Music

The company plans to perform Verdi’s Requiem to mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks, an event that will also be broadcast live on PBS.The Metropolitan Opera has not held a performance in its cavernous theater since March 11, 2020. The following day, it was closed because of the pandemic and has stayed that way for nearly a year and a half.But the company announced on Friday that it would finally return indoors on Sept. 11, with a performance of Verdi’s Requiem to mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks. The event will also be broadcast live on PBS, hosted by the ballet star Misty Copeland.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will conduct the company’s orchestra and chorus, the soprano Ailyn Pérez, the mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, the tenor Matthew Polenzani and the bass-baritone Eric Owens. Five hundred free tickets will be made available to the families of victims of the attacks; the remaining tickets will be $25. Audience members will have to have proof of vaccination status and wear masks.The concert will come before the previously announced opening night of the Met’s season, on Sept. 27: the company premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”But a significant obstacle remains: The company has been in tense negotiations with the union representing its orchestra players, and has yet to announce an agreement. In recent months, the Met did strike deals with the unions representing its stagehands and its chorus, soloists, dancers, actors and stage managers. The company has been seeking to cut the pay of the musicians in its orchestra, who went unpaid for nearly a year after the opera closed. More

The British rapper doesn’t dress or sound like his peers — but that’s just how he likes it.LONDON — Like in every other aspect of his life, Jimothy dresses intuitively.On a recent afternoon at Camden Market in North London, the 22-year-old rapper wore a crisp button-down under a Ralph Lauren puffer jacket, boot-cut jeans and a white messenger bag.“I got my mum to tailor them,” he said, gesturing at the jeans.Browsing the stalls, he considered a rack of fake Gucci belts. “I’m buying fakes now,” he said. “Going broke to look rich is very embarrassing.”When Jimothy (real name Timothy Gonzalez) burst onto the London music scene in 2017 with his viral track “Getting Busy,” his nonconformist dress sense was only part of the reason people kept asking him if “Jimothy” was a comedy bit.“Getting Busy” is an unlikely ode to scheduling set over lo-fi beats, with Jimothy — then performing with the last name “Lacoste” as a nod to his preppy dress sense — rapping in his now-signature deadpan, singsong style. In the accompanying video, he dances atop a bus shelter, before hitching a ride on the outside of a London train.“Everyone needs to know,” he said, swinging his legs over the edge of a Camden canal, “is it a joke, is it a joke?” The question used to bother Jimothy when he was younger and “mad egotistic,” he said. Today, although he emphasizes “it’s me, truly,” the rapper accepts some people just won’t get his thing.“Have you ever heard anything like his music, specifically lyrically, ever?” said Poundland Bandit, the anonymous London-based meme-maker who is a fan. “It’s the purest form of someone genuinely being themselves and having the most fun possible with whatever they create, with no boundaries or fear of criticism.”There is also a vulnerability to Jimothy’s music that evokes the confessional style of other British artists like Mike Skinner (now a collaborator) and the playfulness of Dean Blunt. He either rejects the tropes of rap entirely or subverts them playfully. While other rappers brag about sex, drugs and expensive cars, Jimothy raps about his ambition to one day earn enough money to shop at upmarket supermarkets and listening to his mother’s advice.Jimothy shops with friends. His jeans were tailored by his mother. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesJimothy has come to embrace being unconventional. He grew up in public housing in the affluent London area of Primrose Hill, not far from Camden Market, and was raised by his Spanish mother, whom he still lives with. His father, who is of Caribbean heritage but was born in Britain, was not around much.Street-savvy and smart, Jimothy enjoyed unusual freedom as a child. “When I was 12,” he said, “I felt like a big man.” He would explore London on foot, walking to other boroughs up to four miles away. He would also meet and befriend older children online. “I’d message them on Facebook and say, ‘Yo, I like what you do, let’s chill,’” he said.This precociousness is evident to this day. Browsing the market stalls, Jimothy bartered good-naturedly with the sellers, purchasing a burgundy sweater vest and a counterfeit TikTok sweater. He was charming and thoughtful company, if a little inclined toward sermonizing, whether on the importance of cultivating “severe happiness,” eating healthily or not overthinking things.Jimothy has dyslexia and dyscalculia, which affects his ability to understand numbers — he wears a digital watch because he struggles to read a clock face — and went to a middle school for children with special educational needs.There, he was exempt from the pressure to conform to the social vagaries of his peers, he said, but he was also understimulated and overlooked by teachers.Instead, he taught himself what he needed to know via YouTube. He learned to dance by watching videos of body-poppers and hip-hop, which led to his jerky-fluid dance style. “That was my school,” he said. “Oh, my gosh. I learned more on YouTube than anything. Cooking, how to make friends, how to be confident, how to talk to girls, how to kiss. Everything.”Jimothy’s lifelong fluency in digital culture manifests itself as a hypersensitivity toward his image and a hatred of visual cliché. When he waves a wad of cash in the video for “Make Money,” he does so because he knows that “with the way I’m dressed,” in a black turtleneck and gold rimmed glasses, “it looks interesting,” he said. But if he’s wearing baggy jeans and a chain, “I’m not flexing no cash, because I don’t look different,” he said.“I literally just wear what I like,” Jimothy said of his dress sense.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“It’s called anti-drip. When you’re doing anti-fashion, anti-clothes,” he said of his new counterfeit TikTok sweater. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesAfter leaving school at 16, Jimothy considered becoming a massage therapist. He posted his first two tracks, “T.I.M.M.Y.” and “Getting Busy,” online in 2016 and 2017. He’d only wanted to make music to “play at house parties,” he said. His sister encouraged him to take it seriously.Following the success of “Getting Busy,” in 2018 Jimothy signed to Black Butter Records, the Sony imprint, although he subsequently parted ways with the label. His fans range in age from millennials to Gen Z teens, but they all share one thing: “They relate to me,” Jimothy said. “I think they relate to me more than they like my music.”As his profile has grown, his videos have become more high-concept and slick. Last year, he released his well-reviewed debut album “The Safeway” and he has a tour of midsize British venues planned for the coming months. He’s modeled for Acne Studios and Ralph Lauren, and his bedroom in his mother’s flat is full of gifted swag from fashion labels.Jimothy recently branched into house music and now will use other musician’s beats, something he formerly refused to do. But he maintains that he has kept his bedroom pop ethos, uploading videos to an anonymous YouTube channel, while holding on to control over all parts of his music production.He refuses to write with external songwriters, apart from his friend Joss Ryan, a writer and producer who first worked with Jimothy on his debut album. “His approach to making music is unique,” Ryan said, “because he was, and still is, very self-sufficient.”“I am myself,” Jimothy said. “I try my best, anyway. It’s hard not to be yourself.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesJimothy defends his uncompromising approach. “If I get in the studio with some random songwriter that some label has put me on, it’s not going to work,” he said, “because they don’t know my life.”His latest challenge in resisting the pressure to conform, he said, is his fans, and their opinions on his music.“You’re going to listen to them and think, maybe they’re right,” he said. Sitting by the canal, tourists thronged the footpath behind, and he strained to be heard over the melee. “But as soon as you get into that mind-set,” he said, suddenly animated, the music you’re making changes, and “you’re no longer making it for yourself.”Jimothy paused. “Obviously, they are your customers,” he said, of his fans. “Customer is always right. But is this a business I’m doing? Because I don’t think it is.”After all, “business and feelings and emotions don’t work,” he said. “I’m not doing formula music. I’m doing feeling music.” More

Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

The Afghanistan National Institute of Music became a symbol of the country’s changing identity.For more than a decade, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music has stood as a symbol of the country’s changing identity. The school trained hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, in artistic traditions that were once forbidden by the Taliban. It formed an all-female orchestra that performed widely in Afghanistan and abroad.But in recent days, as the Taliban have been consolidating control over Afghanistan again, the school’s future has come into doubt.In interviews, several students and teachers said they feared the Taliban, who have a history of attacking the school’s leaders, would seek to punish people affiliated with the school as well as their families. Some said they worried the school will be shut down and they will not be allowed to play again. Several female students said they had been staying inside their homes since the capital was seized on Sunday“It’s a nightmare,” Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, said in a telephone interview from Melbourne, Australia, where he arrived last month for medical treatment.The Taliban banned most forms of music when they previously ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001. This time, they have promised a more tolerant approach, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women will be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”But the Taliban’s history of violence toward artists and its general intolerance for music without religious meaning has sowed doubts among many performers.“My concern is that the people of Afghanistan will be deprived of their music,” Mr. Sarmast said. “There will be an attempt to silence the nation.”In 2010, Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar who was trained in Australia and plays trumpet and piano, opened the school, which has more than 400 students and staff members, with the support of the American-backed government. It was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West.The school’s musicians were invited to perform on many of the world’s most renowned stages, including Carnegie Hall. They played Western classical music as well as traditional Afghan music and instruments, like the rubab, which resembles the lute and is one of the national instruments of Afghanistan.The school placed special emphasis on supporting young women, who make up a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, founded in 2015, earned wide acclaim. Many were the first women in their families to receive formal training. In a symbol of its modern ways, head scarves for girls at the school’s campus in Kabul were optional.The school’s habit of challenging tradition made it a target. In 2014, Mr. Sarmast was injured by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play. The Taliban tried to attack the school again in the years that followed, but their attempts were thwarted, Mr. Sarmast said.Now, female students say they are concerned about a return to a repressive past, when the Taliban eliminated schooling for girls and barred women from leaving home without male guardians.Several female students — who were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation — said that it felt like their dreams to become professional musicians could disintegrate. They worried they might not be able to play music again in their lives, even as a hobby.In recent weeks, as the Taliban swept through the country, the school’s network of overseas supporters tried to help by raising money to improve security on campus, including by installing an armed gate and walls.But it’s now unclear if the school will even be permitted to operate under the Taliban. It is also increasingly difficult for citizens of Afghanistan to leave the country. Airport entrances have been chaotic and often impassable scenes for days, even for people with travel documentation. The Taliban control the streets, and though they say they are breaking up crowds at the airport to keep order, there are widespread reports that they are turning people away by force if they try to leave the country.The State Department said in a statement that it was working to get American citizens, as well as locally employed staff and vulnerable Afghans, out of the country, though crowding at the airport had made it more difficult. The department said it was prioritizing Afghan women and girls, human rights defenders and journalists, among others.“This effort is of utmost importance to the U.S. government,” the statement said.In the 1990s, the Taliban permitted religious singing but banned other forms of music because they were seen as distractions to Islamic studies and could encourage impure behavior. Taliban officials destroyed instruments and smashed cassette tapes.Understand the Taliban Takeover in AfghanistanCard 1 of 5Who are the Taliban? More

