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      Could the conservatorship end today?

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      After many months of back and forth, the fate of the conservatorship that has overseen Britney Spears and her fortune since 2008 rests solely in the hands of a probate judge in Los Angeles Superior Court, where a hearing that was set to begin at 4:30 p.m. Eastern may mark the end — or at least the beginning of the end — in a 13-year saga.The New York Times has reporters at the hearing, but with no communications allowed from inside the courtroom, it will take some time to learn what was discussed and decided.Both Ms. Spears, and, in a complete turnaround, her father, James P. Spears — who has long been the official steward of the legal arrangement — have said they want the conservatorship terminated.“The time has come for Ms. Spears’s freedom,” the singer’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, wrote in a court filing late last month. Lawyers for Mr. Spears, who is known as Jamie, put it this way in their own status report this month: “Jamie believes that the Conservatorship should end, immediately.” Jodi Montgomery, the singer’s personal conservator, has also consented, according to court filings, and has worked with Mr. Rosengart on what he called a “termination plan.”But it’s not quite as simple as the apparent consensus on both sides.Typically in deciding whether to end a conservatorship, a judge will consider whether the conservatee has regained “capacity” — a term that generally refers to benchmarks in a person’s functional and cognitive ability as well as their vulnerability to harm or coercion.But Ms. Spears’s case has been considered extremely unusual because she continued to work extensively as a performing musician and global celebrity, bringing in millions of dollars, while simultaneously being considered unable to care for herself by the court.Since June, the singer has been adamant that the arrangement end without her having to undergo additional mental evaluations, and there is no public record of Judge Brenda Penny, who is overseeing the case, having recently called for one.In a since-deleted Instagram caption, Ms. Spears seemed to allude to the possibility that the judge would concur. “This week is gonna be very interesting for me,” she wrote, using emojis for emphasis. “I haven’t prayed for something more in my life.” More

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      Spears asked to end the conservatorship without the typical psychological evaluation.

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      When Britney Spears broke her public silence in June and asked to be released from the court-imposed oversight that has controlled her money and personal life for 13 years, she told the judge: “I want to end the conservatorship without having to be evaluated.”But legal experts have said that judges typically rely on psychological assessments and other factors when considering whether to restore independence to someone under a conservatorship. As they consider whether a conservatee has regained “capacity,” they will generally try to assess cognitive ability and decision making, and the ability to weigh the risks and benefits of things like medical care, marriage and contracts.In most cases, a forensic psychiatrist or a psychologist with expertise in neuropsychological assessments performs evaluations, which can extend over several days. A judge doesn’t have to accept an evaluator’s findings, but they usually do.Ms. Spears continued to work extensively as a performing musician and global celebrity while under her conservatorship, earning millions of dollars. But experts say that professional and financial successes do not directly speak to whether someone has regained “legal mental capacity.”Since June, Ms. Spears has been adamant that she wants the arrangement ended without having to undergo additional mental evaluations. “I don’t think I owe anyone to be evaluated,” she told the court in June. “I’ve done more than enough.”There is no public record of the judge in the case, Brenda Penny, having recently called for one. (According to confidential documents obtained by The New York Times, a court investigator said in 2016 that the conservatorship remained in Ms. Spears’s best interest despite her ongoing requests to end it, but called for a path to independence.)Ms. Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, noted that in a recent filing, lawyers for Ms. Spears’s father, James P. Spears, had stated “no less than three times that no mental or psychological evaluation is required under the Probate Code,” to which Mr. Rosengart added: “Ms. Spears fervently agrees.” More

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      Review: Young Concert Artists Is Back, With a Superb Pianist

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      Zhu Wang played an unusually interesting and adventurous set of pieces at Zankel Hall.Since its founding in 1961, Young Concert Artists has supported emerging musicians who win its annual competition — including offering a coveted New York recital. But during the pandemic, these recitals had to go virtual.On Thursday the organization became the latest New York institution to resume in-person concerts when Zhu Wang, a 24-year-old pianist from China, gave an impressive recital at Zankel Hall. Zhu, making his New York debut, played a demanding 90-minute program without an intermission.With an unusually interesting and adventurous set of pieces, Zhu proved a thoughtful, sensitive performer. He began with Bach’s arrangement for keyboard of Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor; this was Bach’s pragmatic way of getting to know the latest currents in Italian music from the inside. A lithe, flowing first movement leads to a plaintive Adagio, followed by bustling Presto finale. Zhu