Music

The pandemic could not derail the sprawling George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest.BUCHAREST, Romania — Romania has a long record of defying the catastrophes history has served up, so it certainly would not allow the pandemic to derail the George Enescu International Festival, devoted to its premier musical native son, which ended on Sunday. At stake was not only the 25th edition of this country’s largest cultural event, but also the renewal of a global artistic exchange that this still-marginalized part of Europe considers essential to its development.Stubbornly underappreciated elsewhere, Enescu (1881-1955), whose “Oedipe” runs at the Paris Opera through Oct. 14, remains a pervasive presence here, even beyond the musical realm. His face is on Romania’s five-lei note; Bucharest’s largest orchestra is the George Enescu Philharmonic. A sumptuous Beaux-Arts palace along the fabled Calea Victoriei that served briefly as his home is now the Enescu Museum and the headquarters for the Romanian Composers Union.Credited with giving Romanians a national voice inspired by the country’s rich folk music, Enescu also had a fully cosmopolitan outlook that embraced multiple stylistic shifts. He embodied an ideal of the complete musician in his roles as composer, virtuoso violinist and pianist, conductor, teacher and generous mentor to younger artists. Yehudi Menuhin praised him as “the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician and the most formative influence I have ever experienced.”George Enescu, who is stubbornly underappreciated elsewhere but well represented in his home country.History and Art Collection/AlamyEven as the continuing pandemic dashed hopes for a return to more normal life, an astonishing roster of 32 orchestras from 14 countries managed to travel here for the festival, among the most extensive classical music events in the world. Scheduled every two years, it runs in alternation with the George Enescu International Competition for young performers and composers. The festival started in 1958, three years after Enescu’s death, and was initially presented every three years. But an attitude from the Communist government that could be described as ambivalent at best turned downright hostile and self-destructive during the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Much had to be rebuilt following the revolution of 1989.The festival lasts four weeks, with multiple events each day. A major focus is the lineup of top international ensembles, many of which are asked to include a work by Enescu in their touring repertoire. The ticketed events take place in four concert venues in the center of Bucharest, but seven other cities around Romania also present concerts under the festival’s auspices.The conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who concludes his tenure as the festival’s artistic director with this edition, emphasized in an interview the strategic importance of having visiting orchestras commit to a work by Enescu. Many of them will go on to perform these when they return home, he said, “further widening the appreciation and visibility” of the Romanian composer.Jurowski, whose tenure as the festival’s artistic director comes to an end this year.Alex Damian“I have been especially proud of bringing Enescu’s work to London and Berlin and Moscow with my own orchestras over the years,” he added, including a concert version of “Oedipe,” Enescu’s only opera.Luring audiences to Bucharest, however, continues to vex festival organizers. “Everybody has a false image about Romania,” said Mihai Constantinescu, the event’s executive director since 1991, when asked why the mammoth undertaking isn’t on the radar of many abroad.“But the moment they arrive here,” Constantinescu added,” they are amazed.”The violinist Leonidas Kavakos, a longtime regular, spoke of the intensity of the audience’s appreciation: “They remain very quiet, very receptive. You feel the thirst for music and for interacting, and that is something that is vital for anybody who goes onstage.”The violinist Leonidas Kavakos, who appeared in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.Andrei GindacWhen Kavakos joined the Munich Philharmonic for the first of that orchestra’s two concerts under Valery Gergiev, he seemed to astonish himself with the sheer sonic pleasure of tracing Tchaikovsky’s continually repeated melodies in the Violin Concerto in as pure and unindulgent a manner as possible. The wildly unpredictable Gergiev was more engaged than in recent memory, presiding over a magnificently shaped version of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, an unusual and memorable pairing with the Tchaikovsky concerto.Enescu, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja said, “is a universe for himself,” adding, “I find it remarkable how he discovered his language.” She is another festival regular, and at this edition introduced Valentin Doni’s orchestrated version of one of Enescu’s most fascinating and challenging chamber pieces, the Sonata No. 3 for violin and piano (“Dans le Caractère Populaire Roumain”).The violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, whose appearances included as a soloist with the