Music

Though it was operating on fewer cylinders because of the pandemic, for the first time in its seven-year history the event sold out all three nights of music in Brooklyn.As jazz festivals go, BRIC JazzFest is on the small but ambitious side, aspiring to a few ideas at once. It operates in Brooklyn with something close to Manhattan-scale resources, but like BRIC’s flagship music series, the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, it aims to serve a broad audience, not a particularly affluent one.To a greater degree than Celebrate Brooklyn! — a series of mostly free summertime performances in Prospect Park — JazzFest spotlights artists who live and work in the borough, though it brings in some of the best from out of town too. In the process, its organizers cut away at some of the hierarchical thinking that other jazz festivals, at various levels, often reinforce.After three nights of music this past weekend from across the borough’s varied landscape, it was in the closing moments that all these strands came together most effortlessly, in what might have been the festival’s most informal moment.The multi-instrumentalist Louis Cato was leading a jam session, smiling mirthfully from behind an electric bass, guiding a rotating band through deep-pocket covers of jazz standards and D’Angelo B-sides. At one point he followed Yahzarah — a vocalist and longtime veteran of the neo-soul scene, giving a bravura performance — from a coldly grooving cover of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” to a simmering vamp on James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”It felt like a festival-size version of something that you might find happening at a small bar in Brooklyn — and that ought to happen at more of them. Whether it fit perfectly under the banner of a “jazz festival” felt both uncertain and unimportant. Here were pieces of popular culture coming together; what justified its place as the culminating act was the virtuosity of the players, and the way they seemed to have earned the crowd’s constant curiosity.The crowds had been good all weekend, including for strong sets by high-profile headliners like the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who closed Thursday night, and the Sun Ra Arkestra, Friday’s finale. This was the first time in BRIC JazzFest’s seven-year history that it had sold out completely each night, putting some wind into the sails of an organization that has found itself deeply in flux.Much of BRIC’s top leadership has departed in recent months, leaving it in a period of transition as it looks to move beyond the coronavirus pandemic. Shortly before the festival, Lia Camille Crockett, BRIC’s director of performing arts, announced that she was taking a job running NPR’s live-events operation.But in an interview, she said that BRIC had allowed her to experiment during the pandemic in ways that paid off, and she expects the organization to ride out its current straits with a similar resourcefulness. “One of the things I’ve loved about working at BRIC is that it’s always been an environment where you can ask questions, and question why things have been done a certain way,” she said.“It was a year of experimentation,” she added. “Without saying, ‘We have a whole new manifesto,’ it was about taking opportunities where we could to experiment and turn certain things on their head.”Nick Hakim performed with Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist and poet two generations his senior he’d collaborated with earlier this year.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesAt Celebrate Brooklyn! this year, with attendance and sponsorships already expected to be lower than usual, there was extra room for “creative risk-taking,” Crockett said. During the pandemic, she and her team also introduced the idea of having a Brooklyn-based musician help book BRIC JazzFest, along with herself and the producer Brice Rosenbloom. At last year’s digital-only festival, the bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello came on board. This year, the artist-curator was the vocalist Madison McFerrin.In an interview, McFerrin said she had put a priority on keeping the curation close to home, mostly by booking musicians she knew personally from around the Brooklyn scene. She saw it as “an opportunity to just put my friends on,” which led her to think about the natural “range and extension of jazz,” as a way of making music.Getting an artist to open their own contacts list seems a solid way of ensuring that a festival has a cozy and coherent feel to it. And it paid off for McFerrin in a personal way. Her headlining set on Saturday, performed solo with a digital control station beside her, went awry at the start when her loops pedal malfunctioned.Midway through the set, she tried to get the audience to clap a fast and not-uncomplicated pattern as she led into “No Time to Lose,” a peppery original tune. Cato, a longtime friend of McFerrin’s, was standing in the crowd, and he saw what the moment needed. He leapt onstage and saddled up behind the drum set, guiding the crowd through the beat.McFerrin first came in contact with BRIC soon after moving to Brooklyn seven years ago, when an old friend approached her to create a short documentary about her life as an artist for BRIC’s online TV channel. In addition to presenting music, BRIC is the borough’s largest creator of public-access TV content; a provider of media literacy training and documentary resources to Brooklyn residents; and an arts education group active in public schools across the borough.The soul vocalist Nick Hakim also first interacted with BRIC through its documentary work, when the