Music

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

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

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

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

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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

When I discovered the record, it felt like the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.I’m here to spread the good word of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the album.It’s a little odd that a record so rapturously received, at least in the United States in the early ’70s, is now mostly left off best album lists, and didn’t secure a lasting place in the rock music canon.Then again, perhaps it was inevitable that “Superstar” the album would end up eclipsed by “Superstar” the stage show, which followed a year later. It’s natural to think of the album as an artifact of the theatrical experience, rather than as a singular artistic vision in its own right, because that’s the way it usually works. It can be tough, for new listeners, to hear the music for the theater.Maybe it’s just that no serious rock connoisseur wants to admit to digging the guys who did “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Excuse me, for a moment, if I come off as weirdly defensive about the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The night my parents met, my mother, a former singer, was performing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” onstage. She has still never seen “Evita.”Revisiting the 1970 album via the recent release of the 50th anniversary edition, I’m as excited by it as I was when I was 15 and listened to it for the first time. My high school classmates were wallowing in their teenage angst listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn — this was around the turn of the millennium — and here I was, immersed in the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.But for me, tuning into a Judas-centered retelling of the Passion of the Christ felt like a kind of rebellion too. I was obsessed with the song “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” which epitomized emo before that musical term existed, and the electric-shock scream of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, in the role of Jesus, railing at an unresponsive God. (“Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain!”) While “Superstar” isn’t overtly anti-religious, the impertinence of it gave a young, questioning Catholic a lot to think about.Like a lot of music I loved, and still love from that era, it was kind of preposterous. The “Superstar” overture alone — surely one of the most unsettling rock record openers, let alone musical overtures — features harrowing electric guitar, synth, strings, boisterous brass, and a choir dropped in from a horror movie. The whole thing is more Roger Waters than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Indeed, those musical ingredients can be heard in Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” released in the United Kingdom the same month as “Superstar.”The musical tracks for “Superstar,” Rice explained during a podcast, were laid down in a haze of marijuana smoke — at the same London studios where the Rolling Stones recorded “Sympathy for the Devil” — with each day’s session beginning with a half-hour jam session. Most of the musicians had played Woodstock behind Joe Cocker. Gillan recorded his vocals in three hours and played a gig with Deep Purple that night.It’s no wonder “Superstar” rocks.From the get-go, there’s “Heaven on Their Minds,” whose guitar riff has an evocative directness right up there with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It also has Murray Head as Judas screaming “Jesuuuus!” and sounding kind of blasphemous doing it. How often do you want to blast a showtune — the term seems inadequate here — as loudly as possible? How many classic musicals kick off with a sound and atmosphere worthy of heavy metal? (Not counting “Les Misérables,” whose opening number features the chain-gang clink of actual heavy metal.)On the other end of the spectrum is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a moment of tuneful introspection not miles away from Carole King’s “Tapestry,” which was the second-highest-selling album of 1971 behind “Superstar.”If one thinks of “Superstar” as a concept album, it’s that rare one that tells a compelling, coherent story, more narrative driven than Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or The Who’s “Tommy,” with none of the vaporous verbiage of a lot of rock music at the time. The whole thing is built, as Lloyd Webber is fond of saying, “like a cast iron boat” — a rock radio play, or a stage show for the proscenium of the imagination. In music industry parlance, it’s all killer, no filler.Rice, the former aspiring pop star that he was, has always excelled in down-to-earth lyrics that make outsize characters thoroughly relatable. It’s partly why the lead vocal performances here hit you in the gut. When Yvonne Elliman’s Magdalene cries “He scares me so,” you believe her. When Murray Head’s Judas chokes out the same line, in his own anguished version of that song — Lloyd Webber, ever the skillful deployer of the poignant reprise — you believe him, too.When it comes to Lloyd Webber’s musical audacity, it can sometimes feel as if it’s not just rock snobs that underrate “Superstar,” but also self-professed musical theater lovers.Rice, left, and Lloyd Webber are now musical theater royalty. Yet some of their work remains underrated by musical fans.Again, it may seem strange to suggest that the composer of “The Phantom of the Opera,” sometimes considered to be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment, is underrated by musical fans. But it’s precisely because of that kind of commercial success that Lloyd Webber is taken for granted, dismissed as a populist composer of the kinds of hummable melodies that might, say, pacify a temperamental president.This is unfair to the composer who, on “Superstar,” was having his way with the kinds of time signatures that were dazzling fans of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Just listen to “The Temple,” its feverish 7/4 time signature is a nod to Prokofiev’s equally tumultuous seventh piano sonata, with nary a beat to take a breath. Even more impressive is “Everything’s Alright,” probably the catchiest tune ever written in 5/4. And I include Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” in that.That’s not to mention Lloyd Webber’s essential, monumental achievement here, of creating 90 minutes of music deftly combining orchestra, rock band and a small army of vocalists. Let’s just say that Stephen Sondheim, who happens to share a birthday with Lloyd Webber, doesn’t have a monopoly on musical complexity, psychological depth and conceptual ambition.Lloyd Webber and Rice became musical theater royalty. But before that, they were a couple of shaggy-haired youths who captured the disparate music of the era like few other musicals until “Hamilton.” There was nothing like it in 1970, and there’s not been a lot like it since. More