Moldova Philharmonic Orchestra under Adrian Petrescu.Catalina FilipDespite her vivid stage presence and the valiant efforts of Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the concept felt doomed from the start by the impossibility of balancing the forces; the orchestrated piano part kept distracting from Kopatchinskaja. But an experiment that didn’t work served to underscore the festival’s openness to exploring new facets of Enescu and his work.It was a sign of the respect the festival receives in musical circles that Gardner chose it as the occasion for his first public performance since officially taking the reins of the London Philharmonic. Their two programs were part of a deliberate emphasis on British orchestras in this festival edition as a post-Brexit statement of musical solidarity. Six of the seven London-based ensembles initially invited were able to work around the stringent quarantine protocols and perform in Bucharest.“It’s a beautiful requirement that the festival has for us to include a piece by Enescu,” Gardner said. The program framed the sonata orchestration with Michael Tippett’s Ritual Dances from “The Midsummer Marriage” and a colorful, high-contrast account of Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” The next evening, Gardner proved to be a natural storyteller with a thrilling and theatrically paced rendition of Sibelius’s Second Symphony.However much Enescu has been lionized here, aspects of his legacy continue to be reappraised or even rediscovered by Romanians. The pianist Angela Draghicescu garnered media interest around the country for introducing to the festival the long-forgotten Piano Trio No. 1, from 1897, which she performed with colleagues from the Berlin Philharmonic.Draghicescu gave the trio its belated American premiere in 2019 and has become an authority on the enigmatic history of this precocious, Brahms-besotted score, written by Enescu when he was 16 and first discovered as a student in Paris.“It’s still unknown,” she says, “and only now, after the U.S. premiere, has it started to gain an international reputation.”A surprising number of works also received their belated Romanian premieres. One of these was Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1920 opera “Die Tote Stadt,” performed by the Enescu Philharmonic in a concert version infused with loving detail by the conductor Frédéric Chaslin. In the opera’s final moments, the central character recognizes the futility of his desire to arrest time and loss. The score’s radiant resolution settled like a benediction across the vast space of the Sala Palatului, a former congress hall for the Romanian Communist Party whose exterior still bears the scars of bullets from the 1989 revolution.Constantinescu has guided the festival since shortly after that traumatizing transition, but, along with Jurowski, he has announced his intention to depart following this 25th edition. The sought-after Romanian conductor Cristian Macelaru has been rumored to succeed him. Or was it just coincidence that toward the end of the festival, the announcement came that Macelaru had committed to record Enescu’s complete orchestral oeuvre with the Orchestra de France for Deutsche Grammophon? More

“The biggest variables — box office sales and venue rentals — are moving in a good direction,” says the director of the hall, which opens its season Oct. 6.The pianos have been tuned. The crimson carpets have been cleaned. The crystal chandeliers have been dusted.After nearly 19 months without concerts, Carnegie Hall, the nation’s pre-eminent concert space, plans to reopen its doors to the public on Oct. 6.With the coronavirus still omnipresent, the reopening is a logistical feat, involving questions about air-ventilation systems, crowd control and hand-sanitizing stations.It’s also an emotional moment for Carnegie, which lost millions of dollars in ticket sales during the pandemic and at one point was forced to reduce its staff by nearly half. The hall is grappling with an anticipated budget deficit of up to $10 million and is planning a lighter-than-usual season of about 100 concerts (versus the usual 150) as it tries to gauge demand.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, inside hall’s archives.Michael George for The New York TimesClive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director since 2005, says Carnegie is ready for the challenge. The hall has added entrances, upgraded ventilation systems and increased the frequency of bathroom cleaning.“We have to keep adapting to whatever the situation is, not only to look after people as best we can, but also for people to feel as safe as they can,” Gillinson said. “It’s reality as well as perception. Both are equally important.”In an interview, Gillinson discussed the new season, which begins with the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the virtuoso Yuja Wang alongside works by Valerie Coleman, Iman Habibi, Bernstein and Beethoven.Gillinson also spoke about the lack of racial diversity in classical music and the return of the arts amid the pandemic. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Carnegie has been closed for the longest stretch in its history. Are you confident audiences will come back, especially given the continuing spread of the virus and the need for added safety protocols?Without doubt some people will be concerned. All I can say is the reaction we’ve had has been the opposite. It’s been that everybody is so thrilled that things are coming back to life again. When we opened the box office, beginning to start on the road back, we had people in tears because they were so excited about actually being able to buy tickets again. But at the same time, we feel we’ve got to look after the people who have still got concerns.During the height of the pandemic Carnegie was forced to make substantial cuts, including reducing its staff to 190, from 350. How are you planning the new season amid all the uncertainty?The biggest variables — box office sales and venue rentals — are moving in a good direction at the moment. But that doesn’t mean we count anything as done until we’ve completed the season. You have to be working incredibly hard all the time. You have to be responding to everything that’s happening every day because life just does change every day during Covid.What are you seeing so far in terms of ticket sales?The opening concerts look really strong and very positive. The others will continue to sell as we go along.We deliberately didn’t over-pack the fall. It’s much busier from the new year onward because we just wanted to make sure audiences had time to build up their confidence, and time to really get re-engaged with going out again. So it’s a very deliberate strategy.Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra will reopen the hall in the first of their seven Carnegie concerts this season.Chris LeeSince announcing the season earlier this year you’ve added a few concerts to the schedule, including a complete cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra that was supposed to happen last year. How did you decide what to revive?When we had to cancel because of Covid, I spoke to Yannick and said, “Look, I promise that we will bring this back in the future.” It was something that meant a huge amount to him. The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned some contemporary works to go alongside the cycle that would actually have some sort of reflection on the world we live in today and look at Beethoven through that light.The minute we were able to open and the governor gave everybody permission to open with full seating, the first thing I did was phone Yannick to say: “This is it, if there’s any way you can do it. I promised you we would bring this back. How about now?” They jumped at it.At the same time there are many artists whose concerts were canceled who you haven’t been able to reschedule. How are you dealing with that?We do feel an obligation to try and bring people back who we haven’t been able to bring back so far. So that’s going to take some time, because if you lose a year and a half of concerts, there’s a lot of concerts. Sometimes the world can move on as well and they’ll be doing other things and there’ll be other repertoire. But we are looking to do the best we can in terms of looking after the people we had to cancel.The Sphinx Virtuosi perform at Carnegie on Oct. 15.Stephanie BergerDo you worry the pandemic has hurt the careers of rising artists whose engagements at Carnegie or elsewhere were canceled?One of the things I’ve always felt about what we do is that the great artists will always come through and they’ll always succeed. They’ve got something to say that is really important to people. Something like this clearly will have changed plans and will have delayed very early-days careers. But the reality is, I think talent and great artistry are never lost. That never, ever goes away.What about smaller venues and less established artists, who suffered a great deal during the pandemic. Do you think they will make a comeback? Has the pandemic fundamentally changed which kinds of artists and groups can survive?Some of the most innovative, interesting, imaginative work that’s ever happened is going on in New York. It’s the most dynamic scene we’ve ever seen.They’re very entrepreneurial people. They’re very creative people. And they’ll find a way to survive. It’s not like all us large organizations where we have massive overhead, much of which we can’t change.The pandemic has made it very difficult for many ensembles to go on extensive global tours, with stops at Carnegie and other venues. How do you think the pandemic will change touring?You’ve got all the issues like climate change and so on. I think there are going to be a lot more question marks about orchestras at least asking themselves how much touring they should be doing. And I think what they do, they will want it to have greater significance than it had before.It’s not just a question of touring and saying, “I’ve appeared in this city and that city.” It’s: “What have I left behind? Is there is there a legacy or is this something important that came out of my having been there?”This season Carnegie will prominently feature Valery Gergiev, the Russian conductor and friend of Vladimir Putin, who will perform a series of concerts with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra. How do you respond to those who think he shouldn’t