filmmaker Terence Nance made a short film about him for a BRIC series, “Brooklyn Is Masquerading as the World.”This year Hakim and Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist and poet two generations his senior, released a short and enchanted album of tunes they’d written together in Nathanson’s South Brooklyn home. I first saw them play some of these songs live in Nathanson’s driveway, during a little public concert he’d thrown for the neighborhood in May, around his 70th birthday, but Friday night marked the first time the songs had been presented in concert with a full band.The playing was as loose and unforced as it is on the album, and both audience and band seemed aware of the music’s value.Sasha Berliner, a rising young vibraphonist also based in Brooklyn, appeared on the gallery stage — located in the building’s amphitheater-style foyer — with a vigorous, groove-oriented new band. Parrying with the keyboardist Julius Rodriguez, who was on Rhodes, Berliner sounded fully in command, showing meaningful growth from the last time she’d played BRIC JazzFest, two years earlier.Stas Thee Boss performed an update on a ’90s indie hip-hop sound.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesThe gallery stage was burdened with tough acoustics and unforgivingly bright lighting (it’s in a glorified lobby, after all), but it boasted a constant, varied flow of acts that offered a sense of what a working musician’s life sounds like in Brooklyn these days, across a variety of scenes.Stas Thee Boss, an M.C. who moved to Brooklyn from the West Coast a few years ago, brought her group’s throbbing update on a ’90s indie hip-hop sound. The guitarist Yasser Tejeda led a quartet that was one-half percussion, blending rhythmic traditions from his home country, the Dominican Republic, that are rarely put together. Adam O’Farrill, a trumpeter who has lived in the borough almost his entire life, opened the festival on Thursday with a set of twisty new music from a forthcoming album with his quartet, Stranger Days.This year, operating on fewer cylinders because of the pandemic, BRIC JazzFest didn’t include a full week of workshops, film screenings and other free community programming, as it typically would. But with a smaller focus and a slightly more intimate feel, it actually widened the lens to show what’s already happening far outside its doors. More

The singer’s long-awaited comeback single is No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with 54 million streams and strong showings for downloads and radio play.After a six-year wait, new music by Adele was sure to be a hit. But how big of one, especially for a song like “Easy on Me” — a classic piano torch ballad that ignores virtually all contemporary pop standards — was unclear.Turns out it was a really big hit.The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, with 54 million streams, 74,000 track downloads and 19,000 radio spins in the United States during its first full week out, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Released at midnight on Oct. 15, British time — it landed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, so was available to American fans the previous evening — it broke Spotify’s record for the most streams on a single day, with 24 million clicks around the world.While Adele’s streaming numbers are big, they did not break records on the overall chart. When Drake’s single “Way 2 Sexy” came out last month, for example, it logged 67 million streams. But it had far fewer downloads than “Easy on Me,” and it was not nearly as popular on the radio; Billboard’s chart is a composite of all those measurements. (In a quirk that was a result of the unusual timing of the song’s release, it had opened on last week’s chart at No. 68, thanks to just a few hours of availability before the new period began last Friday. So officially, it climbed 67 spots to the top in its second week out.)Online, YouTube musicologists have been praising “Easy on Me” as a prime example of Adele’s vocal talent and old-fashioned songcraft, and the song’s almost total absence of percussion has led enterprising drummers to audition the beats they would add. (Good luck, guys!)As of Monday, the music video — which opens with Adele pushing a cassette tape into a car stereo and goes from wistful black-and-white to an all-the-drama color climax — has logged 112 million views on YouTube.“Easy on Me” is Adele’s fifth song to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100. Her next album, “30,” is due Nov. 19.On this week’s album charts, the Atlanta rapper Young Thug’s new release, “Punk,” opened at No. 1 with the equivalent of 90,000 sales in the United States, including 102 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data. “Punk,” which features appearances by J. Cole, Drake, Doja Cat, ASAP Rocky and others, marks Young Thug’s third time at No. 1, the last just six months ago, with the release of “Slime Language 2,” a compilation album from the rapper’s label, Young Stoner Life.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” last week’s most popular album, falls to No. 2. A rerelease of “Faces,” a 2014 mixtape by the rapper Mac Miller, who died in 2018, is No. 3. Coldplay’s latest LP, “Music of the Spheres,” opens in fourth place, and “Let It Be,” the Beatles’ final studio album, originally released in 1970, is at No. 5 thanks to a deluxe reissue. More

