Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Maria Ewing, Dramatically Daring Opera Star, Dies at 71

      by

      She sought to incorporate acting techniques in her singing rather than settle for predictable staging. Uncertainty about her heritage inspired her daughter, the actress Rebecca Hall, to make the film “Passing.”Maria Ewing, who sang notable soprano and mezzo-soprano roles at leading houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, beginning in the mid-1970s and whose ambiguity about her racial heritage helped drive her daughter, the actress and director Rebecca Hall, to make the recent movie “Passing,” died on Sunday at her home near Detroit. She was 71.A family spokeswoman said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ewing was a striking presence on opera stages, where she strove to bring an actor’s skills and sensibilities to her roles rather than simply stand and sing.“I’ve watched how actors work and work at it,” Ms. Ewing, who was once married to the director Peter Hall, told The Orange County Register of California in 1997, when she was appearing in L.A. Opera’s production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora.”“I don’t mean to criticize or underestimate the importance of beautiful vocalism, which alone can move people,” she added. “But why is it that opera so often becomes predictable in terms of staging?”There was certainly nothing staid about her performance, under the direction of Mr. Hall, in the title role of “Salome,” first seen in Los Angeles in 1986 and restaged in other cities, included London. In the initial production she ended the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing only a G-string; in later ones she dispensed with even that. (She is not the only Salome to have ended the dance in the all-together; Karita Mattila did so at the Met this century.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge,” she told The Register. “You go to the precipice and lean over it. You have to. A role like Salome, you are completely on the edge. You’re over it, in fact.”Though critics had sometimes frowned on her leading roles — her attempt at the title role in “Carmen,” also under Mr. Hall, at about the same time drew some harsh notices — her “Salome” was generally acclaimed. John Rockwell, reviewing a return engagement in Los Angeles in 1989 for The New York Times, called it “the most arresting, convincing overall account of this impossible part that I have ever encountered.”Ms. Ewing as Poppea in Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1984. The production was by the noted director Peter Hall, Ms. Ewing’s husband. Dennis Bailey performed the part of Nerone.Guy Cravett/ThornEMIWhenever Ms. Ewing performed, critics almost invariably commented on her exotic looks. Those were in part a product of a mixed racial heritage that Ms. Ewing tended not to dwell on, even with her daughter, who was raised in England.“When I was growing up, my mother would say things to me like, ‘Well, you know we’re Black,’ and then another day she’d say, ‘I don’t really know that,’” Ms. Hall recounted in an episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS genealogy program, filmed last year and broadcast just last week.“She was always extraordinarily beautiful,” Ms. Hall told Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of the program, “but she didn’t look like everyone else’s mother in the English countryside.”Her mother identified as white, she told Professor Gates, but in interviews over the years Ms. Ewing also alluded to possible Black and American Indian ancestry. Ms. Ewing’s father, Norman, for years presented himself as an American Indian, but the researchers on “Finding Your Roots” determined that this was a fabrication; a DNA test of Ms. Hall done for the program showed that she had no Indian background. Her grandfather had in fact been Black.