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      glaive Showcases His Less Hyper Pop, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Raveena, the Weather Station, Immanuel Wilkins 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.glaive, ‘Icarus’The ostensibly summery, mid-tempo “Icarus” shows off the relatively less hyper side of the hyperpop star glaive, though its lines still hit like angst-ridden daggers: “We’re flying too close to the sun,” he sings to his romantic partner in crime. A highlight from the deluxe edition of his 2021 EP “All Dogs Go to Heaven” (cheekily retitled “Old Dog, New Tricks”),“Icarus” has an instantly catchy hook that shows why many hail glaive as the potential breakout star of his underground subgenre. But the song still retains an appealingly edgy sense of emotional mayhem: “I’m setting fire to my room, ’cause I don’t know what else to do!” LINDSAY ZOLADZThe Smile, ‘The Smoke’The Smile — Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner, a drummer from Sons of Kemet — has quickly demonstrated its range. The trio snarled through its first single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” only to play things cool on its second, “The Smoke.” A minute-long instrumental intro sticks to syncopated bass and dub-echoed drums, in a 10-bar pattern that threatens to trip up unwary dancers as it seems to switch between 4/4 and waltz. Yorke’s high vocals and a hazy horn arrangement join the rhythmic crosscurrent as he sings about what might be the heat of desire or destruction, crooning, “Smoke wakes me from my sleep.” JON PARELESImmanuel Wilkins, ‘Fugitive Ritual, Selah’Peaceful and incantatory, “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” offers a moment to re-center amid the dicey, kinetic tour de force that is “The 7th Hand,” the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s second album with his quartet. Wilkins is more often in a high-octane mode, but here he nearly caresses each note. He wrote “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” — which weaves through a melody built around harmonic shifts until finally landing on a repetitious, soothing coda — as a tribute to spaces like the Black church, where a distance from the white gaze allows for freer expression. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPierre Kwenders, ‘Papa Wemba’The Congolese musician Pierre Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and has lived in Montreal since 2001. “Papa Wemba,” from an album due in April, is a tribute to the singer, bandleader and snappy dresser Papa Wemba, who brought Congolese rumba, or soukous, to an international audience from the 1970s until his death in 2016. “Papa Wemba” adds electronic clout to the soukous beat — it sounds like it’s being punched out on a Teletype — and stirs up a rhythmic vortex with echoing guitars, gruffly sung and chanted vocals and a twin-saxophone riff that approximates the horns saying “Papa Wemba.” PARELESRaveena featuring Vince Staples, ‘Secret’Serpentine and luxurious, Raveena’s “Secret” is a pulsing after-hours affair. With her barely there voice, the R&B singer whispers silken come-ons, a steady thrum ricocheting off a muted tabla drum. It’s retrograde but futuristic, like the forthcoming concept album it appears on, which tells the story of a space princess from ancient Punjab. “Wait a sec, I’ll hit you right back,” Raveena coos in the chorus. You can almost feel her hot breath on your neck. ISABELIA HERRERASaba featuring G Herbo, ‘Survivor’s Guilt’“Survivor’s Guilt” is filled with wounds, yet Saba’s flow is breathless, like he’s outrunning the aftermath of trauma in real time. “I’m trying to move better/What’s really eating when you from a food desert,” he raps, echoing the hyper-speed flows of chopper forebears like Twista. A guest verse from G Herbo cements the song as an unforgettably Chicago linkup. HERRERAEx-Void, ‘Churchyard’Reuniting two members of the too-short-lived noise-pop band Joanna Gruesome, Ex-Vöid is a relatively new, jangly British power-pop group set to release its debut album later this year. The lush, taut “Churchyard” retains their previous band’s keen sense of melody, but this time favoring the sort of clean, bright guitar tones that broadcast their penchant for pop songcraft loud and clear. ZOLADZTess Parks, ‘Happy Birthday Forever’Tess Parks’s voice has an alluring, husky grain on “Happy Birthday Forever,” the first single from her upcoming album, “And Those Who Were Seen Dancing.” The Toronto-born artist hasn’t released an LP since her 2013 debut “Blood Hot,” and has since been collaborating with Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but “Happy Birthday Forever” proves she’s a confident, enchanting presence on her own. The song is propelled by a jaunty beat and a bright piano riff, but there’s a dark undercurrent to the way Parks delivers her lines, like she’s exhaling cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth: “Get me outta here.” ZOLADZDora Jar, ‘Lagoon’A lurching drumbeat, a barely tuned piano: The songwriter Dora Jar — who has lived in New York, California, Poland and England — doesn’t need much more to profess her longing in “Lagoon,” in terms both mundane and surreal: “My heart is a crustacean/Could you come and crack it open?” There’s an Elton John backbeat in her piano chords, but also a 21st-century sense of possibility, as vocal overdubs surround her and, for some reason, what sounds like a banjo surfaces near the end of the tune. PARELESThe Weather Station, ‘Endless Time’“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in the opening moments of this shattering new ballad, the first song released from the Weather Station’s upcoming album, “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars.” Lindeman has said the March 4 LP is a kind of companion piece to last year’s excellent “Ignorance,” and “Endless Time” certainly mirrors its predecessor’s chilling evocation of loss as well as its elegant weaving together of the personal and ecological. But while “Ignorance” experimented with fractured, jazzy rhythms, “Endless Time” echoes through a sparse negative space — just a haunting piano accompaniment and Lindeman’s elegiac vocals. Any “companion record” to a strong artistic statement risks being dismissed as a collection of B-sides, but this arresting first single is Lindeman bringing her “A” game. ZOLADZDonna Missal, ‘Insecure’​​Sooner or later, every sound ricochets around Donna Missal’s “Insecure”: ticks and taps of percussion, calm keyboard note clusters, grainy simulated strings and whispery vocals that split into harmonies, get pitched up and down and waft up out of nowhere. “Never want to see you again,” she announces as the song begins, and she goes on to denounce her “baby” as an unapologetic liar. But the