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      A Black Composer’s Intense Opera Gets a Rare Staging

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      William Grant Still’s one-act “Highway 1, U.S.A.” runs in St. Louis through June 17.The composer William Grant Still was a student of the renowned experimentalist Edgard Varèse, an arranger for the blues icon W.C. Handy and the creator of the enduringly winning “Afro-American Symphony.” Thanks to his rich catalog of symphonic and chamber music, Still, who died in 1978 at 83, was widely known as the pathbreaking “dean” of Black American composers.But his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire. “Troubled Island,” about the Haitian revolution and its aftermath, boasted a libretto by Langston Hughes and additional lyrics by Verna Arvey, a writer who was married to Still. It premiered at New York City Opera in 1949, but continues to wait for a second production. (A fascinating, if scratchy, recording of the premiere can be purchased from the Still estate.)Still was known as the “dean” of Black American composers, but his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire.Carl Van Vechten Collection/Getty ImagesStill’s one-act stunner “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” premiered in 1963, has also been a rarity. But it will enter the limelight this weekend with the opening of a new staging, directed by Ron Himes, at Opera Theater of St. Louis. (It runs there through June 17.)In its two scenes — which together last under an hour — the filling-station owner Bob and his wife, Mary, deal with the ingratitude and arrogance of Bob’s younger brother, Nate, a spendthrift academic whose studies were underwritten by the couple. The plot — its lurid flights counterbalanced by the wholesome devotion of Bob and Mary — swiftly deals with complex, compelling ideas about familial expectation and duty.Conducted by Leonard Slatkin, a veteran advocate for American music, and featuring a cast of rising stars, the St. Louis production is an early highlight of opera’s fledgling return to live performance as the pandemic eases.But this “Highway” likely wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. In a phone interview between rehearsals, the soprano Nicole Cabell said that both she and the baritone Will Liverman had originally been scheduled to perform “Porgy and Bess” in St. Louis this summer.Though widely loved, “Porgy” — written by white artists — has long overshadowed works by Black composers; the pandemic, in this case, overturned its typical dominance. “Porgy,” Cabell said, was “obviously a production that was too big.”St. Louis realized that its contracted soprano and baritone leads could play the married couple in Still’s “Highway.” And Cabell credited the company with finding a way to forge ahead with an operatic work of “cultural significance.”Liverman said that, after 15 months away from performances with an orchestra, “it’s a special thing to come back to work and do a piece by a Black composer, especially after all of the things that have happened with the pandemic, and George Floyd, and how we’re changing our conversations about inclusion.”“It jumps around quite a bit, in terms of the mood,” said Cabell, left, with Gibbs.Eric WoolseyStill was a fan of Wagner from an early age, an affection that can be seen in the fluid way he handles narrative transitions. “Nobody has arias that have really clear endings, in my opinion,” Cabell said.“I feel like you have to be on your toes if you sing Mary,” she added. “Because she is, of course, struggling with lots of conflict: her love of Bob, her suspicion of Nate, her desire to expose him. It jumps around quite a bit, in terms of the mood.”The tenor Christian Mark Gibbs, who plays Nate, described the effect as “conversational.” Like the other singers, he had not had deep exposure to the work of Still before this production.“I heard of him, through the course of some of my studies,” Gibbs said. “I did question, while I was in school: ‘Oh, how come we don’t look at any of those things?’ But then you get back to your studies.”Nate doesn’t have a lot of stage time. He enters mean in the second scene, and only gets meaner. The character’s motivations are barely sketched as the plot moves toward a twisty climax.“He does leave a lot for your imagination,” Gibbs said. “I can come up with a great back story for this character, before he even sings his first line.”Himes, the director — who has moved the setting slightly forward, into the 1960s — has his own view of Nate’s troubles: “He may have been a victim of some racial attacks, while he was in school. He is probably suffering from some kind of trauma.”The cast in St. Louis is relishing what amounts to a highly unusual opportunity in opera. “I think there’s a special energy for them, being an all-Black company,” Himes said. “That’s very rare for all of them in their careers so far, in this classical world.”There have been few productions or recordings of the work. In the 1970s, Columbia’s Black Composers Series included a pair of excerpts from the opera on an album. It took until 2005 for a complete studio recording to be released, featuring the St. Olaf Orchestra led by Philip Brunelle. (The Mary on that recording, Louise Toppin, also directed a production at the University of Michigan in 2019.)Gibbs said he has found himself memorizing the other characters’ music. “I walk around singing some of Bob’s melodies all the time,” he said. “I grew up listening to a little jazz and listening to blues and gospel. It has that soul type of feeling.”That’s the case even though Still, a committed integrationist, didn’t want his work to be viewed merely through a racial lens. “In this opera, there’s no race mentioned at all,” Gibbs said. “That’s another area where it’s open. It can be done by multiple people. He wanted it to be done by various cultural groups.”Slatkin, the conductor, said he has inserted small touches — including “an occasional flutter-tongue” — to give the orchestration behind Nate’s music a bit more bite. He added that some of the score’s harmonies reminded him of Kurt Weill, but that the music has its own clear identity: “As I’ve really gotten into it, I find that there’s something very fresh and appealing about it.”