Music

“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

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

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

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

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

Eminem opened a restaurant in Detroit. We checked it out.DETROIT — On Sept. 27, a strange 30-second film appeared on Eminem’s YouTube channel: not a music video teaser, or the first few verses of a new rap single, but a quick-moving advertisement.In the video, cartons brimming with marinara sauce spin hypnotically on checkered tablecloths. A voice-over rattles off vaguely Italian dishes: spaghetti, spaghetti and meatballs, and a “‘sghetti sandwich” — a scoop of pasta squeezed between two pieces of buttery white bread. Eminem, dressed in a thin gold chain and an eggplant-colored flight jacket, holds up what the viewer can only assume are two middle fingers, their message censored by twin takeout containers bearing the phrase “Mom’s Spaghetti.”Marshall Mathers, the man who brought white working-class angst to the top of the charts, was opening a restaurant.Two days later, the rapper surprised fans at the grand opening in downtown Detroit, where he served heaping ladlefuls of pasta to a queue of customers that snaked around the block. A photo of the rapper standing behind the order window — flipping the bird, of course — quickly shot to the top of Reddit’s front page.Mom’s Spaghetti is named for the famed first verse of “Lose Yourself,” a single written for the movie “8 Mile” that sold more than 10 million copies and earned Eminem a pair of Grammys in 2004. The lyrics are imbued with nauseating, do-or-die dread: Our protagonist is locked in a bathroom, drenched with sweat, washing off a regurgitated wad of pasta clinging to his hoodie. “Knees weak, arms are heavy, there’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti.” It was only a matter of time before the lyric became a meme.Nearly two decades later, the restaurant appears to be Eminem’s way of embracing — or one-upping — the joke.On a visit to Mom’s Spaghetti in December, three months after the initial fanfare, the place did not immediately register as a shrine to a rapper’s career. Instead, I found myself at a small counter-service restaurant, tucked in an alley next to the Little Caesars World Headquarters. (Yes, the pizza chain.) I perused the abbreviated menu and placed my order at an outdoor cashier. Almost as soon as my credit card cleared, a steaming, carb-laden paper bag was handed to me through the window.The restaurant’s abbreviated menu includes spaghetti and meatballs, served in an oyster pail, and a ‘sghetti sandwich.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesAfterward, I was escorted inside a gastropub called Union Assembly, where all of the food served at Mom’s Spaghetti is prepared, to a tiny suite of tables and bar stools where customers can eat.Here is where the Slim Shady aesthetic becomes apparent: Most of the “E’s” on the menu and packaging have been turned backward, and the kitchen is made to look like a street corner bodega. I tucked into a booth, already overwhelmed, preparing for a long night in the afterlife of Eminem’s cultural empire.Curt Catallo, 54, is the owner of Union Joints, which operates several restaurants around Detroit, including this one. He described Mom’s Spaghetti as a “true joint venture” between his business and Eminem. The restaurant first appeared as a pop-up shop in 2017 and has been a fixture at the rapper’s various festival performances since. (During the pandemic, Union Joints and Eminem’s Shady Records delivered the pasta to frontline medical workers.)Mr. Catallo said the restaurant’s busiest periods occur “postgame and pregame,” where the staff harvests customers from the foot traffic pouring through Detroit’s pro sports district. Spaghetti is not typically deployed as a takeout food — noodles take a while to cook — but Mr. Catallo’s staff makes all the pasta a day ahead, then reheats the product in a pair of woks. He believes that method blesses the spaghetti with a delectable down-home texture.“Today’s spaghetti is better tomorrow,” Mr. Catallo said.I’d ordered the spaghetti and meatballs, which was served in an oyster pail and covered with a snowy dusting of Parmesan, as well as a ‘sghetti sandwich. This is not Italian cooking, nor does it try to be. Instead, it might be best described as … well, downright motherly. The greasy slop of the pasta, the sugary tang of the red sauce; it’s the spaghetti that emerges from your pantry on the last night before a grocery trip. Mr. Catallo said the noodles possess an inscrutable leftover chemistry. He means that as an endorsement, and he should.Emily Davenport prepares an order of spaghetti.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesIan McManus, the general manager of the Trailer.