“You, my dear, are indeed a person of African descent,” Professor Gates told Ms. Hall.This was more than a curiosity for Ms. Hall. She had for some time been developing a film based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom passes as white. Part of what interested her about the novel, she said in interviews, was the nagging suspicion that the story was relevant to her own family.“When I asked questions to my mother about her background in Detroit and her family,” Ms. Hall told The New York Times last year, “she left it with an, ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past.’”The film, Ms. Hall’s first feature as a director, premiered in November and has been widely praised as one of the year’s best.Maria Louise Ewing was born on March 27, 1950, in Detroit. Her father was an engineer at a steel company and her mother, Hermina Maria (Veraar) Ewing, was a homemaker.Ms. Ewing studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. About 1975 she made her debut at the Cologne Opera, and in October 1976 she made her Met debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”“At the moment some combination of nerves and artistic immaturity holds her Cherubino short of the very best,” Mr. Rockwell wrote in his review. “But she is a singer of enormous potential.”That same month found her on the Carnegie Hall stage, one of two singers in a Mahler program by the New York Philharmonic conducted by James Levine.“The voice is one with a good deal of color, and of course Miss Ewing will grow into the music,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times.Among her early Met roles was Blanche in John Dexter’s 1977 staging of Poulenc’s “Dialogues der Carmelites.” She was slated for a road production of that opera in Boston in 1979 when fog grounded the plane that was supposed to deliver her from New York to Boston for an 8 p.m. curtain. At 4:30 p.m. she climbed into a cab, which delivered her to the Hynes Auditorium at 8:55; the curtain went up at 9:05. The fare: $337.50, not including a $47.50 tip.In addition to her dramatic roles, Ms. Ewing stood out in comedies like Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.”Ms. Ewing’s daughter Rebecca Hall, left, is a noted stage and film actress. They attended the funeral of Ms. Ewing’s former husband, Peter Hall, in 2017. Also pictured is Leslie Caron, who was also married to Mr. Hall.Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Give any ‘Così’ Kiri Te Kanawa’s patrician Fiordiligi, Maria Ewing’s lovably dopey Dorabella and Donald Gramm’s subtly understated Don Alfonso and you will have yourself a night at the opera,” Donal Henahan wrote of the Met’s production in 1982.In 1987 a dispute with Mr. Levine over a revival and telecast of “Carmen” led her to withdraw from Met performances.“I cannot work with a man I cannot trust, and I cannot work in a house that he is running in this fashion,” she said at the time.But she would eventually return; her final Met performance was in 1997 as Marie in Berg’s “Wozzeck.”She and Mr. Hall married in 1982 and divorced in 1990. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three sisters, Norma Koleta, Carol Pancratz and Francis Ewing; and a granddaughter.In 1996, when she was singing a concert with the Philharmonic, The Times asked Ms. Ewing about that famous dance in “Salome.”“It was my own idea to do the dance naked,” she said. “I felt that it was somehow essential to express the truth of that moment — a moment of frustration, longing and self-discovery for Salome. For me, the scene wouldn’t work any other way.” More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      7 Ways to Remember Martin Luther King in New York