He released his own experiments with sound under the name Pita, and also ran the influential label Editions Mego.It was 1997, and Peter Rehberg and two collaborators had booked a tour of jazz and rock clubs, places that had probably seen their share of experimentation. The people who came to the shows, though, weren’t prepared for what the trio unveiled.“There were some very interesting, sort of disturbed looks on their faces, because we set up with just three laptops in a row and just jammed out,” Mr. Rehberg recalled on a 2019 episode of the podcast “Noisextra.” “And everyone is going: ‘You can’t do that. That’s not music.’ And we’re going: ‘Yeah, fair enough; that’s not music. Did we say it was music?’”Synthesizers and other bedrocks of electronic music had been around forever, but at the time not many people viewed the laptop as a performance instrument.“We never thought of it as being a radical statement,” Mr. Rehberg said. “It was just like, ‘Oh, yeah; let’s do it this way.’”That was just one moment in Mr. Rehberg’s decades-long exploration of sound, both as an artist who often recorded under the name Pita and as head of Editions Mego, a label he founded after being a central part of an earlier label, Mego. He was an important figure in the world of experimental music, though his work — some early recordings were made from sounds emitted by a refrigerator — often defied even that label.Mr. Rehberg died on July 22 in Berlin. He was 53.His former partner, Isabelle Piechaczyk, said the cause was a heart attack.In addition to his solo work, Mr. Rehberg collaborated constantly, both with other sound experimentalists and with choreographers and makers of theater. And his label provided a platform for a wide range of artists who in the digital age have been pushing sound composition in all sorts of directions.“I followed Pita’s work as a musician and label owner for more than three decades, and he always defied expectations,” Peter Margasak, a music journalist and programmer, said by email. “He was the first person who made the laptop seem like a genuine tool for musical improvisation for me, manipulating a computer in real time with precision and voluminous possibility. His stewardship of Editions Mego revealed his eternal curiosity and openness, evolving aesthetically and geographically without surrendering an identity rooted in experimentation and innovation.”Mr. Rehberg was born on June 29, 1968, in London to Alexander and Barbara (Allen) Rehberg. As a youth he accumulated a vast record collection and was interested in new sounds of all sorts. In a tribute on the music and cultural website The Quietus, John Eden, who was a year behind him at Verulam, a secondary school for boys, and became a friend, recalled a moment when they both worked at a Tesco grocery.He drew a scolding, Mr. Eden wrote, “when it emerged that he had spent about an hour dropping Marmite jars on the concrete floor of the storeroom.”“He liked how they sounded,” Mr. Eden explained.Mr. Rehberg performing as part of the duo KTL, with Stephen O’Malley, at the Knockdown Center in Queens in 2013.Brian Harkin for The New York TimesBy his early 20s he was living in Vienna, working as a D.J. and immersed in the experimental scene there. Ramon Bauer, Andreas Pieper and Peter Meininger had created the Mego label, and its first release, in 1995, was “Fridge Trax,” a Bauer/Pieper/Rehberg collaboration built on refrigerator noise. In 1996 Mego issued Pita’s first release, “Seven Tons for Free.”Mego’s founders made him part of the label’s management team at a vibrant time for the label, and for experimentalism.“Electronic music is being flocked to by young composers who are doing to it something like what punk bands did to rock ’n’ roll in the mid-70s,” Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times in 2000, when Mr. Rehberg performed at the Beer and Sausage Festival in Brooklyn, “and Mego is the equivalent of an aesthetic-structuring punk label like Stiff,” the label that released early recordings by Elvis Costello, Devo and others.Mr. Rehberg continued to make solo recordings as Pita, releasing three more albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “Get Out,” “Get Down” and “Get Off.” Writing in The Chicago Reader in 2003, Mr. Margasak, who now lives in Berlin, described “Get Down” this way:“Sound files collide, flow and overlap, as disfigured melodic shapes, tangled-up beats and penetrating tones explode in a furious barrage. The music is often amorphous, but both the changes the synthetic patterns undergo and the order in which the sounds follow one another create some carefully considered surprises.”Mego went out of business in 2005, but Mr. Rehberg revived it soon after as Editions Mego. He went on to release work by scores of artists, sometimes forming sublabels devoted to particular strains or interests.“A Mego record will necessarily be adventurous,” Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote in The Guardian in 2015, “whether it’s showcasing the glitch aesthetic of Fennesz, droning noise from Stephen O’Malley and others, or outsider guitar work from Bill Orcutt or Jim O’Rourke.”Mr. Rehberg, who for the past year had lived in both Berlin and Vienna, is survived by his father; a brother, Michael; his partner, Laura Siegmund; and a daughter from his relationship with Ms. Piechaczyk, Natasha Rehberg. More

