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      Remi Wolf Turns Bedroom Pop Into Hypercolored Explosions

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      The 25-year-old Los Angeles musician’s debut album, “Juno,” is a collage of sounds, emotions and cultural detritus filtered through her own unique energy.LOS ANGELES — Remi Wolf rolled up to an indoor trampoline park in Van Nuys on an August afternoon feeling frazzled. She’d been busy all day, making bugged-out visuals for her songs and prepping for tour. Then the traffic coming from the Eastside of Los Angeles was bad. So, so bad.She’d be ready to sit and talk by the vending machines in a minute, but first she needed to bounce.Wolf took off her light-purple Crocs and pulled on the regulation orange grip socks, which managed to complement her mishmashed look: a recently resurrected Urban Outfitters top she got in high school and a promo cap for a record label she’s not even signed to over her pile of brown curls. At 25 years old, Wolf was at least a decade older than almost everyone else ricocheting across the field of trampolines. Then she hit two forward somersaults.On Friday, Wolf will release her debut album, “Juno.” It’s a collection of nerves, anxieties and self-recriminations set to ebullient melodies and unbound sonic collages. “Juno” was largely written and recorded during the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic. While many artists burrowed into the aesthetics of quiet during this era of isolation, Wolf turned the tumultuous emotions pent-up inside of her into hypercolored explosions.“It’s not mellow at all, but it is very introspective,” she said. “I have a lot of energy. As a person, I can just go and go and go until I crash. And then I’m, like, depressed, or whatever.”As the nebulously defined genre of bedroom pop breaks out beyond the barriers of the bedrooms it was once made in, Wolf has emerged as one of its most engaging talents, bolstered by an unconventional charisma and a powerful voice. “Remi is always pushing what it means to be pop and what it means to be a pop star — not even deprecating it, but just being able to laugh and think about pop music in a totally different way,” said Lizzy Szabo, a senior editor at Spotify who oversees Lorem, the influential, Gen Z-targeted playlist that has become part of Wolf’s dominion.A onetime competitive skier, Wolf took the dedication she once brought to the sport to her music.Emily Monforte for The New York TimesLike many people her age, Wolf has a keen ability to slurp up the often doofy flotsam of the recent past and make it seem far cooler than it was in the first place. That manifests itself in her love of hot-pink novelty trucker hats and candy-raver eye makeup, but it also applies to her taste in music. During a recent sold-out show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Wolf covered MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and a portion of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” all with a relatively straight face.She’s found unlikely inspiration in the Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, one of the most maligned (if possibly misunderstood) lyricists to make it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She calls him “my king” (with more emphatic language) and even named one of the best songs on “Juno” after him. Like Kiedis’s, many of Wolf’s lyrics seem entirely free associative as she references an orgy at Five Guys and a plane flight to Mars.“I just follow these little wormholes in my head,” she said. “I just like to go down whatever imagery I think is describing how I’m feeling.”Despite how nonsensical the lyrics may seem when isolated, to Wolf there is an internal logic behind all of them. Well, most of them. She knows exactly what she means in her song “Grumpy Old Man” when she says she’s got “feelings in my feelings” and “violets on my violence,” but admits that she came up with the line about having “boobies on my booty” just because those words are fun to sing.Earlier this year, Wolf released “We Love Dogs!,” a compilation of remixes of her earlier songs. It included interpretations from known genre twisters like Nile Rodgers and Panda Bear, but also a version of “Photo ID,” her most streamed song, featuring the ascendant star Dominic Fike, who’s become a friend. “A lot of people have their style figured out or maybe a general sound,” Fike said. “She has something special in how she puts together her songs. I feel like Remi is a real singer. Every once in a while they come around, and she’s one of those.”Despite being raised in the largely flat and snowless Bay Area city of Palo Alto, Wolf began training as a downhill ski racer at 8 years old. She spent weekends staying at a cheap hotel in Truckee, a town near Lake Tahoe. She went to the Junior Olympics twice. “I was bouncing between different friends all the time, so nothing ever felt safe,” she said. “I became very independent and very insular in my own being.”When she was 16, Wolf quit competing and threw herself into music with the same resolute mind-set that’s required of athletes. “Once I stopped skiing, I was like, ‘OK, I need something else to do just as intensely and just as hard,’” she said. She started a duo with her friend Chloe Zilliac called, naturally, Remi and Chloe. At 17, Wolf tried out for “American Idol” and got invited to Hollywood, but her experience there didn’t last long.While participating in an after-school music program, a teacher teamed her up with another one of his pupils, a young multi-instrumentalist named Jared Solomon. He had them play “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse, with her singing and him on guitar. “We were instantly like, ‘Whoa, you’re really good,’” Wolf said.Solomon joined Remi and Chloe’s backup band, and they’d rehearse in his garage twice a week before he left to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. When Wolf graduated from the U.S.C. Thornton School of Music a few years later, Solomon reached out to see if he could crash at her place while passing through Los Angeles as his friend’s tour D.J. The two hadn’t really talked in five years; he ended up staying for a week. They experimented on a few songs together in that span, including “Sauce,” a slinky jam that remains one of Wolf’s most popular tracks.