The singer Ed Sheeran announced Sunday on social media that he had tested positive for the coronavirus and would be canceling public appearances and working at home, in quarantine.It wasn’t immediately clear what appearances would be canceled or rescheduled, or whether Mr. Sheeran was sick with symptoms of Covid-19.The news came days before the Friday release of his new album, “=,” pronounced “equals.” The 14-song album includes his recently released single “Bad Habits.”And it comes just after Mr. Sheeran had been announced as the musical guest for “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 6.The four-time Grammy winner took a break from work and social media in late 2019 after two years of touring in support of his best-selling album “÷” (or “divide”). More

Initially known for his tight and soulful playing with the celebrated post-punk band Bush Tetras, he later became an entrepreneur of avant-garde music.Dee Pop, a drummer who first found grimy rock stardom as a founding member of the underground New York band Bush Tetras during the no wave and post-punk scene of the late 1970s, and who later became an elder statesman of the city’s alternative music scene, died on Oct. 9 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 65.His brother, Tom Papadopoulos, said the cause was heart failure.Some 40 years ago, an avant-garde punk movement was rumbling from the underground scene below 14th Street. Bands like the Contortions, Liquid Liquid, D.N.A. and 8 Eyed Spy led the charge, playing nightly at venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3 and CBGB. Amid the fray emerged the moment’s must-see band, Bush Tetras, who disbanded just four years later but left a profound impact on the scene.The female-fronted quartet, often clad in headbands and leopard-print scarves, played a danceable breed of post-punk rooted in jagged guitar hooks and funky rhythms. Key to the band’s dub-struck groove was their leather-jacketed drummer, Dee Pop, whose tight playing laced some soul into the nihilism of the no wave era.“The funk part of it,” Mr. Pop recently told The Village Sun, “became central to our sound. I guess I kind of destroyed no wave by putting a 4/4 beat to it. That’s what made the Bush Tetras a little more accessible.”The band’s other members were the vocalist Cynthia Sley, the guitarist Pat Place and the bassist Laura Kennedy (who died in 2011). The group’s “Too Many Creeps,” a punk anthem about the frustration of having to dodge being hassled by men on city streets, was released in 1980 and became a dance-floor hit. The rock critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time that it “summed up the Lower East Side circa 1980.”Thurston Moore, the singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth, said that in his 20s he admired what he described as the band’s abiding Downtown cool.“When Bush Tetras first started playing out I was extremely impressed,” Mr. Moore said in an email, “and very envious.” Bush Tetras gradually started performing beyond the underground scene, at venues like the Roseland Ballroom and Irving Plaza, and shared bills with bands including X, Bad Brains and Gang of Four. They were a supporting act for the Clash during the band’s storied 1981 run at Bond’s International Casino in Times Square, and the Clash’s drummer, Topper Headon, produced their EP, “Rituals.” But before the group could record a full album, they disbanded in 1983.“When I first left Bush Tetras in ’83, one reason was that I felt we’d gone as far as we could,” Mr. Pop told The Village Sun. “I was very dissatisfied and looked at all of my influences — my love for Béla Bartók or King Oliver or 1940s and ’50s R&B — and that wasn’t what Bush Tetras was about.”Indeed, Mr. Pop’s musicianship stood out as more than a gutsy punk-rock attitude.“He was a very versatile player, and that’s not something that can be said of many drummers who came out of the East Village post-punk scene,” Andy Schwartz, the editor and publisher of New York Rocker magazine, the scene’s bible at the time, said in a phone interview. “He could play blues, jazz, free jazz, post-punk. He never seemed to stop learning.”After Bush Tetras broke up, Mr. Pop drummed across genres.He first joined the Los Angeles punk band the Gun Club, then played with artists like Richard Lloyd and Jayne County. He was a member of Radio I-Ching, an experimental outfit that dabbled in blues and Americana and incorporated unusual stringed instruments like the lotar and the glissentar. He went on to jam with free-jazz luminaries like Roy Campbell Jr., Eddie Gale and William Parker.Mr. Pop performing with Bush Tetras at a 40th-anniversary show in New York in 2020. The band broke up in 1983 and reunited three decades later, after Mr. Pop had worked across genres with several other bands.Sherry RubelDee Pop was born Dimitri Constantin Papadopoulos on March 14, 1956, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. His father, Dino Papadopoulos, was a vascular surgeon; his mother, Gigi (Bakalis) Papadopoulos, was a homemaker and artist.She was also a jazz enthusiast and introduced him early on to drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. While his friends at school listened to Jethro Tull, Dimitri favored John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He graduated from St. Paul’s School on Long Island in 1974 and studied journalism at the University at Buffalo.In addition to his brother, he is survived by his mother; a sister, Tara Papadopoulos; a daughter, Nikki Ziolkowski; a son, Charlie Papadopoulos; and a granddaughter. Two marriages, to Elizabeth Vogdes and the musician known as Deerfrance, ended in divorce.In the late 1990s, Mr. Pop began hosting a weekly performance series that roamed the East Village showcasing live avant-garde music. He started it at a tiny coffeehouse called the Internet Cafe before moving on to CBGB, where he secured the club’s basement space on Sundays.