      by

      From in-person and virtual performances to exhibitions and tours, the city offers plenty of options for honoring the civil rights leader this year.Since 1983, just 15 years after his death, the third Monday in January has been designated as a federal holiday in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. This year, on Jan. 17, cultural institutions all over New York have planned concerts, exhibitions, service opportunities and tours, both in person and online. (Bring your vaccination card, and check mask-wearing and ticketing policies online beforehand.)Here are seven ways to commemorate the legacy of the civil rights leader and learn more about Black history in New York.An Annual Bash in Brooklynbam.org.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 36th annual tribute to King, held in person and streaming live at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, will feature a dance piece by Kyle Marshall, set to the oratory of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and performances by the singer Nona Hendryx with Craig Harris & Tailgaters Tales and the Sing Harlem choir. A keynote address will also be delivered by Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. Following the event, visitors can view a display of digital billboards inspired by the writings of bell hooks or attend a free screening at 1 p.m. of the documentary “Attica,” about the violent 1971 prison uprising.The choreographer Kyle Marshall, who created a dance piece set to the oratory of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”Steven SpeliotisActivism and the Artsapollotheater.org.The Apollo Theater and WNYC’s 16th annual celebration will hold two virtual broadcasts on Monday, at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., engaging WNYC radio hosts, scholars and community leaders in a discussion about how the struggle for social justice has affected artists like Nina Simone and John Legend. Guests include the Rev. Al Sharpton, the sports journalist William C. Rhoden and Trazana Beverley, who won a Tony Award for her role in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The free event can be streamed through the Apollo’s Digital Stage.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics review a masterpiece “African Origin” show, an Afrofuturist period room and a round-the-world tour of Surrealism.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.Discover Seneca Villagecentralparknyc.org; metmuseum.org.Take a tour of Central Park that conjures Seneca Village, the largest community of free African American property owners in early-19th-century New York. Beginning at Mariners’ Gate near the West 85th Street entrance at 2 p.m. on Saturday, your guide will share how the area, once home to around 1,600 residents, provided a respite from the racial discrimination and crowded conditions of downtown Manhattan — until residents were forcibly displaced in 1857 to make way for Central Park. That history is also the subject of a new, vibrant installation across the park, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” imagines the home of a Village resident as it might still exist if the family had been left to live undisturbed.Make a Craftwavehill.org.Just before leading the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, King passed through the hamlet of Gee’s Bend and encouraged its 900 residents to vote. They would go on to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a group that allowed women of the town to earn an income by making quilts that were sold at Saks and Sears; some textiles have entered the permanent collection of the Met. You can put your own sewing skills to the test on Saturday or Sunday at Wave Hill House in the Bronx, where plentiful squares of fabric will be on hand.Quiltmaking at Wave Hill House in the Bronx. Joshua BrightChoose a Causeamericorps.govSince King’s birthday was first observed, it’s been a tradition for volunteers across the country to devote the day to service. Whether you commit to a few hours or a whole month, the website of the federal public-service organization AmeriCorps has a directory where you can search for volunteer opportunities (including ones specific to the holiday). There are virtual options, too, like tutoring or transcription for the Smithsonian Institution and National Archives.A Streaming Sermontheaterofwar.com“The Drum Major Instinct,” a sermon King delivered in 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will be presented on Zoom on Monday at 7 p.m. by Theater of War Productions and the office of Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate. Along with the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, and the city police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, Williams will take part in a dramatic reading of the text, which challenges people to channel justice, righteousness and peace into acts of service and love. Accompanying them will be performances of music composed in honor of Michael Brown Jr., the 18-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.‘Activist New York’mcny.orgAn ongoing exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York chronicles 350 years of social activism in the city, including civil rights, immigration, transgender activism and women’s rights. It begins with the struggle for religious tolerance during the Dutch colonial period, encompasses debates over nudity, prostitution and contraception in New York, from 1870 to 1930, and ends more recently, with the Movement for Black Lives. New material is added regularly, so it’s one to revisit. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Dale Clevenger, Chicago Symphony’s Fearless Horn Master, Dies at 81