“I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth,” Wolf said of life after getting sober. “Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”Emily Monforte for The New York TimesAt the time, she had been trying to break into the music industry as a songwriter. “I was on a bunch of Adderall and I was psychotic at that point,” Wolf recalled. “Then he came through, then we did our thing and then we were like, holy [expletive]!”Solomon became and remains Wolf’s closest musical collaborator. “We’re just so locked in to each other’s energy, especially musically,” Wolf said. “It’s hard for people to penetrate that.” Wolf produced most of the songs on “Juno” with him (he uses the name Solomonophonic), though more established figures including Kenny Beats and Ethan Gruska contributed to a few songs on the album, too. Solomon also plays in her live band, towering over Wolf in a Pantera T-shirt with cutoff sleeves.The earliest work that Wolf put out often leaned toward jazzy soul — which she attributes to her love of major and minor seventh chords — but with “Juno” she widened the scope. While Erykah Badu remains a constant influence, during the album’s making she listened to artists like Jack White, Beck, Sheryl Crow and Michelle Branch. “I’m kind of a rock singer,” Wolf said. “That’s what I started singing, and then I moved more into soulier stuff. But I’m a belter. I love screaming.”A significant moment in Wolf’s personal life also had a major impact on “Juno”: she entered rehab during the summer of 2020, a change that was at least three years in the making. Before, Wolf said, she frequently drank to the point of blacking out. While she said she was usually able to function in her daily life, she had started getting into huge fights with family, friends and collaborators.“I did it for myself obviously, but I did it for my career,” she said of her sobriety. “There was just something in me being like, ‘Don’t destroy this. Don’t destroy your life.’”Drinking left Wolf feeling awful all the time. Her sobriety revitalized her energy and excitement, but it also forced her to confront all kinds of emotional issues that she didn’t make space for with her goal-oriented approach. “So much came up that I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “I didn’t even know what growing as a human was. I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth. Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”When the interview was over, Wolf returned to the trampolines. She took a few flying leaps onto a gigantic inflatable pillow before deciding to grab a final ride on the zip line. She climbed the steps to the top of the platform, listened to a safety spiel from the attendant and then turned around to give a thumbs up to the security camera mounted on the wall. And then, she was off. More

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      Visconti’s Operatic Autopsy of German History, Restored Anew

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      The trilogy of “The Damned,” “Death in Venice” and “Ludwig” is whole again, in editions that freshly reveal their conflicted queerness.The revered Italian director Luchino Visconti was openly gay yet devoutly Catholic, ostensibly Communist yet unyieldingly aristocratic. In short, he embodied contradictions that haunt many of his films, in which criticism can sometimes be confused with reverence, or obsessive detail with tasteless excess.Nowhere is this more evident, to sometimes frustrating and other times awe-inspiring effect, than in his so-called German trilogy of “The Damned” (1969), “Death in Venice” (1971) and “Ludwig” (1973). These films are hard to love and not as widely adored as his earlier masterpieces, like “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard,” but they are a culmination of his preoccupations and paradoxes: Visconti at his most operatic, confessionally queer and questioning of the present through meticulous reconstructions of the past.In this triptych, that past is the history of Germany, recounted in what amounts to an autopsy that traces the apocalyptic 1930s back to the Romantic 19th century. And now, with the Criterion Collection’s recent release of “The Damned,” the three films are all available again, in new restorations that not only improve picture and sound quality, but also hew more closely to Visconti’s controversial intent.His earlier films — even his first, “Ossessione,” from 1943 — hint at a queer sensibility; and he had already begun to develop ever-lavish, operatic set pieces with historical sweep, such as in “Senso” and “The Leopard.” But with “The Damned,” Visconti embarked on a series of films that quietly wrestled with his own conflicted feelings about sexuality and class, and at the same time illustrated the twilight of the monarchy, of the aristocracy and, eventually, of Germany itself.But in reverse: He begins at the end, as if the trilogy were a whodunit, influenced throughout by Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner. (Not for nothing is the Italian title of “The Damned” “La Caduta degli Dei” — “Twilight of the Gods,” the same name given to the finale of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.) The gods here are the members of the von Essenbeck family, industrialists whose decline simultaneously paves the way for World War II.They are introduced — after a credits sequence of brassy melodrama and imagery reminiscent of Wagner’s fiery Nibelheim, where the ruinous gold ring is forged — in 1933 during a birthday party for the patriarch at