“I wanted diversity,” he said of the series. “I wanted to challenge people.”After CBGB closed in 2006, Mr. Pop moved the series to Jimmy’s No. 43, and The Village Voice called him an “avant guardian.” In recent years he held shows at Troost, a bar near his apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.Around 2015, Bush Tetras reunited. The group recorded an EP, “Take the Fall,” in 2018, and then put out a single, “There Is a Hum,” on Third Man Records. A boxed set, “Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras,” is to be released next month on Wharf Cat Records.Mr. Pop died the night before a release party was held at the Howl! Happening arts space in the East Village. The gathering turned into a memorial.As video clips featuring Mr. Pop’s furious drumming played on a projector screen, Pat Place and Cynthia Sley stood up in front of the crowd, holding each other as they remembered their bandmate.“He lived to drum,” Ms. Sley said. “He loved the Bush Tetras.”She choked up.“Bush Tetras,” she added, “is a force that cannot be stopped.” More

His majestic baritone was the key to hits like “Only in America,” “Come a Little Bit Closer” and his signature song, “Cara, Mia.”Jay Black, whose majestic voice on songs like “Cara, Mia” and “Only in America” made Jay and the Americans a potent force in pop music in the 1960s, died on Friday in Queens. He was 82.His son Jason Blatt said the cause was pneumonia that led to cardiac arrest. He also had dementia, his family said.Jay and the Americans began to thrive before the arrival of the Beatles in the United States in 1964. With Mr. Black as their lead singer, the group’s first major hit was “Only in America,” which peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963. That was followed the next year by “Come a Little Bit Closer,” which rose to No. 3, and “Let’s Lock the Door (and Throw Away the Key),” which hit No. 11.In 1965, their version of “Some Enchanted Evening,” from the musical “South Pacific,” peaked at No. 13.Mr. Black — whose original name was David Blatt — was the second “Jay” to front the Americans. He replaced Jay Traynor in 1963, a year after the group’s first hit, “She Cried,” climbed to No. 5 on the chart.Mr. Black’s signature song was “Cara, Mia,” a romantic ballad that peaked at No. 4 in 1965. Mr. Black, who had an impressive vocal range, opened the song slowly, almost operatically, before the melody turned upbeat. Memorably, he held certain notes for long, extended beats.He said two singers had warned him that he was endangering his voice by stretching it to its limits: Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons and Frank Sinatra.“So you’re the ‘Cara, Mia’ guy?” Mr. Black recalled Sinatra saying in 1977 when they were filming “Contract on Cherry Street” (1977), a television movie in which Mr. Black had a rare acting role. In an interview with The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2010, Mr. Black said that Sinatra had advised him, “You better lower your key or you’re going to lose your voice.”That voice sustained him as a solo oldies act long after Jay and the Americans broke up in 1973. But in 2017, during one of his last performances, Mr. Black apologized to fans at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., for struggling to reach his former vocal heights.“I’m not hitting any notes,” he said, explaining that he had not sung in more than a year. “I can’t sing.”David Blatt was born on Nov. 2, 1938, in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, Herman and Francis (Smith) Blatt, brought him up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. David first sang publicly in the choir at Temple Beth-El.But he said he was thrown out of New Utrecht High School and three yeshivas.“I was a bad kid,” he told The Forward in 2014. “I was a wise guy. When I graduated from eighth grade, I was the class comedian. I was always a troublemaker.”Mr. Black began his singing career with two doo-wop groups, the Two Chaps and the Empires. Marty Kupersmith, who performs as Marty Sanders, had been in both groups with him before becoming one of the Americans; when Mr. Traynor left, he invited Mr. Black to replace him. Mr. Black was selling shoes at Thom McAn at the time.Although he had agreed to change his name to Jay, Mr. Blatt did not become Jay Black until he appeared on Mike Douglas’s talk show. He said that when Mr. Douglas asked him his last name, he misheard “Blatt” as “Black,” and from then on he was Jay Black.Mr. Black did not just have a stunning voice; he was also good-looking and could be as funny as a borscht belt comedian. But he was a heavy gambler, an addiction that started in high school and grew as he became more successful. He had also been a close friend of the mobster John Gotti since they were young men.Mr. Black in the mid-1960s. He was selling shoes at Thom McAn in 1963 when he was asked to replace the original “Jay” as lead singer of the Americans.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I went to his trial,” Mr. Black told The New York Times in 1994. “I took some heat about it. I got death threats. But I love the family. I sang at this daughter’s wedding. I sang at his son’s wedding.”Mr. Black landed in bankruptcy court in 2005. He owed $500,000 in back taxes dating to 1993 because of his gambling addiction. Although he won a battle to continue to perform under his name the next year, he could not prevent the court from auctioning off the name “Jay and the Americans” to one of the group’s founding members, Sandy Yaguda (known professionally as Sandy Deanne).