be given such an opportunity, given his silence on abuses in Russia?Why should artists be the only people in the world who are not allowed to have political opinions? My view is you only judge people on their artistry. If somebody was a racist or somebody said things that were clearly abusive of other races or other people in certain ways, that is completely different and that is unacceptable. But in terms of them being entitled to an opinion which happens to be a political opinion, they have every right as every other single member of society has.What do you make of the current debate around the idea that classical music, which has long been dominated by white, male composers, is racist, and that it has not adequately grappled with questions about representation and diversity?If you think of Western culture, literature, painting, music, the bulk of it was done by people who were white in one form or another. And it’s not invalidated. I always worry when people try and apply today’s values to the world of 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, because the fact is, what people were trying to do at that time was completely different and it was relevant for its time. We’ve got to be relevant for our time. Diversity is unbelievably important. That is central to the sort of society we must live in now. And that doesn’t invalidate the fact that there was great art created, and OK, a lot of it was created by white people, and some of it was created by people who were racists.Carnegie was one of the first institutions to impose a vaccine mandate for audiences. Did you meet any resistance?I’ve had a very, very small number of emails from people saying: “This is ridiculous. You’re being paranoid. It’s completely unnecessary.” But we know the world we live in has very, very different views on this. We can only have one view, which is, how do we look after people?How do you see the future of the arts in light of the pandemic?How people are likely to feel, nobody can judge that. We can’t tell. But I do think the arts will come roaring back.Why do people live in New York City? Why do the big companies want to be here? Why do the headquarters want to be here? Why is there all this tourism? Culture is the magnet that actually makes New York New York. More

The British singer-songwriter’s new album, “Colourgrade,” is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music.Some pop artists amplify familiar, universal feelings: the gentle moments spent in love, the torturous pain of heartbreak. But others require us to listen with different ears. They ask us to release control, to resist the desire to fully understand music — to linger in the experience of melody, feeling and sound, even if we can’t quite grasp its meaning.That is the crux of “Colourgrade,” the new album from the British singer-songwriter Tirzah. The 10-song collection is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music, but even prohibitive genre categories cannot capture its free-flowing depth.Tirzah has long had a knack for meditative, asymmetrical pop. She was classically trained at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, but today her practice is rooted in reserved, cutting experimentation. Along with the producer Mica Levi, a childhood friend and Oscar-nominated composer, Tirzah released the stunning “Devotion” in 2018. It’s a stripped-down but luminous album developed over the course of a decade, one that ruminates on romance and human connection.“Colourgrade,” its follow-up, is a little less legible — and that’s exactly the point. Recorded after the birth of Tirzah’s first child and shortly before the arrival of her second, the album engages themes of motherhood, birth, death and community. But rather than make a rosy album about parenting, the album revels in mood, intimacy and texture. There is abstraction here, but it never collapses into pure experimental expression. Tirzah is still precise, even if she’s purposefully unpolished and offbeat.The title track, which opens the album, plummets listeners into this world with immediate dissonance. Tirzah’s voice decays into jagged, vibrating distortion. “Keep your face straight Colourgrade,” it quivers, eventually trembling into focus. “Did I know, little did I know I’d feel like this/I wish, I wish I could see you again, you again.” Her voice shines like dapples of pale moonlight, and is especially arresting in moments of ambling melancholy. A swirl of eerie whistles envelops the production, and her chant of “I wish” leaves behind a sense of palpable longing.“Beating,” another elegantly coarse number, lies at the center of the album. Slow but steady drum kicks lurch over hissing, crackling whispers, and crepuscular synths bubble under the surface. It’s hard to believe this is a song about companionship and the tenderness of new life, but when Tirzah sings, “You got me/I got you/We made life/It’s beating” in the final verse, the clarity of emotion is piercing.Midnight melodies and sparse, repetitive instrumentation are at the core of “Colourgrade.” Tracks like “Hive Mind” and “Tectonic” rely on thumping kicks and rolling synths that build into a brooding, gritty trance. The call-and-response duet of “Hive Mind” gives the song a seesawing quality, and every lyric is delivered with a cool, melodic steadiness that allows emotion to command our attention.Tirzah delivers the songs on “Colourgrade” as small mysteries. Many of them are icy, minimalist sketches. And yet the album is rife with tender (but cryptic) lyrics. That incongruity is what makes “Colourgrade” all the more magnetic. Perhaps it is a reminder, particularly in our current moment, that leaning into uncertainty and the discomfort of the unknown can be freeing. It can force us to confront difficult feelings, to push against protocols — and unlock a world of openness and possibility.Tirzah“Colourgrade”(Domino) More

