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      The Fate of the Met Opera’s Fall Season Lies in Its Orchestra Pit

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      The company has reached deals with the unions representing its chorus and stagehands. Now, to reopen in September, it needs to make a deal with its musicians.When the Metropolitan Opera’s stagehands finally returned to work last week after an agonizingly long furlough that was followed by a seven-month lockout as they negotiated a new contract with pay cuts, they found a time-capsule backstage.The wings were crammed with the mammoth sets of the operas that were in rotation when the pandemic forced the Met to abruptly close its doors on March 12, 2020: “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Werther,” and “La Cenerentola,” which had been scheduled to open that night. All had to be carted away and placed in storage so the company could begin preparing to reopen in September after the prolonged shutdown.The stagehands returned after reaching a deal in a dramatic all-night bargaining session earlier this month in List Hall, the small auditorium where the Opera Quiz is held during the Met’s Saturday matinee radio broadcasts. Management and representatives of the stagehands’ union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees — all of whom were required to be vaccinated to attend negotiating sessions — talked through the night, capping the deal with a 7 a.m. handshake.“We were coming down to the wire,” said James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local One. “If talks had dragged on any longer it may have been impossible to prepare the opera house for a September opening.”James J. Claffey Jr., president of Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, outside Lincoln Center in May.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe deal with the stage hands, which followed one that was struck in May with the union representing the Met’s chorus, soloists, dancers, actors and stage managers, increases the likelihood that the Met will be able to reopen on schedule after one of the most trying periods in its history. But a significant obstacle remains: The company has yet to reach a deal on the pay cuts it is seeking from the musicians in its orchestra, who went unpaid for nearly a year after the company closed.“The Met has a simple decision to make,” Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which started negotiating with the opera company more than three months ago, said in a statement. “Do they want to continue to have a world-class orchestra? If so, they will need to invest accordingly.”The Met, which said that it lost $150 million in earned revenue during the pandemic, and is concerned that it could be some time before its box office revenues return to prepandemic levels, has said that it needs to cut the pay of its workers in order to survive. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, initially sought to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, which the company said would effectively cut take-home pay by around 20 percent. (Last week, the Met learned that it would receive $10 million from the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, an expected boost from the federal government that has been delayed by bureaucratic mishaps.)In the stagehands’ absence, the opera house fell into some disrepair. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe first of the Met’s three major unions to reach an agreement on a new contract was the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents chorus members, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others. The salary cuts fell far short of the management proposal — under the agreement most types of employees will initially see 3.7 percent cuts to their pay — but the deal saves a significant amount of money by moving members to the union’s health insurance plan and reducing the size of the full-time regular chorus..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The details of the agreement with Local One — including how long and lasting the pay cuts will be, and whether there will be changes to work rules or other cost savings — will not be released until July 18, when the union’s members vote on whether to ratify it.In the stagehands’ absence, the opera house fell into some disrepair. Some wheels on the wagons that haul sets and scenery had gone flat. The hydraulics system was in serious need of maintenance. At one point during the shutdown, two scenic backdrops fell to the ground.The Occupational Safety and Health Administration received notice that the backdrops had fallen, as well as a report of mold at the base of the orchestra pit, according to a letter from the agency to the Met. The Met said it had responded to the government inquiry and that the case had been closed; it denied that there had been mold in the orchestra pit.The company typically spends its summer preparing for the new season, including by holding technical rehearsals of new productions, adding to the pressure to reach a deal with the stage hands.But the successful negotiations did not entirely stave off delay and cancellation. Because the stagehands are starting work later than normal, the Met’s technical rehearsals must be moved from the beginning of August to the end of the month; as a result, the Met has decided to cancel one of its fall season operas, “Iphigénie en Tauride” which was supposed to run from Sept. 29 through Oct. 15, the company said. The season is scheduled to open on Sept. 27 with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time the Met is mounting an opera by a Black composer.The orchestra pit at the Met during the pandemic shutdown.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe Met said in a statement, “We’re pleased that our stagehands will now be immediately returning to work and that we have a clearer path to opening our season on schedule in September.”The deal reached with the American Guild of Musical Artists is likely to set the pattern for the amount of cost savings with other unions. Part of the guild’s deal included a provision that if the other unions struck deals that save the Met less money, proportionally, than in the guild’s contract, the guild will recoup the money back. That means the Met’s negotiators will feel limited in how much they can offer the other unions.Still, not all guild members are happy with the deal. Soloists, who will see their pay cut by a significantly higher percentage, largely voted against the plan, but their opposition was not enough to forestall ratification.While the pressure was on the stagehands to return to work as soon as possible, the musicians have more breathing room. At the core of these negotiations is a battle to maintain the work rules that musicians have fought for over decades. The relationship between the company and the union members was tested during the pandemic, when players went without pay for nearly a year and some were forced to move out of the New York City area to save money or to contemplate selling their prized instruments.If the Met, which works with 15 unions, can attain agreements with the three major locals, it will have a clear path to reopening on schedule, but there will likely still be more negotiating to be done. The unions that represent scenic artists and box office staff also have contracts up for negotiation.Carl Mulert, the national business agent for Local 829 of United Scenic Artists, said that the negotiations will start out from a place of tension after the Met outsourced some of the union members’ work overseas and across the country as a result of the stagehand lockout.“The Met has so alienated people and so angered the people who have dedicated their lives to this organization that it’s going to be even harder to make a deal,” he said. “The good will we might have had eight months ago is gone.” More