At a time when a female jazz percussionist was a rarity, she played with Benny Goodman and went on to work with Marian McPartland and other big names.Dottie Dodgion, one of the very few high-profile female drummers in the male-dominated jazz world of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 17 in a hospice center in Pacific Grove, Calif. She was 91.The cause was a stroke, said her daughter and only immediate survivor, Deborah Dodgion.Ms. Dodgion, who was known for her steady and swinging but unobtrusive approach to the drums, worked for more than 60 years with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Benny Goodman, Marian McPartland and Ruby Braff. She also led her own combos. But she rarely recorded.“She didn’t get the exposure that she might have gotten through recording because of her gender,” said Wayne Enstice, who collaborated with her on her autobiography, “The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer” (2021). “She wasn’t taken as seriously as she should have been — not by other musicians, but by people on the business side.”Unlike some drummers, Ms. Dodgion was more concerned with keeping the beat than with calling attention to herself.“There’s no denying that many drummers love the spotlight,” she wrote in her autobiography. “That’s why I sometimes say I’m not a ‘real drummer.’”She rarely took solos, she wrote, and when she did solo her approach “came from being a singer.”“I’d hear the melody inside my head,” she added, “so the rhythms I laid down always followed the song form of whatever tune I played.”She continued to play until she was 90, with her own trio, on Thursday nights at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, near her home in Pacific Grove — a gig that lasted 14 years. After breaking a shoulder in 2019, she sang while another drummer, Andy Weis, filled in for her, until the coronavirus forced the hotel to shut down temporarily.Ms. Dodgion performing in Delaware Water Gap, Pa., in the 1980s with the pianist John Coates Jr. and the bassist DeWitt Kay. via Dottie Dodgion/University of Illinois Press“She swung hard — and that meant there was a lesson to be heard in watching her play,” Mr. Weis said by phone. “She knew exactly what tempo would swing the hardest.”The celebrated jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington recalled that she had begun playing drums at 7 and first saw Ms. Dodgion about two years later at a women’s jazz festival. As far as Ms. Carrington knew at the time, Ms. Dodgion was the only female drummer around.“She always had a beautiful time feel, which is the most important part of being a drummer,” Ms. Carrington said in a phone interview. “She was never the fanciest, trickiest drummer in the world who dazzled with solos, but she really captured the essence of being a drummer.”Dorothy Rosalie Giaimo was born on Sept. 23, 1929, in Brea, Calif. Her father, Charles, was a drummer. Her mother, Ada (Tipton) Giaimo, aspired to be a dancer but became a waitress after her husband left the family when Dottie was 2.One day, when she was 5, her father stopped by her grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, where she was living, and, as she said, “kidnapped” her, taking her on the road for two years to the hotels, road houses and strip joints where he led a band. Absorbing the sounds and rhythms of her father’s drumming was her introduction to show business, albeit against her will. She was 7 when she returned to her mother, who had remarried.Her stepfather, a chicken farmer, raped Dottie when she was 10; he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After she and her mother moved to Berkeley, Calif., Dottie found peace in her weekend bus trips to San Francisco to see her father’s band at a strip club, Streets of Paris.“His excellent time attracted all the best strippers,” she wrote.As a teenager, she sang at private parties and weddings, which led to work in the mid-1940s with bands led by the jazz guitarist Nick Esposito and the renowned bassist Charles Mingus. Singing eventually gave way to drumming, which she picked up by listening to her father, and through the 1950s she played in clubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nevada. For a time, she was the house drummer at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco.When the pianist Marian McPartland formed an all-female band in 1977, Ms. Dodgion was her drummer. From left, Mary Osborne, Vi Redd, Ms. Dodgion, Ms. McPartland and Lynn Milano.Marian McPartlandMeeting the bassist Eugene Wright, who would become an integral part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, had a transformative effect on how she viewed her role in a band.“Eugene coached me on the nuances of playing in a rhythm section,” she wrote, “including the intangible insides on how to fit with the piano and the bass.”Ms. Dodgion’s first marriage, to Robert Bennett, was annulled; her marriages to Monty Budwig, a bassist, and Jerry Dodgion, a saxophonist, ended in divorce.With Mr. Dodgion, who was in Benny Goodman’s band, Ms. Dodgion moved to Manhattan in 1961. On their first day there, the band rehearsed for an engagement at Basin Street East. Ms. Dodgion dropped her husband off; when she returned at the end of the rehearsal, she was surprised when Goodman, who was looking for a new drummer, asked her to sit in with the band.“I thought it was just a jam session,” she told The New York Times in 1972. “Benny’d call out a number — ‘Gotta Be This or That’ — and I’d start looking for the music. But he’d say, ‘Don’t open the book.’ Every tune, it was the same — ‘Don’t open the book.’ At the end of the rehearsal, Benny said: ‘See you tonight, Jerry. You, too, Dottie.’ That was how I found out I was going to play with the band.”Ten days into the engagement at the club, Goodman forgot to introduce her when he name-checked some members of his 10-piece band. When the crowd demanded that he announce her name, he relented, and she received a standing ovation. But as she left the bandstand, she later recalled, Goodman’s manager whispered “’Bye” in her ear, indicating that she was being fired for getting more applause than her boss.Ms. Dodgion was not out of work for long. She quickly got a job with Tony Bennett at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Over the next 40 years, she played with Marian McPartland, Ruby Braff, Zoot Sims, Wild Bill Davison, Joe Venuti and others.“She could adapt from swing to bop, to Latin rhythms, all without calling attention to herself,” Mr. Enstice said. “She could fit in with anyone.”Ms. Dodgion worked with Ms. McPartland in 1964 and again 13 years later, when Ms. McPartland led an all-female band.“Dorothy had a natural sense of swing,” Ms. McPartland told The Sacramento Bee in 1989. “She keeps steady time and she swings — those are the most important things for a good drummer.” More

