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      In the Australian Outback, the Cobar Sound Chapel Quenches the Soul

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      Beneath the skies of a remote mining town, a composer and an architect created a musical chamber for marveling at the universe.Life in Cobar was a delicate thing until the arrival of the Silver Tank. In the vast, red-dirt hinterland of Australia, over 400 miles northwest of the shores of Sydney, rainwater is scarce. ​​For thousands of years, the nomadic Aboriginal Ngiyampaa people excelled at the art of survival by creating natural rock reservoirs. But after European settlers discovered copper and gold in the area in the 1870s, enough water was needed to sustain a booming mining town. Reservoirs were dug. Water was trained in from afar. Then, in 1901, a 33-foot-high steel water tank painted silver, hence its nickname, was erected about a mile outside of town. While the threat of drought remained (and remains to this day), it turned dusty Cobar, a freckle at the edge of the Outback, into something of a desert oasis.The entrance to the sound chapel, which features a bench from which visitors can listen to Lentz’s “String Quartet(s)” (2000-21), a 24-hour-long composition inspired by the Outback’s dramatic skies.Josh RobenstoneNowadays, Cobar pipes in its water from the Burrendong Dam, about 233 miles east, and the tank, whose silver finish long ago succumbed to rust and graffiti, is empty of water. It has, however, been filled with something new — music. On April 2, after two decades of work, it will be officially reborn as the Cobar Sound Chapel, an audacious sound-art collaboration between Georges Lentz, one of Australia’s leading contemporary composers, and Glenn Murcutt, an Australian Pritzker Prize-winning architect. For his reimagining of the roofless tank, Murcutt installed an approximately 16-foot cube within its cylindrical space, in which Lentz’s “String Quartet(s)” (2000-21), a 24-hour-long classical-meets-electronica work, will play on loop via a quadraphonic sound system. Inside the chamber is a concrete bench that seats up to four, from which one can look out through the ceiling’s gold-rimmed oculus. Morning, noon and night, then, the otherworldly sonic stream will reverberate throughout the concrete booth and spill out into the sky that inspired it. The artists’ hope is that their work will prompt visitors to meditate on our place in the universe. “There is a mysterious element to our existence that we ignore at our own peril,” says Lentz, 56. “By turning to something higher than ourselves, we realize we are just this tiny thing in this vast scheme.”Murcutt set a concrete cube within the tank. Inside it is a concrete bench from which one can look up at the sky through the gold-rimmed oculus.Josh RobenstoneLentz’s “String Quartet(s),” on which he collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet, will play on loop via a quadraphonic sound system.Josh RobenstoneLentz has been consumed by questions of cosmology and spirituality ever since he was a child. Born in Echternach, a small town in Luxembourg that formed around a seventh-century abbey, he grew up attending classical music festivals and stargazing with his dad. Later, he studied music in Hanover, Germany. While riding the train to university in the fall of 1988, he happened upon a story in the German science magazine Geo about the creation of the universe. It threw the tininess of humanity into sharp relief for him, and he fell into a depression that left him sleepless for weeks. “It felt like an abyss you look into and go, ‘Wah!’” he says.A view from just outside the concrete chamber, which was built inside of a roofless (and now empty) water tank.Josh RobenstoneEver since, Lentz has devoted his entire body of work to exploring the questions of the cosmos, transforming his initial fear into a quest for contemplation, one that only intensified following his 1990 move to Australia and exposure to the Outback’s ocean of sky. Both a continuation and culmination of his work, “String Quartet(s)” began as an attempt to translate that sky into a score. To do so, he collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet that’s based in Sydney. They used a range of techniques; to mirror a starry night, for example, the musicians invoked the pointillism of the contemporary Aboriginal painter Kathleen Petyarre, plucking their bows at the top of their instruments to create contained bits of sound. “If you repeat that,” says Oliver Miller, the Noise’s cellist and a technical and creative adviser to the chapel, “it converges into a galactic formation where you get a cluster of the Milky Way.”Two concrete slabs mark the entrance to the sound chapel, though, thanks to its oculus, music can also be heard from outside the space.Josh RobenstoneThey ended up with about six hours’ worth of music, which, through digital editing, Lentz expanded into a 24-hour, techno-infused soundscape of terror, wonder and reverence. Taking inspiration from Gerhard Richter, he layered recorded sounds as if they were in a palimpsest. In one track I sampled, a curtain of piercing strings gave the impression of a dust storm haunting the horizon. In another, I fell into a reverie as the strings receded into shiny, ethereal dots, ringing as if in an empty basement. I listened from atop a hill in Connecticut, but to hear the music inside the chapel would be an experience of an entirely different magnitude.The interior walls of the concrete chamber were cast in corrugated iron formwork and act as sound diffusers. The men chose to keep the graffiti that had accumulated on the disused tank over the years.Josh RobenstoneAround 2000, Lentz began dreaming of a music box amid a copper landscape, a place where his music could live alongside its muse. But it wasn’t until he played a concert in Cobar in 2008 that he considered the town as a potential site. He pitched the idea to the Cobar Shire Council, which later proposed the hilltop bearing the tank, suggesting it be demolished to make room. “Absolutely not!” Lentz said. Soon after, he called Murcutt, 85, who is celebrated for hand-drawn, landscape-specific designs inspired by Australian vernacular architecture, such as farmhouses and shearing sheds. “You’d have to be mad to be doing something like this,” Murcutt remembers thinking. “But it’s also extraordinary.”The morning sun creates a sliver of light on the interior of the entrance to the Cobar Sound Chapel, which will open in April.Josh RobenstoneMurcutt has always been drawn to the desert, whose sparseness resonates with the Aboriginal mantra — touch the earth lightly — by which he tries to abide. In keeping with that idea, he set out to design, largely thanks to governmental funding, a simple, solar-powered chapel that would unify sound, site and atmosphere. Two large slabs of concrete mark the entrance outside. Inside, the cubic space (which is slightly slanted to optimize acoustics) is stark, just like the desert itself. In