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      A 1970 Live Album Offers a New Perspective on Roy Brooks’s Jazz

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      “Understanding,” recorded 35 years before the drummer’s death, captures him at a pivotal moment after a series of albums with Yusef Lateef.In 1991, as part of its Magic Music Days initiative, Disneyland hosted the International Musical Saw Festival. Fifty people who played the instrument — the actual tool, held between one’s knees and stroked with a violin bow — descended on Anaheim, Calif., to compete in different genres. Roy Brooks, a drummer from Detroit, took home third place in the pop/jazz category.Two decades earlier, while touring Europe with Charles Mingus’s band, Brooks received a more prestigious honor: a regular feature called “Blues for Roy’s Saw,” where the drummer would step away from his kit and solo on his side instrument. (Instead of a bow, Brooks used a mallet.)Brooks, who died in 2005 at 67 after a life of ecstatic highs and perilous lows, worked with jazz legends like Horace Silver, Yusef Lateef and Mingus; he also had bipolar disorder, and served a sentence for felony assault from 2000 to 2004. On Friday, a previously unreleased Brooks live album from 1970 titled “Understanding” arrives on vinyl, providing an opportunity to deepen listeners’ comprehension of his talent. (Digital and CD releases will come out July 23.)The seven-track “Understanding” was made at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom, where Brooks and his band had recorded their lauded live set “The Free Slave” only six months prior. The concert features the trumpeter Woody Shaw and the bassist Cecil McBee — holdovers from the night that resulted in “The Free Slave” — plus Harold Mabern on piano and Carlos Garnett on tenor saxophone.Despite similar personnel and only a brief interval between engagements, “The Free Slave” and “Understanding” are worlds apart. Where the first release is a euphoric joy ride that touches on funk and odd-time grooving, the new album is an intense, hypnotic journey that seems immovable even at its gentlest moments. What a difference a half-year makes.“Understanding” was recorded at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore.Zev Feldman, a co-producer of “Understanding,” was struck by the LP’s sprawling nature. A typical track runs about 20 minutes, making room for multiple unhurried solos. (Brooks breaks out the saw on “Prelude to Understanding.”)“There’s expansive boundaries here,” Feldman said. “It’s so adventuresome. They’re really going out there.”Brooks, who grew up in Detroit playing basketball and in jazz bands, was in a pivotal place in 1970. He had just wrapped a three-year stint with Lateef (he can be heard on “The Golden Flute” and “The Blue Yusef Lateef”) and was newly a member of M’Boom, the Max Roach group featuring seven or more percussionists.His own rhythm section was unshakable, but never rigid. Brooks and McBee met in the early ’60s at a Sunday jam session in Detroit hosted by Alice McLeod — soon to be Alice Coltrane — but they truly connected while playing in Lateef’s group. When Brooks realized he could trust McBee to handle the heavy time-keeping, new paths seemed to open up for both musicians.“He loosened up and would play things that would loosen me up,” McBee said in an interview. “Although you understood your responsibility to keep the flow. Once you understand that, and know what that is — and you both are clear about that — then you don’t have to do it. Just let it go. ’Cause you can feel it.”Cory Weeds, the founder of the label Reel to Real, which is releasing the album, sees the live recording as a perfect primer for understanding Brooks’s accomplishments.“This record sort of encapsulates his whole career,” said Weeds. “Like, ‘OK, now I sort of get the trajectory of Roy Brooks.’ From growing up in Detroit, and then moving to New York, and doing those straight-ahead dates, to this.”Brooks onstage in 1972, two years after both the live album “The Free Slave” and “Understanding” were recorded.Cellar Music Group/Reel to RealIn the years after the performance that yielded “Understanding,” Brooks returned to Detroit and formed the Aboriginal Percussion Choir, which featured 20 drummers, and developed a solo performance called the Mystical Afronaut, which found him playing along to a Joe Louis fight and jamming with battery-powered toys. His avant-garde leanings didn’t begin in the mid-70s, though; earlier, he had invented the Breath-a-Tone, which connects plastic tubes to a tom-tom. The instrument can be heard near the end of “Billie’s Bounce,” from “Understanding.”“I remember being a kid, watching him solo, and being scared to death,” Brooks’s son Raheem Brooks said in an interview. “Like, ‘Is he going to have a heart attack?’ So much force would go into it — you know, when he solos, he goes in.”Brooks pushed himself to the limits onstage and off, and as the decades passed, he struggled to manage his mental illness.“You read some of the stuff, and I’ve seen stuff like, ‘The Wild Man on the Drums,’ or something like that,” Raheem Brooks said of how he’d seen his father described. “It really paints a picture that’s negative.” But Brooks recalls his father as a tireless, disciplined artist, whose passion for music was all-consuming.“He was always working out things,” Raheem said. “I could be watching ‘Twilight Zone’ or something, and he’s behind me playing steel drums, working out something. Where he lived, it was instruments all over the house. Something come to mind, and he’ll work it out on the marimba, or work it out on the steel drums. Work it out on the balafon, even.”Brooks’s drive to play endured for decades. Mark Stryker, who wrote part of the liner notes for “Understanding” as well as the 2019 book “Jazz from Detroit,” said he saw Brooks give a transcendent performance in the ’90s.“When I saw him play, you felt as if you were in the presence of a spirit,” Stryker said. “There was a shamanistic quality to Roy’s presence and his playing. You absolutely felt that. There was something beyond music happening with Roy.”The promise of great jazz bands, he added, is “that you can have the same players playing the same tunes in the same place and for some reason, there’s this extra jolt of energy and electricity and creativity that pushes the music into a higher plane of invention.” On “Understanding,” he said, “I think that that happened.” More

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      Outspoken Music Scholar to Lead Spoleto Festival