confrontation is hushed, private and solitary, as if it’s taking place in a sonic hall of mirrors. PARELESKatie Dey, ‘Real Love’The Australian songwriter Katie Dey is both deadpan and devastating as she sings about an abusive relationship and her own self-destructive impulses in “Real Love.” The verses have an offhand sound — a thumpy drumbeat, dinky keyboard chords — as she recalls how “I made myself small/you made yourself big,” but her vocals take on hyperpop glitches and an Auto-Tuned edge on the way to a chorus that crashes in with distorted guitars, as she declares, “I want love that hurts.” PARELESTyler Mitchell featuring Marshall Allen, ‘A Call for All Demons’The bassist Tyler Mitchell played briefly in Sun Ra’s Arkestra during the 1980s, then put in decades of work as a straight-ahead jazz musician before rejoining the group about 10 years ago, after its patriarch had died. By now, he’s a deeply embedded member of the band. Leading his own sextet on a new album, “Dancing Shadows” — with the Arkestra luminary and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 97, as a featured guest — Mitchell covers a range of Sun Ra material alongside his own tunes; throughout, he guides things from below with the same bobbing, pulpy vigor that makes him sound at home in the Arkestra. “A Call for All Demons” is a tune that Sun Ra first recorded in the 1950s, and on Mitchell’s album it serves as the opening invocation. RUSSONELLONyokabi Kariūki, ‘Equator Song’Nyokabi Kariūki’s “Equator Song” radiates the dissonance of bilingual (or even trilingual) existence. Kariūki, who grew up in Kenya and now lives in Maryland, recorded the song on a trip to Kenya’s Laikipia county, collaging the chatter of weaverbirds — wordless, sky-high vocalizations floating into the ether. “You’ll find my soul on someone’s tongue,” she sings in English, harnessing the experience of living in a language that will never be your own. But instead of lingering in the discomfort or seeking some empty form of reconnection, Kariūki moves fluidly between English, Maa and Kiswahili. It is an acceptance of the diaspora’s constant condition of loss, and the beauty that exists within it. HERRERA More

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      Beegie Adair, a Jazz Master in Country Music’s Capital, Dies at 84

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      In a city defined by honky-tonks and string ties, she had a 60-year career as a jazz pianist and a mainstay of the local scene.Beegie Adair, whose status as a renowned jazz pianist was all the more noteworthy for the place where she built her career — Nashville, the home of country music — died on Jan. 23 at her residence in Franklin, Tenn. She was 84.Monica Ramey, her manager and frequent vocal partner, confirmed the death. She did not provide a cause but said Ms. Adair had been in failing health.If you happened to live in Nashville and found yourself more a fan of Cole Porter than Porter Waggoner, chances are you came across Ms. Adair at some point in her six-decade career. Starting in the early 1960s, she could be found at least once a week playing at the Carousel, a downtown nightclub, or later at F. Scott’s, a restaurant in the Green Hills neighborhood.Being a jazz musician in Nashville is something like being a surfer in Las Vegas, and those who make it need flexibility and hustle — qualities Ms. Adair possessed in surplus.She played hotel lobbies and retirement homes. She and her husband, Billy Adair, wrote jingles for television commercials. And she was in constant demand as a session musician, appearing on more than 100 albums by a wide range of artists, including Dolly Parton, Henry Mancini, and Mama Cass Elliot.“She was omnipresent,” Roger Spencer, who played bass in the Beegie Adair Trio, said in an interview. “If there was an opportunity to play, she was there.”Ms. Adair mostly played American songbook standards, with a restrained, relaxed technique. She adapted to the venue: If it was a restaurant, she receded to the background; in a club, she could dominate the room.“I’ve played with her in just about every kind of musical setting you can play in Nashville over the years,” George Tidwell, a veteran Nashville jazz trumpeter, said in an interview. “And I never played anything where I didn’t think she was the right person to do it.”She released her first album, “Escape to New York,” in 1991. A few years later she formed her trio, with Mr. Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums. They toured frequently, including trips to Tokyo and London. Starting in 2011, they played annual gigs at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, and later added regular shows at Feinstein’s/54 Below, also in Midtown. They recorded 35 albums and, according to Ms. Ramey, sold some two million copies over the last four decades.Back home, Ms. Adair was the de facto leader of Nashville’s jazz scene, especially during a rough stretch in the 1970s and ’80s when venues closed and gigs were few. What kept her going was the knowledge, not always obvious to the outside observer, that the scene was larger than it seemed, with musicians playing country for the money and jazz for themselves, even if it meant nothing more than jam sessions in someone’s basement.“There are a lot of wonderful jazz players here that don’t get heard often because they’re doing studio work all of the time,” she told The Nashville Banner in 1997. “Every horn player that does studio work is probably a jazz player underneath their skin.”In addition to working steadily as a jazz pianist, Ms. Adair was in constant demand as a session musician.via Adair Music GroupBobbe Gorin Long was born on Dec. 11, 1937, in Cave City, Ky., a small town about halfway between Nashville and Louisville. She began taking piano lessons at 5 and by her teenage years was playing in clubs in Tennessee and Kentucky.Her parents, Bobbe (Martin) Long and Arthur Long, ran a gas station, where young Bobbe also worked when she wasn’t playing piano. To differentiate her from her mother, her father called her “B.G.,” after her first two initials, and the nickname stuck.Ms. Adair graduated with a degree in music education from Western Kentucky University in 1958. After teaching music for three years in Owensboro, Ky., she moved to Nashville for graduate studies in education at Peabody College, now a part of Vanderbilt University.But she was already building a career as a musician in the city’s downtown clubs, especially along Printers Alley, then and now a center of Nashville nightlife. By 1963 she had dropped out of Peabody to play music full time.Ms. Adair came under the wing of the saxophonist Boots Randolph, a resident musician at the Carousel best known for his 1963 hit “Yakety Sax.” He got her gigs and introduced her to the city’s many producers and studio managers, who, though they mostly recorded country and rock ’n’ roll, were always looking for talented, dependable session musicians.Another local music luminary, the guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, was the first to bring her on as a regular at his recording sessions, and his recommendations brought her a steady stream of work in and out of the studio. She played in the house band for “The Johnny Cash Show” and for the local TV host Ralph Emery (who also died this month).She married Mr. Adair in 1974. He died in 2014. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Adair was a prolific musician in his own right, and he built a career as an instructor, eventually becoming a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. In 1995, the couple joined Mr. Spencer and his wife, Lori Mechem, to start the Nashville Jazz Workshop.The workshop trained a new generation of jazz musicians in Nashville, and in recent decades the scene there has started to make a comeback, with its former students starting to win national recognition. In 2016, Ms. Adair and her trio were invited to play Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. “The best thing of all for us was that there were a lot of our fans from Nashville in attendance,” she told The Nashville Scene in 2016, a few days after the show. “I think our appearance there is another indicator that people all over the country recognize that there are great jazz musicians here, and that there is an audience for the music.” More

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      Review: Philip Glass and the Bangles, Mashed at the Symphony

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      Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond brought their gleeful opera-cabaret show “Only an Octave Apart” to the New York Philharmonic.It’s not like the New York Philharmonic hasn’t been queer before. I can’t have been the only boy for whom Jessye Norman’s hair, when she sang Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene with the orchestra on national television in 1995, was a turning point. The ensemble backed Mariah Carey in Central Park, and Elaine Stritch for Sondheim’s 80th. It once paired Lou Harrison and Bruckner.But it’s safe to say it hasn’t presented anything quite like Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond’s Philharmonic debut as a duo on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Performing a rich helping of their recent show “Only an Octave Apart,” they cracked jokes about G spots and traveling for sex, mashed up Purcell’s Dido with Dido’s “White Flag,” layered Philip Glass over the Bangles, and generally camped up the joint.When “Only an Octave Apart” played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last fall, it was a riff on Beverly Sills and Carol Burnett’s high-low 1976 special of the same name, bringing together Costanzo, an operatic countertenor, and Bond, the gleefully savage cabaret diva. I went in with a little trepidation — a fan of both performers, but not quite sure whether the experiment would go off. Would it be too stiff? Too silly? Too talky? Too self-indulgent?It was sublime.By turns hilarious and tender — those dual Didos are very much not played for laughs — the show was a small miracle of careful craft and improvisatory looseness, of arch personae and moving sincerity. Costanzo was a superb, well, straight man to Bond’s battiness, and their voices — one slender and pure, the other husky and vibrato-heavy — improbably blended. The return to live performance after a year and a half of lockdowns only increased the poignancy and delight of their obvious mutual love and respect. It was a confection that nourished.It still is. Alongside the release of an album version, the show is an apt opener for the festival “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within,” organized by Costanzo as part of his Philharmonic residency. Focused on marginalized identities and (forgive the self-helpism) being yourself, the festival’s programs include a pair of premieres sung by Costanzo, as well as a rare countertenor take on Berlioz’s song cycle “Les Nuits d’Été.”On Thursday I missed Zack Winokur’s daffy yet elegant full staging of “Only an Octave Apart,” especially Jonathan Anderson’s delirious gowns. But the 90-minute show compressed nicely into a 50-minute concert half, the union between classical and cabaret smoothed by Nico Muhly’s lush yet subtle orchestrations.Costanzo also joined the orchestra and its music director, Jaap van Zweden, in the premiere of Joel Thompson and Tracy K. Smith’s “The Places We Leave.”Chris LeeSome moody Nelson Riddle-style string arrangements — like the scoring of a Douglas Sirk melodrama — nodded to what came before intermission: the premiere of Joel Thompson’s “The Places We Leave.” Setting a new text by the poet Tracy K. Smith, Thompson also reveled in sumptuous, worried strings, and gave Costanzo mellow, narrative vocal lines that surge into piercing climaxes. There was even a patch of exhausting Handelian coloratura, a wink at the text’s account of a lover who “left me breathless,” and at a Costanzo specialty. (He appears in “Rodelinda” at the Metropolitan Opera in March.)The concert opened with Joan Tower’s stout “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” No. 1, and also included Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, “Classical.” What was this chestnut doing here? Particularly as conducted by Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director — who was otherwise a sensitive leader — with his all-too-characteristic clenched, unwitty approach to the standard repertory.But an aspect of the choice resonated. Like “Only an Octave Apart,” Prokofiev’s First was created in a time of crisis, the violence of the February Revolution in Russia, but has little hint of that darkness in a work of sparkling energy and grace.Is making joyful music in grim times escapist, even reactionary? Sometimes the opposite: The “Classical” looked, as does “Only an Octave Apart,” to the past with a fresh spirit, a kind of progressive nostalgia. And like Costanzo and Bond in their show, Prokofiev used the work not to rest on his laurels but to spur himself to develop; the symphony was the first big piece he wrote without leaning on his beloved piano as a composition tool. It made his future possible.As unlikely yet satisfying a pairing as Costanzo and Bond, then, these two works — bridging an intermission and a century — are a reminder that what emerges and survives from our distressing era may not be what we expect. All we can do is give artists the space to create, and keep our ears open.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Met Opera Never Missed a Curtain. It Hopes Audiences Rebound.