      by

      Mr. Clevenger, who played his notoriously treacherous instrument with daring, was an anchor of the Chicago orchestra’s famed brass section for 47 years.Dale Clevenger, whose expressive, daring playing as the solo French horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 47 years made him one of the most respected orchestral instrumentalists of his generation, died on Jan. 5 at a hospital near his home in Brescia, Italy. He was 81.The cause was complications of Waldenstrom’s disease, a form of lymphoma, his family said.Mr. Clevenger was a pillar of the famed Chicago brass section, which has long been renowned as an unrivaled force for its clean, majestic sound, fearless attacks and sheer might. Working with his equally enduring fellow principals, Adolph Herseth on trumpet, Jay Friedman on trombone and Arnold Jacobs on tuba, Mr. Clevenger helped shape that section into the envy of the orchestra world, and the joy of its conductors.In a statement, Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s music director, called him “one of the best and most famous horn players of our time and one of the glories of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”Mr. Clevenger’s willingness to take risks on his notoriously treacherous instrument, and his ability to surmount those risks seemingly with ease, were symbols of the brash quality of his orchestra. He was a technical virtuoso, but he was also capable of producing an enormous range of colors on his instrument, Mr. Muti’s predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, said. He was also a frequent chamber music partner and soloist.The Chicago ensemble was already full of idols when Mr. Clevenger joined in 1966, but Mr. Herseth and Mr. Jacobs were inspirations for him, both for their excellence and for their longevity.When the Boston Symphony offered Mr. Clevenger a post in the mid-1970s, he asked his mentors if they intended to perform in Chicago for as long as they physically could. They said yes. He resolved, he later recalled, that “as long as they were in the orchestra, there is nothing that would lure me away from Chicago.” Mr. Herseth went on to be principal for 53 years, Mr. Jacobs for 44.Mr. Clevenger was, however, a more versatile musician than that might imply. For 17 years he had a regular Tuesday-night date playing jazz with a group called Ears, which he said made him a stronger orchestral player. “Within the confines of symphonic structure,” he said in 1978 about the lessons he learned from improvising, “I can make music in a more relaxed, freer way.”Jazz was a side gig, but Mr. Clevenger was serious about leaving his seat on the stage to stand on the podium. “My dream is eventually to become a respected conductor of a major orchestra anywhere in the world,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986. That was not to be, but he did direct the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble in the Chicago suburbs, from 1981 to 1995.The Chicago Symphony’s horn section in the late 1970s. From left, Frank Brouk, Richard Oldberg, Norman Schweikert, Mr. Clevenger and Daniel Gingrich. Robert M. Lightfoot II/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Michael Dale Clevenger was born on July 2, 1940, in Chattanooga, Tenn., the third of four children of Ernest Clevenger, a sawmill manufacturer who was briefly the president of the Chattanooga Opera Association, and Mary Ellen (Fridell) Clevenger, a homemaker. He started learning piano at age 7 and went to concerts with his father.“I kept my eye on this shape of metal, which was the French horn,” Mr. Clevenger recalled of attending those concerts in a video interview for Abilene Christian University in 1984. “I was infatuated with the way they looked. The more I looked, the more I became infatuated with the way they sound. I had a dream, a vision, to play one of those things.”Unable to afford a horn, Ernest Clevenger bought his 11-year-old son a trumpet instead, but Dale persisted. At 14, after making do with a school instrument for a year, he had his own horn, and his life.Mr. Clevenger performed in the Chattanooga Symphony and the Chattanooga High School band, under the bandmaster A.R. Casavant, who played him records of the Chicago Symphony during his lunch hour.He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1958 to study with Forrest Standley, the principal of the Pittsburgh Symphony.After graduating in 1962, he freelanced in New York, joined Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra and spent a year as principal of the Kansas City Philharmonic.He failed his first audition with the Chicago Symphony, in May 1965, but succeeded at a second, in January 1966. On his first week on the job, he was a soloist in Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion and String Orchestra.“For his initial time out,” The Chicago Tribune reported, “he seems a capable addition to our superb first chair lineup.”The Martin concerto was recorded and later released. As well as appearing countless times on record as an ensemble player, Mr. Clevenger was a soloist on several later Chicago Symphony recordings, including a glowing account of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings under Carlo Maria Giulini and a disc of Strauss concertos that won a Grammy in 2002. Mr. Clevenger also set down Haydn and Mozart concertos with the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, and earned a further Grammy for the quintets for piano and winds by Beethoven and Mozart, sharing the bill with the Chicago principal clarinet Larry Combs (a fellow jazz player on Tuesday nights), two members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Mr. Barenboim.The composer John Williams wrote a concerto for Mr. Clevenger. Mr. Williams conducted its premiere with the Chicago Symphony and Mr. Clevenger in 2003. Todd Rosenberg /Chicago Symphony Orchestra In his final years in Chicago, music critics began raising questions about whether Mr. Clevenger was performing up to his usual standards. In 2010 Andrew Patner, writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, called for him to place “a cap on a unique orchestral career that should be noted for its many triumphs and not a late struggle against time.”Mr. Clevenger retired from the orchestra in 2013 and joined the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He had also taught at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities.Mr. Clevenger married Nancy Sutherland in 1966; they divorced in 1987. Alice Render, a hornist and sometime section partner in the Chicago Symphony, became his wife that year; she died in 2011. He married Giovanna Grassi in 2012. She survives him, as do a son, Michael, and a daughter, Ami, from his first marriage; two sons, Mac and Jesse, from his second marriage; a sister, Alice Clevenger Cooper; and two grandchildren.Mr. Clevenger, for whom John Williams wrote a concerto in 2003, always maintained that the purpose of his playing was to delight.“I realize that I have been given a gift, by God, to make music, to perform music, and to give people joy,” he said in the 1984 video interview. “I have the pleasure, the privilege, of making people happy — and in doing so, making my own self happy.” More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      2021 in Jazz: Intimacy and Conversation

