, who is 30, try on vintage styles, largely acoustic and hand-played. It’s a sharp turn away from the fearsome, exploratory studio arsenal of “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” her 2021 album that was produced by Nine Inch Nails. The explicit concept makes a pre-emptive strike against accusations of derivativeness. Yet even as the album underlines what Halsey has learned from others, it shows what sets her apart: her insistence on channeling intense pain through her songs. In “Only Living Girl in LA,” which opens the new album, Halsey sings, “I wake up every day in some new kind of suffering / I’ve never known a day of peace.”From the beginning — her first EP, “Room 93,” was released in 2014 — Halsey has sung about fierce inner conflicts. On her 2015 album, “Badlands,” she sang, in “Gasoline,” “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?” Her songs juggle traumas, insecurities, obsessions, self-destructive impulses, the imperatives of stardom and the inevitability of death.Songs on “The Great Impersonator” reflect Halsey’s more recent life changes: the birth in 2021 of her son, Ender Ridley Aydin — whose voice appears in a few songs — and her serious health problems. In June, Halsey revealed that she has been under treatment for chronic autoimmune conditions: lupus erythematosus and T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. And in September, she stated, “I made this record in the space between life and death.”Halsey’s “The Great Impersonator” is full of medical encounters, recognizing the fragility and centrality of the body. “The End” — a Joni Mitchell tribute set to fingerpicked acoustic guitar and high vocal harmonies — sets doctor visits against the solace of love. “I Never Loved You,” with stately piano chords à la Kate Bush, envisions futile surgery after a lovers’ quarrel and a car crash. In “Letter to God (1983),” which hints at the ticking beat and sustained keyboard lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” Halsey recalls an addicted boyfriend who had “track marks on his arms,” then notes, “Now I’m the one with needles in my arms and in my legs / I’m making jokes about the blood tests and I’m planning my estate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jack Jones, a Suave, Hit-Making and Enduring Crooner, Dies at 86

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      With his smooth voice, he drew crowds to cabarets and music halls for six decades. He also sang the themes for films and TV shows, including “The Love Boat.”Jack Jones, a crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 86. His wife, Eleonora Jones, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was leukemia.While his popularity peaked in the 1960s, Mr. Jones found a new audience in later years singing the theme to the hit television show “The Love Boat.” But even then he seemed always to have stepped out of an earlier generation, one that dressed in tuxedos for the songs of Tin Pan Alley and reminded America of its love affairs with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.He won two Grammy Awards and recorded numerous albums of American Songbook favorites that hit the upper reaches of Billboard’s charts on the strength of his smooth vocal interpretations. He performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the London Palladium, and for more than 60 years drew crowds to cabarets and nightclubs around the world.At the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, marking his 52nd year in show business, Mr. Jones opened and closed a two-hour retrospective of his songs with Paul Williams’s “That’s What Friends Are For.” He sang to a packed house of longtime fans:Friends are like warm clothesIn the night air.Best when they’re oldAnd we miss them the most when they’re gone.“Those lyrics evoked the vanishing breed of pop-jazz crooner, of which Mr. Jones and Tony Bennett remain the great survivors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Jones, now 72, draws the same kind of well-dressed sophisticated audiences that used to attend the annual appearances at the defunct Michael’s Pub of his friend Mel Tormé, who died 11 years ago at 73.”Mr. Jones with his fellow vocalist Tony Bennett in 1972.Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Zaho de Sagazan Won Over Iggy Pop

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      Zaho de Sagazan went viral for her performances at the Cannes Film Festival and the Paris Olympics. Next, she’s coming to America.On the Verge showcases emerging talent from the worlds of fashion, food, music, art and design.When the French singer-songwriter Zaho de Sagazan, 24, was a teenager she earned the nickname Petite Tempête — “Little Storm.” “I was crying all the time,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do with all my angst.” But after her twin sister introduced her to the work of the English singer-songwriter Tom Odell — with which she quickly became obsessed, learning all his lyrics and teaching herself to play his songs on the piano — she realized that music could be a means of processing her dark emotions. By 2020, she was sharing videos of her original songs, which blend elements of synth-pop, electronica and chanson Française, on Instagram. Her expressive, sometimes husky voice caught the attention of Warner Chappell/Virgin Music, which released her first album, “La Symphonie des Éclairs” (“The Symphony of Lightning”) in spring 2023. It went platinum in 2024 and earned four awards at Victoires de la Musique, the French version of the Grammys. Tomorrow, a reissued edition will hit streaming platforms with new material, including “Old Friends,” which de Sagazan recorded with Odell. “I basically slid into his DMs,” she says. “We’ve been friends since. Singing with him is one of the few things I dreamed of for myself.”De Sagazan was born and raised in the working-class shipyard town of Saint Nazaire, on France’s Atlantic coast, reared in a family of artists and free spirits with few rules and plenty of encouragement. Her father, Olivier de Sagazan, is a painter, sculptor and performer who has collaborated on immersive exhibitions and videos with musicians including FKA Twigs. During her adolescence, de Sagazan spent hours holed up in her room, alone at the piano, writing about themes including self-doubt, addiction (she recently quit smoking weed, a decade-long habit), climate change and romantic love — though she says she hasn’t yet experienced it herself. She moved to Nantes at 17 and attended university for a while to appease her mother, a schoolteacher, though her ambition was to make music or start a label. To earn money, she worked as a home health aide. “I thought I’d become a nurse or work in a hospital,” she says. “I wanted to care for people. Music is another way of doing that.”Amélie Ambroise and music courtesy of Disparate / Warner Chappell Music FranceWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Met Opera and Singer Injured in Onstage Fall Settle Decade-Old Lawsuit