balanced lyrical warmth and crisp clarity.He then turned to Schumann’s “Humoreske,” a 30-minute suite in seven movements. Performances of this remarkable piece are relative rarities, perhaps because its constant shifts of mood and flights of fancy can seem baffling. Zhu fervently conveyed the rhapsodic sweep and mercurial fervor of the music, while bringing out the inner structure that holds it together. He was especially impressive during episodes of wistful, poetic tenderness.He then spoke to the audience about the next work: Zhang Zhao’s “Pi Huang (Moments in Beijing Opera),” which he said offered impressions of Chinese opera, which combines music, dance and even martial arts and acrobatics. The short, fantastical piece was alive with trills and tremolos, rustling arpeggios, beguiling tunes and jittery dance segments driven by Bartokian cluster chords.Daniel Kellogg, who became president of Young Concert Artists when Susan Wadsworth, its founder, retired in 2019, appeared onstage with Nina Shekhar, the organization’s composer in residence, to introduce her “Vocalise.” (Shekhar will have an orchestral work played by the New York Philharmonic in May.)The term vocalise refers to a song without words. In this premiere, she adapted that concept to the piano. This ruminative 12-minute score begins and ends with an elegiac melody, inspired by Hindustani musical styles. There are stretches of thick, tart block chords, searching lyrical lines, mysterious washes of sound and delicate strands, brought together compellingly in Zhu’s account.He ended with Liszt — choosing not some overtly virtuosic piece, but that composer’s teeming, imaginative “Réminiscences de Norma,” a fascinating reflection on Bellini’s opera in which its melodies are transformed into piano music, by turns contemplative and exciting.Zhu played it brilliantly. And Young Concert Artists is back.Young Concert ArtistsThe bass-baritone William Socolof appears on Dec. 9 at Merkin Concert Hall, Manhattan; yca.org. More

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      Astroworld Disaster Rekindles Fears About Music Festival Safety

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      The concert industry notes that serious problems are still rare, but over the years a number of deadly stampedes have shown the inherent dangers of big, excited crowds.On Dec. 3, 1979, a crowd amassed outside Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati for a concert by the Who. The show was booked without seat reservations, giving early-bird fans the chance to rush toward the stage. In the confusion outside the venue, 11 people were crushed to death.In response, Cincinnati banned that kind of general-admission model, sometimes called festival seating, and the incident served as a reminder of the inherent danger when pop music is mixed with big crowds.Cincinnati’s ban was lifted in 2004, just as a new, lucrative era of music festivals was taking off, led by events like Coachella, that were modeled after European festivals where fans roamed free and took in attractions on multiple stages.But through the years a series of disasters at concerts, clubs and festivals have served as reminders of the dangers of crowds, like the death of nine people at a Danish festival in 2000, or a stampede at a nightclub in Chicago in 2003 that left 21 dead.Those fears were rekindled again with Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston last Friday, where nine people died and more than 300 were injured, at a packed event that drew 50,000 people to NRG Park.For now, more questions than answers surround Astroworld, including how well the festival’s security plan was followed and why it took nearly 40 minutes to shut the show down after Houston officials declared a “mass casualty event.” The Houston police are conducting a criminal investigation, and dozens of civil lawsuits have been filed against Mr. Scott and Live Nation, the festival’s promoter, among other defendants.The event, and the finger-pointing in response, seemed all too familiar to Paul Wertheimer, a concert security expert and longtime critic of the industry. He began his career investigating the Who disaster and has since documented thousands of safety incidents at festivals and concerts; his research has included hours studying the dynamics of mosh pits.“I’ve been living this recurring nightmare, what happened in Houston, for 40 years,” he said in an interview. “I’ve seen it over and over again.”In 1979, 11 people were killed in a stampede at a Who concert in Cincinnati that had no assigned seats.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe Astroworld disaster has already ignited debate about the safety of festivals, just as the industry has finally seen the return of large-scale touring after more than a year of dormancy during the pandemic.To critics like Mr. Wertheimer, Astroworld is yet another sign that concert promoters prioritize profits over safety. The concert industry sees it differently, arguing that the rarity of serious problems given the many thousands of events that go on without major incident each year proves that most shows are perfectly safe, and that expertise has been developed to protect the public.Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, put on some 40,000 shows of various sizes in 2019, the most recent year that it had a full slate of events. Deaths and major injuries are rare, and when they do occur they often involve factors like drug overdoses.Still, the impact of the deaths in Houston are already being felt in the industry, as executives calculate the increased costs and heightened security measures they expect will be required in the future to avoid becoming the next Astroworld.Randy Phillips, the former chief executive of AEG Live, a concert giant that counts Coachella among its portfolio of festivals, said that for shows he is planning on his own as a promoter, “we are oversecuring and overinsuring all participants in a way we probably wouldn’t have pre-Astroworld.”Until the criminal investigation is completed, and courts sort out liability in the civil suits, it may be unclear just what steps festivals promoters and concert venues should take to prevent a recurrence. But few doubt there will be repercussions that will affect insurance, security, government regulations and contractual agreements among promoters, performers, venues and various third parties like security firms.In a statement, Live Nation said, “We continue to support and assist local authorities in their ongoing investigation so that both the fans who attended and their families can get the answers they want and deserve.” The company declined to comment further.For Live Nation and other promoters, festivals have become an important moneymaker. The day before the Astroworld disaster, in a conference call with analysts to announce Live Nation’s third-quarter financial results, Michael Rapino, its chief executive, said that when the company controls all revenue streams for a festival, “it’s our highest-margin business.”Crowd-control plans are an essential part of those events, and have evolved over the last two decades or so as festivals have become a key part of the touring industry.To manage general-admission events, long barriers known as crowd breaks are usually deployed to divide large spaces into smaller zones that contain as few as 5,000 patrons, reducing the risk of overcrowding, Mr. Phillips said. Other practices have emerged, like the use of counterprogramming on multiple stages, with overlapping set times, to prevent the full force of a festival audience from piling into one place at the same time.It is unclear how well those lessons were implemented at Astroworld.In 2010, 21 people died when crowds of thousands passed through a narrow tunnel on the way to a festival in Germany.Erik Wiffers/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday, Samuel Peña, the Houston fire chief, said that barricades had been used to prevent the crowd from surging forward, but the movement of the crowd toward the stage “in essence caused other areas of pinch points.”“As the crowd began to surge and push and compress toward the front,” Mr. Peña said, “it was those people in the center that began to get crushed and the injuries started.”Astroworld has also stood out for the role of Mr. Scott, the festival’s creator and star attraction. A chart-topping rapper and entrepreneur, he has developed a reputation for putting on chaotic, high-energy shows, even encouraging fans to sneak in. Twice before, Mr. Scott has been arrested and accused of inciting crowds at his shows, and pleaded guilty to minor charges.At one point last Friday, Mr. Scott paused his set to take note of an ambulance in the crowd. But what he knew about the extent of danger in the crowd will surely be a central point in the investigation and the civil suits.The relative lack of injury at most big events has led concert executives to defend what they do as safe.Carl Freed, the promoter of the Hot 97 Summer Jam, an annual hip-hop festival at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, called Astroworld “a horrible tragedy,” and added: “But there’s been a great deal of thought put into the safety of patrons. Always has been, always will be.” Summer Jam, which has assigned seating, has had a number of incidents over the years involving fans trying to push their way through security and sometimes scuffling with police.The history of trouble with overcrowding goes back to the very beginning of rock ’n’ roll. In 1952, the disc jockey Alan Freed’s “Moondog Coronation Ball” in Cleveland was shut down by police after up to 25,000 fans showed up for an arena that could hold just 10,000.And a number of events have turned deadly. In 1991, three teenagers were trampled to death at an AC/DC concert in Salt Lake City. That same year, nine people died in a stampede outside a benefit basketball game at City College in New York that was presented by a young rap promoter, Sean Combs. In one of the highest-profile disasters in recent years, 21 people died in 2010 when crowds of thousands were forced to pass through a narrow tunnel on the way to the Love Parade, a festival in Duisburg, Germany.The rise of big outdoor festivals in the late 1960s helped establish rock as a paramount cultural force, but the problems at Woodstock (gate-crashing; traffic and sanitation failures) and Altamont (a fan’s death at the hands of a Hells Angels security crew) frightened local governments around the country, which passed public gathering laws that stunted the growth of American festivals for decades.Brian D. Caplan, a lawyer who is not involved with the Astroworld suits, said that it may take courts time to establish which parties face liability, but that the history of dangers and violence at concerts serves as fair warning to promoters that steps must be taken to protect the public.“These happen sporadically, but all large promoters would know that an event of this nature could happen,” Mr. Caplan said. “They do the best they can to ensure these things don’t happen, but when they do it’s difficult to escape some form of liability for the consequences.”Viewing the footage of Astroworld, Mr. Wertheimer said that the deaths could have been prevented simply by reducing the density of the crowd. But with the popularity and profitability of festivals, he doubted that would happen.“It’s going to be business as usual after this in Houston,” he said, “unless officials rise up and try to protect their communities.” More

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      Review: The Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason Makes an Entrance