“Having an impostor group go out, that bothers me,” Mr. Black told Newsday after the court allowed him to keep his name. “I don’t know who’s going to be singing these songs. Even if someone does a great impersonation of me, it’s still not me.”Mr. Yaguda formed a new version of Jay and the Americans in late 2006, reuniting with two other original members, Mr. Sanders and Howie Kane, and adding a third “Jay”: Jay Reincke, whose given name is John.“We shared both wonderful and very contentious times,” the group said in a statement on Facebook after Mr. Black’s death, “and much like an ex-wife, we are so proud of the beautiful children we created. We’ll always remember The Voice.”In addition to his son Jason, Mr. Black is survived by two other sons, William and Beau; a daughter, Samantha; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; a sister, Gail Decker; and a brother, Norman Blatt. His marriages to Marsha Garbowitz, Kathy Izzo and Andi Francis ended in divorce. He died in a hospital.In February 1964, two days after the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Jay and the Americans and the Righteous Brothers opened for them at their first concert in the United States, at the Washington Coliseum. When the fans loudly chanted “We want the Beatles!” while the Americans were performing, Mr. Black felt he had to react.“Jay, being who he is,” Mr. Yaguda told the Vinyl Dialogues blog in 2020, “went out and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m glad you all came out to see us tonight.’ And they all cracked up. That won them over, so they shut up and listened to us and, when we were done, gave us a big round of applause.” More

A Slovak coloratura, she was a fixture at the opera houses of Vienna and Munich, artfully balancing technical brilliance with deep expression.Edita Gruberova, a Slovak soprano who enchanted audiences with gleaming, vibrant and technically dazzling singing over a 50-year career, becoming a leading exponent of the coloratura soprano repertory, died on Monday in Zurich. She was 74.The cause was a head injury from a fall in her home, said Markus Thiel, a music journalist and her biographer.Ms. Gruberova, whose career was mainly in Europe, was a true coloratura soprano. She had a high, light and agile voice that was easily capable of dispatching embellished runs, all manner of trills and leaps to shimmering top notes.She excelled in the roles associated with her voice type, especially in the early 19th-century bel canto operas of Bellini (Elvira in “I Puritani” and Giulietta in “I Capuleti e i Montecchi”), Donizetti (the title role in “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Elizabeth I in “Roberto Devereux”) and Rossini (notably Rosina in “Il Barbieri di Siviglia”).Reviewing her 1989 performance as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera, the critic Martin Mayer wrote in Opera magazine that Ms. Gruberova “trills without thinking about it,” could “sing very softly and still project into the house,” and “soars over ensemble and orchestra in the great third-act finale.” Many opera devotees considered her a successor to the formidable Joan Sutherland.Ms. Gruberova knew that opera fans were often swept up in the sheer pyrotechnics of a coloratura soprano’s singing. That was the easy part, she said in an interview recorded at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1986, where she was starring in “Lucia di Lammermoor.” The hard part was conveying emotion through the technical feats.This, she said, “is what people want to hear from me, or what they hear from me and like.” Even a coloratura’s high notes, including a big final high note in an aria, “must also be the expression from emotions,” she said. It must “say something” and not be “for display.”Reviewing that 1986 “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Chicago for The Christian Science Monitor, Thor Eckert Jr. wrote that Ms. Gruberova had given “an astonishing demonstration of her art.”“The level of poise, of sheer vocal mastery, of musical and dramatic insight” were unmatched on the vocal scene of the time, he said. Her performance of the Mad Scene, he added, was “a study in the communicative power of histrionic simplicity.”Yet there were dissenters on this occasion, including John von Rhein, the critic for The Chicago Tribune, who wrote that she had treated the scene as if it were “merely a florid showpiece.”To her many admirers, however, Ms. Gruberova artfully balanced technical execution and emotional expression, a quality described in a 2015 Opera News article by the soprano Lauren Flanigan. Ms. Flanigan was an understudy to Ms. Gruberova in the title role of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” in Barcelona in 1992.In that troubled queen’s first aria during the run, Ms Gruberova “was by turns girlish and direct, vulnerable and overbearing,” Ms. Flanigan wrote, adding, “Her voice was compelling me to pay attention and listen.”Ms. Gruberova in 1970. A teacher arranged for her to audition the previous year at the Vienna State Opera without the knowledge of Czechoslovakia’s Communist authorities.