“Still’s voice — simply historically, because of when he lived, what he did and what he accomplished — needs to be heard,” Slatkin said.St. Louis plans to film the performances with an eye to streaming the work later this year. For Liverman, that documentation is crucial. “That’s the thing with Black composers in general,” he said. “I think the music’s out there. It’s just not performed enough. You’re not going to find a million interpretations, like ‘Winterreise’ or something like that. A lot of those works are just hard to come by.”But he thinks the power of “Highway” will speak for itself. “The show moves right along,” he said. “It’s sort of like a short film or an episode on a show — and it works beautifully in that way.” More

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      Alix Dobkin, Who Sang Songs of Liberation, Dies at 80

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      She broke new ground in 1973 with her album “Lavender Jane Loves Women,” recorded and distributed by women for women, which sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia.Long before K.D. Lang transformed herself from a country artist into an androgyne pop idol and sex symbol, smoldering in a man’s suit on the cover of Vanity Fair being mock-shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford; long before Melissa Etheridge sold millions of copies of her 1993 album, “Yes I Am,” and in so doing came out as a gay rock star; and long before the singer-songwriter Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” hit the Billboard charts, the folk singer Alix Dobkin chopped her hair off, formed a band and recorded “Lavender Jane Loves Women.”Released in 1973, it was the first album recorded and distributed by women for women — arguably the first lesbian record. Ms. Dobkin started her own label, Women’s Wax Works, to do it.Once a folk star playing Greenwich Village clubs with Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ms. Dobkin turned to writing songs like “View From Gay Head” (“Lesbian, Lesbian/Let’s be in No Man’s Land”). Her lyrics sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia and also poked fun at its vernacular and customs, as she did in “Lesbian Code,” which contained lines like “Is she Lithuanian?,” “Is she Lebanese?” and “She’s a member of the church, of the club, of the committee/She sings in the choir.”Her music was the soundtrack for many young women coming out in the 1970s and ’80s, a rite of passage spoofed by Alison Bechdel, the graphic memoirist, in her long-running comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (A panel titled “Age 21” showed a young woman with cropped hair and pinwheel eyes, smoking a bong and reading Mary Daly’s “Gyn/Ecology,” another feminist touchstone, as the lyrics from Ms. Dobkin’s “The Woman in Your Life Is You” waft around her, a Lavender Jane album cover propped up in a corner.)“I can’t tell you how cool it was as a young dyke to see those album covers,” said Lisa Vogel, founder of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, otherwise known as Michfest, where Ms. Dobkin would perform for decades. “To see someone not trying to pass one bit.”Ms. Dobkin died on May 19 at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., after suffering a brain aneurysm and a stroke. She was 80. Her former partner Liza Cowan announced the death.She was a star of the women’s festivals that were an expression of the alternative economy lesbian feminists were building in the ’70s — a byproduct of second-wave feminism — with their own books, publishing companies, record labels and magazines. Michfest was the biggest, an entire city built from scratch each season in Oceana County, complete with health care clinics, crafts, workshops and food for thousands. It was a complete matriarchal society. No men were allowed.When the festivals began in the mid-’70s, there were no safe spaces for lesbians, said Bonnie J. Morris, a historian and archivist of feminist music and the author of “Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals.” “You weren’t welcome to have a double bed in a hotel; there were no Disney Gay Days. Festivals were a way to get together, share information and recharge.”It was backstage at a women’s festival in 1983 that Ms. Etheridge first met Ms. Dobkin. “She was in the tradition of the classic folk troubadour, changing the world through song and cleverness,” Ms. Etheridge said in an interview.“She made an impact,” she added, “and she did it with humor. Until I heard Alix, I had no idea I would be an out lesbian performer; I just wanted to be a rock star.”“When I told her I was thinking of recording an album, she said, ‘Oh, Melissa, there’s no radio station that’s going to play a lesbian.’ After ‘Yes I Am’ came out — and I came out — she said to me, ‘Damn it, you proved me wrong. I’m so grateful.’”Alix Cecil Dobkin was born on Aug. 16, 1940, in New York City. She was named for an uncle, Cecil Alexander Kunstlich, a womanizing, drug-addicted ne’er-do-well who cleaned up his act and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Her parents, Martha (Kunstlich) and William Dobkin, were, like many Jewish intellectuals of the time, Communist Party members and social activists. Alix grew up listening to the folk music of Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, as well as the Red Army Chorus and Broadway show tunes, and singing at home with her parents.Ms. Dobkin at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1980.Liza CowanAlix was 16 when the F.B.I. began investigating her. She had joined the Communist Party that year, but her parents had become disillusioned and left; there were too many F.B.I. informants, her father told her later.The F.B.I. followed Ms. Dobkin until she turned 30, noting in her file that she had become a housewife and mother. The file, which Ms. Dobkin retrieved in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, proved useful decades later, when she was writing her memoir, “My Red Blood” (2009). It recorded her many addresses and helpful dates, like that of her wedding in 1965, though it had the venue wrong.Ms. Dobkin studied art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, earning a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1962. A fellow student and Communist Party member was also a booker at a local nightclub, and he began to manage her, often along with a young comic named Bill Cosby. He found the pair regular work at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, where she met her future husband, Sam Hood, whose parents owned the place, as well as Mr. Dylan and other folk luminaries. When Ms. Dobkin married Mr. Hood, her career as a performer took a back seat to his as a producer. They divorced amicably in 1971, when their daughter, Adrian, was a year old.Like many women in that transitional time, Ms. Dobkin was frustrated by her role as a housewife and had joined a consciousness-raising group. When she heard Germaine Greer, the feminist author of “The Female Eunuch,” interviewed on the countercultural radio station WBAI, it was a revelation. She wrote to Ms. Cowan, a producer at the station who had conducted the interview. Ms. Cowan invited her on the program to perform, and the two women fell in love.After they got together, Ms. Dobkin decided she wanted to make music for and by women only. Ms. Cowan would go on to found lesbian magazines like Dyke, A Quarterly. In the mid-’70s, the couple bought a 70-acre farm in rural Schoharie County, in central New York State — not an easy locale to plunk down a gay family.“I remember being called a ‘hobo’ by the kids in school,” Adrian Hood said, “though they were trying to say ‘homo’. I craved a normal mom with long hair.”Ms. Dobkin in performance in Ulster County, N.Y., in 2017. “She made an impact,” her fellow singer Melissa Etheridge said, “and she did it with humor.”Retts ScauzilloMs. Dobkin’s tour schedule slowed down a bit in the late ’90s, and when Ms. Hood had her own children, Ms. Dobkin took on a new role.“She was a stay-at-home grandma by choice, which allowed me to work full time,” said Ms. Hood, who is dean of students and director of admissions at a day school in Woodstock. “That was a huge gift. She was able to express that everyday maternal attention that she missed with me.”In addition to her daughter, Ms. Dobkin is survived by her brother, Carl; her sister, Julie Dobkin; and three grandchildren. In 2015, a photograph of Ms. Dobkin taken by Ms. Cowan wearing a T-shirt that read “The Future Is Female” exploded on social media, thanks to an Instagram post by @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, an account that documents lesbian imagery. It brought the T-shirt, originally made in the 1970s by Labyris Books, the first feminist bookstore in New York City, back into production — and introduced Ms. Dobkin to a new generation of young women.“I’ve prepared all my life for this job,” Ms. Dobkin told the crowd at a women’s music festival in 1997. “Because being a Jew and being a lesbian are very similar. That’s why I look so much alike. I have so much in common. It’s OK to be a Jew, it’s OK to be a lesbian — as long as you don’t mention it. And what we also have in common is that we were never supposed to survive.” More

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      Mustafa, a Folk Hero for a Weary Generation

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      The 24-year-old Canadian musician memorializes friends lost to violence on his debut EP, “When Smoke Rises.”LOS ANGELES — In the middle of Mustafa’s potent, chilling and heart-rending debut EP, “When Smoke Rises,” is “The Hearse,” a startling two-minute meditation on revenge in the wake of a friend’s murder.