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      A young star made his New York Philharmonic debut in an evening of bold, charismatic musical storytelling.It takes a long time for the soloist to enter in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto: three and a half minutes of orchestral music with the force and sweep of a symphony. But when that entrance finally comes, it’s marked in the score as “risoluto” — resolute, bold, declarative.And it could hardly have been more so than it was at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, when the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason made his debut with the New York Philharmonic. Having sat patiently at his instrument during the introduction, Kanneh-Mason, 22, became suddenly animated, matching the ensemble’s grandeur with his own: fiery vibrato, dramatic phrasing, richly voiced yet crisp forzando chords.This wasn’t the Kanneh-Mason whom nearly two billion people saw perform at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. Then, he was more restrained — with the occasional expressive, searching look in his eyes, but generally measured as he played three short pieces. One of them, Fauré’s “Après un Rêve,” has racked up millions of streams on Spotify.The streaming numbers for his latest album — “Muse,” with the excellent pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, his sister — are much smaller so far. But that recording is far more revealing than the wedding performance of his sound and style, proving his gift as a compelling musical storyteller in sonatas by Barber and Rachmaninoff, whether charting thorny passages or soaring to emotional heights.That was recognizably the musician who played the Dvorak concerto on Thursday: a charismatic protagonist and a generous collaborator in chamber-like passages. But Kanneh-Mason could also be a bit of a ham, his extremities of expression sometimes tipping into an unwieldiness that, as he maintained the overall shape of a phrase, sacrificed intonation along the way. These passing errors, though, were less memorable than the grace of his bow gliding over harmonics, or the control and tension with which he was able to build long crescendos.After the standing ovation that followed, he announced that his encore would be a premiere: “3-Minute Cello Concerto,” by the 11-year-old Larissa Lakner, part of the Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program. Delivered with the same sincerity afforded Dvorak, this work was a dialogue between soloist and orchestra, in varied episodes of Mozartean tidiness and melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on a “Harry Potter” soundtrack; Kanneh-Mason had his share of pyrotechnics in agile fingering, double stops, octaves and passionate legato. It has been heartening to see ever-greater attention given to the children in this initiative, whose work has been featured in widely attended outdoor concerts, pandemic Bandwagon performances and, here, a high-profile subscription program.The concert was conducted by Simone Young, lately a more regular presence at the Philharmonic.Chris LeeThe conductor was Simone Young, who stepped in two years ago after a long absence to lead the orchestra because its music director, Jaap van Zweden, burned himself with an ice pack, and is thankfully becoming a more regular presence at the podium here. Preceding the Dvorak was a brief opening in the form of the “Fuga (Ricercata)” from Bach’s “Musical Offering,” arranged by Webern in a modernist showcase of 18th-century complexity; after intermission came Brahms’s First Symphony.With an ear for easily overlooked details and dramatic instincts that gave the whole evening a sense of drive and accumulation, Young subtly threaded elements of the Bach through the pieces that followed. By slightly emphasizing the section cellos in the opening of the Dvorak, she lent their part the brightly articulated counterpoint of individual voices in the “Fuga”; later, in the first movement of the Brahms, Webern’s arrangement was echoed as a leading line was passed from oboe to flute and cello.Young led the orchestra with decisive urgency and refreshingly little over-the-top physical extroversion. (She had that combination of qualities in common with another star of the evening, Sheryl Staples, the principal associate concertmaster, who was heavily featured as a soloist in the Dvorak and Brahms.) Most impressive was the reserve Young employed in the opening movements of those two works. Substantial, and with spectacular endings, each could almost be a stand-alone piece.But Young withheld somewhat in both, preferring a slow burn that built toward truly stirring finales — the galloping Brahms blossoming into a radiant chorale and popping chords that sent the audience, once again, standing to greet the music with enthusiastic applause.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats Friday and Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      ‘Be Nice to Tourists’: New York’s Arts Scene Needs International Visitors

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      The United States now allows vaccinated international travelers into the country. It’s welcome news for arts institutions that lost revenue and cut jobs during the pandemic.When many readers in Toronto, London, Paris and Hong Kong open their newspapers on Monday, they will be greeted with a full-page advertisement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.“We reopened in August 2020, but have been missing one critical thing — you, our international visitors,” the ad will say. “The Met is only The Met when it is being enjoyed daily by visitors from around the world.”The unusual display — museum officials say they do not believe they have ever run a global marketing campaign of this scope aimed at visitors so far from their Fifth Avenue home — is a signal of the thirst among New York arts institutions for foreign visitors to return. American borders reopened to international tourists this week for the first time since the early months of 2020. Their return represents another milestone in New York’s reopening, and few sectors of the city’s economy are more of a draw to foreign travelers — or lean more heavily on them for revenue — than the arts.