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesEminem is not here, nor should he be expected anytime soon. Ian McManus, 22, who manages the Trailer — a merchandise shop above the dining area — told me the rapper has dropped by the restaurant a “handful” of times since it opened. “He only lets a few of us know when he’s coming,” Mr. McManus said. “And he only lets us know day-of. If he’s coming through, I’ll find out when I’m on my way downtown.”A smattering of Eminem-themed pint glasses, T-shirts and sneakers filled the room, but the real pièce de résistance was at the back: the Robin costume from the music video for “Without Me,” encased in glass. The sound was the soundtrack to the year I turned 10; seeing a relic of it up close felt like being in the Louvre.Eminem has been famous, and will remain famous, for a long time, but it has also been eight years since his last No. 1 hit. Perhaps that’s why he’s preserved himself in a mini-museum. The rapper is entering that vexing post-prime era that inevitably hunts down every enormously successful person. How should Eminem structure his third and fourth acts? Ideally with some humor and some grace. If Paul Newman could sell salad dressing and enjoy his golden years, maybe Marshall Mathers can do the same with spaghetti.After all, the Eminem brand is still strong, even now. Misty Jesse, 49, and her 15-year-old son, Romeo Jesse, who were dining at Mom’s Spaghetti that December night, told me they grew up with Eminem, which sounds confusing but is honestly quite plausible if you do the math. “I saw him live at the old Detroit Tigers stadium,” said Ms. Jesse, who made the trip to the restaurant from the Dearborn Heights suburbs so that Romeo could shop for some Eminem gear. “It’s crazy how it all circles back around.”Eminem’s Robin costume from the music video for “Without Me” is kept in a glass case inside the Trailer.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesFans will also find notes and lyrics written by Eminem on display.Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“She was surprised that he was one of the first people I started listening to,” Romeo said. “She’s happy that we could bond over his music and sing along to it in the car.”The Jesses are locals, which makes them outliers here. Almost everyone else inside the restaurant, save for the employees, was visiting Detroit for business, pleasure, or a combination of both. A trio of auditors from Atlanta crowded around a table glazed with spaghetti sauce; they were only in town for a few days, and they’d arrived at Mom’s Spaghetti out of passive curiosity — the same gravitational force that pulls New York City sightseers into the Times Square Madame Tussauds.Morgan Martin, 28, said that Eminem’s 2010 album “Recovery” got stuck in her car’s CD player when she was in high school. For 10 years, she exclusively listened to that record as she drove around Georgia. Her friends claim that the experience endowed her with the ability to rap with a near-perfect Eminem cadence.“I’ve since gotten a new car that connects to Bluetooth,” Ms. Martin said, “so now I’m learning more of his work.”For her, Mom’s Spaghetti was a destination. “When I learned we were coming to Detroit, I knew where we were eating,” she said.An illuminated sign above the order window outside Mom’s Spaghetti.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesHer friend and dinner date, Caylen Hemme, 27, was not apprised of that plan. “I didn’t know this was Eminem’s restaurant,” she said from across the table. “I just saw that they had vegan meatballs.”John Farran, a 32-year old service engineer from Orlando, had dined at a high-end Italian restaurant the previous night. The experience, he said, paled in comparison what Mom’s Spaghetti had to offer. “Their sauce was like a soup,” Mr. Farran said, “plus they didn’t give you bread.” He then gestured toward the caramelized chunk of starch half-submerged in the noodles. “It made the whole trip for us, pretty much,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything to look forward to.”“No offense to Detroit,” Mr. Farran said. “Great city.”Mr. Catallo, the restaurant operator, said Mom’s Spaghetti is planning on expanding its menu. Soon there will be Bolognese sauce, from a recipe Mr. Mathers has taste tested. I imagined the rapper, whose career was once defined by rage and controversy, letting a meat sauce linger on his palate for a moment before giving it his stamp of approval. Could Eminem become a latter-day Jimmy Buffett, bringing Mom’s Spaghetti to tourist districts around the country? He declined to be interviewed for this article, so I can’t say for sure.But I can tell you with certainty that on a cold night in Detroit, after scarfing down a pound of pasta, I felt changed. Knees weak, arms heavy. More