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      Mena Mark Hanna, who has studied colonialism in classical music, will be the first person of color to lead the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C.A scholar who has spoken forcefully about the legacy of colonialism in classical music will serve as the next general director of Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C., announced on Tuesday.Mena Mark Hanna, 37, the son of Egyptian immigrants, will be the first person of color to lead the festival, which was founded in 1977.The appointment of Hanna comes as the festival tries to recover financially from the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the cancellation of its 2020 season and led to a 70 percent decline in ticket sales this year. The festival’s leaders are also grappling with questions about increasing diversity in staff and programming amid a broader reckoning over racial justice in the United States.Hanna, who will take office in October, said he would make it a priority to use culture to confront the legacy of slavery in the United States and build an inclusive environment.“Art has a very unique role to play in this conversation by really harnessing its transformative power to bridge differences,” Hanna said in an interview. “More needs to be done in terms of making sure that we have diverse perspectives at every single point of the life cycle of a work of art.”Hanna will replace Nigel Redden, the longtime leader of the festival, who last fall announced plans to retire after 35 years, citing the pandemic and the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, among other factors. Redden, who is white, said at the time that the movement had made him realize the importance of stepping aside to make way for a new generation of leaders.Hanna is a protégé of Daniel Barenboim, the celebrated conductor who founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said. Hanna is a professor of musicology and composition at Barenboim-Said Akademie, a music conservatory in Berlin named for both men. He previously served as assistant artistic director at Houston Grand Opera.Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performing at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in November 2019.Peter AdamikAs a scholar, Hanna investigated difficult questions about cultural imperialism in art. He has called classical music a “thoroughly colonized medium” rooted in 19th-century norms, and he has criticized the persistence of orientalism in operas such as “Aida.”At Spoleto, Hanna will inherit one of the country’s most prominent music festivals, with an endowment of about $20 million and an annual budget of about $8 million. In June, the festival finished its 45th season, staging some 77 opera, theater, dance and music performances over 17 days.The festival is known for bringing artists together across disciplines and commissioning and staging innovative works, such as “Omar,” an opera by Rhiannon Giddens that is based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807. It will premiere at the festival next year.Hanna said he was eager to explore ways that art might be able to help bring attention to social challenges.“We have a unique opportunity to define how our history can inform our present and how we can be stronger for it,” he said. “We can use art to give us a glimpse of a future that can only be imagined right now.” More

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      Byron Berline, Master of the Bluegrass Fiddle, Dies at 77