“It’s crucial that we recover this segment,” said Chris Heywood, a vice president for global communications at the city’s tourism agency, NYC & Company. “Arts and culture are going to lead our recovery. That is the backbone.”Indeed, billions of dollars and many thousands of jobs are at stake. Employment in New York City’s arts, entertainment and recreation sector plummeted by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020, according to a state report. Even as things reopen, and workers are hired back, challenges remain: The tourism agency forecasts that visitor spending in 2021 will be about $24 billion, roughly half of what was spent in 2019.Few sectors of the city’s economy are more of a draw to foreign travelers — or lean more heavily on them for revenue — than the arts.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInternational visitors typically make up about a fifth of the city’s visitors, but they tend to stay longer and spend more than domestic visitors: what they spend accounts for roughly half of all tourism dollars.On Broadway, tourists from outside the United States comprise about 15 percent of the audience during a traditional season, said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. (There is a reason that the website of “The Lion King” is lined with flags indicating where to click for translations of its sales pitch in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish.)The Metropolitan Opera said that international ticket sales have accounted for about 20 percent of total box office revenues during the last five seasons. And more than half of New York’s international visitors go visit an art gallery or museum during their trip, according to data from NYC & Company. One in four go to some kind of live performance when they are in the city — be it a concert, play, musical, a dance performance or opera.So New York has been missing them.“This is a big step forward,” said Victoria Bailey, the executive director of Theater Development Fund, the nonprofit organization that operates the TKTS booth, where about 70 percent of the tickets are bought by tourists and roughly half of those sales are to foreign travelers.Groups catering to tourists from overseas are gearing up. Broadway Inbound, a subsidiary of the Shubert Organization that is responsible for the wholesale distribution of show tickets, recently restarted a marketing program that helps highlight more than 20 partnering shows to group buyers, tour operators and the travel industry.The Metropolitan Museum of Art has moved some of its marketing dollars overseas in part because the it has hit something of a “ceiling” on attendance, Ken Weine, a spokesman for museum, said. Before the pandemic, international travelers accounted for about a third of the museum’s visitors; these days, the number of people who come to the museum daily is about half of what it was before March of 2020.The newspaper ad from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will run in Toronto, London, Paris and Hong Kong. Museum officials say they do not believe they have ever run a marketing campaign of this scope aimed at visitors so far from their Fifth Avenue home.Metropolitan Museum of ArtMusicals like “The Phantom of the Opera,” which have leveraged the interest of tourists who want to see a long-running show that they are familiar with, have purposefully invested advertising dollars during this holiday season and placed their displays in high-traffic, touristy areas. That is why there is an imposing three-dimensional statue of the Phantom’s mask strategically plopped next to the TKTS booth and outdoor advertising for “Chicago” all over Times Square.Foreign travelers have not yet begun buying tickets to “Phantom” in material numbers, said Aaron Lustbader, the general manager of the show. But officials hope that will change soon.“Typically, January and February are two of the very weakest months of the year and this has certainly been true for ‘Phantom,’” he said. “Our hope is that due to pent-up demand of nearly two years and assuming it would take most people at least a few weeks to put together plans, that the city sees a far higher number of international tourists in these otherwise lean months.”Barry Weissler, a producer of “Chicago,” said the show typically partners with online travel sites to serve ads and try to spark the interest of inbound, foreign tourists ahead of their flights to New York.And for their part, tour operators and ticket vendors overseas say they have started to see their New York business bounce back — somewhat.Eric Lang, who runs an Amsterdam-based travel and information website that helps vacationers plan trips to New York, said his ticket sales in October were up to about 5 percent of normal. This month, sales are closer to 15 to 20 percent of what he had come to expect for this period, before the pandemic. “Growth from zero,” he said.Lee Burns, a product manager for AttractionTickets.com, which sells event tickets to people and travel agents in the United Kingdom, said he thought the timing of the American reopening might have come “a bit too late” to capitalize on the 2021 holiday season. So far, he said, his company’s New York sales are at only about 10 percent of what is normal for the holiday season.“People are booking now for next Thanksgiving and next Christmas,” he said. Nonetheless, he said he and his team are trying to figure out if there is any sort of deal they can offer for this Black Friday.Those who come to New York from overseas will need to navigate and adhere to the rules and vaccine requirements set by the state, the city and individual venues.They will find that many venues and presenters, including Broadway theaters, the Met Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, will admit travelers who show proof of having received one of the vaccines approved by W.H.O. — a list that includes AstraZeneca, Sinopharm and Sinovac, vaccines that have not been authorized for use in the United States.To help theatergoers prepare for their visit to “Come From Away,” the show recently released a health and safety video outlining what patrons should expect when they show up at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. An official with Broadway Inbound said it had touched base with the creators of the video to help ensure it would be educational to both domestic and foreign visitors.Heywood, meantime, had a plea for New Yorkers already here. “Be nice to tourists,” he said. “This is important.” More