The country artist, 80, is releasing her first secular recording in about a decade. Her husband, Marty Stuart, calls her “the ultimate outlaw” for doing things her way.What’s the meaning of country music?“I’ve always believed it’s the cry of the heart,” the 80-year-old singer and songwriter Connie Smith said on a recent video call from her Nashville office, decorated in the distinctive palette she wears onstage. Framed by black walls and purple tufted furniture, she explained, “It’s not necessarily that I’ve lived the song, but that I understand living it. I lived enough to know the heartache and the joy.”Since Smith’s breakthrough hit “Once a Day” topped the Billboard country chart for eight weeks in 1964, she’s navigated four marriages, five children, 53 studio albums and numerous record labels. Partly because of a period of semiretirement in the 1980s, she’s not necessarily a household name, but her contralto singing is regularly compared to Patsy Cline’s for its might and emotional resonance. Smith similarly conveys a distinct sense that vulnerability does not equate to weakness.“She might sing a sad song but she’s never sounded like a victim,” the country singer Lee Ann Womack, a longtime fan, said in an interview. “She’s always sounded like she could kick your ass.”On Friday, Smith will release album 54, “The Cry of the Heart,” her debut for the independent label Fat Possum and first secular recording in about a decade, after intermittent forays into gospel. While country music is no stranger to a comeback, since the 1990s many of the genre’s figureheads have been resuscitated by studio wizards and the enthusiasm of younger generations. But “The Cry of the Heart” takes a different path, where resurgence doesn’t mean reinvention: It’s produced by the country musician Marty Stuart, 63, whom Smith married in 1997. The album’s tender piano chords, steel guitars and lush analog quality recall Smith’s ’60s era recordings, a template known as the “Connie Smith Sound.”“Connie is the ultimate outlaw,” Stuart said in an interview. “Most people’s definition is get drunk, get crazy, act foolish. Her version is stick to your guns. Be who you are at any cost.”Smith’s breakthrough hit “Once a Day” topped the Billboard country chart for eight weeks in 1964.Andrew Putler/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSmith’s fierce individualism sprouted from a tough foundation. “I was born a fighter because I was born into an alcoholic family,” she said. Raised in Southern Ohio by her mother, Wilma Lily, and stepfather, Thomas Clark, Smith came of age among 14 siblings and stepsiblings. Her stepfather played mandolin at square dances and her three sisters sang.“I tried to sing with them but he’d run me out because I was messing it up when I was trying to learn harmony,” she said. The family would tune its battery-powered radio to broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry, and Smith became enamored with the music of Kitty Wells and the Louvin Brothers.Smith made her stage debut during her senior year of high school at a local square dance, where she earned $3 for performing a cover of the pop standard “My Happiness.” A few years later, in August 1963, she entered a talent contest at Frontier Ranch, a bygone country music park near Columbus, Ohio, and won with a spirited rendition of Jean Shepard’s “I Thought of You.” She was awarded five silver dollars and a slot at the Grand Ole Opry opening for the singer and songwriter Bill Anderson. With his help, Smith landed a recording contract with Chet Atkins at RCA Victor in June the following year. She tracked her debut 45, “Once a Day” backed with “The Threshold,” both written by Anderson, on July 16 at the label’s famed Studio B.Its immediate success was dizzying. “I’d have somebody pulling me on one arm, and somebody else pulling me on the other arm,” Smith said of a D.J. convention she attended amid the sudden burst of fame. The setting was new to her and a bit stressful, but while bouncing between meetings she saw a man coming up the hall. “Before I could almost recognize who it was, he was singing” — she lowered her voice in a countrified croon — ‘Once a daaay/All day looong.’” It was George Jones. Soon, another great, Loretta Lynn, was offering her advice, woman to woman.“Connie is the ultimate outlaw,” Marty Stuart said. “Most people’s definition is get drunk, get crazy, act foolish. Her version is stick to your guns. Be who you are at any cost.”Kristine Potter for The New York Times“She told me who to trust and who not to trust, where to go and where not to go,” Smith recalled.As the years went by, Smith repaid the favor and served as a beacon for a younger generation of women in the industry. “She’s one of those artists that’s always been great,” the country singer Tanya Tucker said in an interview. “She never goes out of style.”Smith said the inspiration for “The Cry of the Heart” arrived when she and Stuart heard “I Just Don’t Believe Me Anymore,” a new song written by Smith’s longtime collaborator Dallas Frazier, famous for country hits like “Elvira” and “All I Have to Offer You (Is Me).” “It’s one of those hillbilly songs I love,” Smith said. “I told Marty, ‘I have to record this.’”Hargus Robbins, an accomplished session pianist known as Pig who played on Smith’s debut single, the new album and countless sessions in between, said Smith comes to the studio well prepared. “She knows her songs when she comes in,” he said. “She doesn’t have to fumble over the melody or how she wants to phrase them.” Having recorded with Cline, he said he understands firsthand the comparisons between the two artists. “They’re both strong-willed people,” he added. “They know what they want and they expect to get it.”The new album’s opening ballad, “A Million and One,” recalls a classic Smith torch song, with the singer detailing the number of teardrops she’s cried over an imaginary lover (“A million and one tears/A million and two”). Smith and Stuart co-wrote “Here Comes My Baby Back Again,” which blends Smith’s sensibility with her husband’s love of rock ’n’ roll, on a tour bus. The closer, Merle Haggard’s “Jesus, Take a Hold,” is a song Smith first recorded in the early ’70s. This time, it’s stripped back to spotlight Smith’s impassioned voice.“It’s just as relevant today as it was back then, if not more so,” she said.The album’s pending release is energizing for Smith, but she almost didn’t live to see it. On a Sunday night in February, Stuart rushed her to the emergency room near their home in Hendersonville, Tenn., and Smith was diagnosed with Covid-19. She had sepsis, and pneumonia in each lung. The couple was terrified, but Smith’s fighting instinct kicked in.“The doctor stuck his head in the door and said, ‘If your heart stops, do you want to be resuscitated?’” Smith said. “I said, ‘Absolutely. I will not be a Covid statistic. That’s not the way I want to go out.’”To illustrate her doggedness, she recalled one of her first jobs: working in her high school’s office. She said her peers wanted her to bend the rules, but she wasn’t amenable. “It’s just the way I’ve always felt in my life,” she said. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I also tried to do my best to do what’s right.” More

A concert in the morning, then a rehearsal in the afternoon. Bringing your violin outside to practice under the trees, and studying scores before bed.