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      His updated version of an old-timey approach enhanced recordings by everyone from Bill Monroe to the Rolling Stones.Byron Berline, the acclaimed bluegrass fiddle player who expanded the vocabulary of his instrument while also establishing it as an integral voice in country-rock on recordings by Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and others, died on Saturday in Oklahoma City. He was 77.His death, in a rehabilitation hospital after a series of strokes, was confirmed by his nephew Barry Patton.Mr. Berline first distinguished himself as a recording artist when he was 21 on “Pickin’ and Fiddlin’,” an album of old-time fiddle tunes set to contemporary bluegrass arrangements by the innovative acoustic quartet the Dillards. The album features Mr. Berline’s heavily syncopated playing, along with long bow strokes that incorporate more than one note at the same time.Later in the decade, Mr. Berline’s lyrical phrasing was heard on pioneering recordings by country-rock luminaries like the Flying Burrito Brothers and the duo Dillard & Clark, featuring the Dillards banjoist Doug Dillard and the singer-songwriter Gene Clark, late of the Byrds. He also recorded with Elton John, Rod Stewart and Lucinda Williams, among many others.Weaving elements of pop, jazz, blues and rock into an old-timey approach to his instrument, Mr. Berline contributed instrumental selections to Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 anti-western, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” He also overdubbed Nova Scotia-style fiddle on the Band’s 1976 single “Acadian Driftwood” and played on the albums “GP” (1973) and “Grievous Angel” (1974) by Gram Parsons, the country-rock progenitor and founding member of the Burrito Brothers.Mr. Parsons recommended Mr. Berline for what would become undoubtedly his most famous session appearance: the freewheeling fiddle part he added to “Country Honk,” the Rolling Stones’ down-home take on their 1969 pop smash “Honky Tonk Women.” Recorded in Los Angeles, the song was included on “Let It Bleed,” the group’s landmark album released that December.“I went in and listened to the track and started playing to it,” Mr. Berline said of his experience with the Stones in a 1991 interview with The Los Angeles Times.When he was summoned to the control booth, he recalled, he feared the band was unhappy with his work. Instead, they invited him to recreate his performance on the sidewalk along Sunset Boulevard, where the Elektra studio, where they were recording the track, was located. Hence the car horns and other ambient street sounds captured on the session.“There was a bulldozer out there moving dirt,” Mr. Berline said. “Mick Jagger went out himself and stopped the guy.”But Mr. Berline was not merely renowned for his work accompanying other artists; he was considered a musical visionary in his own right, providing leadership to, among others, the progressive bluegrass band Country Gazette.Mr. Berline was just 21 when he drew notice for his work on an album of old-time fiddle tunes by the innovative acoustic quartet the Dillards.In 1965, after hearing his playing on “Pickin’ and Fiddlin’,” the folklorist Ralph Rinzler invited Mr. Berline and his father, a fiddler himself, to appear as a duo at the Newport Folk Festival.While at Newport, Byron also had a chance to jam with the singer and mandolinist Bill Monroe, widely regarded as the father of bluegrass, who invited him to become a member of his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Then a student at the University of Oklahoma, Mr. Berline demurred; after completing his degree, he joined the Blue Grass Boys two years later.Mr. Berline spent only a few months with Monroe before