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      For Jazz Musicians in 2021, Two Was the Magic Number

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      A host of outstanding duet albums emphasized musicians not only collaborating but truly listening to each other.The violinist and multimedia artist Laura Ortman stood onstage at the Stone earlier this month clad in a bejeweled paisley jacket with a bow under her arm. She welcomed the crowd with an interested smile, and explained that the music that evening would be “dedicated to distance.” After the set she spoke again, saying that throughout it she had been meditating on the feeling of “never being close enough.”The first 20 minutes were played only in duet with the pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, and they were probably the most affecting part. The musicians weren’t heavy-handed about the set’s theme, but about 15 minutes in, after a hefty silence, Ortman played a few sharp, playful curlicues on the violin and Alcorn responded with a restive note held in the lower register. They carried on like this for about a minute, and the tension was noticeable from below: two communicators, stuck at opposite ends of multiple spectra at once — melody/drone, high/low, rhythmic/unfixed — finding a way to direct and follow at the same time.Throughout 2021, I often got the most out of records made by duos, which allowed me to hear musicians not just collaborating but conversing directly. It likely wasn’t just the pandemic that brought me there, or that led to so many great duet recordings this year: We’ve been tunneling toward mutually assured isolation for a long time, embracing a digital existence that has reorganized, among other things, how we talk to each other and how we make music.The pair of electromagnetic, almost sensual albums released by the saxophonist Sam Gendel and the bassist Sam Wilkes seem to be having an intimate conversation with this moment. They recorded “Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar,” released in 2018, and its follow-up, “Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs,” out this year, live to tape during a series of casual performances outside restaurants in Los Angeles, with each musician manning a setup of loops, effects and other manipulators. They hardly sound like live albums, but they’re not studio recordings either.Sam Wilkes, left, and Sam Gendel recorded two albums live to tape during a series of performances outside restaurants in Los Angeles.Her Productions“Honestly, it’s an extension of hanging out and connecting on some stuff and then saying, ‘Oh, let’s jam,’” Gendel said in a video interview with Wilkes last week. “Then after we jammed, it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s move the jam down the street and play in front of some people, low-key, just unannounced.’” Some members of their impromptu audience were transfixed; others, they said, carried on eating and chatting.It works: Gendel and Wilkes seem so intently focused on each other, they might not need an audience. But there’s plenty of room for your ears, if you tap into the space they’ve created.Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, a pair of hip-hop producers with Hall of Fame résumés, teamed up a few years ago with a shared goal: to challenge themselves to take their chops up a notch, not just as producers but as instrumentalists.“That became the aspiration — to go beyond just sampling, to really understand, like, Man, what were they thinking about when they played this?” Muhammad said in a video interview, referring to the jazz musicians whose recordings he has sampled so heavily from, as a member of A Tribe Called Quest and after.Younge and Muhammad invited some of their ’70s jazz heroes — Roy Ayers, Brian Jackson, Gary Bartz — into the studio, and recorded a series of short albums through a process that was heavily improvised. They’ve been releasing those records throughout the pandemic on their own label, Jazz Is Dead. Loose and vernacular and charged with reverence, these LPs have the ambient feeling of a studio outtake from a recording session that never happened, caught somewhere in the airspace between 50 years ago and today.The pianist Jason Moran self-released a duet performance he’d given at the Big Ears Festival in 2019 with the drummer Milford Graves.Tony Cox, via Big Ears FestivalUnlikely cross-generational collaborations bore rich fruit in other realms of the jazz world this year, too. In the spring, the pianist Jason Moran self-released an arresting