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      Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers’s ‘Red’ Duet, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Beyoncé, Let’s Eat Grandma, Beach House and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Taylor Swift featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Nothing New’Like “Fearless” before it, Taylor Swift’s rerecorded and reclaimed “Red (Taylor’s Version),” out Friday, features a trove of newly recorded material from the vault. One of the best offerings is “Nothing New,” a melancholic meditation Swift wrote in 2012 and returned to nearly a decade later, enlisting the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers as her very capable duet partner. The song is kind of a shadow version of “The Lucky One,” Swift’s incisive but ultimately peppy track about the price of fame on the original release of “Red.” “Nothing New” is much darker in tone and more sharply critical of a culture that moves from one young ingénue to the next: “How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?” Swift asks, foreshadowing some of the themes she’d explore on her 2020 album “Folklore.” Most striking, though, is the bridge, in which she imagines meeting the Eve Harrington to her Margo Channing, a predecessor with “the kind of radiance you only have at 17.” It’s hard not to picture the longtime Swiftie Olivia Rodrigo (“She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me”), who seems to have fulfilled this prophecy to a T. But in the time that has passed from when Swift wrote this song to when she finally recorded it, the mournful “Nothing New” has transformed into something triumphant: It’s proof that Swift has outlasted her novelty and stuck around longer than her detractors imagined. Plus, she doesn’t seem to mind Rodrigo calling her “mom.” LINDSAY ZOLADZBeach House, ‘Superstar’Beach House’s music contains many gifts, but it’s the group’s ability to magnify life’s small dramas into sky-sized emotions that glitters. “Superstar” is a prodigious torch song that fits comfortably among other beloved anthems in the band’s catalog: the blissed-out “Myth,” the romance of “Lover of Mine.” Here, the duo immerses itself in the cosmos, the trick of light of a falling star guiding the nightmare of a relationship’s end. “When you were mine/We fell across the sky,” sings Victoria Legrand as the band once again harnesses an indescribable feeling and bottles it. ISABELIA HERRERABeyoncé, ‘Be Alive’There’s nothing subtle about the message of Black striving and ambition in “Be Alive,” Beyoncé’s song for “King Richard,” the movie about the father and tennis coach of Venus and Serena Williams. “This is hustle personified/Look how we’ve been fighting to stay alive,” she sings. “So when we win we will have pride.” The beat is blunt, steady and determined, and as Beyoncé pushes her voice toward a rasp, she girds herself in vocal harmonies, a multitracked family. The song insists on the community effort behind the triumph. JON PARELESIrreversible Entanglements, ‘Open the Gates’“Open the gates, we arrive — energy time,” Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) commands in the title track to the new album by Irreversible Entanglements, which backs her spoken words with a shape-shifting jazz quartet. “Open the Gates” is a concise but packed two-and-a-half minutes, with a six-beat bass vamp holding together prismatic, multilayered percussion and horns — a welcome that promises eventful times ahead. PARELESGirl Ultra, ‘Amores de Droga’“Amores de Droga” doesn’t require much to glow: a steady four-on-the-floor rhythm, the weightless melodies of the Mexican R&B chanteuse Girl Ultra, a couple of bleeding-heart lyrics. “A mi nadie me enseñó a querer,” Girl Ultra sings. “Yo no nací pa’ enamorarme.” (“No one taught me how to love/I wasn’t born to fall in love.”) It’s a refutation — a detox from poisonous love and all its dangers. HERRERATeddy Afro, ‘Armash (Stand Up)’Ethiopia is consumed in a civil war as its Tigray ethnic minority, formerly in control, moves against a democratically elected government that has been taking its own brutal measures. On Nov. 2, the government declared a state of emergency. That was the day Teddy Afro released “Armash,” a nine-minute plea for Ethiopian unity sung in Amharic. It has two chords, an expanding horn line and a voice with deep sadness and a tinge of Auto-Tune, as he sings, “Longing for a country, here, in my own motherland.” It has logged more than three million listens on YouTube, but music can’t heal everything. PARELESMelanie Charles, ‘All Africa (The Beat)/The Music Is the Magic’In 2017 Melanie Charles self-released “The Girl With the Green Shoes,” a tantalizing, 30-minute mixtape that sampled Kelela, Nina Simone and Buddy Miles, and shined a light on Charles’s rangy talents as a vocalist, flutist and producer. She returns this week with “Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women,” her debut for the major jazz label Verve, and this one is a mixtape too, of sorts: She samples or reworks a song by a different Black woman ancestor on nearly every track. Abbey Lincoln gets covered twice, in a medley that starts with “All Africa,” a rolling rumination on the ancient power of the drum originally on “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Charles layers four-part harmony and swathes of effects onto an incantation of “The beat!” and her band kicks into a scorching, slow-motion groove. It opens onto a blasted-out cover of “The Music Is the Magic,” one of Lincoln’s most enchanted compositions, but after just over a minute, it fades out. The proof of concept is there. Now we’re waiting for more. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOShamir, ‘Cisgender’Most of Shamir’s songs have been wrapped in sweetness. Not this one. “Cisgender” is an uncompromising declaration of gender fluidity: “I don’t wanna be a girl, I don’t wanna be a man,” Shamir declares. “I’m just existing on this God-forsaken land/You can take it or leave it.” The track is industrial, with brute-force drums and distorted guitar, insisting that limits are being pushed; variations of a four-letter word pop up in the lyrics. In the video, the singer has deer horns and cloven hooves. PARELESMitski, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’There’s sleek, poppy sheen to Mitski’s latest single, the second from her newly announced sixth album, “Laurel Hell,” but beneath the distortion-scorched surfaces of her early work, she’s been writing melodies this catchy and anthemic since her great 2014 album “Bury Me at Makeout Creek.” Co-written with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, “The Only Heartbreaker” is propelled by punchy percussion and retro-sounding synthesizers that explode into a dramatic conflagration during the song’s bridge. Like so many of Mitski’s best songs, this one is about embracing emotionality and the inevitability of messiness: “I’ll be the bad guy in the play,” she tells a relatively reserved partner. “I’ll be the water main that’s burst and flooding/You’ll be by the window, only watching.” ZOLADZPinegrove, ‘Alaska’“Last month in Alaska,” Evan Stephens Hall sings at the beginning of the latest song from Pinegrove, stretching out those vowels with a twangy sense of yearning. (In the next verse, impressively, he’ll wring a similar kind of musicality out of the word “Orlando.”) Taken from the New Jersey indie-rockers’ forthcoming album “11:11” (out Jan. 28), “Alaska” is one of those cozy winter songs you want to wrap around yourself like a wool blanket. The lyrics showcase the vivid poeticism of Hall’s writing (“like a ladder to the atmosphere, the rungs each come again and again”) while the song’s driving rhythm and fuzzy guitars create an atmosphere that’s at once emotionally restless and as warm as a hearth. ZOLADZCamp Cope, ‘Blue’Following the righteous punk anger of Camp Cope’s great 2018 album “How to Socialize & Make Friends,” the Australian trio’s first single in three years is something of a departure: “Blue” is a twangy, acoustic-driven reflection, its sonic palette akin to something off Waxahatchee’s “St. Cloud.” But subsequent listens reveal singer Georgia Maq’s emotional perception to be as receptive and unflinching as ever, as the song depicts a relationship in which both partners are struggling with their own forms of depression: “It’s all blue, you know I feel it and I bet you do.” ZOLADZLet’s Eat Grandma, ‘Two Ribbons’“Two Ribbons,” the title song of an album due in April, puts a serene facade on all-consuming grief. It backs Jenny Hollingworth’s voice with, mostly, two chords from a calmly strummed electric guitar, along with underlying tones; Velvet Underground songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” are predecessors. Her voice and her words cope with suffering, death, mourning, survival, and moving on; the song is quietly shattering. PARELES.Mdou Moctar, ‘Live at the Niger River’Mdou Moctar, a Tuareg guitarist and singer born in Niger, and the other three members of his band, set up to perform on a bank of the Niger River during a scenic sunrise to play four songs — “Tala Tannam,” “Bissmilahi Atagh,” “Ya Habibti” and “Chismiten” — from the album they released this year, “Afrique Victime.” With just two guitars, bass and calabash, the music is live, unadorned and pristinely recorded. Drone harmonies make it meditative, even as the rhythms and guitar lines streak ahead. PARELESAdam O’Farrill, ‘Ducks’The trumpeter and composer Adam O’Farrill has a way of showing his ambition by turning the volume down, asking the members of his quartet, Stranger Days, to play their spare but not-simple parts with measured intention, so that all four instruments can be heard at the same volume. On “Ducks,” from “Visions of Your Other,” O’Farrill’s just-released album with Stranger Days, the drummer Zack O’Farrill (his brother) leaves space around every drum stroke. The busiest it gets is at the end of the track, when O’Farrill and the tenor saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo hold long notes together in taut harmony. RUSSONELLO More

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      Juilliard Stages an Orpheus Rarity From Opera’s Early Days