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesEdita Gruberova was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (in what is now Slovakia), the only child of a German father, Gustav Gruber, and a Hungarian mother, Etela Gruberova. Her father, a laborer, was a volatile man who drank to excess and was imprisoned for anti-Communist activities when Ms. Gruberova was a child. Her mother, who worked on a collective farm, a vineyard, had a pleasant singing voice and encouraged her gifted daughter’s singing in school choirs and local ensembles.Ms. Gruberova attended the Bratislava Conservatory and continued her studies at the city’s Academy of Performing Arts. While still in training, Ms. Gruberova performed with the Lucnica folk ensemble and appeared with the Slovak National Theater. She once played Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.”She made her official debut in 1968, in Bratislava, as Rosina in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” That same year she won a voice competition in Toulouse, France, and the acclaim led to appearances with an opera ensemble in the central Slovakian city of Banska Bystrica.Her teacher at the conservatory, Maria Medvecka, arranged for Ms. Gruberova to audition for the Vienna State Opera in 1969. She did so secretly so that the Czech authorities would not find out.An engagement there as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” followed in 1970 and brought her considerable attention. That year she emigrated to the West. She would go on to give more than 700 performances with the Vienna State Opera, the last a farewell gala concert in 2018. She became a mainstay as well of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Mozart’s Queen of the Night was also her role in a highly praised debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in England in 1973 as well as in her Met debut in 1977. A breakthrough came in 1976 when Ms. Gruberova sang Zerbinetta in a new production of Strauss’s “Ariadne aux Naxos” in Vienna, with Karl Böhm conducting.The reviews were sensational, especially for her brilliant rendering of Zerbinetta’s long showpiece aria, when the character, a coquettish member of a comedy troupe, tries to persuade the heartsick Ariadne to forget the godly lover who has abandoned her and look to other men.The eminent Böhm, who had worked closely with the composer, famously commented at the time, “My God, if only Strauss had heard your Zerbinetta!”Performing primarily in Europe, Ms. Gruberova made only 24 appearances with the Met through 1996, including performances as Verdi’s Violetta (another of her trademark roles), Donizetti’s Lucia and Bellini’s Elvira.In 1970, she married Stefan Klimo, a musicologist and choir master. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. She is survived by two daughters, Barbara and Klaudia Klimo, and three grandchildren. From 1983 to 2005 she was in a relationship with Friedrich Haider, an Austrian conductor and pianist.Ms. Gruberova leaves a large discography of recordings, including classic accounts of operas by Strauss, Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, and albums of arias and songs. She appeared in several films of operas, most notably two directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” in 1982, singing Gilda to Luciano Pavarotti’s Duke of Mantua, with Ingvar Wixell in the title role, and Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1988, singing Fiordiligi.Ms. Gruberova’s last performance in opera was as Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” in Munich in 2019.In 1979, while singing Zerbinetta at the Met, she was briefly interviewed for the afternoon radio broadcast and made comments about the role that seemed pertinent to her own character.“I don’t see her as a soubrette but as a young lady who has lived, you could say, with quite a past,” Ms. Gruberova said. “But she does not take anything too seriously, because she can laugh it off. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word melancholy.” More

After a long pandemic pause, “The Phantom of the Opera” is returning to Broadway with some help from its creator.“The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history, resumes performances Friday.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAndrew Lloyd Webber looked pleased.He was standing over the large orchestra pit of his musical “The Phantom of the Opera” at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, hearing the instrumental “Entr’Acte” from the top after a half-hour of detail work — more emphatic delivery here, more passionate lyricism there. He held his hands at his hips, a contented smile on his face.“That’s great, much better,” he said after the ensemble finished. “It just needs to be played like it’s on the edge, all the time.”Lloyd Webber, the composer of some of the most famous musicals of the past five decades — in a wide stylistic range from the radio-ready rock of “Jesus Christ Superstar” to the maddening tunefulness of “Cats” and the lush Romanticism of “Phantom” — was in town from Britain to prepare for the reopening on Friday of the longest-running show in Broadway history.Andrew Lloyd Webber visited the musical to rehearse the pit orchestra with its conductor, Kristen Blodgette.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesVisits from composers are rarely afforded to musicals as settled in as “Phantom,” which opened at the Majestic in 1988. But because the pandemic kept it shuttered for over a year and a half, its return is more like a revival; the production’s tech has been spruced up during the pause, and the cast and orchestra were rehearsing the material as if it were new.And that’s exactly how Lloyd Webber wanted it to sound, he told the musicians during rehearsal on Thursday, by way of some personal history.“I remember when I was a boy I managed to get a ticket to the Zeffirelli production of ‘Tosca’ at the Royal Opera House,” Lloyd Webber said, recalling how he had always heard that Puccini’s melodrama was a potboiler not worth the price of admission. Yet Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director with an extravagantly cinematic sensibility, “decided that he would shake up the cobwebs.”On Thursday, Lloyd Webber also worked on the duet “All I Ask of You” with Meghan Picerno and John Riddle, the show’s current Christine and Raoul.