duet performance he’d given at the Big Ears Festival in 2019, alongside the drummer and polymath Milford Graves. The young vocalist Nick Hakim and the elder saxophonist Roy Nathanson created a tender and playful album, “Small Things,” in Nathanson’s basement in early 2020. The eminent jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders teamed up with the electronic musician and composer Floating Points, né Sam Shepherd, to record “Promises,” which both expanded and cooled down each musician’s natural aesthetics. It landed at the top of many critics’ best-of-2021 lists, including mine.The duet has a long and fertile history in jazz, though in the course of an artist’s career it’s usually seen as a detour, not a main road. Even Louis Armstrong, jazz’s first great soloist, made some of his finest early recordings in duet with the pianist Earl Hines; ever since, the format has offered listeners a close perspective into both the playing and the listening of jazz’s great improvisers. And from the 1960s it has been a preferred format on the avant-garde, where free-form improvising can really reward a smaller format. When Graves, who died this year, was in his 20s and already well into a Promethean career, his duet with the piano titan Don Pullen became a vehicle for artistic innovation, economic self-determination (through their collaborative label) and political visioning.Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson are contemporary improvisers who approach abstraction from two different angles: Courvoisier as a pianist at the bridge between free jazz and European classical music, and Halvorson as a deconstructive guitar improviser, strongly affiliated with (for lack of a better term) the Brooklyn jazz scene. Their second duo album, “Searching for the Disappeared Hour,” was a chance to mine the jazz canon for inspiration while finding ways to playfully disrupt each other’s style.They re-listened closely to “Undercurrent,” the famed album of duets by the guitarist Jim Hall and the pianist Bill Evans, and sought to create something with a similar quality of attentive mystery. Courvoisier and Halvorson each contributed about half the compositions on “Disappeared Hour,” and each one wrote with the other player in mind. Then, once the pieces were written, the other musician went in and tinkered with them.“I love her melodies: She has this typical Mary sound, a very unique way of writing,” Courvoisier said in an interview. “Sometimes I’d ask her, ‘Can I reharmonize that one?’ She said, ‘Sure.’” This worked in both directions. “She does the same with my songs,” Courvoisier said. “She’ll hear me and say, ‘Can I bend that note?’ I’ll say, ‘Great.’”When improvised music comes wild and untethered, as theirs often does, some listeners lose their bearings. But when someone says they’re not sure how to engage with music like this, I suggest listening to it simply as a feeling, not as a bunch of strategies or linguistic parts. In duo scenarios, it’s especially easy to listen that way, mostly because that’s how each player is hearing the other: through feeling.Sara Schoenbeck is one of the few improvising bassoonists of her pedigree, but she rarely makes music as a leader. When she decided a few years ago to make an album under her name, a duet format made sense: Hers is a quiet, unwieldy instrument; playing in duos allows her “not to have to stress about using amplification, or not have to change the way that I would naturally want to play,” she said in an interview.The self-titled album that she released last month consists of nine duets, each with a different musical partner; including original compositions, open-ended improvisations and one cover of a tune by the slowcore band Low, each track is arresting in a different way. One of the quietest — and the one that most rewards careful listening — features the saxophonist and avant-garde eminence Roscoe Mitchell. Playing with him, Schoenbeck said, made her think about patience. It was a reminder that the way to show someone you’ve heard them isn’t always to respond.She said she’d challenged herself with this question: “How much can you start from a small idea, and not move too quickly?” And Mitchell, she said, is “kind of a master at that.”“When you’re performing, your endorphins change; your idea of time and space changes, and it’s really easy to move too quickly,” Schoenbeck added. “So that’s something I’ve come back to: How do you not move too quickly, how do you stay in a space, how do you gradually change the language that’s happening? It’s hard.” More