the four corners of the ceiling, sunlight streams through windows of Russian blue glass painted by the local Aboriginal artist Sharron Ohlsen, who also employs pointillism in her work. And, over the course of each day, an ellipse of light traverses the floor and concrete walls, which were cast in corrugated iron formwork and act as sound diffusers. Music booms from a speaker in each wall, enveloping listeners, Miller says, as if they were “moving within a cosmic nebula or swimming within a school of deep-sea jellyfish.”And so, over a century after arriving in town, the Silver Tank — which promises to put Cobar on the cultural map, especially as the chapel will play host to an annual string quartet festival sponsored by Manuka Resources, a local mine — once again provides something essential. For anyone who spends time inside, it offers a sanctuary for contemplating existential questions that, particularly in the age of the pandemic, haunt us so acutely. And while the piece may not provide answers, it is also a comforting reminder that, even in a vast, seemingly empty expanse, there can still be music. More

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      Lawsuit Accusing Nirvana of Sexually Exploitive Imagery Is Dismissed

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      Spencer Elden, who was pictured naked as a baby on the cover of “Nevermind,” said Nirvana had engaged in “child pornography.”A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a man who said he had been sexually exploited by the grunge rock group Nirvana when the band used a photo of him as a baby, naked and drifting in a pool, for the cover of its seminal album “Nevermind.”In his complaint, the man, Spencer Elden, 30, accused Nirvana of engaging in child pornography when it used a photo of him as the cover art of “Nevermind,” the Seattle band’s breakthrough 1991 album that helped define Generation X and rocketed the group to international fame.The lawsuit was dismissed after a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California said that Mr. Elden’s lawyers missed a deadline to respond to a motion for dismissal by the lawyers for Nirvana.Judge Fernando M. Olguin said that Mr. Elden’s lawyers had until Jan. 13 to file a second amended complaint to address “the alleged defects” in the defendants’ motion to dismiss.Robert Y. Lewis, one of Mr. Elden’s lawyers, said they would file the complaint well before the deadline. He said the missed deadline was a result of “confusion” over how much time they had to respond to the motion for dismissal.“We feel confident that our amended complaint will survive an expected motion to dismiss,” Mr. Lewis said.The lawsuit was filed in August against the estate of Kurt Cobain; the musician’s former bandmates, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic; and Mr. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, among other parties. Their lawyers did not immediately respond to messages for comment on Tuesday.In their motion to dismiss, the lawyers for Nirvana said that Mr. Elden’s lawsuit failed to meet the statute of limitations to file a complaint citing a violation of federal criminal child pornography statutes. But they also denied that the picture, “one of the most famous photographs of all time,” was an example of child pornography.“Elden’s claim that the photograph on the ‘Nevermind’ album cover is ‘child pornography’ is, on its face, not serious,” they wrote. “A brief examination of the photograph, or Elden’s own conduct (not to mention the photograph’s presence in the homes of millions of Americans who, on Elden’s theory, are guilty of felony possession of child pornography), makes that clear.”Instead, they said, “the photograph evokes themes of greed, innocence and the motif of the cherub in Western art.”Mr. Elden was 4 months old when he was photographed in 1991 by a family friend, Kirk Weddle, at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena, Calif.The photo of Mr. Elden was picked from among dozens of pictures of babies Mr. Weddle photographed for the album cover, which Mr. Cobain, the band’s frontman, envisioned showing a baby underwater.Mr. Weddle paid Mr. Elden’s parents $200 for the picture, which was later altered to show the baby chasing a dollar, dangling from a fishhook.In the decades that followed, Mr. Elden appeared to celebrate his part in the classic cover, recreating the moment for the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th and 25th anniversaries, though not naked.But in the lawsuit, Mr. Elden said he had suffered “permanent harm” because of his association with the album, including emotional distress and a “lifelong loss of income-earning capacity.”The lawsuit did not provide details about the losses but said that Nirvana, the producers of the album and others had all profited from the album’s sales at the expense of Mr. Elden’s privacy.The lawyers for Nirvana said that Mr. Elden used his fame from the photo to pick up women and benefited financially from the album cover. They described the various times he re-enacted the photograph for a fee, his public appearances parodying the cover, and the copies of the album that he autographed, which were then sold on eBay.They wrote: “Elden has spent three decades profiting from his celebrity as the self-anointed ‘Nirvana Baby.’” More

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      15 Songs We Almost Missed This Year

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      Hear tracks by Sofia Kourtesis, Remble, Caetano Veloso 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.Sofia Kourtesis, ‘La Perla’At first, Sofia Kourtesis’s “La Perla” develops like a Polaroid shot of a white sand beach. This is earnest, pulsating deep house: ripples of synths, oceanic drum loops, feather-light hums, the iridescent touch of piano keys. But when the Peruvian producer’s voice arrives, the track transforms into something less picture-perfect. “Tú y yo/En soledad/Igual acá/Tratando de cambiar/Tratando de olvidar,” she intones. (“You and I/In loneliness/Same here/Trying to change/Trying to forget.”) Kourtesis composed the song with the water and her father, who was dying from leukemia, in mind; he used to say that staring at the sea is a form of meditation. Lying somewhere between hope and melancholia, “La Perla” embodies mourning: the on-and-off work of confronting your own suffering, while harnessing fleeting moments of solace when you can. ISABELIA HERRERAYoung Stunna featuring Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, ‘Adiwele’This eight-minute track from South Africa is a collaboration by the singer Young Stunna and the amapiano producer Kabza De Small, from Young Stunna’s debut album, “Notumato (Beautiful Beginnings).” It materializes slowly and methodically, with just an electronic beat at first, then hovering electronic tones and blipping offbeats, then syncopated vocal syllables. Eventually Young Stunna’s lead vocal arrives, breathy and increasingly insistent, tautly bouncing