Our pop music critic remembers going to concerts with his mom, who died last year.Getting gifts for my mother was never easy — she was particular, as am I, and not always in overlapping ways. But when I saw that Tina Turner was going to be performing around her birthday in 2008, I bought tickets as soon as they were available.Growing up, there was a lightly worn hardback of “I, Tina” above the refrigerator. My mom spoke about “Tiiina” like an old friend, someone she used to get in trouble with. If you were alive and watching television in the mid-1980s, the image of Turner ecstatically stomping across the screen, hair pointing to the moon, was indelible. Here was a woman in charge of her destiny.Because I got them quickly, our seats were in the center of the second or third row. There’s a thing that happens at a concert, especially in an arena, when you are seated right up front. The speakers are generally booming sound to the middle and back of the room, but up close, you can actually hear what’s happening onstage, and also what’s going on right around you. Which is why for most of that night’s show, I couldn’t really hear the roar of the crowd, but I could hear my mom yelling encouragement, loudly, at Turner.It was a pointillist way to experience a show — an almost literal call and response. My mom was in no way chill. Turner vamped, my mom hooted. Turner sang of brittle love, my mom pumped her fist in assent. I can’t quite tell you how the concert was, because for those two hours, I felt like I was eavesdropping on private communiqués.More than anyone, my mother — who died late last year — gave me music. She gave me the idea that there was freedom, or identity, to be found within. My mother was raised in an ungenerous home, and from her youngest years was looking for any safe space available to her. That often meant music, which would become a constant in my young life: WBLS or Z100 in the car, Whitney Houston or Andreas Vollenweider or the Bee Gees in the house.At the time of the Turner concert, I’d been writing about music for more than a decade, and had been reviewing shows regularly for The Times for a few months. Those nights out were alternately riveting and glum, and always experienced at a little remove. I had become a professional observer.Which, in fairness, I always had been, dating back to the first proper concert I attended: Ryuichi Sakamoto at the Beacon Theater. This was in 1988, not long before my parents separated. My mother had me very young, and for the majority of my childhood until that point, had mostly been a stay-at home parent. But she had recently begun working, and finding success, in Manhattan. Our lives were changing, subtly for the moment.I don’t remember much about that night apart from the need to dress up — it was a long way from Sheepshead Bay in outer Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. The Beacon Theater crowd was disciplined. It was the most reserved I ever witnessed my mother at a concert.But the chic cosmopolitanism of the performance reflected a future she was envisioning and willing herself toward. She was also manifesting a range of imagination for me far vaster than the one she’d been afforded as a child. After the show, my mom, grandmother, great-grandmother and I all waited by the stage door exit to grab a glimpse of Sakamoto as he left — for months, years even, my mom insisted he reached through the crowd, looked me in my eyes and shook my hand.She had a way with narrative — she was the main character long before main-character energy was a thing. And she wanted that for me even if I was always a little naturally reticent. A studied and practiced mama’s boy, I learned to navigate the world by bending myself around her shape, a fearless mother’s careful son.Tina Turner, as photographed on the writer’s BlackBerry in 2008.Jon CaramanicaRyuichi Sakamoto onstage at the Beacon Theater in 1988.Bell Biv DeVoe on the 1991 Club MTV Tour.Raymond Boyd/Getty ImagesAretha Franklin, captured on the writer’s old iPhone in 2017.Jon CaramanicaEveryone was playing their part when, a couple of years after the Sakamoto show, I cajoled her into taking me to see the Club MTV Tour at the Jones Beach amphitheater. The lineup, frankly, was jacked: Bell Biv DeVoe, C+C Music Factory, Gerardo. The highest of NRG.I was still learning how to navigate those spaces, trying to figure out just how loudly I could declare my enthusiasms in public. So even though I knew every word of every song of every performer, I mostly sat still.My mom, though, was just as exuberant then as at the Turner show. Like any sullen teenager, I was embarrassed — but I also was learning firsthand it was safe to be yourself, even while Bell Biv DeVoe was calisthenically attacking the stage during “Do Me!”She was giving me a blueprint to feel free, though even now, I experience exuberance at concerts far more intensely on the inside than the outside. Maybe that’s