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      The Best Albums of 2021? Let’s Discuss.

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOlivia Rodrigo and Tyler, the Creator released the only albums that appeared on the 2021 year-end lists of all three pop music critics for The New York Times. Beyond that, there was a diverse bounty: Memphis rap, Colombian electronic folk, British spazz-rock, Atlanta soul, Georgia country-rap, Chicago jazz abstraction, California Technicolor rock and Adele.On this week’s Popcast, a critic round table about the year in albums, with conversation about Rodrigo and Tyler, and also Lana Del Rey, Playboi Carti, Adele, Mdou Moctar, Snail Mail, Remi Wolf, Moneybagg Yo, Bomba Estéreo, Black Midi, PinkPantheress and much more.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, who writes about pop music for The New York Times and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      What Can You Learn from a Celebrity Masterclass on Empathy?

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      Pharrell Williams is joined by a chorus of famous people whose lessons about feeling for others strangely highlight their personal achievements.Each online course from Masterclass begins with the same introduction. Heels click purposefully into a room. A piano lid is confidently opened, a marble slab floured, a knife honed. Lighting pools warmly amid expensive-looking wood. Swells of music coalesce into momentary silence; something of quality is about to start.The instructors in this nave of learning have unequivocally made it in their fields. Margaret Atwood speaks on writing, Frank Gehry on design and architecture, Misty Copeland on ballet. If you want to learn about acting, here is Samuel L. Jackson; if you’re interested in directing, here is Ron Howard. Lately the topics have also edged into softer territory, bathing everyday challenges in celebrity wisdom. Some feel like unboxing videos for admirable personality traits. Anna Wintour had a lockdown hit with a course on “creativity and leadership.” RuPaul’s, on “self-expression and authenticity,” touches on the craft of drag but mostly focuses on concepts like conquering your inner naysayer and cultivating stillness.Into this mix comes Pharrell Williams, pop star, producer, designer, reality-TV judge, guy with a skin-care line. In the first frames of his new course, he slides into a chair dressed in knee-shorts and a shrunken schoolboy blazer, as if to sartorially convey that every student is a teacher. His skin is amazing, his head chiseled into gorgeousness, his gaze unswerving, as if blinking were for the less focused. He is not here to teach us hitmaking, or streetwear design, or even multitasking. He’s here to give a class on empathy.“I think empathy is the most important thing,” he says. “It’s not a natural thing to just literally think of others all the time. It’s just not. You constantly have to challenge yourself to be a little bit more open to what other people are going through.” With that, we’re full steam into a seriously weird offering of 21st-century moral instruction, or self-help, or celebrity branding, or whatever this edutainment golem is — 10 segments in which the pop star will show us how to become more boundlessly compassionate humans.For this job, he has been teamed with a brain trust that includes Cornel West, Roxane Gay, Walter Mosley and Gloria Steinem, among others. All the guests also teach their own, more specific Masterclasses; judging by the wardrobe, they seem to have taken time in their own class shoots to drop some off-the-cuff wisdom on what Williams calls “the art and sport of considering others.” The result feels like a compilation of commodified theory of mind, generously spiked with images of pride flags, Black Lives Matter placards and people in kaffiyehs smiling warmly.Empathy has had a hot ride in America lately. The word saw a nearly fivefold increase as a Google search between the first inauguration of Barack Obama — who defined empathy as being able to “stand in someone else’s shoes” and famously talked of America’s “empathy deficit” — and the summer of 2020, when interest spiked to an all-time high. Now C.E.O.s are being encouraged by organizational psychologists and consultants to cast themselves as “Chief Empathy Officers,” in an attempt to reimagine their offices as places workers might actually desire to return to. The concept seems to have become a cure for any societal ill. A recent HealthDay headline asked, “How to Counter the Anti-Mask Backlash?” and then answered with, you guessed it, “Empathy.” The word has expanded in such fascinating directions that there is a Damien Hirst-designed “Empathy Suite Sky Villa” at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas — the most expensive hotel room in the world, featuring formaldehyde-preserved sea animals and a transparent bar filled with medical waste.Such concepts don’t float through popular culture at random. They come when they are needed most. Interest in mindfulness, for instance, grew as the popularization of the smartphone fractured our focus. Similarly, the rapid rise of empathy — at least as a word you might see inscribed on a river-rock keychain or kitchen poster — paralleled the bifurcations of the Trump presidency. It’s as if the word spent the era expanding into a mantra of secular transcendence, some spirit of better angel, containing all that is good and bonding and human.Much of what’s described seems to climax with personal achievement, rather than anything having to do with others.Williams is one of many celebrities to have jumped into this cultural current. Back in the early 2000s, he started a streetwear label called Billionaire Boys Club, a name shared with a notorious 1980s Ponzi scheme; in 2013, he co-wrote the Robin Thicke hit “Blurred Lines,” which was criticized by feminists for its “rapiness.” Now he sells goods under the brand name Humanrace, “in the belief that taking better care of ourselves can teach us to take better care of each other,” and talks about having his “mind opened up” by reactions to the Thicke song and realizing “how it could make someone feel.” From a branding perspective, his Masterclass makes perfect sense.But from most other perspectives, it’s a strange offering. For one thing, its takeaway tends to be disappointingly self-serving. In his second lesson, Williams describes how his solo hit “Happy” made him a less selfish person — because he’d made a song that made others genuinely happy, and then watched as it became hugely successful. Gloria Steinem talks about starting Ms. Magazine as an act of empathy. The ultramarathon runner and Peloton executive Robin Arzón tells of a sudden diabetes diagnosis that did not stop her from running an important race, and how this inspired other diabetics. Much of what’s described seems to climax with personal achievement, rather than anything having to do with others.Self-actualization is, of course, different from empathy. And while some forms of empathy are surely teachable — there are books, meditations, soup kitchens, hospices and family members that offer great opportunities for empathetic practice — it feels very unlikely that watching impressive people talk about their lives is going to do it. The selling point here seems to be more about comfort and validation. The course is as cozy as reading a picture book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg to a child at bedtime, as righteous as planting an “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL” sign on an upscale suburban lawn overlooked by security cameras. It presents a cast of thoughtful, optimistic, largely Black and brown figures patting their assembled audience on the back, in effect assuring them that, yes, they are on the right side of history, part of the solution, just for paying to be there.Perhaps the course could be a gateway to action for some, in the same way that watching a baking show might make them hungry for cake. But mainly, what this Masterclass offers is a chance to feel nearer to the people whose shoes we’d already love to be standing in. It has less to say about any of the shoes that might be tougher to imagine walking in, the ones that actually need filling.Source photographs: Screen grabs from MasterclassMireille Silcoff is a writer based in Montreal. A longtime newspaper and magazine columnist, she is also the author of four books, most recently the story collection “Chez l’Arabe.” More