his lines off the beat. “Adiwele” roughly means “things falling into place”; it’s a grateful boast about his current success, but it’s delivered like someone racing toward even more ambitious goals. JON PARELESBabyTron, ‘Paul Bearer’“Bin Reaper 2” — one of three very good albums BabyTron released in 2021 — has several high points. There’s “Frankenstein,” built on a sample of an old Debbie Deb song, and the disco-esque “Pimp My Ride.” But “Paul Bearer” might be the best. BabyTron is a casually talky rapper from Michigan, and in keeping with the rap scene that’s been germinating there for the past few years, he’s a hilarious absurdist, flexible with syllables and also images: “Point it at his toes, turn his Yeezys into Foam Runners,” “High as hell on the roof, dripping like a broke gutter.” JON CARAMANICAMabiland, ‘Wow’For the Colombian artist Mabiland, living with the injustice of anti-Black violence is so surreal, it resembles the worlds of sci-fi and neo-noir films like “Tenet” and “Oldboy.” On “Wow,” she draws comparisons to these cinematic universes, offering a macabre reflection on those who were killed in recent years: George Floyd, but also the five of Llano Verde, a group of teens who were shot in Cali, Colombia, in 2020. Over trap drums and a forlorn, looped guitar, the artist recalibrates her voice over and over, shifting between raspy soul, high-pitched yelps, wounded raps and sweet-tongued singing. It is a subtle lesson in elasticity, creating an expansive vocal landscape that captures her pain in all of its depth. HERRERARemble, ‘Touchable’One of the year’s signature rap stylists, Remble declaims like he’s giving a physics lecture, all punching-bag emphasis and tricky internal rhymes. An inheritor of Drakeo the Ruler, who was killed this month — listen to their collaboration on “Ruth’s Chris Freestyle” — Remble is crisp and declamatory and, most disarmingly, deeply calm. “Touchable,” from his vivid, wonderful 2021 album, “It’s Remble,” is one of his standouts, packed to the gills with sweetly terrifying boasts: “Came a long way from pre-K and eating Lunchables/I just took your life and as you know it’s unrefundable.” CARAMANICAMorgan Wade, ‘Wilder Days’“Don’t Cry,” which Morgan Wade released at the end of 2020, cut right to the quick: “I’ll always be my own worst critic/The world exists and I’m just in it.” “Wilder Days,” from her lovingly ragged debut album “Reckless,” is about wanting to know the whole of a person, even the parts that time has smoothed over. Wade has a terrific, acid-drenched voice — she sounds like she’s singing from the depths of history. And while this song is about wanting someone you love to hold on to the things that gave them their scrapes and bruises, it’s really about holding on to that part of yourself as long as is feasible, and then a little longer. CARAMANICALady Blackbird, ‘Collage’There’s a deep blues cry in the voice of Lady Blackbird — the Los Angeles-based songwriter Marley Munroe — that harks back to Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Billie Holiday. “Collage,” from her album “Black Acid Soul,” rides an acoustic bass vamp and modal jazz harmonies, enfolded in wind chimes and Mellotron “string” chords. It’s a song about colors, cycles and trying to “find a song to sing that is everything,” enigmatic and arresting. PARELESCaetano Veloso, ‘Anjos Tronchos’Recorded during the pandemic, “Meu Coco” (“My Head”) is the first full album on which Caetano Veloso, the great Brazilian musician whose career stretches back to the 1960s, wrote all the songs without collaborators. “Anjos Tronchos” (“Twisted Angels”) is musically sparse; for much of it, Veloso’s graceful melody is accompanied only by a lone electric rhythm guitar. But its scope is large; the “twisted angels” are from Silicon Valley, and he’s singing about the power of the internet to addict, to sell and to control, but also to delight and to spread ideas. “Neurons of mine move in a new rhythm/And more and more and more and more and more,” he sings, with fascination and dread. PARELESCico P, ‘Tampa’The year’s pre-eminent hypnosis. Put it on repeat and dissociate from the cruel year that was. CARAMANICACassandra Jenkins, ‘Hard Drive’“Hard Drive,” which includes the lyrics that provided the title for Cassandra Jenkins’s 2021 album, “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” plays like Laurie Anderson transported to Laurel Canyon. With unhurried spoken words and an occasional melodic refrain, Jenkins seeks insight and healing from people like a security guard and a bookkeeper, who tells her “The mind is just a hard drive.” The music cycles soothingly through a few chords as guitars and piano intertwine, a saxophone improvises at the periphery and Jenkins approaches serenity. PARELESFatima Al Qadiri, ‘Zandaq’On “Zandaq,” Fatima Al Qadiri looks 1,400 years into the past to illuminate a view of the future. Inspired by the poems of Arab women from the Jahiliyyah period to the 13th century, the Kuwaiti producer arranges plucked lute strings, echoes of bird calls and dapples of twisting, vertiginous vocals, fashioning a kind of a retrofuturist suite. The song draws on classical Arabic poetry’s ancient reserve of melancholic longing, considering the possibilities that emerge by slowing down and immersing oneself in desolation. HERRERANala Sinephro, ‘Space 5’The rising United Kingdom-based bandleader Nala Sinephro plays harp and electronics, with a pull toward weightless sounds and meditative pacings, so comparisons to Alice Coltrane are inevitable. But Sinephro has her own thing going entirely: It has to do with her lissome, contained-motion improvising on the harp, and the game versatility of the groups she puts together. Her debut album, which arrived in September, contains eight tracks, “Spaces 1-8.” On “Space 5,” she’s joined by the saxophonist Ahnasé and the guitarist Shirley Tetteh; it’s a jeweled mosaic of a track, with the components of a steady beat — but they’re distant and dampened enough that it never fully sinks in on a body level. Instead of head-nodding, maybe you’ll respond to this music by being completely still. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emile Mosseri, ‘Moonweed’“Moonweed” is only two minutes long, but contains all the reverie and tragedy of a big-screen sci-fi drama. (It’s a collaboration between the experimental artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the film composer Emile Mosseri.) With its unhurried piano and slow gurgle of galactic synths that arrive like an extraterrestrial transmission sent from the stars, the track manifests as both earthen and astral bliss. HERRERAJohnathan Blake, ‘Abiyoyo’The jazz drummer Johnathan Blake is used to playing as a side musician in all-star bands; when he leads his own groups, he also tends to field a formidable squad. On “Homeward Bound,” his Blue Note debut, Blake is joined by the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, the vibraphonist Joel Ross, the pianist David Virelles and the bassist Dezron Douglas — today’s cats, basically. Blake has a swing feel that’s both densely powerful and luxuriously roomy, and he deploys it here across a set that includes some impressive original tunes. On “Abiyoyo,” the South African folk song, he strikes the drums softly, with a mallet in one hand and a stick in the other, while Virelles handles a similar balance, using the full range of the piano but never overplaying. RUSSONELLORan Cap Duoi, ‘Aztec Glue’Vertigo alert: Ran Cap Duoi, an electronic group from Vietnam, aims for total disorientation in “Aztec Glue” from its 2021 album, “Ngu Ngay Ngay Ngay Tan The” (“Sleeping Through the Apocalypse”). Everything is chopped up and flung around: voices, rhythms, timbres, spatial cues. For its first minute, “Aztec Glue” finds a steady, Minimalist pulse, even as peeping vocal samples hop all over the stereo field. Then the bottom drops out; it lurches, slams, races, twitches and goes through sporadic bursts of acceleration. It goes on to find a new, looping near-equilibrium, spinning faster, but it doesn’t end without a few more surprises. PARELES More

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      Adele Closes Out 2021 With a Sixth Straight Week at No. 1

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      “30” ended the year with the equivalent of 1.8 million sales in the United States.Adele’s “30” finished 2021 at the top of the Billboard album chart, logging its sixth week at No. 1.“30” had the equivalent of 99,000 sales in the United States during the week that ended Dec. 30, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That total included 35 million streams and 71,500 copies sold as a complete package.Since its release in November, “30” has had the equivalent of 1.8 million sales in the United States, including 448 million streams and nearly 1.5 million copies sold as complete albums.Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” is No. 2, Taylor Swift’s “Red (Taylor’s Version)” holds at No. 3 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 4.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” rises seven spots to No. 5. Now in its 51st week on the chart, “Dangerous” had the longest run at No. 1 in 2021, with 10 weeks at the top, and remained in the Top 10 every week except on last week’s chart, when it dipped to No. 12.Also on this week’s album chart, Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” is No. 6 and the soundtrack to the new Disney animated film “Encanto” is No. 7. More

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      Review: Amid Omicron, the Met Opera Opens a Weimar ‘Rigoletto’

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      Quinn Kelsey and Rosa Feola lead a superb cast in Bartlett Sher’s new staging of Verdi’s classic drama.While a surge of coronavirus cases, driven by the spread of the Omicron variant, has taken a profound toll on live performance in New York, the Metropolitan Opera has not yet canceled a performance. The company was so determined not to lose the premiere of its new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” that at the final dress rehearsal, on Tuesday, everyone onstage wore a medical mask.These precautions, and perhaps some luck, paid off: The premiere took place as planned on New Year’s Eve in front of a sizable audience. And this was a compelling new “Rigoletto” — marking Bartlett Sher’s eighth production for the Met since his debut in 2006.The tenor Piotr Beczala, front left, as the lecherous Duke of Mantua in Bartlett Sher’s staging, which moves the setting from Renaissance Italy to Weimar Berlin.Richard Termine for The New York TimesIf shifting the opera’s setting from Renaissance Italy to 1920s Berlin was not entirely convincing, this was still a detailed, dramatic staging, full of insights into the characters. The chorus and orchestra excelled under the conducting of Daniele Rustioni, who led a lean, transparent performance that balanced urgency and lyricism.The baritone Quinn Kelsey, a Met stalwart for over a decade, had a breakthrough as the jester Rigoletto, part of the retinue of the lecherous Duke of Mantua. With his brawny, penetrating voice and imposing presence, Kelsey has always been an arresting artist. But this role shows off his full vocal and dramatic depth.He sang with an elegance and tenderness I had not heard from him before. During scenes at the duke’s palace, Rigoletto’s sneering crudity barely masked his hatred for the court. Yet when alone with Gilda, his beloved daughter, Kelsey’s Rigoletto melted, singing with warmth — yet also a touch of wariness, lest too much vulnerability leave him open to the threatening outside world.The soprano Rosa Feola, who had an outstanding Met debut as Gilda in 2019, was back in the role on Friday, and even better now. Her plush, warm voice carried effortlessly through the theater. Coloratura runs and trills emerged as integral extensions of the long-spun vocal lines. She captured Gilda’s innocence, but also the sensual stirrings and secret defiance that drive this over-protected young woman’s disastrous decisions.The tenor Piotr Beczala sang the duke in the Met’s previous two productions. Once again, he brought clarion sound and pinging top notes, along with cocky swagger to the role. Passing moments of vocal rawness didn’t feel out of place for this rapacious character.When Joshua Barone reviewed this production for The New York Times when it was introduced at the Berlin State Opera in 2019, he wrote that Sher’s treatment of the Weimar Republic came off as “more of a context than a concept.” For the Met, Sher has been able to fully realize his vision, including the introduction of a turntable for Michael Yeargan’s enormous set, which now rotates to allow fluidly cinematic shifts between scenes.Sher told The Times recently that he chose 1920s Berlin as a pre-fascist world of unchecked cruelty and extravagance, enabling an exploration of “how a corrupt leadership infects a culture, infects how wealth and privilege dominate and squish people below it.” Yet while the production did convey this foreboding clash of indulgence and oppression, there were few specific indications of Weimar politics or culture, other than a scene-setting curtain borrowed from the work of the artist George Grosz.Which is not to say that the staging lacks boldness. In the first scene, when the duke boasts to Rigoletto of his latest intrigue — with the alluring wife of Count Ceprano — he complains that her husband is in the way.The willing Rigoletto openly mocks the hapless count. But Kelsey, keeping with the production’s directness, audaciously crosses the line, bullying the count, even slapping him on the back of his head. No wonder Rigoletto becomes the target of vengeful courtiers, who plot to abduct Gilda, whom they assume to be his mistress.Unlike when Sher’s production was first seen, in Berlin in 2019, its set now rotates on a turntable for smooth transitions between scenes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesIn the next scene, walking by