part of my origin story as a critic — watching the show, and watching my mother watch the show, and watching others watch my mother watch the show. It’s all part of the experience.BY THE TIME of the Turner show, my mom had been living with lung cancer for about three years. She’d been diagnosed, miraculously, on a scan following a car accident. The years that followed were harrowing and unpredictable.Nothing will strip your varnish quite like watching someone you love wither. It made me tentative, as if any wrong move on my part might put her in peril. When, in 2017, she told me she wanted to see Aretha Franklin perform, all I could think about were the liabilities — What if the show ran late? What if my mom started to feel weak during the performance? What if Franklin seemed … ill? Would it be too much to bear?Over the years, as a critic, I’ve had to watch many late-career concerts from onetime titans — it can be grim. That was part of my hesitation, too, that the effort that I knew my mother would put into going to the show would somehow not be repaid. I wanted to protect her, and myself too.As anyone who’s seen Franklin perform knows, though, I truly needn’t have worried. She was a little frail, but vigorous and stubborn, perhaps powered by the determination of someone who was not in flawless health. (Franklin died the following year; this ended up being one of her last shows.)There were so many stretches of time during my mother’s illness when I felt I had nothing to give, that nothing I did would be useful. Faced with the scale and nimbleness of a wily cancer, you can’t help but feel insufficient.This, however, I’d gotten right. As at all the other shows, I watched my mother watch the stage. All night long, she radiated hope. Franklin was in declining health, but my mother saw none of that. Or maybe she saw it, but just not how I saw it. For her, Franklin was indomitable. A beacon of resilience.The days just after the show were difficult — for me. I felt awful that I couldn’t give her that sensation every day. My mother, on the other hand, talked about it for weeks. About how Franklin was bossing the band around. About how she brought her purse out onstage and someone ran after her with it when the show was done. About her fur coat. In every telling, Franklin was very much alive, and so was she. More

In shows like “Caroline, or Change” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the composer excels at translating her astute insights about characters into music.Jeanine Tesori can take apart music and put it back together as well as any composer who’s put note to paper. She can write a recitative worthy of Janacek, or a pop tune that could have charted on 1970s AM radio. She can conjure a gospel number, a tap soft-shoe, or a folk-rock confessional like a seasoned pro.And as the co-creator of “Caroline, or Change” (now in a widely acclaimed revival on Broadway) and the Tony-winning “Fun Home,” she has helped to expand the boundaries of the American musical in a way that recalls such forebears as Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Swados.But you don’t come away from a Tesori musical — not the soulful “Violet,” the jazzy “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the snarky “Shrek the Musical,” the meta-cultural “Soft Power,” nor the offbeat “Kimberly Akimbo,” now in a well-reviewed premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company — marveling at her formal innovation.For all her formidable tools and training, Tesori understands that “craft is the conduit for a really fresh and profound encounter with human experience,” her “Fun Home” co-writer Lisa Kron said. “It’s not an end in itself.”Said David Lindsay-Abaire, with whom she adapted “Shrek” for Broadway, and who adapted his play “Kimberly Akimbo” with her: “She thinks like a playwright. She understands story and narrative and character, and the architecture of a scene.”It’s not just structure she’s attuned to, said Tony Kushner, with whom she wrote “Caroline, or Change,” but subtext as well.“She either comprehends or intuits, not what necessarily is the most obvious choice for dramatic action or dramatic events, but what’s under the surface, where the real meaning of a piece lies,” Kushner said. “I’ve never met anybody more wide open to that, or more emotionally intelligent about human beings than she is.” While that’s surely a fine quality in any person, here’s the key: “She has this absolutely uncanny ability to translate that into music.”From left: Nya, Sharon D Clarke, Harper Miles and Nasia Thomas in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is the mystery of Jeanine Tesori — of any composer for the theater, really. Where does the music come from, and how does it work its magic? A nonverbal language with the power to move us, sometimes literally, music can be wed to words and characters in ways