His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

The N.F.L. announced the three Southern California natives will share billing with Mary J. Blige and Eminem at Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles.The N.F.L. announced Thursday that five performers would share headlining duties at the Super Bowl, with a distinct nod to West Coast hip-hop given the game’s location at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Three Southern California natives and rap titans — Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar — will take the stage alongside Mary J. Blige and Eminem during the halftime show scheduled for Feb. 13, 2022. The game will air on NBC.“The opportunity to perform at the Super Bowl Halftime show, and to do it in my own backyard, will be one of the biggest thrills of my career,” Dr. Dre said in a statement.The halftime show for Super Bowl 56 will be the third produced by Roc Nation, the entertainment and sports company started by the music impresario Jay-Z, as the N.F.L. pushes to modernize the show and appeal to a more diverse audience. Jennifer Lopez and Shakira were dual headliners of the 2020 performance in Miami Gardens, Fla. The Canadian pop superstar the Weeknd performed at halftime of February’s Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., before a crowd limited by coronavirus pandemic restrictions. He reportedly spent $7 million of his own money on the production, in part to ensure that the spectacle would wow TV audiences.Organizers said the expected return of the Super Bowl’s usual capacity crowd at SoFi Stadium, the $5 billion venue near Los Angeles International Airport that opened in 2020, would restore energy to the festivities.“This year we are blowing the roof off the concept of collaboration,” said Adam Harter, the senior vice president of media, sports and entertainment at PepsiCo, which sponsors the show. “Along with the N.F.L. and Roc Nation, we continue to try and push the limits on what fans can expect during the most exciting 12 minutes in music.”The Super Bowl is typically the most watched broadcast of the year, despite ratings declining in five of the past six years, notably among the advertiser-coveted demographic of people aged between 18 and 49. In February, 96 million people watched the Super Bowl between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs, the game’s smallest audience in 15 years, despite the N.F.L.’s biggest star, quarterback Tom Brady, leading Tampa to victory. That decrease was in line with overall drops in viewership for sporting events held amid the pandemic.If advertiser interest is any indication, though, this season’s Super Bowl could mark a resurgence. NBC said earlier this month that it had nearly sold out of Super Bowl advertising spots, which cost a record $6.5 million for 30 seconds.Kevin Draper contributed reporting. More

With his band the Lost Planet Airmen, he infused older genres like Western swing and boogie-woogie with a freewheeling 1960s spirit and attracted a devoted following.George Frayne, who as the frontman for the band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen melded Western swing, jump blues, rockabilly and boogie-woogie with a freewheeling 1960s ethos to pave the way for generations of roots-rock, Americana and alt-country musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was 77.John Tichy, one of the band’s original members, who is now a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said the cause was esophageal cancer.Though the band lasted only a decade and had just one Top 10 hit, Mr. Frayne’s charisma and raucous onstage presence — as well as the Airmen’s genre-busting sound — made them a cult favorite in 1970s music meccas like the San Francisco area and Austin, Texas.Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen was not the only rock band exploring country music in the early 1970s. The Eagles, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Poco and others mined a similar vein and were more commercially successful. But fans, and especially other musicians, took to the Airmen’s raw authenticity, their craftsmanship and their exuberant love for the music they were making — or, in many cases, remaking.