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      Review: In Time for the Holidays, Radiant Praetorius Carols

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      Tenet Vocal Artists marked the 450th anniversary of the German Baroque composer Michael Praetorius’s birth, and the 400th of his death.The German hymn commonly known as “Lo, how a rose, e’er blooming” has long been a beloved Christmas carol. It’s sung by church choirs and high school choruses. Versions have been recorded by Linda Ronstadt and Sting.But we have the early German Baroque composer Michael Praetorius to thank for the original single, so to speak: “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.” The text and hymn melody were first printed together in 1599. But in 1609, Praetorius wrote a tender, four-part setting that plumbed the melody for all its harmonic possibilities, and became the equivalent in its day of a hit tune.On Saturday, at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan, the splendid ensemble Tenet Vocal Artists performed, with 14 exquisite singers and 11 vibrant players of period instruments, a ravishing account of the beautifully direct yet intricate Praetorius version, part of a generous 75-minute concert of this composer’s works.The program — while Jolle Greenleaf is Tenet’s artistic director, this one was led by Jeffrey Grossman, who played organ — honored the fact that this year marks both the 400th anniversary of Praetorius’s death and the 450th anniversary of his birth. (An on-demand video of the concert will be available for a month starting Tuesday at tenet.nyc.)Praetorius was a leading figure of the German Lutheran chorale tradition — the practice of using hymn tunes as components of pieces that often unfold with striking complexity, as in the wondrous “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” which Tenet performed compellingly. On one level this music comes across as a multi-section, chorale-like setting of an alluring melody. But just below the surface the music teems with inner details: flourishes of offbeat counterpoint for the voices, squiggling riffs for the instruments.In the later phase of his career, Praetorius was increasingly influenced by new styles coming out of Italy, including the technique known as “cori spezzati,” in which groups of singers and players were divided into smaller ensembles so that phrases could be bounced back and forth.In this regard Praetorius was indebted to a younger German contemporary, Heinrich Schütz, whom he got to know when they both worked in Dresden. Schütz had studied in Venice for three years with a progenitor of the technique: Giovanni Gabrieli, the composer and organist at St. Mark’s Basilica. In a nod to Schütz’s influence, Tenet began the program with his “Jauchzet dem Herren,” in which mini-phrases are boldly echoed.That Praetorius brought his own take to the technique was amply demonstrated with a performance of four fleet dances for instruments from his collection “Terpsichore,” his only surviving secular music. The interplay went beyond echo effects; sometimes a flourish was tossed from one group to another with an open invitation to elaborate on it. In several of the large-scale choral works, the Tenet singers enhanced the dramatic impact of the cori spezzati passages by positioning themselves well apart from one another in the church.The revelation, for me, was a performance of the lengthy “Vater unser im Himmelreich,” from Praetorius’s 1619 collection “Polyhymnia Caduceatrix” — magnificent music, laid out in multiple sections, with sublime stretches of overlapping counterpoint and plush harmonies that cadence into radiant consonance. Historians point to this score as the German Baroque counterpart to Monteverdi’s seminal Vespers of 1610.Yet some of the more modest fare was just as rewarding, like the setting of what’s familiar today as the carol “Joseph Dearest, Joseph Mine.” How often do you get to hear Praetorius’s subtly ingenious and glowing version?Tenet Vocal ArtistsPerformed on Saturday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Manhattan. More