that feel definitive, clarifying. As Lindsay-Abaire put it: “I don’t know if pure is the right word, but something less diluted. You hear the characters’ emotions and know what’s going on inside those heads and hearts,” dramatic content that in nonmusical plays “you rely on the actors to communicate.”George Brant, with whom Tesori is adapting his play about a female drone pilot, “Grounded,” for the Metropolitan Opera, said that Tesori is “able to get at the guts of the piece and transform it into something that still feels like itself, but more.”The question of music’s storytelling potency is sharpened in Tesori’s case because, unlike Sondheim or many of her generational peers (Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel), she doesn’t write lyrics. Instead, she has worked with playwrights to shape not only her show’s scripts but bracingly original songs as well, in idioms and character voices as wide-ranging as the musical genres she references.Looking at her list of collaborators, Lin-Manuel Miranda said: “It’s as if she’s made it a mission to bring every serious dramatist to swim in the musical theater pool. But the other side of that is she’s bending their skills to our art form, and innovating our art form with every at bat.“It’s how you know she’s the best,” he added “because she works with the best and makes them sing.”It’s not as if she has a cookie-cutter style, though. As Lindsay-Abaire said, “The fact that the lyrics are all so different — that Tony’s are Tony’s, Lisa’s are Lisa’s, mine are mine, is a testament to Jeanine embracing her collaborators and our voices. It’s not like: This is how Jeanine teaches all these playwrights to write lyrics.”For her part, Tesori — who recently turned 60 but retains a youthful bonhomie, with “Fun Home” wallpaper patterns tattooed on her forearm — has a firm grip on what her strengths are.“I’m not a lyricist at all, but I’ll say what my gift is: recognizing lyrics in the sea of words,” Tesori explained during a recent interview in her office at City Center, where she serves as a creative adviser. She immerses herself in her collaborators’ verbiage in various ways. She asks for what she calls “noodles,” which Kron described as “bits of lyric that didn’t make it into the lyric I built for her.” Tesori also has them read their lyrics aloud to her, sometimes “two or three times,” as Kron recalled, to glean intention from inflection.Then, Tesori said, her mind goes to work on fragments of material, in a process she compared to the sequence in “The Queen’s Gambit” when the lead character envisions complicated chess moves on the ceiling. “Things start clicking into place,” Tesori said, “and I think: Oh, there! There!”“Meryl Streep disappears into her characters. You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too,” Tesori said. “I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHer facility with a wide range of musical styles can be traced to a diverse musical education. She started piano lessons at age 6 with a teacher, she said, who let her play any musical style. “He did not judge anything, and that was really the lesson,” she said. After a rebellious break from music during her teen years, and a brief flirtation with pre-med classes, she studied music at Barnard College and soon got work as a Broadway pit pianist and freelance music director.Most formative, though, was her partnership with Buryl Red, a Baptist choral arranger with whom she ran a music company for 25 years until his death in 2013. Assisting Red on countless recording sessions in Nashville and around the world, she absorbed a range of musical influences, in particular gospel, that have served her well in such scores as “Violet” and “Caroline, or Change.”This broad palette isn’t mere versatility for its own sake. Her colleagues talk about her rigor at winnowing their material, while her peers praise the results. The composer Stephen Schwartz hailed “her ability to always sound like Jeanine and yet to write very specifically for whatever character or milieu that she’s doing,” while Miranda said that she “serves character absolutely and rigorously.”Said LaChiusa: “I never hear the composer screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Instead, I hear, ‘Listen to these words,’ and ‘Feel this character’s joy, this character’s sorrow.’”Honing in on character may get closer to the heart of the matter. By comparison, Tesori recalled of a famous collaborator on the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Mother Courage,” for which she wrote music. “Meryl Streep disappears into her characters,” she said. “You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too: I want them to be musicalized, not me. I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”In the case of “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori gives the title character — a teenager with a