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThroughout the coronavirus pandemic, jazz’s flexibility has become an asset. It informed how 2021 played out in the jazz world — the return of Pharoah Sanders with a new, unlikely collaborator, the electronic musician Floating Points; interesting intersections with hip-hop that call back to earlier jazz fusion; duet recordings that emphasize call and response, two artists communicating across the empty transom.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the pandemic is continuing to shape the world of jazz recordings, how the genre revives its heroes and also some promising new artists.Guests:Giovanni Russonello, who covers jazz for The New York TimesMarcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York Times and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Love, Trust and Heartbreak on Two Stages

      by

      The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Two Held in Fatal Shooting of the Memphis Rapper Young Dolph

      by

      One suspect was captured by federal marshals in Indiana after failing to surrender as he had promised on social media, the authorities said.Two people have been arrested in the killing of the rapper Young Dolph, who was shot by two people while buying cookies at a bakery in Memphis in November, according to the authorities.The U.S. Marshals Service announced on Tuesday that one of the suspects, Justin Johnson, 23, had been captured that day in Indiana. Last week, the police in Memphis obtained a first-degree murder warrant for Mr. Johnson and law enforcement agencies offered a reward of $15,000 for information leading to his arrest.Also on Tuesday, the other suspect in the killing, Cornelius Smith, was indicted by a grand jury in Tennessee on charges including first-degree murder and property theft in connection with the killing, the Shelby County district attorney general, Amy Weirich, said in a news release. Mr. Smith, 32, was also charged with the attempted murder of Young Dolph’s brother, who was also at the bakery during the shooting.Mr. Smith was arrested on Dec. 9 in Southaven, Tenn., on a warrant charging him with auto theft in connection with the getaway car used in the killing, Ms. Weirich said.Young Dolph, 36, a promising hip-hop artist who had emerged in recent years and whose real name was Adolph Thornton Jr., was shot on Nov. 17 inside Makeda’s, a bakery in downtown Memphis. The gunmen fled, and he was pronounced dead at the scene, the Memphis Police Department said.It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Johnson and Mr. Smith had lawyers.The U.S. Marshals Service, the Memphis Police Department, and Shelby County District Attorney’s Office are to hold a joint news conference on Wednesday to discuss the case.Mr. Johnson, 23, had posted on social media over the weekend, maintaining his innocence and saying that he intended to turn himself in on Monday, Action News 5 in Memphis reported. Monday passed with no arrest, and two U.S. Marshals fugitive task forces captured Mr. Johnson on Tuesday afternoon.Mr. Johnson, a rapper known as Straight Drop, also has an outstanding warrant for a violation of supervised federal release on a prior weapons conviction, the U.S. Marshals Service said.A memorial for Young Dolph in Memphis on Nov. 18, the day after the rapper was shot to death.Justin Ford/Getty ImagesYoung Dolph’s last solo album, “Rich Slave,” debuted at the No. 4 spot on the Billboard Chart in 2020. He had previously survived at least two shootings in 2017.The Memphis Police Department and Mayor Jim Strickland have pointed to Young Dolph’s killing as yet another example of a steady rise in gun violence in the city. In a letter to constituents last week, Mr. Strickland called for reform to state gun laws to increase penalties for crimes like aggravated assaults.Mr. Johnson had not been adequately punished, Mr. Strickland wrote, referring to the six months he served in prison four years ago after he fired a gun at a bowling alley and injured several people.“One of our top legislative priorities has been and continues to be finding a workable solution to these laws so that, if a person commits a violent crime, they are not back out in a few weeks or months doing the same things again,” he wrote. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Bill Staines, Folk Music Mainstay, Dies at 74