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      On Saturday evening, if all goes as planned, the Metropolitan Opera will celebrate a milestone: reaching a long-planned midwinter break without having had to cancel a single performance, even as the pandemic created havoc backstage.As the Omicron variant spread through the city in December and January, the virus upended the Met’s operations, with at least 400 singers, orchestra players, stagehands, costume designers, dancers, actors and other employees testing positive, according to a snapshot of cases provided by the Met on Friday.But there are encouraging signs that at the opera house, as in the city, the recent surge has peaked and cases are falling dramatically again.During the first week of January, as cases were reaching new heights in New York, more than 100 employees at the Met tested positive, including six solo singers and five members of the children’s chorus. By last week, the total number of positive cases among the Met’s large roster of employees had fallen to 22, about the same number as in early December, and there have been eight positive tests so far this week.Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said that during the worst days of Omicron, he worried the company might run out of personnel and be unable to perform. But the Met’s strict safety protocols, which included vaccine and mask mandates and regular testing, provided some assurance, he said, that nobody would become seriously ill.“I knew that if we could just keep bringing in reserves, as well as getting people back to work as soon as they had cleared the quarantine period, we would be able to keep performing,” Gelb said. “Our struggle to keep the Met up and running in the face of Covid became a unifying force for the entire company as we battled a common enemy.”The Met never missed a downbeat or a curtain, even as the Omicron variant wreaked havoc across the performing arts — resulting in the cancellation of scores of Broadway shows, concerts and dance performances.The virus has taken a toll on attendance this winter, across the performing arts.On Broadway, just 62 percent of seats were occupied the week that ended Jan. 9; in the comparable week in the January before the pandemic, 94 percent of seats were filled. Last week, after many of the weakest shows closed and others reduced their prices, 75 percent of all seats were filled but overall box office grosses were down.At the Met, where 77 percent of seats were filled the week of Dec. 18, attendance dropped precipitously as the virus surged, bottoming out at 44 percent in mid-January, before beginning to rise again.Now the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, will have some time to ride out the next phase of the pandemic: It is about to take a long-scheduled break from performing for much of February, before returning on Feb. 28 with a starry new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Putting on opera in a pandemic is not easy: The soprano Rosa Feola, right, wore a mask as she was fitted for a costume for “Rigoletto” designed by Catherine Zuber, left.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe company decided back in 2018 to institute a midseason break, long before the coronavirus emerged. The idea was to stop performing in the middle of winter, when sales are generally weakest, and to add more performances in the late spring, moving the end of the opera season to early June from May. The first midwinter break was supposed to take effect in the 2020-21 season — the season lost to the coronavirus.Now — as the recent surge in cases has left performing arts organizations facing alarmingly low attendance — the Met will have nearly a month off.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 5Omicron in retreat. More

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      Reawakening the Antichrist (and Other Lost Opera Gems)

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      It can be challenging to revive forgotten works like “Antikrist.” But the absence of entrenched traditions can be liberating.BERLIN — The Whore of Babylon, in a grotesque fat suit, belts out a hymn to hedonism midway through the Deutsche Oper’s new production of “Antikrist” here.Ersan Mondtag’s riotously colorful, boldly stylized staging of what this work’s Danish composer, Rued Langgaard, called a “church opera” is a near-breathless swirl. Nodding to various early-20th-century art movements, including Symbolism, Expressionism and the Bauhaus, it is only the third full staging of the work, which was written and revised between 1921 and 1930, but which remained unperformed at the time of Langgaard’s death, in 1952.Inspired by the Book of Revelation, “Antikrist” premieres Jan. 30 and runs through Feb. 11. It is the latest in a series of operatic rediscoveries at the Deutsche Oper, which, in recent decades, has made a point of highlighting works from outside the canon. In recent seasons, it has lavished attention on Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” as part of a series devoted to that once-renowned 19th-century composer, as well as two early-20th-century titles, Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane” and Zemlinsky’s “Der Zwerg.”A scene from “Der Zwerg,” another rarely performed work that was revived at the Deutsche Oper.Monika RittershausAlong with the Deutsche Oper’s commitment to commissioning new operas, these rediscoveries are a way of refreshing and enlarging opera’s notoriously narrow repertoire. An essentially unknown work like “Antikrist” presents a host of logistical challenges, from training singers to attracting audiences, but it can provide its director with rare creative license. The absence of entrenched performing traditions can be artistically liberating.