a row of gray, forbidding houses and wearing a clownish version of a long black coat and top hat — the vivid costumes are by Catherine Zuber — Rigoletto is visibly shaken by a curse that’s just been leveled on him at the palace. As he trudges home, steadying himself with a walking stick, he happens upon Sparafucile (the chilling bass Andrea Mastroni), an assassin for hire. This moment replicates the opening image of the production, when, through that Grosz curtain, we see the jester treading home as the orchestra plays the ominous prelude. You have the striking realization that Rigoletto takes this isolated walk every night; his life and emotions come into new focus.Rigoletto’s house is here a humble but comfortable three-story dwelling. This performance made abundantly clear how mistaken he has been to restrict Gilda’s freedom and put off her questions about her background — even about her dead mother. His treatment just makes Gilda prey to the advances of the dashing young man who has been following her: the duke, pretending to be a poor student. The smitten Gilda sings the aria “Caro nome” outside her bedroom on the second floor, sometimes leaning over the stair railing — an image at once dramatic and intimate. Feola sang exquisitely.The most disturbing moment comes in Act II. Having been abducted and deposited in the duke’s bedroom, where behind closed doors he forces himself on her, the shaken Gilda emerges wearing only a slip, a white bedsheet draped around her shoulders. As she confesses to her father what has happened, Feola’s ashamed Gilda sang with wrenching poignancy. Yet youthful bloom and even sexuality also radiated through her tone, suggesting how confused her feelings were.During the last act, set at the cheap inn run by Sparafucile and his sister Maddalena, we finally see some trappings of 1920s Berlin. To lure victims for her brother, Maddalena (the mezzo-soprano Varduhi Abrahamyan, in an auspicious Met debut) is styled like Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box.” The famous quartet is vividly staged, as Maddalena romances the lothario duke in an upstairs bedroom, while downstairs at the bar the stunned Gilda listens with Rigoletto.Golden confetti rained down at the Met after the production premiered on New Year’s Eve.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRustioni’s conducting was consistently lucid, colorful and dramatic. There is no need for me to urge the Met to bring him back, since the company has already tapped him to take over from Yannick Nézet-Séguin a run of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” opening this week, alongside his “Rigoletto” duties.During the enthusiastic ovation after Friday’s performance, golden glitter rained down from the Met’s ceiling. The cast and creative team onstage directed their applause to the audience — a fitting tribute to the opera lovers who put their worries about the virus aside in order to be there for this memorable evening.RigolettoContinues through Jan. 29 with this cast and conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Sandra Jaffe, Who Helped Preserve Jazz at Preservation Hall, Dies at 83

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      With her husband, she opened a club in New Orleans in 1961 to showcase traditional jazz. Defying changes in musical fashion, it has been open ever since.In 1961, Sandra and Allan Jaffe stopped in New Orleans on their way home to Philadelphia from an extended honeymoon in Mexico. They heard music playing all around them in the French Quarter and stepped into an art gallery on St. Peter Street where a combo was playing traditional jazz.The Jaffes, then in their 20s, were transformed by what they heard. They came back a few days later to hear the combo again. The gallery’s owner, Larry Borenstein, told them that he was moving his business next door and offered to rent the couple the modest space (31 by 20 feet) for $400 a month.“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Mrs. Jaffe told the alumni magazine of Harcum College, from which she graduated, in 2011. “‘Of course,’ we said, and that was the beginning of Preservation Hall. We never left New Orleans.”Preservation Hall — which serves no alcohol, has no air-conditioning and seats 50 or so on six benches — has celebrated jazz for 60 years in a city widely regarded as its birthplace. It defied segregation laws in the early 1960s. It survived Mr. Jaffe’s death in 1987, and it survived Hurricane Katrina. The coronavirus pandemic shut it down, but it reopened triumphantly in June.And it has nurtured musicians, some of whom played with Louis Armstrong (like the guitarist Johnny St. Cyr) and even (like the bassist Papa John Joseph) with the cornetist Buddy Bolden, said by many jazz historians to have been the music’s first significant practitioner. Many of them had been largely forgotten amid the growing dominance of rock ’n’ roll and other more modern forms of music.“There is no question that Preservation Hall saved New Orleans jazz,” George Wein, the impresario who produced the Newport Jazz Festival and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, told Vanity Fair in 2011. “When it became an institution in New Orleans, everybody who went down there went to the hall. They paid a dollar to go hear people like George Lewis or Sweet Emma Barrett and made them national figures.”Mrs. Jaffe with the impresario George Wein at the 2010 Newport Folk Festival. “There is no question,” Mr. Wein once said, “that Preservation Hall saved New Orleans jazz.”Douglas Mason/Getty ImagesMrs. Jaffe died on Monday in a hospital in New Orleans. She was 83.Her son Ben, the creative director of Preservation Hall, confirmed the death.The Jaffes played different roles at Preservation Hall. Allan Jaffe, who played the helicon, a brass instrument, was the link to the musicians and sent them out on the road as the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Mrs. Jaffe, who shared management duties with her husband, was usually stationed at the hall’s front gate, basket on her lap, collecting money from the patrons.“That’s how she was remembered by many: as the first to interact with people,” Ben Jaffe said in an interview. “She was also the de facto bouncer and security; she’d have to step in when people were being inappropriate or espousing racist language. My mother would bite first, then assess the situation.”Preservation Hall was integrated at a time when there were still Jim Crow laws that banned the mixing of races. Mrs. Jaffe was once arrested there, along with Kid Thomas Valentine’s band, for flouting the ban on integration.“The judge banged his gavel and said, ‘In New Orleans, we don’t like to mix our coffee and cream,’” Ben Jaffe said, recalling what his parents had told him. “She burst out laughing and said, ‘That’s funny — the most popular thing in New Orleans is café au lait.’”Mrs. Jaffe watched and listened as the trombonist Freddie Lonzo sang when Preservation Hall reopened in June after the Covid lockdown.Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune/The Advocate/Associated PressSandra Smolen was born in Philadelphia on March 10, 1938. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Her father, Jacob, held various jobs, including running a gas station and a taproom; her mother, Lena (Kaplan) Smolen, was a homemaker.Sandra studied journalism and public relations at Harcum, in Bryn Mawr., Pa., and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1958. She worked for an advertising agency for two years and married her husband on Christmas Day 1960. After honeymooning in Mexico, they headed to New Orleans, where one of his fraternity brothers lived; Mr. Jaffe had gotten to know the city during his military service.After their first musical encounter at the art gallery, the Jaffes decided they would stay three more days, until the combo that had entranced them was to appear again. “Our parents were expecting us back in Philadelphia any day,” she told the Harcum magazine, “but we had to stay a little longer.”After making the rental deal for the gallery, the Jaffes joined with other fans of its jam sessions to form the New Orleans Society for the Preservation of Traditional Jazz to book musicians; several months later, the couple opened the hall. For the first year or so, they kept the jobs they had found in New Orleans, Mrs. Jaffe at a typesetting business and Mr. Jaffe at a department store.They did not charge admission at first. Instead, patrons dropped money in a basket that Mrs. Jaffe passed around; she would shake it if someone appeared unwilling to contribute. Eventually, they began charging $1 (today, tickets cost $25 to $50).Mrs. Jaffe was usually stationed at Preservation Hall’s front gate with a basket, collecting money from the patrons.via Jaffe FamilyBusiness was propelled early on by a laudatory two-and-a-half-minute piece about Preservation Hall — which featured Mr. Jaffe but not Mrs. Jaffe — on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.”Mr. Jaffe started sending musicians on tour in 1963, and various versions of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band have been playing around the world and recording ever since. The band members have included the pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, the brothers Willie and Percy Humphrey (who played clarinet and trumpet) and the husband and wife Billie and De De Pierce (she played piano and sang, he played trumpet and cornet). Ben Jaffe currently plays sousaphone in the band.“I took the band on tour for many years,” Resa Lambert, one of Mrs. Jaffe’s sisters, who worked at the Hall for many years, said in an interview. “I was a roadie. For seven men. It was great.”In addition to her son Ben and her sister, Mrs. Jaffe is survived by another son, Russell; four grandchildren; and another sister, Brenda Epstein.The Preservation Hall Jazz Band received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2006. The ensemble was cited for “displaying the unbreakable spirit of New Orleans and sharing the joy of New Orleans jazz with us all.”Mrs. Jaffe, who accepted the award with her son Ben, remained involved in the Hall until recently, although she no longer had a hands-on role.“She would call every day asking questions about ticket sales and touring,” Ben Jaffe said. “She always felt engaged and always was engaged, even when she wasn’t physically there.” Until recently, he said, she would grab a broom and sweep the sidewalk in front. More

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      A Conductor Considers Her Future

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      Susanna Mälkki is at the top of her field as major American orchestras search for their next music directors.HELSINKI, Finland — It was late morning recently, not long after sunrise, as members of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra unwrapped their scarves, unpacked their instruments and settled in for rehearsal at the Musiikkitalo concert hall here.The orchestra’s chief conductor, Susanna Mälkki, walked in from the wings, stopping to banter with players as she made her way to the podium. Once there, she removed her medical mask with a feigned look of relief and raised a baton. With no words and barely a pause, a Lamborghini going from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye, the orchestra launched into the galloping grandeur of Szymanowski’s Concert Overture.Mälkki’s rehearsals tend to unfold like this, with seamless shifts between cordiality and efficiency. A former orchestral cellist, she understands the value of concision in a conductor and precisely articulates what she wants. With results: Her performances often strike a remarkable balance of clarity and urgency, whether shepherding a premiere or reinvigorating a classic.The classical music field has taken notice. At 52, Mälkki is one of the world’s top conductors, widely sought between her appearances in Helsinki and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which she is the principal guest conductor. And with openings on the horizon at major American orchestras — especially the New York Philharmonic, which she leads at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 6, and which is searching for a music director to succeed Jaap van Zweden in 2024 — her name is on leading wish lists.“I’m counting my blessings, that I get to work with all these orchestras,” Mälkki said during a series of interviews this fall. “Any speculation — there’s no need for that.”She is aware of the eyes on her, and of the pressure to appoint women in the United States, where there are currently no female music directors among the largest 25 orchestras. (Nathalie Stutzmann takes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s podium next year.)“My standpoint has always been that since I do not wish that my gender is something that is held against me, I also shall not use it to benefit from it,” Mälkki said, adding, “Music, with the capital M, remains its own independent entity — and that, for me, is the best part.”Her work, she said, should speak for itself. And it does: “Susanna has to be at the top of anyone’s list,” said Chad Smith, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive.Mälkki leading the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, where she is the chief conductor, in early December.Maarit KytöharjuBorn in Helsinki in 1969, Mälkki has almost always led a life that revolved around music. She played multiple instruments as a child but settled on the cello, rising to become the principal cellist of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in her mid-20s. But she also studied conducting and longed to move into that field, which would have been virtually unthinkable for a woman when she was growing up.Among the first major conductors to see Mälkki wield a baton was her compatriot Esa-Pekka Salonen, at a workshop in Stockholm. “He came to me afterward,” she recalled, “and, unbelievably, he said, ‘You look like you’re in the right place.’ So, if you get rotten tomatoes thrown to you later, you can still think, ‘Well, you know, maybe I’m doing something right.’”In 1998, she made the leap to full-time conducting and gave up her post in Gothenburg, where the orchestra’s manager told her, “I’m sure you’re very talented; it’s just a pity that you can never become anything.”Mälkki said the remark was so hurtful that “for years I couldn’t even tell people about it. But again, it comes back to the music, because I was not thinking of myself; I was thinking of all the things I wanted to do with the music.”She first made a name for herself in contemporary repertory, and moved to Paris to serve from 2006 until 2013 as the director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the group founded by Pierre Boulez. (She still lives there, while also keeping an apartment near the Helsinki waterfront, where she likes to go for restorative walks.)“Those years of all those world premieres — it was an incredible school,” she said. “My brain was overheated many times, but it was actually a really fantastic way to learn the craft, because you have to be able to read your score and organize the rehearsals so that the musicians understand what their part is in the big context.”From left, the singer Fiona McGown, the composer Kaija Saariaho and Mälkki preparing Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in France.Jean-Louis FernamdezIn 2016, Mälkki became the first female chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic. She had made guest appearances with the orchestra before, but this was a homecoming that felt, she said, “like the chance to make a contribution to Finnish music life after the fantastic education I had received.”Her players now included old classmates from the nearby Sibelius Academy, the prestigious school that has produced other conducting luminaries, such as Salonen, as well as emerging talents like Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Mäkelä.That same year, Mälkki was named the principal guest conductor in Los Angeles, at an orchestra she had first led in 2010. The ensemble had not had a principal guest since Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle, then rising stars, in the 1980s. But the players liked her, and she was invited back repeatedly after her debut.At the time, the orchestra was run by Deborah Borda, who is now the New York Philharmonic’s chief executive. Mälkki had made an impression with her “very deep connection to the music,” Borda recalled recently.“She’s very passionate, but it’s a quiet passion, a quiet charisma,” Borda added. “It’s stunning: More than an outward manifestation, this is like a flower that opens.”During a rehearsal in Los Angeles in October, Mälkki was, as in Helsinki, amiable and assertive. Carolyn Hove, the Philharmonic’s English horn player, described Mälkki as “100 percent prepared” by the time she arrives at the podium, and that “when a conductor is really efficient, it just makes our jobs so much more fun.”While running through Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase,” Mälkki gestured to sections of the ensemble but also let her gaze shift upward. (“Some people listen with their eyes closed,” she said, “and I guess my way of looking up is the same, that I want to free my ears.”) All the while, she kept notes in her head that she rattled off as soon as the playing stopped.Those notes were thorough, and crucial, as the orchestra rehearsed for the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Vista,” a piece dedicated to Mälkki, who is a leading navigator of Saariaho’s idiosyncratic sound world. “I always trusted her, and she understands my music,” Saariaho said in June, shortly before Mälkki conducted the world premiere of her opera “Innocence” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.Over the past two decades, their relationship has developed to the point where, Saariaho said, “we don’t need to verbalize very much.” When “L’Amour de Loin” arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, Saariaho insisted that Mälkki conduct it. (She will return to the Met to conduct Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” this spring.)Mälkki’s specialty in living composers like Saariaho is one of the reasons she was brought to Los Angeles, Smith said. “The other part,” he added, “was just the way she thinks about programming, which is unique.” He used that October concert as an example: opening with “Vista,” followed by Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and the “Poème.”Mälkki rehearsing a program of works by Saariaho, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“On paper those things are not related to each other, but there’s this remarkable thread that goes from the Kaija through the Scriabin,” Smith said. “You experience it as a listener, as a musician. It informs the way each piece is played.”Mälkki continues to learn new works — “little by little,” she said. “Some young people want to do the Mahler right away, and we know many of those, whilst I actually waited quite a long time because I wanted to make sure that I had all my tools.”Some composers, she added, demand maturity — like Bruckner, whose symphonies she is studying now. And, experienced in 21st-century operas by Saariaho and Unsuk Chin, she is looking back toward Wagner.“It’s just quite extraordinary to think that there’s all this repertoire,” she said, “and I could actually just keep exploring that endlessly.”The question is what comes next. The Helsinki Philharmonic recently announced that Mälkki would step down in summer 2023 and become the orchestra’s chief conductor emeritus. A mix of symphonic and opera appearances will follow. Where or whether a music directorship fits into that is anyone’s guess.Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said that a list of candidates for her orchestra’s opening is “always going” in her head. But, she added, “you cannot rush one of these searches,” and at any rate she is more focused at the moment on the renovation of David Geffen Hall, which is set to be completed by fall 2022.Though the orchestra has never had a female music director, Borda added that she is “not striving to demonstrate a social agenda in this appointment.”“We are striving to make the right choice,” she said. “It’s a chemical equation. There has to be combustion, no matter what. Even if you have social goals and aims, you have to, in working with the musicians and the board, make sure that it’s the best person for the job.”There’s also the matter of whether Mälkki would want it.“I think this is a question that will be carefully thought about if it comes up,” she said with diplomatic care. After a pause, Mälkki continued: “There are all sorts of things to be considered, and it would be wrong to choose something just for the prestige of it. It’s ultimately a choice of artistic fulfillment. We’ll see.” More

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      Sam Fender, a Songwriter Caught Between Stardom and His Hometown