      by

      Among his best-known songs were “River,” “The Roseville Fair” and a cross-generational classic, “A Place in the Choir.”The folk singer Bill Staines used to tell a story about the oddest line in his best-known song, “A Place in the Choir,” whose lyrics celebrate the diversity of the animal kingdom and, by implication, the human one.Thanks to numerous cover versions and a best-selling picture book, countless children and adults could sing you the chorus:All God’s critters got a place in the choir,Some sing low, some sing higher,Some sing out loud on a telephone wire,Some just clap their hands, or paws, or anything they’ve got.But what about the line that ends one of the verses? “The otter hasn’t got much to say, and the porcupine talks to himself.” What’s up with that porcupine?The line, as Mr. Staines often related, came from a camping trip he and his wife, Karen Elrod Staines, took to the Tobacco Root Mountains in southwest Montana. Lying awake in their tent at 4 a.m., he heard an odd chattering outside.“And I figured, Well, they’ve landed,” he told the story to an audience in 2009. But when he peered out the tent flap, it wasn’t extraterrestrials; it was a porcupine talking to itself.Mr. Staines died on Dec. 5 at his home in Rollinsford, N.H. He was 74.His wife said the cause was prostate cancer.Ms. Staines, who works in special education, said the song, which first appeared on Mr. Staines’s 1979 album, “The Whistle of the Jay,” didn’t leap out at either of them as a career highlight.“When Bill wrote ‘P.I.C.’ and played it for me when I got home from school, we both shook our heads and said, ‘I don’t know if this is a keeper or not,’” she said by email. “Obviously and luckily, we were wrong.”The song has been covered by Peter, Paul and Mary; Red Grammer; Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy; and many others. A rousing live performance by the Irish group Celtic Thunder on YouTube has been viewed over seven million times.“Songs are like children you care about,” Mr. Staines, who recorded almost 30 albums, told The Register of Yarmouth, Mass., in 2013. “You write a song and it’s born and you have to nurture it awhile and it grows up healthy and strong and then it develops relationships with people who don’t have anything to do with you. ‘A Place in the Choir’ has a life of its own. It’s like a child that’s grown up and gone away.”William Russell Staines was born on Feb. 6, 1947, in Medford, Mass., to William Henry and Dorothy (Trask) Staines. He grew up in Lexington, Mass., and two boyhood friends, Dick and John Curtis, were the catalysts for his performing career.“When I was around 11, Dick got a guitar, so of course I had to get one,” Mr. Staines told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 2018. “It was a Sears Silvertone three-quarter-size guitar with a cowboy painted on it. I sanded the cowboy off the front, and Dick and John and I started a little rock ’n’ roll band, with contact pickups on our acoustic guitars.”Before long, he had gone solo and begun writing his own songs, upgrading to a full-size guitar, which he played in an unusual way: upside-down.“When I got my first guitar, I picked it up and held it the correct way, the right-handed way,” he told the Quincy newspaper. “But I’m left-handed and it just didn’t feel right. So I flipped it over and figured this must be the left-handed way of playing. You know, a D chord is still a D chord, so I just had to get to it differently.”That approach gave his picking a somewhat different sound, since he was hitting the high strings with his thumb. At least one fellow guitarist was impressed.“About four years ago I met this fellow in California who was a wonderful guitar player, who said, ‘I really like the way your style sounds,’” Mr. Staines told The Wenatchee World of Washington State in 2009. “And I saw him a year ago, and he’d went out and bought a left-handed guitar and was playing it right-handed. So that’s even one step to the weirder.”Mr. Staines wrote countless songs. Many evoked the natural world, like “River,” one of his best known, with its wistful refrain:You rolling old river, you changing old river,Let’s you and me, river, run down to the sea.Others were character sketches — “pensive, probing narratives made especially memorable by their ability to translate the common details of common lives into songs of uncommon eloquence and beauty,” as L.E. McCullough put it in The Austin American-Statesman in 1986. There was, for instance, “The Roseville Fair,” about a couple’s first meeting and their enduring love. Among those who covered the tune was Nanci Griffith, who called Mr. Staines “the Woody Guthrie of my generation of songwriters.” Ms. Griffith, who died in August, credited Mr. Staines with encouraging her in her own career.Mr. Staines, an old-school troubadour who traveled tens of thousands of miles every year to perform, started out in coffee shops and other small venues. Early in his career, he was M.C. of the Sunday hootenanny at the famed Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.He was still a road warrior half a century later. His most recent album, in 2018, was called “The Third Million Miles.”In addition to Ms. Staines, whom he married in 1976, Mr. Staines is survived by a son, Bowen Keith Staines, and a brother, Stephen.Mr. Staines had another talent: yodeling. He sometimes gave workshops on the skill. In 1975, he won a yodeling contest at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas — “defeating some crestfallen Swiss yodelers,” The Christian Science Monitor reported. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      James Mtume, Whose ‘Juicy Fruit’ Became a Hip-Hop Beat, Dies at 76