“It’s totally crazy,” Mondtag, who also designed the sets and helped design the costumes, said of the piece. “It’s something between Schoenberg and Wagner, and like a sacred opera without linear narration. So you have the freedom to do whatever you want.”Mondtag, one of Germany’s leading young avant-garde directors, was putting the finishing touches on “Antikrist” when the pandemic locked the country down for the first time, in March 2020. Since then, he’s staged two other rarely performed 20th-century works, Schreker’s “Der Schmied von Gent” and Weill’s “Silbersee,” both for Vlaamse Opera in Belgium. A relative newcomer to opera, Mondtag said it was hardly surprising that he’s been getting assignments like these, rather than war horses like “Tosca.”Mondtag onstage at the Deutsche Oper. He says he didn’t set out to become a specialist in unknown operas: “It just happened that way.”Gordon Welters for The New York Times“It’s considered more experimental to do unknown things,” Mondtag said. In his short time working in opera, he added, he has acquired something of a reputation as an “expert of unstageable or unknown operas. I didn’t choose that; it just happened that way.”When the Deutsche Oper returned to live performance in the summer of 2020, it concentrated on a new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring.” All four titles premiered at the house during the pandemic, but after the “Ring” played its last performances earlier this month, the company turned its attention to the delayed “Antikrist” premiere.“It’s such impressive music that I think it’s necessary to do it,” said Dietmar Schwarz, the Deutsche Oper’s general director. He added that while he would love it if Mondtag’s production inspired new interest in “Antikrist,” he was mostly focused on finding a curious and open audience in Berlin.“We’re not necessarily doing it for the survival of this old opera,” he said.Isolated productions of rediscoveries rarely catch fire. One exception was David Pountney’s acclaimed staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s punishing 1965 work “Die Soldaten,” which was first seen in 2006 at the Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany and traveled to the Park Avenue Armory in New York two years later. A spate of productions followed in Berlin; Munich; Salzburg, Austria; and elsewhere.A scene from a 2008 performance of “Die Soldaten” at the Park Avenue Armory. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera had been revived at the Ruhrtrienniale festival in Germany two years before.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet even if rediscoveries are confined to a single production, German opera administrators have increasingly made them a priority. This contrasts with the United States: These days, it is more common for the Metropolitan Opera or the Lyric Opera of Chicago to present an attention-generating world premiere than to dust off a forgotten work. (Leon Botstein’s full-production revivals at Bard College in New York are a notable exception.)“There is a treasure trove of stuff out there,” said Barrie Kosky, who leads the Komische Oper in Berlin. Since arriving at that company in 2012, he has scored some of his greatest hits with productions of long overlooked works, including operettas by German-speaking Jewish composers like Paul Abraham and Oscar Straus.“Let’s face it, we can’t survive on just a diet of the 20 most famous titles,” Kosky said.“Of course, it’s always a risk because sometimes you bring back a piece and it doesn’t work,” he said. Or, he added: “You say: ‘Look, we’re bringing this back. It’s not a perfect piece, but this score is still worth hearing.’ I think that’s also very legitimate and valid; I don’t think everything has to be a masterpiece.”Kosky pointed to his own eclectic programming at the Komische Oper — where, before the pandemic, the house was selling 90 percent of its seats — as evidence that theaters can be filled with works by composers other than Mozart and Puccini.“All of that’s been blown out of the water when I see that we can sell out ‘The Bassarids’ completely,” he said, referring to Hans Werner Henze’s 1965 opera, which Kosky staged in 2019. “Or we can have incredible advance sales for an operetta where people don’t even know the title or the music.”Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, center, in “The Bassarids,” a sold-out production at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2019.Monika RittershausWhen Matthias Schulz, the general director of the Staatsoper in Berlin, programmed a Baroque festival in his first season leading the company, he didn’t go for the usual suspects.“I wanted to do everything except Handel,” he said.The centerpiece of the festival’s first edition, in 2018, was Rameau’s “Hippolyte et Aricie.” Since then, two rarities have followed: Scarlatti’s “Il Primo Omicidio” and, this past fall, Campra’s “Idoménée,” far more obscure than Mozart’s later “Idomeneo.”Hidden in the corners of opera history, Schulz said, “there are real masterworks and we have a responsibility to find them. We need to convince the audience that what we do is interesting, and to challenge them.”A scene from a 2021 production of Campra’s “Idomenée” at the Staatsoper in Berlin.Bernd UhligThat process looks different in Berlin, with a rich opera landscape thanks to three full-time companies, than it does in smaller cities. Laura Berman, the artistic director of the Staatsoper in Hanover, in northern Germany, said that drawing an audience with obscure titles can be a challenge. But, she added, the right work and the right production can also put a smaller house on the map.In her first season in Hanover, Berman scored a hit with Halévy’s religious potboiler “La Juive” — which, like Meyerbeer’s grand operas, faded from the repertory by the early 20th century. Lydia Steier’s production conjured a historical survey of antisemitism, starting in post-World War II America and working back to 15th-century Konstanz, Germany, the setting specified by the libretto. The 2019 staging was acclaimed, and helped the company earn the title of Opera House of the Year from Oper Magazine.Berman said she wasn’t surprised that a production about the need for tolerance had resonated in Hanover, a religiously and ethnically mixed city she that called “extremely diverse.”“People have always talked in the theater about ‘hooks’: how to get the audience hooked into going to see something,” she added. “I truly feel today that the topic is major, especially for younger audiences, more than the title.”A scene from the Staatsoper in Hanover’s 2019 production of Halévy’s “La Juive.”Sandra ThenShe added that works like “La Juive” were excellent for convincing people “that an opera house is a forum for social and political discussion — which, in the end, it always has been, for at least several hundred years.”The Staatsoper’s next big premiere in Hanover will be Marschner’s “Der Vampyr” in late March — directed by Mondtag. “His visual world is really special,” Berman said. “But for me, the main factor is being able to think through works and being able to bust them open.”That is less “terrifying,” she added, “if you do a work where there are no preconceived notions.” More