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      Vicente Fernández, ‘El Rey’ of Mexican Ranchera Music, Is Dead at 81

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      A beloved Mexican singer, Mr. Fernández was known for his powerful operatic range and marathon performances, delivered in a signature charro outfit and intricately embroidered sombrero.Vicente Fernández, the powerful tenor whose songs of love, loss and patriotism inspired by life in rural Mexico endeared him to generations of fans as “El Rey,” the king of traditional ranchera music, died on Sunday morning. He was 81.His death was announced in a post on his official Instagram account, which did not give a cause or say where he died. He had been hospitalized for months after a spinal injury he sustained in August, according to previous posts from the account.Accompanied by his mariachi band, Mr. Fernández brought ranchera music, which emerged from the ranches of Mexico in the 19th century, to the rest of Latin America and beyond. In his signature charro outfit and intricately embroidered sombrero, a celebration of the genre’s countryside origins, he performed at some of the largest venues in the world.He recorded dozens of albums and hundreds of songs over a career that spanned six decades. His enduring popularity was reflected in a series of industry accolades, including a place in the Billboard Latin Music Hall of Fame, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Grammy Awards and eight Latin Grammy Awards. He sold tens of millions of copies of his albums and starred in dozens of movies.He was known for giving epic, hourslong concerts, communing directly with his fans and taking swigs from bottles of alcohol that were offered to him. Known fondly as “Chente,” he would tell his audiences that “as long as you keep applauding, your ‘Chente’ won’t stop singing.”Reviewing a 1995 performance at Radio City Music Hall for The New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote that Mr. Fernández “sang with operatic power and melodrama,” flexing his “ardent tenor” to “prodigious crescendos and a vibrato that could register on the Richter scale.”He continued to give marathon performances well into his 70s. At a 2008 concert at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Fernández held court for three hours. A lingering note, delivered in his “lively, if slightly weathered tenor,” could render the audience silent, Jon Caramanica wrote in his review in The Times.Vicente Fernández was born on Feb. 17, 1940, in Huentitán El Alto, in the state of Jalisco in western central Mexico. His father, Ramón Fernández, was a rancher and his mother, Paula Gómez de Fernández, stayed at home to raise their son.He grew up watching matinee movies featuring the Mexican ranchera singer Pedro Infante, an early influence. When he was 8, he received his first guitar and began studying folk music. He left school in the fifth grade and later moved with his family to Tijuana after their cattle business collapsed. He told The Los Angeles Times in 1999 that he took whatever work he could, laying bricks and shining shoes, and even washing dishes.“I’ve always said I got to where I am not by being a great singer, but by being stubborn, by being tenacious, by being pigheaded,” Mr. Fernández said. He gravitated to a public square in Guadalajara called Mariachi Plaza, where he performed for tips, he told The Los Angeles Times. His career took off after he won a competition called La Calandria Musical when he was 19, he said in a 2010 interview with KENS 5 of San Antonio. He moved to Mexico City where he sang at a restaurant and at weddings, and unsuccessfully pitched himself to local record labels.The labels came calling soon after the death in 1966 of Javier Solís, one of the most popular Mexican singers who specialized in bolero and ranchera music. Mr. Fernández then recorded his first albums, including hits like “Volver, Volver,” which elevated him to a level of fame that he had never envisioned, he told KENS 5. Other hits, including “El Rey” and “Lástima que seas ajena,” would follow.“When I started my career, I always had the confidence that I would one day make it, but I never imagined that I would reach the heights at which the public has placed me,” Mr. Fernández said.His public statements occasionally got him into trouble in his later years, such as when he said in a 2019 interview that he had refused a liver transplant because he feared that the donated organ might have come from a gay person or a drug addict. Earlier this year, he apologized after he was seen in a video touching a female fan’s breast without her consent while they posed for a photo.Mr. Fernández married María del Refugio Abarca Villaseñor in 1963. She survives him, as do the couple’s children, Vicente, Gerardo, Alejandra and Alejandro, a Grammy-nominated ranchera performer.Asked if a routine or exercise was a key to his longevity as a performer, Mr. Fernández told KENS that he walked every day for an hour and rode horses when he was home on his ranch. But when he was on tour, he said, “I don’t leave the hotels.”“Still, that keeps me healthy,” he said. “My voice is well rested. When I hear the public’s applause, I don’t know where the voice comes from, but it does for three hours. You’ll have to ask God to find out how he blesses me every time.” More