      by

      In a wide-ranging career, he went from playing percussion with Miles Davis to writing and producing sleek R&B to a long stint on political talk radio.James Mtume, the musician, songwriter, producer, bandleader and talk-radio host whose 1983 hit “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled in more than 100 songs, died on Sunday at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 76.His cause was cancer, his family said.Mr. Mtume started his career as a jazz percussionist. He was in Miles Davis’s band for the first half of the 1970s, appearing on Davis’s landmark 1972 jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors.But in the late ’70s he pivoted to R&B: He co-wrote hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, produced albums and formed a group, Mtume, which had major hits with his songs “Juicy Fruit” and “You, Me and He.” His sparse, sputtering electronic beat for “Juicy Fruit” gained an extensive second life in hip-hop when it was sampled on the debut single by the Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy,” a No. 1 rap hit in 1994.Mr. Mtume was born James Forman on Jan. 3, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was the jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath, but he was raised by his stepfather, James Forman, a jazz pianist also known as Hen Gates who had played with Charlie Parker, and his mother, Bertha Forman, a homemaker.Jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and John Coltrane were frequent family visitors, and the young James Forman grew up playing piano and percussion; his biological uncle, the jazz drummer Albert (Tootie) Heath, gave him his first conga drum.He was a champion swimmer in high school, winning the Middle Atlantic title for backstroke, and attended Pasadena City College on an athletic scholarship.In California, he joined the US Organization, a Black nationalist cultural group that introduced the holiday Kwanzaa, and he took an African last name: Mtume, Swahili for messenger. He also turned seriously to music.In 1969, Albert Heath recorded four modal, Afrocentric jazz compositions by Mr. Mtume on his album “Kawaida,” featuring Mr. Mtume on congas alongside Herbie Hancock on piano, Don Cherry on trumpet and Jimmy Heath on saxophones. Mr. Mtume also worked with Art Farmer, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard and Gato Barbieri.He joined Miles Davis’s band in 1971 as it was making the transition to the jagged, open-ended, rhythm-dominated funk of “On the Corner.” In an extensive Red Bull Music Academy interview in 2014, Mr. Mtume said that Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” He worked with Davis until 1975, touring and appearing on the albums “Big Fun,” “Dark Magus,” “Agharta,” “Pangaea” and “Get Up With It,” which included a Davis composition titled “Mtume.”Working with Davis, Mr. Mtume expanded his sound with electronic effects. “You don’t fight technology, you embrace it,” he said in 2014. “It’s like fire. It’ll burn you, or you learn how to cook with it.”In 1972, Mr. Mtume made his recording debut as a leader with “Alkebu-Lan: Land of the Blacks” on the Strata-East label, credited to the Mtume Umoja Ensemble. It opened with a spoken manifesto that praised “the role of Black music as a functional organ in the struggle for national liberation.” He released a second jazz album, “Rebirth Cycle,” in 1977.Mr. Mtume with Miles Davis in 1973. In a 2014 interview, he said Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” R. Brigden/Express, via Getty ImagesWhen Davis stopped performing in 1975, Mr. Mtume and the guitarist Reggie Lucas, another member of the Davis group, joined Roberta Flack’s band. Their composition “The Closer I Get to You,” which she recorded as a duet with Donny