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      Don Wilson, Who Gave the Ventures Their Distinctive Rhythm, Dies at 88

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      He was a founder, with Bob Bogle, of what has been called the best-selling and most influential instrumental band in rock ’n’ roll history.Don Wilson, co-founder of the instrumental rock group the Ventures, whose twanging, hard-driving sound, propelled by his dynamic rhythm guitar, led to hits like “Walk — Don’t Run” and helped shape the surf music of the early 1960s as well as influencing generations of guitarists, died on Saturday in Tacoma, Wash. He was 88.His daughter Staci Layne Wilson confirmed the death, at a hospital.Mr. Wilson and Bob Bogle formed the group that became the Ventures in the late 1950s and had been having modest success performing in the Seattle area when, with Nokie Edwards on bass and Skip Moore playing drums, they recorded “Walk — Don’t Run” in March 1960. It was their version of a song by the jazz guitarist Johnny Smith that had previously been recorded by Chet Atkins.The group had already released one 45 r.p.m. record, having formed their own label, Blue Horizon, with the help of Mr. Wilson’s mother, to do it. But that first record didn’t generate interest, and neither did “Walk — Don’t Run,” until they played it for Pat O’Day, who had the afternoon show on the Seattle radio station KJR. He smelled a hit.The station always played an instrumental leading into its newscast at the top of the hour, but without introducing it, Mr. O’Day said in an interview for “Sonic Boom! The History of Northwest Rock, From ‘Louie, Louie’ to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” a 2009 book by Peter Blecha. “So we put it on every hour as that filler there,” he said, “and of course you know what happened after that.”What happened was, callers flooded the station wanting to know what that catchy record was. One of the callers was from Dolton Records, which had earlier turned away the fledgling Ventures. Dolton signed them, and soon the record reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It stayed on that chart for months and became one of the most recognizable songs of the era.Mr. Wilson spoke when the Ventures were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. With him were, from left, John Durrill, Fiona Taylor (the band’s manager), Bob Spalding, Nokie Edwards and Leon Taylor.Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage The group went on to have a number of other successful singles, most notably its version of the theme from the television series “Hawaii Five-0,” which made the Top 10 in 1969. The lineup shuffled a bit — Mr. Bogle, who died in 2009, switched to bass; Mr. Edwards, who died in 2018, was the better player and became lead guitarist; and Mel Taylor, who died in 1996, settled in as drummer. Mr. Wilson pounded out his rhythm accompaniments for 55 years, turning over the job to Ian Spalding, son of another current member, Bob Spalding, during a show in Tokyo in 2015.In 2019 the Grammy Museum mounted an exhibition in honor of the group, calling the Ventures “the most influential, best-selling instrumental band in rock and roll history.” The group, the exhibition said, has recorded more than 250 albums, including a series of instructional records aimed at novice guitar players.Leon Taylor, Mel’s son, is the Ventures’ current drummer and had a close-up view of Mr. Wilson’s impact.“Don has been a part of my life since I was a little kid,” he said by email. “Don was a unique talent that influenced thousands of guitar players all over the world.”Mr. Blecha, too, cited the group’s influence on would-be guitar players, as well as its chutzpah in putting out its first records on its own label when no one else would, something rare for the time.The Ventures in 1999, from left: Gerry McGee, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bogle and Mr. Wilson.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns via Getty Images“But beyond all that,” he said by email of Mr. Wilson in particular, “you just gotta admire a musician who carved out such a lucrative and impactful career playing mainly rhythm guitar. Guys who have accomplished that comprise a rather short list.”Donald Lee Wilson was born on Feb. 10, 1933, in Tacoma to Woodrow and Josie Wilson. His father was a car salesman, and his mother became a record producer and was key to the band’s early success.“When I was younger I wanted to learn how to play the trombone,” Don Wilson said in an interview for “The Ventures: Stars on Guitars,” a 2019 documentary film directed by his daughter Staci. “I thought the trombone had such a mellow sound. It was Tommy Dorsey that I really liked.”He played trombone in an Army band, where a bandmate taught him chords on the guitar, adding to the few he had already been shown by his mother. After mustering out, he was working at his father’s used-car lot in Seattle when Mr. Bogle came in, looking to buy a car. They started talking and hit it off.Mr. Bogle got Mr. Wilson a job working with him as a bricklayer. They soon realized that, with all the rain in the Pacific Northwest, they had a lot of down time, since many of their jobs were outside. And both of them had rudimentary guitar skills.“We bought two guitars in a pawnshop in Tacoma, Washington, and we probably paid 10 or 15 dollars apiece for them,” Mr. Wilson said in the film.The group was just the two of them at first, Mr. Bogle playing lead and Mr. Wilson rhythm. That, of necessity, led them to develop a unique sound, underpinned by Mr. Wilson’s driving approach.“In the early days Don had to play very rhythmic and strong because they didn’t have a drummer,” Bob Spalding, who first played with the group in 1981 and joined for good after Mr. Bogle’s death, said by email. “Later, when they became a quartet with a drummer, his style never changed, and that unique rhythm guitar drive became a prominent characteristic of the band’s music.”In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”At his death, Mr. Wilson lived in Covington, Wash. In addition to his daughter Staci, his survivors include three other children, Jill Fairbanks, Tim Wilson and Cyd Wilson; and two grandchildren.In 2008 John Fogerty inducted the Ventures into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In his induction remarks, he marveled that the group had recorded more than 250 albums.“Good Lord, think about that,” Mr. Fogerty said. “Nowadays, some of us would be happy to sell 250 albums.” More