being drafted into the Army, but bluegrass aficionados regard two of the three songs he recorded with him, “The Gold Rush,” written with Monroe, and “Sally Goodin,” as matchless performances.Mr. Berline was the winner of three national fiddle competitions and a member of the National Fiddler Hall of Fame.Byron Douglas Berline, the youngest of five children of Lue and Elizabeth (Jackson) Berline, was born on July 6, 1944, in Caldwell, Kan., near the Oklahoma border. His father worked a farm and played banjo and fiddle at barn dances and other events. His mother, a homemaker, played piano.Young Byron started playing a three-quarter-sized fiddle when he was 5; he won his first public competition at 10, outplaying his father. Among his early influences was Eck Robertson, the first old-time fiddler to appear on record.A gifted athlete, Mr. Berline earned a football scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, where he enrolled in 1963, only to fracture his hand that fall. The injury caused him to focus on music, although he maintained his athletic scholarship by joining the track team as a javelin thrower.Mr. Berline attracted the attention of the Dillards while playing in a campus folk group at Oklahoma. They invited him to play on “Pickin’ and Fiddlin’.” After graduating from college in 1967 and completing his military service in 1969, Mr. Berline moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Bette (Ringrose) Berline, at the urging of Doug Dillard, who recruited him to record with Dillard & Clark.After three years of session work in California, along with time in the Flying Burrito Brothers, Mr. Berline formed his own group, Country Gazette, and signed with United Artists Records. The band’s bluegrass blend proved influential, and it recorded for almost two decades, but Country Gazette never achieved mainstream success.Another project, Byron Berline & Sundance, likewise secured a deal with MCA Records. But the group’s three founding members, guitarist Dan Crary, banjo player John Hickman and Mr. Berline — later billing themselves as Berline, Crary & Hickman — fared best in a traditional bluegrass market, releasing records on independent labels like Rounder and Sugar Hill into the 1990s.Over the years Mr. Berline also provided music for television shows like “Northern Exposure” and movies like “Basic Instinct.” He also had a minor role as a musician in the Bette Midler movie “The Rose” (1979) and appeared, as part of a string quartet, in an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”Mr. Berline in 2004 at the Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie, Okla., which he and his wife, Bette, owned. The shop burned down in 2019; several months later, he opened another shop on the same street.Paul Hellstern for The New York TimesIn the mid-’90s, Mr. Berline and his wife moved to Guthrie, Okla., and opened the Double Stop Fiddle Shop, its name taken from the fiddle technique of playing two strings at the same time. The shop burned down in 2019, consuming its inventory of antique instruments. Several months later, Mr. Berline opened another shop on the same street.Mr. Berline is survived by his wife; a daughter, Becca O’Connor; a sister, Janice Byford; and four grandchildren.Although uncredited, Mr. Berline remarked in interviews that he did more than play the fiddle on Mr. Dylan’s soundtrack to “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”“He said, ‘Can you sing?,’” Mr. Berline recalled, referring to Mr. Dylan in his 1991 interview.“I said, ‘Sure.’ So I got up and helped sing background vocals on ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’” More

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      Even the Tuning Up Gets an Ovation as Tanglewood Reopens