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      Review: ‘Density’ Keeps Expanding the Flute’s Universe

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      Now in its eighth year, Claire Chase’s multidecade project to create a modern repertory for her instrument shows no signs of slowing.It was a familiar, comforting sight: the flutist Claire Chase, standing atop a scaffold and softly lit, a warmly glowing star in the expansive darkness of the Kitchen’s performance space.Since 2013, a scene like this has greeted every audience to witness an installment of “Density 2036,” Chase’s multidecade initiative to commission a new program of flute music each year, leading up to the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s brief but influential 1936 solo “Density 21.5,” a work that, she once wrote, “unfurled genre-dissolving possibilities for the instrument.”These programs — theatrical as well as musical, vocal as well as instrumental — have taken on the reliability of holiday gatherings. And, like many such gatherings, Chase’s was jeopardized by the pandemic: The seventh installment, Liza Lim’s “Sex Magic,” premiered online last December.What a relief it was, then, to be back at the Kitchen on Friday for Part VIII of “Density” — one of the great musical undertakings of our time, a singular project by a singular artist on the messily ambitious scale of Wagner’s “Ring” and Stockhausen’s “Licht.” The climax will be a 24-hour marathon concert, but until then, “Density” is unfolding incrementally, with Chase as the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe.This latest performance — dedicated to the composer Alvin Lucier, whose “Almost New York” was featured in Part I, and who died recently at 90 — opened with Lim’s “Sex Magic,” in the form of the excerpt “Throat Song,” for ocarina and voice, blending and blurring the two in gentle polyphony.Lim’s piece was a reminder that, while “Density” is, on paper, a mission to develop a modern solo flute repertory, it has in practice been much broader. Chase and her cohort of composers have made an encyclopedic embrace of the flute family — especially in Marcos Balter’s “Pan,” which constituted Part V — and remained open to the ways in which the human body can produce sound, such as in Pauline Oliveros’s monodrama-like “Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase,” from Part III. Some works haven’t even been solos. (And some, it should be said, have been easier to respect than love.)The concerts are anything but straightforward. Friday’s came with a host of additional credits, including for Levy Lorenzo’s sound, Nicholas Houfek’s lighting and production design, Monica Duncan’s projections and Kelly Levy’s stage management. The reason was clear the moment Chase began to play Wang Lu’s “Aftertouch,” which complements three types of flute with street noise, a club-worthy beat and videos, by Polly Apfelbaum, of spinning singing bowls. It seems like a lot, but the elements wove together naturally: the city’s restlessness; the dizzying video; Chase’s arpeggios, amplified and, through electronics, feeding one another in waves of sound that transformed into clashing ripples.If “Aftertouch” courted dance, the low frequency of its beat rattling the rafters, then Ann Cleare’s “anfa,” which followed, invited something like the opposite. Its title, according to the program notes, comes from the Irish word for “a disturbance in the elements,” and its baseline is deceptive stasis. Chase stood with her towering contrabass flute against the backdrop of a projected film landscape, by Ailbhe Ni Bhriain, of an Irish bog — a site, Cleare says, of rich industrial and geological history.The video has the look of a still image, but Cleare’s score reveals that there is always more to a landscape than meets the eye. Accompanied by electronics, Chase sounded both of the earth and beyond it, shifting textures with tectonic patience and warping time. Quietly, but alarmingly, the image changes to another in which inky plumes erupt with increasing frequency; by the end, their slowly spreading tendrils begin to overtake the bog.Matana Roberts’s “Auricular Hearsay” countered Cleare’s muted intensity with piercingly loud extroversion. Written for flute, video and the option of collaborators, it uses a mixed-media framework that Roberts calls “Endless Score,” and is, the composer writes, “a visual and sonic exploration of the brains of the neurodiverse,” inspired by how they “operate in starts, stops, spurts.” Improvising from a set of instructions, Chase played no fewer than a half-dozen instruments, including slide whistles, percussion and panpipe, alongside Senem Pirler’s scene-stealing live electronics and against blazing projections.It’s a marvel that, after this rush of premieres, Varèse’s original “Density 21.5” had the freshness of a new discovery. But its inclusion also put a lot of pressure on the pieces that preceded it: Will they still have such an eager audience in 2136?And what about artists able to take them up? So much of “Density 2036” has been written specifically for Chase, tailored to her nimble technique, vocal prowess and charismatic presence. Although each addition has been a gift, it will be even more impressive if these works break the trend — all too common in new music — of coming and going like the burst of breath that makes a flute sing.Density 2036, Part VIIIPerformed Thursday through Saturday at the Kitchen, Manhattan. More