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      Lucy Rowan Mann, Doyenne of a Prime Classical Music Prize, Dies at 100

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      With her husband, the violinist Robert Mann, she mentored young classical musicians and administered the Naumburg Foundation’s storied annual awards.Lucy Rowan Mann, whose guidance of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and its influential awards helped propel a raft of major classical music careers for 50 years, died on Jan. 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.The cause was Covid-19, her daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta, said.Ms. Mann was the executive director of the foundation, which she ran with her husband, Robert Mann, who was its president and the founding first violinist of the renowned Juilliard String Quartet. She handled administration and fund-raising, while Mr. Mann, who died in 2018 at 97, focused on the musical aspects of the competition and on the judging.But Ms. Mann, who started at the Naumburg Foundation in 1972 and continued until this year, did more than office work. She scheduled performances for the young Naumburg winners, did publicity for them and even arranged travel. The couple were a well-oiled machine; Carol Wincenc, who in 1978 won the inaugural Naumburg Competition for flute, said in an interview that the Manns exhibited “teamwork of the highest order.”Naumburg winners who have gone on to prominent careers include, in addition to Ms. Wincenc, the violin soloists Leonidas Kavakos and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; Frank Huang, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic; the pianists Andre-Michel Schub, Stephen Hough and Anton Nel; the clarinetist Charles Neidich; and the cellist Colin Carr. Singers who have won include Julia Bullock, Dawn Upshaw and Lucy Shelton.Music competitions are often key pieces in building a career, offering prize money, concert dates and public validation, but they can be rife with pressure and are often criticized for valuing technical brilliance over personality.But, as Mr. Mann wrote in The New York Times in 1985, “a competition is as musical, humane and culturally meaningful as it wants to be.” Ms. Mann’s administration and care for the competitors lent that humanity, colleagues and musicians said.The Naumburg Foundation, established in 1925, started administering annual awards in 1926. Robert Mann himself won a Naumburg Award for violin in 1941.The awards categories rotate among instruments each year. Initially, they included pianists, cellists and violinists, but the competition has expanded to include vocalists, chamber ensembles and flutists, and it also features other instruments on a rotating basis. The 2022 Naumburg Competition will be for saxophonists.First-prize winners receive $25,000 and two New York recitals and have a work commissioned for them.Ms. Mann made it part of her mission to push for greater awareness of 20th-century American composers. In her office at the Manhattan School of Music, where the Naumburg Foundation is based, she was known to stage birthday celebrations for contemporary composers, bribing students with candy to encourage them to attend and learn more about musical history.Lucille Ida Zeitlin was born on June 20, 1921, in Brooklyn. She and her two siblings were raised by their mother, Rose Kuschner. Their father, Irving Allen Zeitlin, was a nightclub manager. “My father was a scoundrel and a womanizer,” Ms. Mann told The Times in 2013. “He was never around.”She attended public high school in Brooklyn and went on to Brooklyn College to study acting, but dropped out and moved to Washington. There, she studied drama under Walter Kerr, who was teaching at the Catholic University of America and later become a theater critic for The Times. During World War II, Ms. Mann worked in secretarial roles at the War Department and elsewhere.Her marriage to Mark Rowan, who served in the Army and later became an English professor, ended in divorce after eight years.She returned to New York and in 1947 and became the manager for concerts at the Juilliard School. She met Mr. Mann while also managing the Juilliard String Quartet. They married in 1949.In addition to their work at the Naumburg Foundation, the Manns performed together in the Lyric Trio: Ms. Mann narrated folk stories from Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen over music played by Mr. Mann and the pianist Leonid Hambro. Eric Salzman, reviewing a Lyric Trio concert at Carnegie Hall for The Times in 1962, called their performance “witty, pointed and delightful.”Their son, Nicholas Mann, who is also a violinist, occasionally performed with them as part of the Mann family-centered Baca Ensemble, for which Robert Mann composed. In a 1986 Times review of a performance by the group at Carnegie Hall, Allen Hughes wrote, “Miss Rowan is a persuasive reader, Mr. Mann’s scores are serious and well-wrought, and words and music coexisted amiably in these performances.”Ms. Mann was also an artist: She began painting as a hobby but became more serious about it later in life, culminating in retrospectives of her bright abstract works at the Tenri Cultural Institute in Manhattan in 2017 and 2019.In addition to her two children, she is survived by five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. More

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      'Peter Grimes' Review: Opera Stars Take On an Omicron-Battered Vienna