Summer is a time of exploration and self-discovery for all kinds of young people. But for budding musicians, band and orchestra camp can be especially transformative.

It’s their first full immersion in their instrument; an opportunity to meet others who love Beethoven, Barber and bowing technique as much as they do; and a taste of what life as a player might actually be like.

Here is a glimpse of the 11- to 15-year-old campers this summer in the intermediate division at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Northern Michigan, learning about Mozart and themselves.

Their schedule includes both regular camp activities (like capture the flag and cleaning the bunk) and, well, less regular ones, like chatting with fellow eighth graders about phrasing in a Mendelssohn quartet.

This is Anika Patel’s sixth summer at Interlochen. “People are really, really serious about their music here, which I really like.”

“Living with the people you play with is a different experience,” Trinity Williamson, who plays violin, said.

“There’s a lot of playful competitiveness.”

Anthony McGill, the principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, credits Interlochen with showing him what being a musician could be like. “This was the first time I had that level of performances every week, that whole sense of what a regular schedule would be,” he recalled.

“I was like a professional musician, but I was 11.”

Román Berris is from Venezuela and took up the oboe when he was 5. “The instrument was really big for me.”

He was playing first oboe in a recent concert when the conductor told him to stand up after a solo. “All my friends were in the audience, and the ones playing with me, they were clapping for me,” he said.

“I just met them like five days before, and we were so close.”

As the intermediate orchestra’s concertmaster, Tai Caputo got to conduct the Interlochen theme song, played after every concert. After being isolated for a year and a half it was even more special.

“Everyone knew that our time with each other to make music is just really precious.”

Diamond Ramos played trombone in an ensemble. After six hours of class each day, she also enjoyed making s’mores and going boating.

Chloe Wyruch is a third-generation camper. “If you’re in your school band, some people’s parents might be making them do it,” she said. “But at Interlochen, everybody is super excited and into it.”

Looking back, McGill from the New York Philharmonic said, camp “was the first time I was away from home, and it was eight weeks, so I was homesick, but I was able to make serious lifelong friends.”

Liszt’s “Les Préludes” always closes out the summer. And by then, he said, “everyone is crying.” More

The British documentarian Nick Broomfield tries, again, to solve the killing of Biggie Smalls.In “Last Man Standing,” subtitled “Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac,” the British documentarian Nick Broomfield tries to tie up loose ends from his “Biggie and Tupac” (2002). That movie presented an unproven conspiracy theory that the rap mogul Marion Knight, widely known as Suge, was involved, along with corrupt police officers, in the 1997 shooting death of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, in Los Angeles, and the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. (Broomfield appears to tacitly roll back that claim in the new film, which gives a different emphasis to the events surrounding Shakur’s death.)The first doc’s dubious evidence was questioned, and Knight has long denied any involvement in the killings. But the idea behind “Last Man Standing,” Broomfield explains, is that with Knight now serving a 28-year prison sentence, people are more open to talking. Much of “Last Man Standing” plays like outtakes. There’s some kick in hearing that Knight apparently kept piranhas and fed them bloodworms, or in seeing footage of a pre-stardom, 17-year-old Shakur, the son of a Black Panther, discussing how the rich and the poor should change places every week.But the new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects. His trademark is appearing on camera and demanding answers with an obnoxious Fleet Street persistence. By contrast, the talking heads and blank backgrounds here are pretty dull, although it is amusing when Pam Brooks (returning from Broomfield’s “Tales of the Grim Sleeper”) insists to a wary party on the phone that the director can’t be an ex-cop because he’s English. “Last Man Standing” is backloaded; its efforts to counter an alternative theory of the case come mainly toward the end.Last Man StandingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More