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      The mood was festive as the Boston Symphony returned to its summer home for its first in-person performances since March 2020.LENOX, Mass. — If you were brave enough, there was a time last summer when you could still turn into the drive of Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra here. There were the usual local teenagers to direct you to your parking space, one pointing the way every few yards; the usual state troopers, patrol cars idling, there to tip a hat; the usual flowers, lining the path through the pristine white gates.But the familiarity stopped there. Walking through the grounds, kept open and manicured even in the absence of performances, the loneliness was overwhelming. No volunteers, overeager to help. No ice creams. No parents fretting, wondering how far from the stage to set up, safe to settle their infant when the time came. Nothing to see, the Koussevitzky Music Shed boarded up, disconsolate; no music to hear, only the birds.Well, music is coming home.The Boston Symphony opened its shortened, little-short-of-miraculous summer season here with a concert on Saturday night, the orchestra’s first in-person performance since the dark, fearful nights of March 2020, and its first with its music director, Andris Nelsons, since the January prior.Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony in a Beethoven program on Saturday night.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe program was made to please, and please it did, but the atmosphere would have been festive regardless. There were standing ovations for the orchestra, standing ovations for the conductor, standing ovations for Mark Volpe, the orchestra’s just-retired president and chief executive. The players, not normally given to outward expressions of emotion, stomped their feet when their leader, Tamara Smirnova, found the right key on the piano to invite them to tune.The authorities had set attendance at half the norm, but the rolling grounds hummed with chatter, lawn chairs crammed close; the front rows of the Shed felt full, three-foot distancing or not. There would be no intermission, though the concert still lasted nearly two hours; there would be no “Ode to Joy,” with singing still banned. I saw a single mask, amid thousands of faces.By Sunday afternoon, when a second concert took place, it all felt oddly normal: students wandering in and out of the Shed, hearing a piece then leaving to practice, or not; spectators darting for cover as the rain came down, giving up on their defenses against the bugs; the whole place glowing, despite the gloom, with the bright green tarps that were on offer at the door, some protecting bottoms from the mud, others shielding picnics from the rain. Priorities.“Reconnect, Restore, Rejoice,” the front of the program book declared. Nelsons, in his halting, earnest way, spoke from the stage of how the pandemic — seemingly thought of in the past tense, even as the world counts over four million lives lost — reminded us of “how much we need art, how much we need culture,” and of music being “comfort for our souls.”The whole place glowed and felt like normal, our critic says, with people worried about typical things, like rain and bugs.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThere would be no revolutions here, and no memorials either, just a restoration of the ancien régime: an orchestra playing what it has long played, and playing it pretty well. Beethoven it would have to be, and the Fifth Symphony, too — the Beethoven of triumph over disaster, of the human spirit, indomitable.Near enough, at least. Surely it will take time for players, even of this quality, to form a collective again, to fill out their sound, to find the attack and the togetherness that mark the best ensembles. An improvement from Saturday night was already audible on Sunday, in a peppy run-through of Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony.Before that, there were slack moments in the Beethoven, bars when balances were set aside in pursuit of sheer exuberance, passages that were allowed to drift by a conductor who has seemed to grow more standoffish as an interpreter since his arrival in Boston in 2014.But the effect was still potent, surprisingly not so much for the impact of the whole, but for glimmers of the players set free: the clarinet of William R. Hudgins, so mellow, such a balm; the flute of Elizabeth Rowe, so unusual in its woodiness; the trumpet of Thomas Rolfs, so rousing at full stretch.Nelsons conducts Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with Emanuel Ax at the piano.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe same fine subtleties appealed in the work of the soloists on offer, too, neither of them ostentatious. Emanuel Ax is nobody’s idea of a spotlight-hugging pianist, preferring to share it or give it away wholesale, but what a delight it was to hear such discretion in his “Emperor” Concerto — such care taken over the voicing of a chord, such sensitivity in the way his right hand shaped phrases in response to the orchestra. Baiba Skride took much the same approach to the Sibelius Violin Concerto, an affecting account of deep, even forlorn introspection, much of it played inward, toward the violas on her left.Comfort for the soul, indeed.The question remains, however, whether this orchestra will decide to attempt more, even as salaries recover from 37 percent cuts and losses of more than $50 million in revenue cast a shadow over the budget. It has brought in a new president and chief executive, Gail Samuel, from the ambitious Los Angeles Philharmonic; an encouraging amount of its streaming energy over the past year was spent exploring music that it has for too long ignored; and the Symphony Hall season will offer new works by Julia Adolphe, Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin.But that season looks dreary compared with those being offered by similarly tradition-bound orchestras elsewhere. It speaks volumes that scant time was dedicated here to anything contemporary, even if Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” made its mark, throbbing with frantic energy while seeming to run on the spot, with its brief response to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.The Boston Symphony returns, then — and continues merely to abide. More