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      Adele’s ‘30’ Crosses a Million Sales and Holds at No. 1

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      The singer’s first album in six years became the first release to reach that milestone since Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” a year ago. But in 2015, Adele’s “25” sold 3.4 million its first week.Adele holds the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart for a third time this week with “30,” with no major new releases to challenge it.Her first album in six years, “30” had the equivalent of 193,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That included 58 million streams and 149,000 copies sold as a complete package. “30” has now sold more than one million copies as a full album, the first release to do so since Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” a little over a year ago — though Adele’s last LP, “25,” sold nearly 3.4 million in its first week out in 2015, when Adele withheld the complete album from streaming services.Also this week, Swift’s “Red (Taylor’s Version)” holds at No. 2. Polo G’s “Hall of Fame,” which opened at No. 1 back in June, jumped 66 spots to No. 3 thanks to a new version with extra tracks. Michael Bublé’s “Christmas,” a seasonal hit each year since its release a decade ago, is No. 4, and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which had a 10-week run at No. 1 at the start of the year and has never dipped further than No. 9 on the chart, holds in sixth place. More

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      Review: ‘Magic Flute’ Welcomes Children Back to the Met

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      A winning cast opened the company’s holiday season with a trimmed, English-language version of Mozart’s classic.It’s always heartening to see lots of eager children in the audience when the Metropolitan Opera presents its family-friendly version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” during the holidays.But when the company reopened in September, their return was uncertain. The Met, which since the start of its season has required all who enter to be vaccinated, de facto banned children under 12, who were not eligible for vaccines.When eligibility expanded at the end of October, though, the door was open for kids to come back. And they did on Friday, to Julie Taymor’s fantastical production — trimmed to just under two intermissionless hours and performed in J.D. McClatchy’s snappy English adaptation.The tenor Rolando Villazón as Papageno, a role usually sung by baritones, and the soprano Hera Hyesang Park as Pamina.Karen Almond/Metropolitan OperaThe performance boasted a winning cast and glowing playing from the orchestra, led with elegance and insight by Jane Glover. I’ve long been in the minority in finding Taymor’s stylized, puppet-filled staging overly busy — too inventive for its own good. But the audience applauded each scenic touch and stage trick, including some children near me, though there seemed not that many of them in attendance overall. (The company is also offering an abridged, English-language version of Massenet’s “Cinderella,” which opens on Friday.)From the melting love aria that Prince Tamino sings early on, the tenor Matthew Polenzani — who sang the role at this staging’s premiere in 2004 — was in warm, ardent voice. When the questing Tamino exchanges questions with the Speaker (the robust bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi), who oversees the entrance to a temple of wisdom, Polenzani’s heated earnestness lent the scene dark intensity. And his English diction was a model of clarity.Pamina, with whom Tamino falls in love, was sung beautifully by the plush-voiced soprano Hera Hyesang Park. Pamina’s mother, the Queen of the Night, was the soprano Kathryn Lewek, who dispatched her florid leaps and super-high notes with fearless brilliance. The powerful bass Morris Robinson made an imposing yet trustworthy Sarastro, the spiritual leader of the temple.In a bold move, the tenor Rolando Villazón sang Papageno, the hapless bird catcher — traditionally a baritone role. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Villazón, a star since the early 2000s, was candid about the vocal troubles and mental setbacks that almost led him to retire in recent years. He said in the interview that he believed his voice was mended. But on Friday, his low range was weak and patchy, and even his higher notes had trouble carrying in the house.Still, he sang honestly and energetically, and brought a charming blend of comedic antics and wistful yearning to his portrayal of this bumptious character who yearns for love — and finds it, eventually, with Papagena, here the sunny soprano Ashley Emerson.On the podium, Glover balanced warmth and brightness, breadth and high spirits, and rightly received an enthusiastic ovation. When she made her Met debut in 2013 in this holiday “Magic Flute,” she was just the third woman to conduct at the company. This current run is her first time back.Glover has worked with the Royal Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival in England, the Berlin State Opera, the Royal Danish Opera and other major houses. Isn’t it time for the Met to utilize her full capabilities?The Magic FluteThrough Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More