their ornate and expansive family home, first shown through the eyes of the lower-class people who make it run.Berger as Martin von Essenbeck, a villainously ambitious young man scheming to rule his family’s business in “The Damned.”The Criterion CollectionBetween the scenery and the sounds of Bach wafting from a distant room, an older way of German life is established, then followed by a drag performance in which a grandson, the young Martin (Helmut Berger, Visconti’s lover), channels Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” much to the family’s disgust. But he is interrupted by the announcement that the Reichstag is burning. Selfishly and obliviously, he continues until he is again cut off. “They could have chosen a better day to burn the Reichstag, right, Grandfather?” he responds.That grandfather is murdered the same evening, and what follows is a “Macbeth”-like melodrama of opportunism, murderous scheming and sexual deviancy; Martin, though coded as gay, also molests young girls and, in the film’s appalling climax, rapes his mother into a catatonic state. By the end, the von Essenbeck company’s leadership falls to Martin, who is all too ready to cooperate with the Nazi regime, while his mother and her lover marry then take cyanide together — a scene that recalls the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.But among those horrors is a sequence that ended up censored and is presented in its original form in the Criterion release: a dreamy and homoerotic recounting of the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the paramilitary brownshirts. At a Bavarian lake hotel, they pass an orgiastic evening of folk songs, beer and increasing nudity before retreating to rooms for gay sex, but only deep into the night — as if they were Wagner’s lovers Tristan and Isolde. Indeed, the camera cuts to one of the von Essenbecks, Konstantin, barking through that opera’s “Liebestod” (“love-death”) at a piano. When they are all massacred in the morning, a member of the SS remarks “Alles tot,” or “all dead,” a line that also appears in the final scene of “Tristan.”A kind of liebestod ends “Death in Venice” (also available from Criterion), an adaptation of Mann’s novella that makes more literal its forbidden desire. Visconti changed the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), from a writer to a composer resembling Mahler. That composer’s Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony is the film’s musical soul: “Death in Venice” is virtually a silent movie, an opera of facial expressions by Aschenbach and coy returned looks from the boy he obsesses over as beauty personified, Tadzio. (He’s played by Bjorn Andresen, a Swedish teenager handpicked by Visconti in a disturbing audition shown in the recent documentary “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”).Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice,” an opera in facial expressions set to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.The Criterion Collection“Death in Venice” both satirizes and relishes upper-class Venetian tourism of the early 20th century, with a patient camera that settles, uncomfortably if nauseatingly, on an overdecorated hotel and its overdressed guests. Yet sequences there also carry a trace of elegy for a world soon to be erased by World War I, the kind of nostalgia of Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel.”Aschenbach’s desire, like all homosexuality in the German trilogy, is doomed. In something of an operatic mad scene, he visits a barber who dyes his hair, powders him with ghost-white makeup and rouges his cheeks. His unrestrained passion compels him to follow Tadzio to his death, of cholera, as he watches the boy from his lounge chair on the beach, black dye streaming down his cheek in the heat. But it’s an ecstatic death, that of Isolde, unconsummated yet transfigured.Wagner’s influence on “Ludwig” is even more explicit. He is a character in this sprawling psychodrama-as-biography about King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Helmut Berger again) — a movie presented in various cuts over the years, and in the restoration released a few years ago by Arrow Academy more complete than ever, running over four hours. The imagery of night versus day in “Tristan” also runs through the reign of Ludwig, who made that opera possible while also bankrolling Wagner’s spendthrift habits and extravagant ambition.Ludwig appears to behave with childish petulance — hiding, after Wagner is expelled from Munich, in a dark room with a toy that projects rotating stars on the ceiling to a music-box rendition of the “Song to the Evening Star” from “Tannhäuser.” But he is more like Tristan, hiding in the world of night from what is expected of him in reality: monarchical duties, the expectation to marry.Visconti’s film is primarily nocturnal, or shot in rooms with closed curtains and, in one case, an artificial grotto inspired by the “Tannhäuser” Venusberg. Instrumental arrangements from that opera follow Ludwig, like Mahler with Aschenbach, until the music fades, tellingly, after the death of his beloved Wagner.The king becomes increasingly isolated, eating from a table in his bedroom that is raised and lowered through the floor so he doesn’t have to see his staff members, even though they are also the outlet for his gay longing. In a scene that echoes “The Damned,” Ludwig’s men gather for folk-fueled debauchery inside a hut modeled on the “Ring.”Again, the sequence is long: elegiac, immersive and ultimately tragic. It is in scenes like this that Visconti is at his most brazenly queer. But he also relegates gay desire to that realm of night, and inextricably links it to Romanticism and decadence — the same kind that, the three films’ autopsy shows, put Germany on its inevitable path to destruction. More

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      Adele Announces ‘30,’ Her First Album in Six Years