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      Olivia Rodrigo Holds at No. 1 With ‘Sour’

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      The singer-songwriter’s debut album has now spent three weeks in the Billboard 200’s peak position.This week on the music charts, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” returns as the No. 1 album, while BTS’s song “Butter” closes in on her record for the year’s longest-running top single.“Sour,” which came out in May, rises two spots this week to claim its third time at No. 1, with the equivalent of 88,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. It is only the second LP of 2021 to spend at least three times in the top spot, after a 10-week run by Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album.” (Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” which came out in December, had three weeks at the top through early January.)For Rodrigo, the chart success comes after news emerged last week that songwriting credits for one of her singles, “Deja Vu,” were quietly changed. In addition to Rodrigo and her co-writer, Dan Nigro, the credits for that song now include Swift and two writers of her 2019 song “Cruel Summer,” Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent. None has commented on the change, but in interviews Rodrigo has mentioned “Cruel Summer” as an influence.The K-pop juggernaut BTS tops Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart this week for a seventh time with “Butter.” So far this year, Rodrigo has the longest run at the peak with “Drivers License,” which was No. 1 for eight weeks.Also on this week’s album chart, Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” holds at No. 2, Lil Baby and Lil Durk’s “The Voice of the Heroes” is No. 3 and Wallen’s “Dangerous” is No. 4. The Chicago rapper G Herbo’s new “25” opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 46,000 sales, including 61 million streams. More

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      A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)

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      At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, it was hard for even beloved classics to live up to the elegant intensity of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered here on July 3.Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution’s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a “création,” as the French call it, succeeds.And “Innocence,” which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.“I have a long career in commissioning,” Audi told The Times recently. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in “Innocence” — a character crushing a handful of cake onto another — returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”The carnivalesque staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozzi di Figaro.”Jean-Louis FernandezLotte de Beer’s “Figaro” production is an intentional, endearing mess — an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell’arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing — a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars — and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.In the title role of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves’s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations — and with, at best, a dad bod.Christopher Purves’s incarnation of Falstaff is not the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit. As a careful master chef, he relishes his creations.Monika RittershausWhile Falstaff is often likable, Kosky’s implicit promise is that we’ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director’s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character’s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand “Falstaff” productions; the merry wives of Windsor’s revenge, little crueler.The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a “Falstaff” is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone’s staging — an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a Métro car — is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman’s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Stone, who moved the opera to modern-day Paris. Jean-Louis FernandezPerhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production’s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it’s hard to know who’s really betraying whom, who’s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme’s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she’s never been better as Isolde — singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton sings rather than barks Tristan, a tenor’s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like “Innocence.” In an enormous former ironworks at Luma — the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix — “The Arab Apocalypse” was created as part of the festival’s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.But based on Etel Adnan’s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, “Apocalypse” was dreary — the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.“Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory” was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.From left, Julie Roset, Valerio Contaldo and Etienne Bazola in “Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory.”Monika RittershausHer images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by Sébastien Daucé, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Théâtre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.Audi’s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music’s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)The program of concerts — which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse — will grow, as will the scope of the festival’s productions. With “Tosca,” Aix’s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.Commissions are also central to his agenda; “Innocence” is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.The production — like “Tristan,” directed by Stone — keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone’s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera’s impact wavers.But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, “Innocence” is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age’s travails. More

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      Prominent Lawyer in Discussions to Represent Britney Spears