Hathaway, reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978 and was later remade by Beyoncé and Luther Vandross.They formed Mtume-Lucas Productions to write and produce songs. Among the artists they worked with were Phyllis Hyman, Teddy Pendergrass, the Spinners and Stephanie Mills, for whom they wrote the 1980 hit “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” a Grammy Award winner for best R&B song. On Instagram this week, Ms. Mills praised Mr. Mtume, writing, “He was so brilliant and an amazing music mind.”Between production jobs, Mr. Mtume and Mr. Lucas recorded with their core musicians as the group Mtume, which featured the singer Tawatha Agee. Mr. Mtume described the group’s first albums as “sophistifunk,” using plush harmonies and elaborate orchestrations.But one day, Mr. Mtume recalled, he realized that “I was playing something that sounded just like something else I had done. I got up and I walked away, and I disbanded the band, and I decided not to do any more productions.”He put together a second lineup of Mtume, without Mr. Lucas, and turned to a style he described as “neo-minimalism,” using just a handful of instruments and fewer effects. The new Mtume lineup recorded “Juicy Fruit.” At first, Mtume’s record label, Epic, dismissed the song as too slow for daytime radio, but it became a No. 1 R&B hit.The title song of Mtume’s 1984 album, “You, Me and He” — a confession of polyamory — reached No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart. On the group’s final album, “Theater of the Mind,” released in 1986, Mtume turned to sociopolitical commentary in songs like “Deep Freeze (Rap-a-Song) (Part 1).” That same year, Mr. Mtume wrote the score for the film “Native Son” and produced a solo album for Ms. Agee.In a radio interview in 1988, during a freewheeling era of hip-hop when samples were widely used without payment or credit, Mr. Mtume denounced hip-hop’s reliance on sampling, calling it “Memorex music” and complaining that the originators were ignored. The hip-hop group Stetsasonic responded with “Talkin’ All That Jazz,” which argued, “Rap brings back old R&B/And if we would not, people could’ve forgot.”Eventually, sampling — by then licensed and credited — would keep Mr. Mtume’s music on the radio. “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled by Alicia Keys, Warren G, Jennifer Lopez, Keyshia Cole, Faith Evans and dozens of others, and many of Mr. Mtume’s other songs and productions have made their way onto new tracks.In 1994, Mr. Mtume scored the TV series “New York Undercover.” At his urging, the show’s story lines featured a nightclub, Natalie’s, where an older generation of musicians, including B.B. King and Gladys Knight, got new TV exposure and younger performers revived old songs. During the 1990s he also produced songs for Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, and K-Ci & Jojo.Yet by the mid-1990s, Mr. Mtume had grown dissatisfied with the music business. He moved into talk radio, and was a co-host from 1995 to 2013 on the weekly show “Open Line,” heard first on WRKS-FM (Kiss-FM) in New York and then on WBLS-FM when the stations merged, discussing politics, activism, news and culture alongside Bob Slade and Bob Pickett. Over the years, he also traveled to Cuba, Libya, Sudan and South Africa. He recorded a TED Talk in 2018, “Our Common Ground in Music,” in which he discussed “the cross-pollination of culture, politics and art.”He is survived by his wife, Kamili Mtume; his brother, Jeffrey Forman; two sons, Faulu Mtume and Richard Johnson; four daughters, Benin Mtume, Eshe King, Ife Mtume and Sanda Lee; and six grandchildren.“Pressing the boundaries. To me that’s always what it was about,” Mr. Mtume said in 2014. “Never give yourself a chance to look back, because that’s always easier. Looking forward is always harder.” More