“He said, ‘We’re gonna reach back and get this great old music and infuse it with a ’60s and ’70s spirit,’” Ray Benson, the frontman for Asleep at the Wheel, one of the many bands inspired by Mr. Frayne, said in a phone interview. “He saw the craft and beauty of things America had left behind.”Mr. Frayne and his band were more comfortable onstage than in the recording studio. They often performed 200 or more shows a year, and they were widely considered one of the best live bands in America; their album “Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas” (1974), recorded at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, was once ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 albums of all time.“He was a comic-book character come to life,” Mr. Benson said of Mr. Frayne. “He looked the part of the wild man, chomping on a cigar and banging on a piano. But he was also an artist, who happened to use the band as a way to express a much bigger picture.”Mr. Frayne in performance with a later version of the Lost Planet Airmen in 2016.John Atashian/Getty ImagesGeorge William Frayne IV was born on July 19, 1944, in Boise, Idaho, where his father, George III, was stationed as a pilot during World War II. Soon afterward the family moved to Brooklyn, where his father and his mother, Katherine (Jones) Frayne, were both artists. The family later moved to Bay Shore on Long Island, near Jones Beach, where George worked summers as a lifeguard.Mr. Frayne’s first marriage, to Sara Rice, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Sue Casanova, and his stepdaughter, Sophia Casanova.Having learned to play boogie-woogie piano while at the University of Michigan, Mr. Frayne used his musical talent to make beer money, joining a series of bands hired to play frat-house parties. He soon fell in with a group of musicians, including Dr. Tichy, who played guitar, and who introduced Mr. Frayne to classic country, especially the Western swing of Bob Wills and the Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens.Both Mr. Frayne and Dr. Tichy stayed at Michigan for graduate school and continued to play in clubs around Ann Arbor. Although they offered throwback country to students otherwise keen on protest songs, they were a hit. They just needed a name.Mr. Frayne was a big fan of old westerns, especially weird ones like the 1935 serial “The Phantom Empire,” in which Gene Autry discovers an underground civilization. Something about sci-fi and retro country clicked for him. He took the stage name Commander Cody, after Commando Cody, the hero of two 1950s serials, and named his band after the 1951 movie “Lost Planet Airmen.”He received his master’s degree in sculpture and painting in 1968 and that fall began teaching at Wisconsin State College-Oshkosh, today the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. But he was restless; he flew back to Ann Arbor on weekends for gigs, and when Bill Kirchen, the lead guitarist for the Lost Planet Airmen, moved to Berkeley and encouraged the rest to follow, Mr. Frayne quit academia and headed west.The San Francisco scene was still in the thrall of acid rock, but the East Bay was more eclectic. Soon the band was opening for acts like the Grateful Dead and later Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper.The Lost Planet Airmen grew to eight core members, several of them sharing lead-singer duties; there would often be 20 or more others onstage, dancing, playing kazoo and even, at certain adults-only shows, stripping. Their music was bright and up-tempo, centered on Mr. Frayne, who sat — or just as often stood — at his piano, longhaired and shirtless, pounding beers and keys.A 1970 profile in Rolling Stone, a year before the band released its first album, called Commander Cody and His Lost Airmen “one of the very best unknown rock ‘n’ roll bands in America today.”At first the Lost Airmen’s rockin’ country didn’t really fit in anywhere — neither in the post-hippie Bay Area nor in Nashville, where they were booed off the stage at a 1973 concert, the crowd yelling “Get a haircut!”“We didn’t think of appealing to anybody,” Mr. Frayne told Rolling Stone. “We were just having a good time, picking and playing and making a few dollars on the side.”In 1971 the band released its first album, “Lost in the Ozone.” It spawned a surprise hit single, a cover of Charlie Ryan’s 1955 rockabilly song “Hot Rod Lincoln,” with Mr. Frayne speed-talking through the lyrics:They arrested me and they put me in jailAnd called my pappy to throw my bail.And he said, “Son, you’re gonna’ drive me to drinkin’If you don’t stop drivin’ that hot … rod … Lincoln!It was that song, and the band’s frequent trips to Austin, that allowed them room to find their place, nestling in among the seekers and weirdos piling into the city and building its music scene.“They were plowing new turf, even if they were doing it with heritage seeds,” the Austin journalist Joe Nick Patoski said in an interview.But the success of “Hot Rod Lincoln” haunted them, especially when they tried to reach too far beyond their fan base.“Their success got them pigeonholed as a novelty band, and so the suits at the record company were looking for the next ‘Hot Rod Lincoln,’” Mr. Patoski said.In 1974 they signed with Warner Bros. Records, but the relentless pressure to produce new music, and the band’s lackluster album sales, eventually broke them apart — a story documented in the 1976 book “Starmaking Machinery: The Odyssey of an Album,” by Geoffrey Stokes.