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      The singer’s long-awaited return will start this week, with the release of a single, “Easy on Me,” followed by a new album on Nov. 19, she announced on Wednesday.Almost six years to the day since the release of her previous blockbuster album, Adele will make her long-awaited return to the music industry with a new album on Nov. 19, she announced Wednesday on social media.Titled “30,” in line with her previous LPs “19,” “21” and “25” — for the ages Adele was while writing them — the singer, now 33, said in a statement that the album came out of “the most turbulent period of my life.”In 2019, Adele filed for divorce from her husband of two years, the charity executive Simon Konecki. The couple have a young son.“I’ve learned a lot of blistering home truths about myself along the way,” Adele wrote in her announcement.She compared the music to “that friend who, no matter what, checked in on me even though I’d stopped checking in with them because I’d become so consumed by my own grief,” adding: “I’ve painstakingly rebuilt my house and my heart since then and this album narrates it.”“30” will be preceded on Thursday night — midnight in the United Kingdom — by a single, “Easy on Me,” produced by Greg Kurstin, who collaborated with the singer on “Hello,” the chart-topping lead song from “25,” in 2015.Described in a recent Vogue cover story as a “a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad,” “Easy on Me” was previewed by Adele on Instagram on Saturday, and features the lyrics:“Go easy on me, babyI was still a childDidn’t get the chance toFeel the world around me.”Yet even as Adele’s new music is widely expected to be among the most commercially successful of the year, based on her track record of world-beating sales, the singer is also managing expectations as she re-enters a changed business.“There isn’t a bombastic ‘Hello,’” she told Vogue. “But I don’t want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don’t want to happen again.”The track debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for 10 weeks. But streaming — which now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — was still catching on. When “25” was released, on Nov. 20, 2015, it was not made available on services like Spotify and Apple Music until seven months later, instead relying on traditional sales.That resulted in a record-breaking 3.38 million albums sold in the United States during its first week — nearly a million more than the next-highest-selling release in the Nielsen/SoundScan era. (The company, now MRC Data, began tracking point-of-sale data in 1991.)The album “25” has since been certified 11-times platinum and won six Grammys in 2017, making Adele the first artist ever to sweep the top three categories — record of the year, song of the year and album of the year — on two separate occasions. (She did the same in 2012, with “21.”)Unlike Adele’s previous releases, “30” is expected to be available on streaming services upon release, although Vogue reported that the singer was “adamant that it come out in tangible form,” on CDs and vinyl, as well.According to reports, the new album will feature collaborations with the producers and songwriters Max Martin and Shellback, who worked on the previous Adele single “Send My Love (to Your New Lover)”; the singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (“When We Were Young,” from 2015); the producer Inflo; and the composer and producer Ludwig Goransson, known for his work with Childish Gambino and on films like “Black Panther.”“I was so fragile when I was writing it that I wanted to work only with a few people,” Adele said in her Vogue interview, citing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a “very big reference.”And while the singer’s divorce helped to inspire the album, it is not the only subject, she said. “It was more me divorcing myself,” Adele explained, invoking “self-destruction,” “self-reflection” and “self-redemption.”In recent years, the singer has also taken to working out two or three times a day, leading to significant weight loss (“I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety”); hosted “Saturday Night Live” as a nonmusical guest; and entered into a relationship with LeBron James’s agent Rich Paul (“I know what I want”).“I’ve shed many layers but also wrapped myself in new ones,” Adele wrote in her statement on Wednesday, “discovered genuinely useful and wholesome mentalities to lead with, and I feel like I’ve finally found my feeling again. I’d go as far as to say I’ve never felt more peaceful in my life.” More

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      Review: The Met’s ‘Turandot,’ Strongly Sung, Garishly Staged

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      Christine Goerke and Yusif Eyvazov star in a revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s production, which adds gaudiness to Puccini’s sophisticated score.By opening its season a few weeks ago with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in its history, the Metropolitan Opera was attempting to engage with the present moment, in all its roiling complexities.But on Tuesday the old Met, a company of grand tradition and unabashed spectacle, returned with a revival of Puccini’s “Turandot” in Franco Zeffirelli’s glittering, gaudy, opulent, tacky and overwhelmingly popular 1987 production.When this production was last mounted, in the fall of 2019, the lead roles of Turandot, an icy Chinese princess, and Calàf, the prince who seeks to win her love, were sung splendidly by the soprano Christine Goerke and the tenor Yusif Eyvazov. Assuming these demanding parts again on Tuesday, they were even better.But 2019 seems a long time ago. Much has changed since the pandemic forced the closure of cultural institutions around the world, including a wave of anti-Asian hostility that has compelled the arts to re-examine lingering prejudices and