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      Mathew Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, plans to attend a hearing on Wednesday and make the case that the singer should be permitted to hire him for her conservatorship battle.A prominent Hollywood lawyer has had discussions in recent days with Britney Spears about representing her in her conservatorship battle, and he plans to attend a hearing in Los Angeles on Wednesday to begin the process of taking over as her counsel, according to a person briefed on the matter.For the past 13 years, under a strict legal arrangement that curbs many of her rights, Ms. Spears has been represented by a court-appointed lawyer whom she criticized at a hearing last month as she urged the court to let her hire her own counsel.Ms. Spears has told others she wanted to take a far more aggressive legal approach. In recent days she began having discussions with Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor who has represented several celebrities in recent years, about having him and his firm take over and push for an end to the conservatorship, according to the person.The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because Ms. Spears has not retained Mr. Rosengart and a judge will need to sign off on any such arrangement. TMZ first reported that Ms. Spears was interested in having Mr. Rosengart represent her.If allowed by the court, Ms. Spears’s retaining of Mr. Rosengart would signal a drastic change in the handling of the case. Confidential court documents recently obtained by The New York Times revealed that Ms. Spears had expressed strong objections to the conservatorship over several years and questioned her father’s fitness as conservator. Mr. Rosengart would be expected to aggressively pursue a path to ending the arrangement..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The feud has escalated in recent months as scrutiny of the unusual conservatorship has intensified and Ms. Spears has publicly questioned its legitimacy. The guardianship was instituted in 2008, when concerns about her mental health and potential substance abuse led her father, James P. Spears, to petition for legal authority over his daughter. Since her June 23 statement to the court, several pillars of the conservatorship have fallen: Bessemer Trust, the wealth-management firm that was set to take over as the co-conservator of her estate, requested to withdraw; Ms. Spears’s longtime manager, Larry Rudolph, resigned; and Samuel D. Ingham III, the lawyer appointed by the court in 2008 to represent her when she was deemed unfit to hire her own counsel, asked the court if he could step down.Mr. Ingham said in a court filing that he would serve until the court had appointed new counsel for Ms. Spears, but it is not clear how a new lawyer would be selected or whether Judge Brenda Penny, who is overseeing the case, would allow Ms. Spears to have a say in the matter.Mr. Rosengart, 58, a partner at the law firm Greenberg Traurig, once served as a law clerk for the former New Hampshire state judge David Souter, shortly before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. Mr. Rosengart worked at the Justice Department as an assistant United States Attorney in the 1990s.After leaving the Justice Department, he worked as a white-collar defense attorney and civil litigator. In recent years, he has represented several high profile Hollywood personalities, including Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg and Kenneth Lonergan.In Mr. Penn’s case, Mr. Rosengart helped him win a defamation case against a director who made claims about Mr. Penn’s past behavior. The lawyer produced an affidavit from Madonna, the actor’s ex-wife, that refuted the director’s assertions. Mr. Penn said in a statement on Sunday that Mr. Rosengart “is a tough as nails streetfighter with a big brain and bigger principles.”At a hearing on June 23, Ms. Spears vehemently criticized the conservatorship, claiming she had been forced to perform, take debilitating medication and remain on birth control.She also raised questions about Mr. Ingham’s advocacy on her behalf. She said in court that she had been unaware of how to terminate the arrangement.“I didn’t know I could petition the conservatorship to be ended,” Ms. Spears, 39, said in court. “I’m sorry for my ignorance, but I honestly didn’t know that.” She added, “My attorney says I can’t — it’s not good, I can’t let the public know anything they did to me.”“He told me I should keep it to myself, really,” the singer said.It is unknown what private discussions Mr. Ingham and Ms. Spears have had about whether or how she could ask to end the conservatorship. Last year, Mr. Ingham began seeking substantial changes to the setup on behalf of Ms. Spears, including attempts to strip power from her father, who remains in control of the singer’s nearly $60 million fortune.Mr. Ingham’s request to withdraw also included the resignation letter of the law firm Loeb & Loeb, which Mr. Ingham had brought on last year to assist him in preparation for litigation.A lawyer for Lynne Spears, Ms. Spears’s mother and an interested party in the conservatorship, has asked the court to allow Ms. Spears to hire her own private legal counsel.Ms. Spears’s personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, recently filed an urgent request for the court to appoint a guardian ad litem who would be assigned solely to help Ms. Spears choose her own lawyer. The filing stated that Ms. Spears had been “repeatedly and consistently” asking for Ms. Montgomery’s assistance in finding a new lawyer and that Ms. Spears deserved to be represented by a top-tier firm. More