The singer-songwriter’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the rerecorded edition of her breakthrough 2008 LP, surged to the top of Billboard’s album chart.Streaming is everything in music today. But a pile of CDs, a marker and some elbow grease can still take you to No. 1 (at least if your name is Taylor Swift).This week, Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the rerecorded edition of her breakthrough 2008 LP, returned to No. 1 on Billboard’s chart — up from No. 157 last week — with the equivalent of 152,000 sales in the United States, thanks largely to a limited release of autographed CDs on Swift’s website and the availability of the album’s vinyl version.“Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” which opened at No. 1 in April, notched its second week at the top with just 8.7 million streams, the lowest streaming number for a No. 1 album since AC/DC’s “Power Up” last November. But Swift also moved 146,000 copies as a complete package, including 77,000 on CD, 67,000 on vinyl and about 1,000 each on cassette and digital download, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Altogether, that pushed “Fearless” over the top in its 25th week out.Last month, Swift tweeted that she had signed so many CDs, “I may never write the same again, as my hand is now frozen in the permanent shape of a claw.”It is a tactic Swift has used before. Last year, she sent signed copies of “Folklore” — the first of her two quarantine LPs — to indie record stores, and later sold more autographed CDs on her website. “Folklore” held the No. 1 spot a total of eight weeks, more than any other album in 2020.Also this week, Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” is No. 2; the rapper Meek Mill’s new “Expensive Pain” opens at No. 3; YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Sincerely, Kentrell,” last week’s chart-topper, falls three spots to No. 4 in its second week out; and Lil Nas X’s “Montero” is in fifth place.“Love for Sale,” the album of Cole Porter songs by Lady Gaga and the 95-year-old Tony Bennett, opens at No. 8. More