disease that ages her prematurely — bittersweetly introspective songs, while the callow teenagers and needy adults around her sing in a range of prickly, searching pop and rock. And in the quasi-operatic “Caroline, or Change,” she breathes life not only into the Black and Jewish characters but also into several inanimate objects, from a beatific moon to an angry, mournful city bus.Tesori knows how to translate feeling into song so well that she was even brought in as a vocal producer on the new “West Side Story,” at the screenwriter Kushner’s recommendation. She coached performers on the Bernstein-Sondheim songs, which they recorded in a studio before a frame was shot, and she followed up on set to make sure they maintained consistency.“I love the treasure map of looking into a score as if you’re singing it into being,” she said of the film, though she could also have been describing the kind of information she encodes in her own work. “So you’re not singing ‘West Side Story,’ you’re actually expressing something a character needs in that moment. The tritone in ‘Maria’ is part of an expression, not a famous motif.”Searching for a pre-verbal language to express big feelings, especially unexpressed ones among family members, may be how her musical antennae were formed. Gesturing to the family struggles at the center of “Fun Home,” “Caroline” and now “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori said, “I love a household — the counterpoint of the attic, the living room, and the basement.” Growing up as one of four girls in a Sicilian American family on Long Island, she recalled, “There was beauty to it, and there was great chaos to it, and they were all happening at the same time, depending on which fader was up.”She remains tied to her Long Island roots, and photographs of her grandparents are prominently displayed in her office. Her grandmother’s ageless quality, she said, informed her work on the lead character of “Kimberly Akimbo,” while her immigrant grandfather’s thwarted career as a band composer and arranger — he had to pump gas to make ends meet — is part of what fuels the “urgency” she feels about making music.Though Tesori doesn’t typically originate projects, she is careful in choosing them. When David Henry Hwang pitched her the idea of “Soft Power” — a reverse “King and I,” in which a Chinese diplomat becomes an adviser to an American politician — she said she immediately knew: “This is so ambitious and worth failing at, worth spending the four or five years they all take, no matter what.”Victoria Clark, center, as the title character in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHwang said she dug with complete commitment into both the show’s irony and its sincerity, and above all she “forced me to take my character seriously, and face my own trauma.” (Hwang was stabbed on a Brooklyn street in 2015 in what was possibly an anti-Asian hate crime.) The show, originally produced in Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Public Theater in 2018, is still aiming for Broadway.With Tazewell Thompson, she wrote the opera “Blue,” about the police killing of a young Black man, which premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in the summer of 2019. Planned for 2020 stagings scotched by Covid, the opera has new 2022 dates at companies in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Toledo, Ohio, with more commitments to follow. Thompson joined Tesori’s other collaborators in marveling at her ability to make music speak emotionally.“It comes completely from her being in touch with the world, having her ears and eyes always open, watching, peering, getting involved,” Thompson said.That kind of openness can be draining, she said, citing the Sondheim song “Finishing the Hat” for the way her mind will tend to wander to her work. “I feel like I’m always chasing music; I think about it almost all the time,” she said with a note of desperation.While she maintains strong relationships — not only with her colleagues but also with her 24-year-old daughter, Siena, whom she co-parented with her ex-husband, the musical director Michael Rafter — she admitted she struggles with work-life balance and thinks about retiring all the time.“I find it a really hard life,” she admitted. “The loneliness of writing is very difficult. When students say, ‘I want to write for the theater,’ there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Run!’ And there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Stay.’”Making music has been a craft Jeanine Tesori has learned, clearly, but hearing the world as music may just be how she is wired.“Someone came to ‘Kimberly,’ this incredible woman, and she said, ‘Oh, I thought it was WON-dah-ful, it’s bee-YOO-tee-ful,’” Tesori said. The compliment was nice, sure, but “all I could hear was timbre of her voice. I started notating it in my head.” More