“The only thing worse than selling out,” Mr. Frayne told Mr. Stokes, “is selling out and not getting bought.”After the band broke up in 1977, Mr. Frayne continued to perform with a variety of backup bands, always as Commander Cody. In 2009 he re-formed the Lost Planet Airmen, mostly with new members, and released an album, “Dopers, Drunks and Everyday Losers.”He also returned to art, making Pop Art portraits of musicians like Jerry Garcia and Sarah Vaughan — collected in a 2009 book, “Art, Music and Life” — and experimenting with video production.As a musician, he had one more minor hit, “Two Triple Cheese, Side Order of Fries,” in 1980. But it was the song’s video, directed by John Dea, that really stood out: A fast-paced, low-tech (by today’s standards) mash-up of 1950s lunch-counter culture and hot-rod mischief, it won an Emmy and is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. More

Kelefa Sanneh hopes to start some arguments with his new book, “Major Labels,” which chronicles the past 50 years of rock, hip-hop, country and other musical genres.Seventeen years ago, Kelefa Sanneh was doing what he likes best: poking at conventional wisdom.As a pop music critic for this newspaper, he wrote a piece against “rockism,” the longstanding critical bias that favored guitar-driven popular music written by its performers (Bruce Springsteen, U2) as more authentic and worthy than songs by production-heavy pop idols (Christina Aguilera, Usher). Sanneh argued for the possibility of “a fluid musical world where it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures.”Rockism was an insider’s concept at the time, bandied about among critics, but it became a household word, along with its antagonist, poptimism, a belief in not only expunging the guilt from those pleasures but investing deep thought in them.Sanneh had been trying to muddle things, but soon afterward, they got very simple again. Poptimism won. In a rout.“At the time, it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Sanneh is hoping to kick-start a few new disputes and revisit some older ones in his first book, “Major Labels,” a history of the past 50 years of popular music told through the stories of seven genres: rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music and pop. It is due out from Penguin Press on Tuesday.Kelefa Sanneh’s book “Major Labels” is out on Oct. 5.Since 2008, Sanneh has been on staff at The New Yorker, where he’s written about politics, boxing, comedy and sociology in addition to music. After years away from the critic’s beat, “the idea of diving back into music started to seem exciting,” he said. “And I realized I was still obsessed with it.”Browsing through Metropolis Vintage, a T-shirt shop just south of Manhattan’s Union Square, Sanneh approvingly noted the democratic mix of concert mementos. “One of the things I like about popular music is how it frustrates pretension,” he said, skimming through the hangers. “You have all these arguments, but they all end up on T-shirts next to each other on the rack. The arguments fade and someone is like: ‘Should I grab a Madonna shirt or maybe Bob Seger?’”Sanneh, tall and reedy at 45, was wearing a baseball hat with the phrase “Woo Ah!” across the front in pink — a keepsake from a concert by the German star Kim Petras, a current pillar of poptimism.Sanneh writes early in the book that “Major Labels” is “a defense of musical genres.” It’s popular now to praise people who can “slip between” genres or “transcend” them, he said. But to his ear, genres are not only inevitable but valuable.“Every community is defined by inclusion and exclusion,” he said. “And every musical community is in part a critique — implicit and often explicit — of other forms of music, other communities. You don’t get that tight-knit sense of being part of something without at least a little bit of pigheadedness.”His book ponders the historical divisions between R&B and hip-hop, the disco wars and the ensuing paths of dance music, the ways in which country music has hewed closer to the mainstream without losing its defining characteristics. He wanted to retrace how genres developed and solidified (and where they might remain ductile), and to recount the types of debates that he says don’t arise much anymore, like “whether Prince is a sellout, or whether Grand Funk Railroad is the future of rock n’ roll.”Sanneh describes a typical Gen X childhood of being introduced to popular music — Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Bob Marley — by peers, sometimes taped off the radio. (Sanneh said he’s a full-time streamer these days and no longer buys physical copies of music.) But it wasn’t until he discovered punk as a young teenager — the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols — that he felt a passion for it.“It really was linked to the idea of having opinions,” he says of the time when his fandom intensified. He had previously thought, “Here are the Beatles, everyone likes the Beatles and you’re listening to the Beatles. I didn’t realize you could say: ‘No, I’m turning this stuff off, and this stuff on; that’s bad, that’s good.’ That was almost more seductive to me than the music; the idea that you could make up your own mind about it.”Sanneh at Academy Records in New York’s East Village. In the 2000s, “it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesAs a student at Harvard, Sanneh worked in the punk department of the radio station WHRB, a position that required he pass a written examination. He still considers himself a punk at heart, a jarring claim for someone with his temperament and who writes about his mother chaperoning him at a Ramones concert when he was 14.It’s easy to imagine that he inherited his kindly but questioning spirit from his parents. His father, Lamin Sanneh, was born and raised in poverty in Gambia. Raised Muslim, as a teenager he converted to Christianity, which he discovered through his own studying. He went on to become a leading scholar of world religion who taught at Yale for 30 years.His son can remember him discussing various subjects at the family dinner table and becoming “impatient with pat explanations.” He was equally annoyed by simplistic Christian political positions and by knee-jerk dismissals of Christianity; and, after 9/11, by broad-stroke arguments that either lumped Islam together with Christianity or posited the faiths as polar-opposite rivals. Kelefa Sanneh’s mother, Sandra Sanneh, followed her own remarkable trajectory. White and raised in South Africa, she became a scholar of Zulu and other African languages, retiring from Yale in 2020 after her own three decades there.Kelefa Sanneh was born in Birmingham, England, and soon after moved to Accra, Ghana, where his father was teaching. Two years later, another job took the family to Aberdeen, Scotland, and when Sanneh was 5, the family moved to Massachusetts. He’s always been most comfortable and confident writing in a mode that’s “a bit more analytical, a little less hot-blooded,” he said, and tries to explain subjects as if coming to them from another world.“I always thought about it as related to being an immigrant,” he said.Growing up, Sanneh also recalls “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out: ‘What are they doing over there?’ And that immigrant’s sense of whenever someone says, ‘No, this is country music, they’re singing about the troops, this is not for you,’ saying, ‘Hold on a second, I’ll be the judge of that.’ So I’ve always thought of it as curiosity and maybe a bit of mischief.”“His basic stance is amused skepticism,” said Ben Ratliff, another former music critic for The Times who worked with Sanneh. “He can put on an extraordinarily dispassionate performance, in the best critical sense of that word.”Sanneh, who moved to the U.S. when he was 5, can remember, he said, “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesSanneh comes across as more of a complicator than a contrarian, not reflexively antagonistic but suspicious of unanimity. “Fundamentally I like when people disagree about stuff,” he said. “Anytime there’s a situation in which people claim there can be no disagreement, I always get interested.” He has brought that interest to bear in nuanced pieces about affirmative action and antiracism, among other subjects.Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker, has known Sanneh for more than 20 years, and read drafts of “Major Labels” for him. Finder also met Sanneh’s father on several occasions before his death in 2019 and finds similarities in how father and son approach their fields.Lamin Sanneh, Finder said, “devoted a lot of energy to ecumenism; he wanted a world in which people can live together in a community without everyone being the same. In a cultural zone, K’s instincts are similar.” (Those who know Kelefa Sanneh call him K.)In the realm of music, Sanneh says, many listeners grow harder to please as they get older. He’s had the opposite experience, his interrogation of different genres opening him up to their various pleasures.“I got less judgmental over the years, which is probably a good thing for a music listener but maybe not such a good thing for a music critic,” he says. “I found it surprisingly more and more difficult to find stuff that I really, really hated.” More

The court set a hearing for Nov. 12 to decide whether to terminate altogether the conservatorship that has dominated Britney Spears’s life for 13 years.The hearing was set after Judge Brenda Penny suspended Ms. Spears’s father, James P. Spears, as her conservator. A lawyer for Ms. Spears, Mathew S. Rosengart, had sought Mr. Spears’s immediate suspension, and asked for the next hearing to discuss terminating the conservatorship.Mr. Rosengart told the court he would be submitting a termination plan so there could be an orderly transition. “My client wants, my client needs, my client deserves an orderly transition,” he said.A lawyer for Mr. Spears, Vivian Lee Thoreen, had sought to terminate the conservatorship right away instead of suspending Mr. Spears, while Mr. Rosengart had asked the judge to wait so he could further investigate Mr. Spears’s conduct.It is unclear whether Ms. Spears will appear at the termination hearing.The Nov. 12 hearing is also expected to resolve any formalities around Mr. Spears’s suspension. Ms. Thoreen had asked questions about the possibility of an appeal.The judge set a second hearing date for Dec. 8 to resolve outstanding financial matters, including over a million dollars in legal fees billed to the estate. More