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“What I just remember is, Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas that night, in the second act, made an impression on me that I’ll never forget,” he continued. “It was just extraordinary, because the critics were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is actually the greatest score.’ I’m not trying to say this is the same thing, but it’s just that we have to approach everything now as if it’s the very, very, very first time.”“Phantom” may not be Puccini, but its score — thick and lavishly orchestrated — shares more with opera than most Broadway musicals. It calls for an unusually large ensemble of nearly 30 players, about a third of whom have been with the show since 1988. “Today I don’t think we would be able to do that,” Lloyd Webber said during an interview between rehearsals. “I think everybody’s forgotten what a real orchestra can sound like.”During the pandemic shutdown, Lloyd Webber was one of theater’s fiercest and most outspoken advocates.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGiven that size, Lloyd Webber was particular about amplification on Thursday, preferring to let the instruments sound as acoustic as possible. But the orchestra needed to give more to make it work; virtually all of his notes to the conductor, the associate musical supervisor Kristen Blodgette, were about adding emphasis to a score that is already brazenly emphatic.“You can make a little more of that phrase,” he said at one point; at others: “We want the audience in our grip,” “It’s just a little undernourished” and “I think that can really come up a bit, I would treat it as appassionata.”He was joined by David Caddick, the production musical supervisor, who wanted for more of the same, asking the strings to “play into the shape of the melody” during a section of the “Entr’Acte” based on the soaring duet “All I Ask of You,” and reminding them to “make every melody sing out.”The “Phantom” orchestra is unusually large, consisting of nearly 30 players.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesWhen some of the cast later came onstage — to rehearse the operatic set piece “Prima Donna” and “All I Ask of You” — Lloyd Webber at times seemed to be channeling Hal Prince, the show’s legendary director, who died in 2019, guiding the singers in their understanding and delivery of lyrics on a level as small as single words. “I’m one of the only ones left who was here on the ground floor,” Lloyd Webber later said. (The choreographer, Gillian Lynne, died in 2018.) “But I was very close to Hal on this.”In the scene leading up to “Prima Donna,” for example, he welcomed more joy and comedy. He told Craig Bennett, who plays Monsieur Firmin: “It’s great fun if you can say ‘To hell with Gluck and Handel, have a scandal’ — it’s the inner rhyme, isn’t it? That’s the game, savoring every moment because there are some good lines there.”And to Meghan Picerno and John Riddle, the show’s current Christine and Raoul, he said while running through “All I Ask of You”: “I think that what we’re perhaps not getting is that they’re like teenagers in love. It needs to be more earnest. Say ‘One love, one lifetime’ as if you really mean it. Just run with it. The more of that there is here, the more of an antidote it will be to what comes in the second act.”A poster for the show outside the theater. “I do always love to hear it,” Lloyd Webber said of the “Phantom” score.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAgain, this is uncommon; such attention from a composer is more likely to be given to a new show, such as Lloyd Webber’s latest, “Cinderella,” which opened in London this summer after a series of pandemic delays. During that time — and throughout the shutdown — he was one of theater’s fiercest and most outspokenly frustrated advocates. And when “Cinderella” at last debuted in the West End, its opening night was also a milestone for being that musical’s first performance for a full-capacity audience.It’s an ordeal that could make for a chapter of the awaited sequel to his memoir, “Unmasked,” which follows his life and work only until “Phantom.” “Oh, I’m not writing that,” he said in the interview between rehearsals, adding with a puckish grin: “There’s too much I know. I’d rather write another show, and get ‘Cinderella’ here.”But first, he had “Phantom” to open the next day. And a rehearsal to return to. As he stood up from a lobby chair to walk back into the house, he said, “I do always love to hear it.” More

The unflashy maestro, who died on Thursday, gave orchestras a sound with integrity, weight and gravity, without heaviness.What I can still feel today, almost in my skin, is the warmth. It was July 20, 2009, at the Royal Albert Hall in London; I sat behind the orchestra, all the better to see the conductor.Bernard Haitink had led the London Symphony Orchestra through the first three movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I can’t remember much about them, to be honest, though I’m confident that the portrayal of their carnage, ironies and fear was sure. All memory of that melted in the generosity of the embrace that followed.If a D flat chord can be decent, can be understanding, then the one Haitink drew that evening from the orchestra’s strings near the start of Mahler’s concluding Adagio, the composer’s farewell to life, was that and more.Haitink lay something close to a benediction on that benighted music, and through it on us, as if to say that everything would be all right, that we could accept calmly what was to come. Never had I heard such resolve, such serenity in the face of death as Haitink found