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      The musician is fast becoming one of Britain’s biggest rock acts with tracks about working class life in North Shields. Can he let himself leave the town?NORTH SHIELDS, England — Sam Fender, a singer-songwriter often labeled Britain’s answer to Bruce Springsteen, realized his life had changed for good on Halloween.This year he bought “eight massive boxes” of chocolate for any children who might knock on his door in North Shields, a working class town that sits on the banks of the River Tyne in northeast England.Fender expected the stash to last all night, but it went almost instantly.“Everyone in the neighborhood was, like, ‘That’s Sam Fender’s house, let’s go knock!’” the musician recalled in a recent interview at his studio a short walk from the town center, in a nondescript building surrounded by car mechanics’ workshops. The trick or treaters’ parents were more keen on getting selfies with the star than candy, whether they knew his music or not. “That scared us a bit,” he said. “It was just nuts.”Over the past year, Fender, 27, has become one of Britain’s biggest music stars, but said he still doesn’t want to be “that guy” who is too famous to answer his door on Halloween — a position that touches on a tension running through his newfound success: how to be a star while remaining part of the local community that defines his songwriting.His second album of anthemic pop-rock, “Seventeen Going Under,” released in October, quickly hit the top of the British charts, just like his debut did, and since then he’s sold out arenas, announced a 45,000-capacity outdoor show in London and charmed the British public by appearing hung over on morning TV.For a few weeks this fall, the album’s title track sparked a TikTok trend because of lyrics — “I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” — that speak to suffering at the hands of bullies and domestic abusers.All that success had been built on the back of North Shields, a depressed town of some 30,000 people in a region where 34 percent of children live in poverty, but is also home, Fender said, to some of “the funniest, most loving, caring people you’ve ever met.”Fender sets most of his songs in the town, often referencing local pubs or fistfights on the nearby chilly beaches, and sings about his and his friends’ experiences, including troubled childhoods, male suicides and widespread political alienation.Owain Davies, Fender’s manager who was also born locally, said Fender’s songs were “emotive and powerful,” but their subject matter allows them to “speak for a lot of people up here — a lot of us.”Now Fender is in a sort of limbo, unable to have a normal life in North Shields or Newcastle, the nearest city, as he tries to navigate fame, even as he desperately wants to. “I’m bouncing between two complete opposites and I’m in a stage now where I don’t feel I belong in either of them,” Fender said, breaking eye contact only for bites of a chicken burger with copious mayonnaise he’d ordered from his local pub.The thought of leaving home was difficult for an artist in the northeast in a way it wouldn’t necessarily be for someone from London, he explained: “We’re tribal. Anything from Newcastle that does good belongs to Newcastle.”At a time when many British music stars attended performing arts schools and arrive primed for success, Fender’s route to fame is more illustrative of the barriers class can still present. Class has long animated music here, as a topic for songs and a badge of honor: The Clash made supporting workers’ rights part of its mission and the Sex Pistols sneered at the Queen; the Britpop battles of the 1990s pitted the middle-class Blur against the working-class Oasis, as the arty Pulp sang about posh outsiders slumming it with common people.Fender on the streets of North Shields near where he grew up. Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter initially growing up on a middle class street in North Shields, things became difficult, Fender said, after his parents divorced when he was 8. As a teenager, he lived with his mother, a nurse who had to stop work because she suffered from fibromyalgia, a condition that causes pain and fatigue.“We were always having to beg, borrow and steal off anyone who could help her,” Fender said.At 18, Fender was working in a local pub to support them both when Davies, the manager, came in. At his boss’s encouragement, Fender played the Beatles song “Get Back” followed by one of his own tracks.Davies, recalling that moment in a telephone interview, said he’d drunk several pints of beer by that point but was still “totally struck by this incredible voice.” He immediately got on the phone to book Fender some proper shows.“It feels like a Disney story when you tell it,” Fender said, adding, “Davies saved my life.”What followed was far from a fairy tale of overnight success, though. For the next few years, Fender kept playing gigs and writing songs, “trying to figure out who I was,” he said.Then, age 20, he became seriously ill (he won’t discuss the condition’s specifics) and sat in the hospital thinking, “If I’m going to die young, I want to make sure I’ve wrote something worth listening to.” Soon, he was writing songs about his life in North Shields.Fender sitting on the bank of the River Tyne. “We’re tribal,” he said. “Anything from Newcastle that does good belongs to Newcastle.”Mary Turner for The New York TimesThis local focus has won him fans far from Britain. Steven Van Zandt, a veteran member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band who regularly plays Fender’s music on his radio show in the United States, said in a telephone interview that Fender “could have taken the easy route” thanks to his voice and looks. Instead, Fender chose to sing “these intensely personal songs of working class life that had no guarantee of success,” Van Zandt said, calling that decision “courageous.”Fender seemed overjoyed some of his heroes, who include Springsteen, loved his music, but in an hourlong interview, he returned to talking about his hometown again and again. At one point, he mentioned a campaign he led last year to stop the local council from charging people money for calling its emergency help lines for the homeless. After Fender took to social media to complain about the problem, the council promised to make the lines free.“I sometimes feel like, ‘Am I really doing anything that good?’” Fender said. That was a rare moment when he felt he was, he said.Fender insisted he would never leave North Shields behind and became visibly anxious when talking about the possibility. But Halloween night and other similar experiences had shown him it might be time to try living somewhere else for at least a few months. Somewhere that doesn’t feel like a “goldfish bowl,” he said, maybe New York, maybe London, somewhere that is “the opposite of where I’m from.” The only thing for certain was his songs wouldn’t change.“You can take a lad of Shields,” he said, “but you can’t take Shields out of the lad.” More