racist stereotypes. For some, “Turandot” — not just Zeffirelli’s extravagant production, but the opera itself, set in the fantastical Peking of legend — is an example of the problem. As much as I love the music, and as often as I’ve seen (or put up with) this staging, it was impossible not to view it this time in this context.To hear Puccini’s score as rife with awkward evocations of Asian exotica and stereotypes is, to me, unfair. The story of “Turandot,” which is based on a fairy tale by the 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, prodded Puccini, who had already absorbed elements of Asian music, to explore those sources even further. In the score, he incorporates several Chinese melodies. Like Debussy, who had an epiphany when he attended an 1889 exposition of Asian arts and culture in Paris, Puccini was genuinely excited by Chinese culture. He doesn’t just drop these tunes into this score, but blends them — with nuance and respect — into his own Italianate, 20th-century harmonic language.Goerke sang the daunting aria “In questa reggia” with steely sound and thrilling intensity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, the characters can come off as clichéd or worse. And it’s too easy to dismiss concerns by saying the opera is just a fairy tale, or that Zeffirelli’s production is just an over-the-top costume epic that shouldn’t be taken too seriously.Perhaps the most problematic characters — at least in Zeffirelli’s interpretation — are the trio of royal ministers with names that can make today’s audiences cringe: Ping, Pang and Pong (in this revival, Hyung Yun, Tony Stevenson and Eric Ferring). True to Gozzi, Puccini was evoking stock types out of commedia dell’arte. As the ministers bicker, chatter and fret over the deadly riddles Turandot puts her suitors through, he gives the three ministers much bustling, comedic music to sing. Yet the orchestra keeps needling the vocal lines with jabbing dissonances and modernist harmonic twists, so a sober subtext comes through.And there are stretches when the ministers pine for their homes in the country and yearn for the old times that are some of the most beguiling music in the opera. These ravishing episodes are lush with Impressionist-like harmonic writing and hazy colorings. (You almost hear Puccini saying, “Take that, Debussy!”) The issue is less the score than the production: The Met could rid Zeffirelli’s staging of the mincing, fan-waving antics, allowing the ministers to appear as the sage observers they are.Goerke and Eyvazov sang so well that I was swept up in Puccini’s music during their scenes, despite the silvery extravagance of the imperial palace, here so bright you almost squint. Goerke sang the daunting aria “In questa reggia” with steely sound and thrilling intensity, and, later, soared impressively over the full chorus and orchestra. Eyvazov, an athletic-looking Calàf, had beefy sound and clarion top notes, getting a big ovation for his “Nessun dorma.”Puccini’s score blends Chinese melodies into his Italianate, 20th-century harmonic language, but Zeffirelli’s 1987 staging can feel over-the-top.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe soprano Gabriella Reyes, her voice radiant and rich in vibrato, was an uncommonly strong Liù, the servant in love with Calàf; Timur, Calàf’s father, was the stalwart bass-baritone James Morris, appearing 50 years after his Met debut. The superb Met chorus has Puccini’s score and Zeffirelli’s staging down pat; the singing in the big ensemble scenes was glorious. The conductor Marco Armiliato led a sure-paced and colorful performance.But what is the Met to do with this production, which seems increasingly anachronistic? Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, got burned in 2009 when he replaced Zeffirelli’s grandly realistic production of “Tosca” with a sparer, grimmer staging that was booed at its premiere and, in time, cast aside. This “Turandot” has drawn audiences for decades. But the time may have come for a more probing and restrained take on what is — for me and many others — Puccini’s great final opera.TurandotThrough Nov. 16 (and in the spring with a different cast) at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Paddy Moloney, Irish Piper Who Led the Chieftains, Dies at 83

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      The band he fronted for nearly 60 years toured the world, collaborated with rock stars and helped spark a renaissance for traditional Irish music.Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.Mr. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger.Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Long Black Veil” (with Mr. Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Mr. Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.Mr. Moloney had an affinity for country music.“I always considered Nashville like another part of Ireland, down to the south or something,” he said on the website of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2020. “When I’ve come over there and played with musical geniuses like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas or Earl Scruggs, they pick everything up so easily. You don’t have to duck and dash.”The last track on “Another Country” — “Finale: Did You Ever Go A-Courtin’, Uncle Joe/Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — features Ms. Harris, Ricky Skaggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, described it as “the closest you will come to an Irish hooley on record,” a reference to an Irish party with music. The track, the magazine said, sounded like “a few pints were quaffed and the boxty bread was passed around before the assembled greats of music decided to have a musical free-for-all.”Mr. Moloney in 2012. That year, the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains embarked on a tour that ended on St. Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesPatrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Company. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker.Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of man known as the “King of the Pipers.”He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Company, a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by the Irish author John Montague.In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Mr. Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.On his own, Mr. Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains teamed up with 12 folk, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and indie rock artists — including Bon Iver, the Decembrists, the Low Anthem and Imelda May — to record the album “Voice of Ages.” They also embarked on a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day.“What’s happening here with these young groups,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times at the time, explaining the album’s concept, “is they’re coming back to the melody, back to the real stuff, the roots and the folk feeling of them all. I can hear any of them singing folk songs.” More

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      A Temporary Concert Hall Hopes for a Permanent Audience

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      The Isarphilharmonie in Munich, a prefabricated stopgap during a renovation, is trying to lure listeners far from the city center.MUNICH — It was an unusual sight last Friday: the denizens of this wealthy city lifting the hems of their gowns and adjusting their bow ties as they stepped into a rough-around-the-edges industrial space for one of the premier cultural events of the fall.They were entering the lobby of the Isarphilharmonie, a new concert hall far from the old-fashioned grandeur of the Bavarian State Opera or the Herkulessaal, inside the former royal palace. And far from the city center, where most of Munich’s high-profile classical music performances take place.The new hall is a rarity: an ephemeral, prefabricated venue designed with top-level acoustics and built for 40 million euros (about $46 million) in only a year and a half, all as a renovation stopgap. A temporary replacement for the ungainly and unremarkable concert hall at the Gasteig, which is closing for a multiyear makeover, the Isarphilharmonie is just one entity of that complex — including the Munich City Library and education facilities — to make an interim move nearly three miles down the Isar River to Halle E, once a transformer hall for a power utility, in a quieter, less polished part of town, next to a tire shop.The modular concert hall is a prefabricated box of wood coating a steel frame, with acoustic design by Yasuhisa Toyota.HGEsch/gmp ArchitektenFor many, the journey there is not nearly as easy as to the Gasteig, which is within walking distance of Munich’s Old Town and is outside a busy S-Bahn station. Isarphilharmonie attendees on Friday were encouraged to use public transportation, then take a short walk to finish the journey, or a bicycle. But not their cars, please, because unlike the Gasteig, the new complex (known as Gasteig HP8 for its address on Hans-Preißinger-Straße) has no parking facilities. For now, some drivers can park at a nearby wholesale flower market and ride a shuttle the rest of the way.It’s not lost on the leadership of the Gasteig and its house orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, that the Isarphilharmonie needs more than novelty to lure people downriver during the renovation, which had been expected to last several years but could stretch to nearly a decade. About 60 to 70 percent of tickets sold for the new space are from the orchestra’s subscribers, said Paul Müller, the Philharmonic’s executive director, but that still leaves a significant gap to bridge.So Müller and his colleagues — including Max Wagner, the Gasteig’s director — have examined potential models elsewhere. Such as the Philharmonie de Paris, so far from Paris’s center that it overlooks the freeway that forms the city’s border, and which has kept ticket prices low to remove at least one barrier to potential audiences. The Isarphilharmonie, Müller said, will be similar: “This needs a very different structure. You cannot ask for €90 per ticket.”A former power utility structure, now called Halle E, serves as the Isarphilharmonie’s lobby.Robert Haas/Gasteig GmbHBut perhaps the highest priority in attracting new concertgoers and pleasing existing ones is to provide a hall that doesn’t feel like the substitute that it is. Shifting to nomadic performances during the Gasteig renovation — as the New York Philharmonic is doing while its Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, is overhauled this season — was not feasible here, Wagner said. So the Isarphilharmonie, designed for temporary use but with a potential future after the Gasteig’s reopening, was designed to hold its own among Germany’s important concert halls. (It will also host Munich’s other major ensemble, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.)Designed by von Gerkan, Marg and Partners, and with prestige acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota — of the Paris Philharmonie and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles — the 1,900-seat, modular space is a striking yet unshowy black wooden box, with a pale timber stage that focuses attention like a movie screen (or like Richard Wagner’s proto-cinematic stage at the Bayreuth Festival Theater a bit north of here).