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      For over four centuries, the Orpheus myth has inspired opera composers. One was Luigi Rossi, whose 1647 retelling deserves more attention.What became known as opera originated in Florence, Italy, during late-16th-century equivalents of college dorm bull sessions.At the time, that cultured city was a hotbed of artistic experimentation. A group of composers, poets, singers, intellectuals and royal patrons formed a club for discussions that eventually led to an idea: to create a new hybrid of music and theater in the manner of Greek tragedies, which they believed had been written as sung-through dramas.There was striking consensus about the ideal subject for the first attempts at this art form: the mythological Orpheus whose songs had the power to entrance nature, soothe souls and even conquer death. When his wife, Eurydice, dies from a snake bite right after their wedding, the grief-stricken, resolute Orpheus descends to the underworld, charms Pluto himself, and receives conditional permission to lead Eurydice back to earth and back to life.The earliest surviving opera, by the composer and singer Jacopo Peri, titled “Euridice” after its heroine, was introduced in Florence in 1600. Two years later, Peri’s ruthlessly ambitious rival Giulio Caccini presented his own “Euridice,” purposely employing the same libretto (by Ottavio Rinuccini) and rushing his piece into publication before Peri had a chance. In 1607, Claudio Monteverdi, then working for the Duke of Mantua, presented the first truly great surviving opera, “L’Orfeo.”In the four centuries since that milestone, Orpheus has continued to claim the imaginations of composers. The latest is Matthew Aucoin, whose “Eurydice,” based on the 2003 play by Sarah Ruhl, premiered at the Los Angeles Opera early last year and opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 23.There are at least 75 known operas offering various takes on the Orpheus myth: later in the 17th century, from Matthew Locke in England, Charpentier and Lully in France and Reinhard Keiser in Germany, then from Telemann, Benda and Haydn in the 1700s. When Gluck decided, in the 1760s, that the time had come to reform and elevate the opera genre, which had become too flashy, what did he come up with? “Orfeo ed Euridice,” naturally.From left, Kevin Ray, Raehann Bryce-Davis and Stacey Tappan in Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” at the Los Angeles Opera. The work opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 23.Emily Berl for The New York TimesInterest in the myth fell off somewhat during the 19th century. In fact, the great Orpheus work from that era was Offenbach’s delightfully witty and irreverent operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld,” which pokes fun at the obsession. But the subject came roaring back in the 20th century, especially the later decades, with major works by, among others, Hans Werner Henze, Harrison Birtwistle and Philip Glass. It’s extended to Broadway as well, in the musical “Hadestown.”Only a handful of Orpheus operas have entered the active repertoire. Among the overlooked works is Luigi Rossi’s “L’Orfeo,” which premiered in Paris in 1647, and is now receiving a splendidly performed and inventively staged production by Juilliard Opera and Juilliard415, the school’s early music ensemble, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater.Rossi, who had enjoyed a thriving, if tumultuous career in Rome, relocated to Paris, where, under the sponsorship of Cardinal Mazarin, he was tasked with introducing French audiences to Italian opera. The result was his near-epic take on the Orpheus myth, presented in a reportedly spectacular production.In line with common practices of Baroque opera, the conductor Avi Stein, who drew spirited and stylish playing from a 16-piece ensemble, consulting with the director, Mary Birnbaum, trimmed and adapted Rossi’s score for the Juilliard production. The work’s more than two dozen characters were reduced here to a cast of 14 excellent young singers, some taking two or three roles. The original prologue and epilogue, allegorical paeans to the young Louis XIV, were replaced with shorter vocal pieces from Rossi’s catalog. With the score cut by about a third, the running time offered some two hours of engaging, often splendidly beautiful music.In this version of the tale, Orfeo and Euridice become pawns in the hands of capricious godly and allegorical characters: Venus and Amore, Pluto and Proserpina and personifications of Jealousy and Suspicion. There is also Augure, a diviner who can sense the future, and from the start the omens look forbidding for the newlyweds.Richard Pittsinger, left, as Orfeo and Roset as Euridice in the Juilliard production.Rosalie O’ConnorStill, their essential love, despite threats from outside and their own doubts and insecurities, come through beautifully thanks to the winning singing and youthful bearing of the tenor Richard Pittsinger as Orfeo and the soprano Julie Roset as Euridice. In this telling, Orfeo has a rival, Aristeo (the charismatic mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas), who has been struck by Cupid and desperately fallen in love with Euridice. In a bold interpretive touch, this production presents Aristeo as a woman. That tweak, as executed here, was no glib nod to sexual politics, but an intriguing reading of the erotic confusions that swirl within the characters and throughout this entire opera.Although the story unfolds in stretches of melodically enhanced recitative, Rossi’s score is unusually rich with vocal duets, trios and ensembles, arias and choruses with catchy tunes, orchestral ritornellos and dances galore (charming choreographic gestures by Jeffrey Page). Why is this wonderful opera not presented more often?Aucoin’s “Eurydice” — like Ruhl’s play, which she adapted into the opera’s libretto — tells the myth from the woman’s perspective. And in this fantastical modern-day version, there are tensions between the couple from the start. Eurydice loves Orpheus but gets impatient with his self-absorbed fixation on music. He doesn’t share her passion for books and words. In an intriguing nod to mythology, Orpheus is presented as two characters: an everyday guy and a spirit double who appears when the young man’s questing nature comes to the fore.When Eurydice dies, she embarks on a soul-searching journey in the underworld. That might seem like a leap from the original myth. But it is actually a crisis that many Orpheus adaptations have plumbed — especially, to my surprise and delight, the one by Rossi.L’OrfeoThrough Sunday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; juilliard.edu. More