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      Wendy White, a veteran mezzo-soprano, was performing when she fell in 2011. Her suit, which claimed negligence, had been one of the company’s longest-running court cases.More than a decade after she was injured in a fall from a platform on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera while singing in a production of “Faust,” the veteran mezzo-soprano Wendy White has settled her lawsuit against the company.Ms. White, who says she suffered nerve and muscle damage that prevented her from singing professionally after the accident in 2011, had been expected to return to court this month. But she recently reached a deal with the Met and a scheduled trial was called off. Neither side disclosed details.“Under the terms of the confidential agreement we’re not permitted to comment,” the Met said in a statement. A lawyer for Ms. White declined to comment.The settlement brings to an end one of the longest-running legal disputes in the Met’s 141-year history. The case dragged on amid rounds of legal filings and appeals — and efforts by New York State lawmakers to help Ms. White. She was injured during the Dec. 17, 2011, performance of Gounod’s opera about selling one’s soul to the devil while singing the role of Marthe.Ms. White was walking from a backstage staircase to an elevated platform onstage when a piece of scenery broke and the platform collapsed. She fell eight feet. She did not break any bones, but was taken to the hospital for injuries.The Met said at the time that her injuries did not initially appear to be serious. But Ms. White, who sang more than 500 performances at the Met after making her debut as Flora in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in 1989, never appeared on its stage again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Circe and Muse No Longer: A New Opera Reconsiders Alma Mahler

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      “Alma,” premiering this week at the Vienna Volksoper, views its often-vilified protagonist through a feminist lens: as a thwarted composer and mother.At the end of 1901, the budding composer Alma Schindler received a 20-page letter from Gustav Mahler laying out the expected terms of their future life together.She was 22 years old; he was nearly two decades older, an established composer and the director of the Vienna Court Opera. She had to stop writing music, he wrote, because “if we are to be happy together, you will have to be my wife, not my colleague.” Later he added: “You must surrender yourself to me unconditionally, make every detail of your future life dependent on my needs.”Soon after, the couple wed. Looking back years later, she wrote of the incident: “The iron had entered my soul and the wound was never healed.”Ella Milch-Sheriff’s opera “Alma,” which premieres on Saturday at the Vienna Volksoper, positions this decision as a turning point in the life of Alma Mahler-Werfel. She outlived Mahler by more than 50 years and came to be associated — as a lover, a supporter, an object of obsession or an inspiration — with some of the best-known artists of the 20th century, including Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Kokoschka.“When she gave up her composing, she, in a way, killed her own soul,” Milch-Sheriff said in an interview at the Volksoper. “After that, she didn’t feel she deserved to have children because she’d already killed her own children, which were her future creations that were never born.”“Alma” unfurls in reverse chronology, with acts focusing on Mahler-Werfel’s lost children.Lisa Edi for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lana Del Rey Wed a Swamp Tour Guide, Joining Other Celebrities Who Married a Normie

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      The pop singer and songwriter married her longtime boyfriend, Jeremy Dunfre, a swamp tour guide. Other celebrities have also wed someone who’s not rich or famous.The pop superstar Lana Del Rey has made it official with her longtime boyfriend, Jeremy Dunfre, an alligator swamp tour guide in Louisiana.Del Rey, 39, and Dunfre, 49, filed a marriage license with the Lafourche Parish clerk of court in Thibodaux, La., on Friday, according to The Associated Press, which reported that it had obtained the document.A Sept. 26 ceremony was officiated by the celebrity pastor Judah Smith, best known for being a spiritual adviser to Justin Bieber and as the lead theologian of Churchome, a megachurch outside Seattle, according to the document cited by A.P.Questions about whether the couple said “I do” hit a fever pitch online and on social media in recent weeks, and pictures of their wedding flooded the internet. According to The A.P., the singer and songwriter exchanged vows with Dunfre in Des Allemands, La., where Dunfre works as a captain at Airboat Tours by Arthur.It was unclear exactly when the couple began dating, but pictures posted to Del Rey’s Facebook page show the “Video Games” singer on one of Mr. Dunfre’s boat tours in 2019.Here are some other celebrities who have married someone they met out in the world, with no connection to their work or fame.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      6 Social Media Accounts That Changed How I Rediscover Music

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      Hear songs surfaced by Ryley Walker, Drumeo and other feeds from Bring Me the Horizon, Lil Tecca and more.Ryley Walker’s X account is filled with wild (true) stories and a pure love of rock.Astrida Valigorsky/Getty ImagesDear listeners,Sometimes, to listen to music, you have to do something more than just listen.Personally, I spend a significant — disproportionate? unhealthy? — amount of time on social media, and I find myself drawn to accounts that are music-adjacent, or perhaps music-enhancing. They’re not criticism or reporting, but through a hammered-home gimmick (all great accounts have them) they serve up extremely engaging information about certain styles and scenes that you might otherwise allow to float on by.Here’s a list of some of the accounts that fill my screen, along with a song that each one either brought me back to or introduced into my life.Get your scroll on,JonListen along while you read.1. Drumeo (TikTok, YouTube)Drumeo’s videos are created as an extension of a drumming-education platform. The clips feature drummers talking about their craft, and the account’s most intriguing recurring series forces well-established drummers to invent a part for a song they’ve never heard and which is outside of their usual style. The results can be chaotic: Dennis Chambers, a jazz fusion and funk legend, treats a Tool song like an unwelcome pop quiz that he then casually rewrites; Dirk Verbeuren from Megadeth takes a surprisingly patient approach to “Mr. Brightside,” perhaps finding the Killers not quite muscular enough; and Liberty DeVitto, who played for decades with Billy Joel, takes a wry joy in pounding along to Deftones, as if unleashing a lifetime’s worth of backlogged pugnacity.A rediscovered song: Bring Me the Horizon, “Can You Feel My Heart”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More