“We wanted to build something only in wood,” Max Wagner said. (That proved impossible given local fire codes; in the final design, wood coats a steel frame.) “We were lucky because wood is now like gold. But we ordered all this before the pandemic, so we had the delivery and the old price.”That was crucial to the Isarphilharmonie opening on Friday after construction that began in spring 2020; the rest of Gasteig HP8 will follow by next March.Among the hall’s opening festivities is a cycle of Beethoven’s five piano concertos with Daniil Trifonov as the soloist, beginning with the Fourth.Tobias HaseThe hall’s sound was put to the test that night with a three-hour Munich Philharmonic concert — led by the orchestra’s music director, Valery Gergiev — which, while a bit scattered, demonstrated a variety of acoustic possibilities. It was also a milestone for pandemic-era performances: the first in Bavaria, because of newly implemented measures, to allow a full audience, mask free.A premiere, Thierry Escaich’s “Araising Dances,” opened the program, answering any questions about Toyota’s acoustics with a cello’s pristine pizzicato resonating above the rest of the orchestra, and a solo violin’s ethereal high note eerily bleeding into spectral harmonics. Written for the Isarphilharmonie, the work explored opposites of sound: the full might of the ensemble in a danse macabre versus a chamber group from just the principal strings. As a pièce d’occasion it did the trick, showing off the space and providing a rousing finale that would have lingered in the air longer had it not inspired immediate applause.Next came Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, featuring Daniil Trifonov as soloist. Among the Isarphilharmonie’s opening offerings is Trifonov’s first outing playing all five Beethoven concertos, but in the Fourth he entered with muddled phrasing that virtually contradicted the transparency of the Escaich. (Exceptional acoustics only get you so far.) What followed was an interpretation of overexcited extremities, as if he hadn’t yet settled on a reading of the piece. And he was at odds with the Philharmonic, which could have been lighter but still aimed for restraint and delicacy under Gergiev. Trifonov’s encore, an arrangement of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” was a return to form: unquestionably sensitive, approaching sublime.On Saturday in Halle E, the Philharmonic unveiled its new late-night programming, featuring FM Einheit in a work by Vangelino Currentzis.Tobias HaseAlthough the second half of the concert may have wandered, it nonetheless proved a showcase for both the hall and the Philharmonic: Henri Dutilleux’s “Métaboles” reached a satisfyingly earsplitting volume; the opening of Rodion Shchedrin’s “The Sealed Angel” was an appetizing preview of choral performances to come; and Ravel’s second “Daphnis et Chloé” suite was a fittingly grand combination of orchestra and voices. Here, the flutist Michael Martin Kofler spun sensual melodies that, in a space that hid not even Gergiev’s occasional grunts, cut easily through the other players. The opening-night listeners were always going to applaud heartily, but that didn’t make their enthusiastic response to the Ravel any less deserved.With the end of the concert came a reminder that the Isarphilharmonie is still new, with problems to work out — such as finding a way for 1,900 people to exit gracefully without bottlenecking. As if to offer an apology, servers were waiting throughout Halle E with trays of sparkling wine. The following evening, the space would be used less formally, for one of the Philharmonic’s new efforts in alternative programming: a late-night performance, featuring FM Einheit and members of the orchestra, of an experimental work by Vangelino Currentzis (the brother of the conductor Teodor Currentzis).But on Friday, if the transition to a new hall wasn’t entirely seamless for attendees, it was for another group: taxi drivers. Clearly having heard the news of the opening, they were lined up outside, ready to shepherd the chilly and stranded audience back home. More

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      How Xenia Rubinos Freed Herself on a New Album, ‘Una Rosa’

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      On her third LP, the singer-songwriter brings her brassy vocals to a surreal, electronic universe.Xenia Rubinos stuck her head inside a white, doughnut-shaped couch, trying to get a better feel for the furniture’s globular shape. Earlier, she had plastered her face on an oblong, clear sculpture made out of plastic, smushing her right cheek up against the material.Navigating a museum devoted to the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a cloudless late September afternoon, Rubinos, a New York singer-songwriter, approached each sculpture with the same free-spirited curiosity as she does her own music. (You’re allowed to touch some, and Rubinos wasn’t shy about going all in.) When we arrived, she suggested we tour the space in reverse order. “I just like coming in and taking the gas out of all of the things,” she said with a chuckle. “I don’t know anything about it, I don’t have to,” she said of Noguchi’s sculptures. The art “activates me.”Over the past eight years, Rubinos’s own art has activated her listeners with its imaginative dissection of punk, R&B, jazz and hip-hop. Her first two albums, “Magic Trix” (2013) and “Black Terry Cat” (2016), artfully collaged genres and braided incisive lyrics about identity and police brutality, among other themes. The Puerto Rican-Cuban artist possesses a smoky wisp of a voice, and it holds all the experimentation together. Both releases established her as a promising figure in Brooklyn’s independent music landscape.Rubinos’s third album, “Una Rosa,” out Friday, arrives as a rich statement about finding creative freedom. “It’s a thick listen,” Rubinos said. “It was thick even for me as I was making it.” The album touches on heavy topics at a heavy moment: mourning, heartbreak, the pressures of capitalist productivity, the killing of Breonna Taylor. One moment Rubinos nimbly intones melodies from a José Martí poem through a dense glaze of Auto-Tune, the next she growls through gritted teeth over a gauzy lattice of synths.The emphasis on synths marks a turning point for Rubinos, who has always focused on eclecticism but emerged from a more formal jazz background: She studied jazz composition at the Berklee School of Music, but felt deeply alienated by the sexism and elitism of that scene. “I got there and I hated the way that I was objectified,” she said. “That just made me shut down and completely hide myself. I would wear baggy clothes all the time. I didn’t want to be sexualized at all, and I wanted to be taken seriously.”On “Una Rosa,” she releases herself. The vocal performances on tracks like “What Is This Voice” and “Don’t Put Me in Red” are deliciously fragile and imperfect, which Rubinos found refreshing after years of striving for perfection. “It was like, ‘Nothing to prove to anybody here, and we’re just doing music.’ This is what this song calls for. This is what this idea sounds like,” she said.Electronic music has intrigued Rubinos since she was a child. When she was 12, she recorded herself on a Casio keyboard and a karaoke machine. “I would hold the microphone up to it and I would program a little beat on the keyboard that had drum instruments,” she said. “I thought I was Blu Cantrell,” she added with a cackle.For “Una Rosa,” she was inspired by the Dominican experimentalist Kelman Duran, the Afro-Caribbean spiritualists Ìfé and the spiky electronics of the producer Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, who is of Indigenous descent. All of these artists, she said, have a singular capacity to borrow elements of pop music and place them in a surreal, electronic palette — a gap she had long yearned to close in her own music.The melody of the title track, an electronic reimagining of a Puerto Rican danzón by José Enrique Pedreira, returned to Rubinos in the early hours of a melancholy morning during the spring of 2019. She remembered the tune was from a color-changing fiber optic flower lamp her great-grandmother once owned, but it took her two years to identify it as a composition by Pedreira. That lamp served as the inspiration for the album artwork of “Una Rosa.”During the recording process, Rubinos said she became “obsessed” with traditional Cuban rumbas. She was especially enthralled by a snippet in the documentary “Las Cuatro Joyas del Ballet Cubano” (“The Four Jewels of Cuban Ballet”). Eventually, she traveled to Havana in search of its origin, and she spent time visiting the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where a family friend is a dancer.Electronic music has intrigued Rubinos since she was a child.Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times“I would go to write for the record, and I would play clave for five hours not knowing what I was doing,” she said. “Sacude,” one of the album’s standouts, came to her in a flurry during that period: the syncopated insistence of a clave pulsates under the brassiness of Rubinos’s voice, a wall of synths shape shifting in the chorus. “Cuanto quisiera salir de esto ya/Si sigo este rumbo/Pronto me sorprende la muerte,” she sings in Spanish. “Oh, how I wish I could escape from this already/If I stay on this course/Soon, death will sneak up on me.”This is one of the album’s greatest gifts: its sense of high drama. Many moments on “Una Rosa” recall the narrative tension of a tragic film, like “Did My Best,” a chronicle about the sorrow of sudden loss peppered with the sound of exploding fireworks, closing doors and clicking car turn signals; or “Ay Hombre,” a bleeding-heart torch song that evokes the anguish of classic bolero singers. Rubinos refracts these sounds through an electronic prism, reshaping them as soundtracks for imagined romances and deaths in the 21st century.The album’s narrative urgency was born out of a period of turmoil for Rubinos, who said she felt drained after a long span of nonstop touring and performing. “When I came back from that, I was on empty and I didn’t feel like writing songs. I didn’t feel like listening to songs,” she said. “In my personal life I felt like [expletive].”She sought guidance from a curandero, a healer, who did a spiritual cleanse and diagnosed her with “pérdida de espíritu,” or “loss of spirit.” She also began working with a choreographer friend, trying to reconnect to her body through the pleasure of dance and improvisational movement.While all of these experiences played a part in “Una Rosa,” Rubinos said the album isn’t about a journey of healing. “I struggle with talking about the context of what happened to me going into this record, because the music itself is not about depression or about mental health,” she said. “Es difícil, a veces.” It’s difficult, sometimes, she explained in Spanish. “There always has to be a message or there always has to be this takeaway from every song,” she added. “And it’s hard for me, because it’s not so linear.” More

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      The Music Lost to Coronavirus, Part 3

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThis past summer, it briefly seemed as if the worst of the coronavirus might be behind us. But despite some encouraging signs — like the concert business amping up again — the pandemic’s landscape continued to shift; the Delta variant spread widely, and deaths rose again. Many musicians and people integral to the music business have been lost to Covid-19.On this week’s Popcast, the third in a recurring series, a handful of remembrances of musicians who died during the pandemic:Jacob Desvarieux, one of the founders and the core arranger of Kassav’, the band that pioneered zouk music, who died at 65.John Davis, one of the actual singing voices behind the façade-pop supernova act Milli Vanilli, who died at 66.Chucky Thompson, a hip-hop and R&B producer responsible for hits by Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and others, who died at 53.Guests:Doreen St. Felix, television critic at The New YorkerGil Kaufman, senior writer and editor at BillboardJeff Mao, longtime music journalist and D.J.Connect 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