in that movement; it sang with empathy, and it seemed to sing the truth.Under no conductor did music so often sound so right as it did under Bernard Haitink, who died on Thursday at 92.You went to a Haitink concert fully aware of what to expect, only for those expectations usually to be surpassed. Whether it was in Brahms or Bruckner, Beethoven or Mahler, at his best, and especially in his later years, Haitink was able to make music emerge as if it was entirely uninterpreted — without it becoming anonymous. Haitink’s conducting was personal, even as it felt impersonal.Plenty of artists say that they want to get out of the way of the music, that they want to let it speak for itself. The claim is always illusory, for the transfiguration of notes on a page into sound in a hall demands that choices be made. But Haitink made the illusion seem real.Other men would have made that talent at conveying naturalness into something doctrinaire, would have rooted it in a claim to be extending some grand tradition, or in a declared attachment to the letter of the score. But Haitink was not obviously an heir to the literalism of Arturo Toscanini, and certainly not to the uncanny subjectivity of Wilhelm Furtwängler or the eccentricities of Willem Mengelberg, the conductor he grew up hearing at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where he was chief conductor from 1961 to 1988.What Haitink did have was a sound. David Alberman, the chair and principal second violin of the London Symphony, wrote that Haitink had an “unmistakable ability to change the sound of an orchestra with his mere presence,” an ability that even the musicians who adored him could hardly explain.The sound was not flashy, nor did it seem as if it were applied from the outside. It imbued what the ensembles he led already possessed with a deeper integrity, a weight, a gravity, that was nonetheless rarely portentous or heavy. Indeed, in the French repertoire in which he excelled, that careful seriousness of purpose drew a clarity, a beguiling transparency.Haitink offered no insistent interventions in the roiling aesthetic debates of the decades after World War II. Even when he began to move with the times, he arrived at a style that was characteristic for its lack of fuss, as in the leaner Beethoven of the last of his three cycles of the symphonies, in which the influence of the historically informed performance movement was plain, but subtly so.“I have no message to the world,” he told The New York Times in 2002. When pressed, he would deny knowing much about what he was doing; a book of reflections was entitled “Conducting Is a Mystery.” (His master classes suggested otherwise.)This was not the norm among conductors of a domineering, publicity-seeking age, but then again, Haitink eschewed stardom. “I’m not a conductor type,” he frankly told The Times in 1976.Whether it was because of the deprivation of his childhood in occupied, impoverished Amsterdam, or for reasons deeper to his psychology, he was shy, quiet, humble. He came to say little in rehearsals, but he did not need to. Conducting with his eyes and brow, a lean of the head here and a hint of a smile there, he steadily refined his technique down to stabs of time beaten firmly, the left hand offering an utterly exact emphasis when necessary.Haitink could be usefully obstinate amid administrative problems, as when he confronted financial and other difficulties at the Concertgebouw and, most dramatically, at the Royal Opera House in London in the late 1990s, near the end of a tenure that ran from 1987 to 2002. But it is hard to think of another conductor who would have been as willing, at the height of his powers in the 2000s, to take posts he knew were only temporary at ensembles as distinguished as the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as they searched for new leaders.If there was little of the ego about Haitink, there still remained sufficient pride that he made over 450 recordings. Some of them are unnecessarily duplicative, some oddly ill conceived or a tad staid. Many are to be returned to like old, knowing friends.Much of his attention was put to Mahler and Bruckner, the latter’s Seventh being his trademark, the work with which he retired in 2019. Neither his gorgeous 1978 account with the Concertgebouw, nor his marginally more monumental repeat with Chicago in 2007, should be missed.Introductions to his Beethoven and Wagner, his Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, his Bartok and his Stravinsky remain easily available, but his best work can take some searching: an amazingly convincing set of Liszt’s symphonic poems; a Vaughan Williams survey in which the lows are desperately low but the highs are exceptionally high; Mahler symphonies taped live at a series of Christmases in Amsterdam; cleareyed, sensitive Mozart operas with forces from Glyndebourne, where he was music director for a decade; Ravel, as glistening with the Concertgebouw as with the Boston Symphony Orchestra later on; radio broadcasts that go as far as Henze, Takemitsu and Ligeti; a Strauss “Alpine Symphony” of rare humanity; a Brahms cycle from Boston that unfolds with unforced, unforgettable patience.It was in Brahms that I last heard him, in his final run with the Boston Symphony in 2018, an account of the Second Symphony that, I wrote then, had “nothing wistful or valedictory about it,” just that “familiar, staunch certainty.” It was scrappy, but it glowed with the same warmth as the Mahler I had heard a decade before in London — with that same sanity and wisdom.Apt, for the conductor who might well have been the wisest of them all. 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