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      The tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the soprano Lise Davidsen are leading a luxuriously cast revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”VIENNA — Whenever I open Instagram these days, it seems, I’m served an ad for “Hamilton.” Once a destination musical that took months of planning or deep pockets to see, it is now algorithmically spreading the word that last-minute tickets are up for grabs, no #Ham4Ham lottery required.Such is the state of live performance as the Omicron variant upends shows and keeps wary audiences at home.Take the Vienna State Opera, one of the world’s great companies and a major tourist attraction. Forced to close for nearly a week in December because of the coronavirus, it is only now returning to full capacity. Nearly 450 seats (in a house with just over 1,700) were still unsold on Wednesday morning, with mere hours to go until the opening of a luxuriously cast revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” — ostensibly one of the hottest tickets in Europe, featuring the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the fast-rising soprano Lise Davidsen.By curtain time, the house appeared much fuller, but hundreds of tickets remain available for each future performance. It’s easy to see why people might be discouraged, and why the company is practically begging for attendance: Visitors to the State Opera, who are required to wear N95-quality masks inside the building, must also be fully vaccinated and boosted, as well as tested (by P.C.R., pointedly not antigen) for the virus.I wasn’t alone in scrambling to produce all the necessary documents as I entered: an ID, a nontransferable ticket, a certificate of vaccination and a negative test result — which came with a 70-euro price tag because I had traveled from Berlin, where rapid tests are widely available and free, but P.C.R. ones are not.The things we do for opera.And, in this case, for the opportunity to hear Kaufmann in his debut as Peter Grimes, as well as Davidsen in her first staged performance as Ellen Orford — initial impressions of roles these artists are rumored to be taking elsewhere in future seasons, including the Metropolitan Opera.In this production, Kaufmann’s Grimes is literally burdened by ropes.Wiener Staatsoper/Michael PoehnOften stranded by Christine Mielitz’s neon-streaked staging of the opera — a psychologically complex tragedy of provincial cruelty and loneliness — Kaufmann and Davidsen seemed forced to rely on their dramatic instincts rather than a cohesive vision. Although the evening was far from a disaster and was warmly received, neither singer appears to have found a new signature role.Kaufmann, in particular, struggled to trace clearly his character’s decline from social isolation to volatility and suicidal delirium. A fisherman who is believed by mobbish villagers to have killed his apprentices, Grimes carries the weight of perception; in this production, he is literally burdened by ropes and the bodies of the boys who died under his watch. Sounding likewise weighed, Kaufmann mostly sang in shades of weariness, with an overreliance on floated pianissimos punctuated by outbursts more heroic than pained or violent.If this approach — steadfastly resigned rather than mercurial — made for static storytelling, it paid off in Grimes’s climactic mad scene. Having long sulked under a halo of anguish, Kaufmann was all the more moving in this hushed monologue, lending an inevitability to his character’s death.But in this scene, as throughout the opera, Britten scatters spiky marcato and staccato articulation. Kaufmann opted instead for a consistent legato, sometimes at odds with the orchestra and, in extreme cases, slurring phrases into unintelligibility.Ellen Orford requires more modesty than the mighty Wagner and Strauss roles that have swiftly made Davidsen famous.Wiener Staatsoper/Michael PoehnDavidsen’s Ellen is a departure from the mighty Wagner and Strauss roles that have swiftly made her famous. “Grimes” requires comparative modesty, a challenge she met on Wednesday with graceful control — judiciously deploying the reverberation she is capable of when needed to illustrate her iron will in the face of a small town’s rushed judgments, and dropping to a glassy pianissimo in moments of convincing despair. She matched the score’s precise indications with crisp delivery and diction, but also, in Act II, wove a delicately doleful quartet with Noa Beinart as Auntie and Ileana Tonca and Aurora Marthens as the two Nieces.The other star onstage was the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, as Balstrode — who is, aside from Ellen, the only resident of “the Borough” (as the town is called) who treats Grimes with some sympathy. But that was difficult to discern in this performance; Terfel’s robust voice had a touch of wickedness, with smirks here and there that made it seem as though he were encouraging Grimes’s destructive path. It came as no surprise when Balstrode, at last, told the poor Grimes to sink with his boat at sea.Other cast members stood out, for better and worse: the affecting textures of Martin Hässler’s Ned Keene and the dark comedy of Thomas Ebenstein’s Bob Boles; but also the shouty cries of Stephanie Houtzeel’s Mrs. Sedley, an interpretation better fit for Brecht than Britten.The conductor Simone Young shaped enormous peaks and valleys of sound in the orchestra. The great interludes were distinct narratives: the first setting a tone with its chilling thinness, the third angular and balletic, the fifth gently rocking yet tense. And the chorus, monochromatically costumed and often moving in unison, sang with as much richly defined character as any single performer onstage. In Act III, its members truly embodied the destructive power of a determined mob.That scene is one of the most horrifying in opera, a grand climax in a work that, when performed at this level, makes any onerous safety protocol worthwhile. If you can get over that hurdle, there are several opportunities — and many, many tickets — left to hear it for yourself.Peter GrimesThrough Feb. 8 at the Vienna State Opera; wiener-staatsoper.at. More