“I was all about the peace/I didn’t wanna risk it all/Oh, I know what’s at stake,” he sings, trying to maintain equanimity in the face of trauma. But his mood, and the song — a soft folk number with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and an almost unconscious, corporeal rhythm — takes a somber, unexpected turn: “But you made yourself special/I wanna throw my life away/For you.”Mustafa, 24, sings these lines with an almost ethereal sigh, like you would serenade a lover, not the enemy in your cross hairs. And yet it is, somehow, a love song. And also an elegy. An indictment of the self. An indictment of the state. A bitter promise.When Mustafa began writing songs a few years ago, there were no other topics but the heaviness of his experiences. “I couldn’t write anything else,” he said earlier this month, in a sparsely decorated Airbnb on the east side of Los Angeles. “It was everything I was dealing with. It engulfed me.”More than 2,000 miles away from where he grew up in Regent Park, Canada’s oldest housing project and one of the roughest neighborhoods of Toronto, he was relaxed, wearing a black sweatsuit and a kufi, and speaking with a sober, sometimes sorrowful peace that comes from years of weathering storms.“When Smoke Rises” is a suite of folk songs about life — and death — in his hometown; the title refers to the rapper Smoke Dawg, a close friend who was killed in 2018. The EP is bracing and beautiful, hopeful and desperate, a solemn prayer for lives that never reached their potential, and a determined act to render their stories with beauty and care.For just this reason, Mustafa wasn’t sure if he was going to include “The Hearse” on the EP — whether it was fair to center his own hurt and preoccupation with those he perceived as enemies. “I thought about some opps more than I thought about friends, I was so obsessed with them,” he said. “This project is about the grace of the friends that I lost, you know? And I’m like, does that take away from that grace?”But ultimately, he concluded, he couldn’t fairly tell the story of his upbringing, and how it has both shaped and undone him, without it. “My grief,” he said, “is incomplete without the rage.”“When Smoke Rises” is full of such cruel, pained calculations: how to memorialize the dead, how to express love in hopeless circumstances, how to protect those you care about when no one else will, or can. “Don’t crease your Air Forces/Just stay inside tonight,” he gently pleads on the weeping sigh “Air Forces.” On the directly anxious “What About Heaven,” he sings as if calling after someone he fears he might never see again: “We forgot to talk about heaven.”The turbulence he sings about is still very much ongoing. Sometimes, Mustafa said, after writing a song, he’d wonder, “Did I just crystallize a feeling that I haven’t even survived?”Mustafa — born Mustafa Ahmed — has been grappling with the weight of injustice since his older sister first encouraged him to form his thoughts into poems in the mid-2000s. His family emigrated to Canada from Sudan around 1995. By age 12, he was getting local media attention for his verse about the challenges facing his community; in 2016, he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Youth Council.None of that changed the cycle of devastation in Regent Park, though, and Mustafa has become something of a community ethicist and mentor, a guide for families dealing with the death of their loved ones, and an outspoken advocate for the Muslim community. He is also something of a guardian: His younger brother Yassir and a young Toronto rapper named Lil Berete were staying in the Airbnb with him. At one point during the conversation, Berete’s mother called on FaceTime, and Mustafa assured her that her son was praying every day, going to the mosque and not smoking.“I’m just using the avenue of music to do the very thing that I’ve always done,” Mustafa said.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times“It doesn’t matter how anti-establishment, anti-imperialist I am, change won’t be in my lifetime,” Mustafa said. “So all that I can do is within me. I try to keep people alive. And I try to make sure that we’re protected.”As a young person, while many of his peers were finding themselves in hip-hop, Mustafa gravitated to folk music and earthy singer-songwriters: Nick Drake, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. “I remember being younger and people were mad, like, ‘This guy’s always emotional,’” he said with a laugh. “But the truth is, I was just exploring a sentimental language, you know what I mean?”During the making of “When Smoke Rises,” Mustafa was taken by how Sufjan Stevens memorialized his mother on the 2015 album “Carrie & Lowell.” Mustafa pulled out his phone to read a letter he sent to Stevens via an intermediary, part mash note, part confessional. “I dreamed to bridge the worlds of grief and glory,” he wrote, confiding in Stevens about the ghosts hovering over his music. “The deaths were complicated and violent and unfair, but still they are my own. And the way I reflect them can be all that and still beautiful, as you have so brilliantly displayed. Nothing in vain.” (He hasn’t yet heard back.)Tensions in Regent Park are ongoing; Los Angeles has become a safe retreat for Mustafa, a place where he can explore his creativity. When he was first exploring the studio, as he was struggling to find the proper voice and tone for his stories, he fell into songwriting for others, collaborating on tracks by the Weeknd and Camila Cabello, as well as the Shawn Mendes-Justin Bieber hit “Monster.” But writing about anyone but himself was, in fact, a distraction.“I wasn’t being daring at all,” he said. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anything, explaining anything in its full truth.”Eventually, in 2019, he went to London to work with the producer Simon Hessman on demos he’d been chipping away at for a couple of years. Later, they were joined by Mustafa’s friend Frank Dukes, who has produced for Post Malone, Rihanna and the Weeknd. Dukes had been probing Smithsonian Folkways anthologies of Sudanese and Egyptian music, some samples of which ended up on “When Smoke Rises,” bridging Mustafa’s modern-day tales to the past. Mustafa also includes vocal samples of friends who have died, and of his mother, his way of inscribing them into history.Mustafa’s earliest versions of these songs tilted toward pure folk. “I think we always struggled with what the rhythmic architecture of the music was, because it was so guitar-driven,” said Dukes over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Los Feliz the following evening. Working with North African samples helped create an unobtrusive backdrop that deepened Mustafa’s storytelling. “Sometimes it takes a while to arrive at that simplicity,” Dukes said. (James Blake and Jamie xx also contributed production.)Before he started writing music for himself, “I wasn’t being daring at all,” Mustafa said. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anything, explaining anything in its full truth.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesThe mood at dinner was lighthearted, with clouds in the distance. Mustafa had spent some time earlier that day in a public back and forth on Instagram with an executive at Warner Records, a minor social media conflagration — “a microcosm of what happens when you’re in full support of Palestinian lives,” he posted — spurred by the recent violence in Gaza.“I’m just using the avenue of music to do the very thing that I’ve always done,” he said, underscoring the complete overlap of his personal and creative lives. He’d just returned to the table after stepping away to find a quiet spot for prayer. “For a lot of people, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a seamless transition. He’s saying exactly what he’s always been saying. And he’s standing alongside of the same people he’s been standing alongside. All that he’s doing is stretching those words through melody.’”But being the bard of a horrific stretch of time, and a creative conscience for a community in pain, hasn’t come without a tax.“I don’t want to write these songs. I don’t like these songs,” he said later that night, in a car headed to meet up with some of his Palestinian friends. “I resent everything about them and how they’ve come to be and everything that surrounds them. I hate that I had to make them.” The music remains a live wire, not a safe haven: “Just because it’s my responsibility doesn’t mean that it’s serving me.”At this point, he’s not even sure if he’ll ever perform them in concert. But he’s relieved to have put them into the world, if only so he might move on: “I just want young kids to come up and be like, ‘Oh, that’s what grief looks like.’ It wasn’t tucked away. It wasn’t buried.” More

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      Was 1971 the Year ‘Music Changed Everything’?

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      How would 1974 feel about that? Or 1965? A new eight-part documentary on Apple TV+ is the latest salvo in the record geek’s eternal debate.Everything changed with the music of 1971. No, wait. It was 1973. Check that — 1974 was the year, except it was music, film and television, but only in Los Angeles. More

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      DMX’s Posthumous All-Star Track, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Griff, Kidd G, Masayoshi Fujita and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.DMX featuring Jay-Z and Nas, ‘Bath Salts’This song from “Exodus,” the first posthumous DMX album, features a 1990s rap supergroup that could have been. DMX sounds limber and loose, and Jay-Z and Nas are having far more fun here than they did on the grown-and-grumpy “Sorry Not Sorry,” from the latest DJ Khaled album. The union of the three titans is consequential, but they treat it like a friendly cipher, the mark of stars confident in their legacy. JON CARAMANICASofi Tukker and Amadou & Mariam, ‘Mon Cheri’The nonprofit Red Hot Organization supports its efforts to fight AIDS with albums full of unexpected collaborators. The preview of its dance-oriented “Red Hot + Free” collection, due July 2, is “Mon Cheri,” which brings together the Florida dance-pop duo Sofi Tukker with the Malian singers Amadou & Mariam. Sophie Hawley-Weld of Sofi Tukker coos the verses in Portuguese, philosophizing about time and rhythm over a twangy guitar line that hints at Malian modes; when Amadou & Mariam arrive for the choruses, calling for togetherness in love, a 4/4 thump kicks in, steering the song directly to the dance floor. Before it’s over, a synthesizer starts cheerfully sputtering like a high-tech kazoo. JON PARELESMelvin Gibbs featuring Kokayi, ‘Message From the Streets’Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, and the culmination of a heady year of Black Lives Matter organizing. It was also the bassist Melvin Gibbs’s birthday. Over the past 12 months, Gibbs paid a number of visits to the site of Floyd’s death, and he was moved by the complicated but nearly serene energy about the place, which has become a kind of pilgrimage site and memorial. On Tuesday, Gibbs released an EP, “4 + 1 Equals 5 for May 25,” that balances coiled frustration with catalytic release. The idea, he wrote in the notes accompanying the EP, was “to manifest peace while facing up to cataclysm.” Working with the Washington, D.C.-based rapper Kokayi, Gibbs assembled a collection of pieces (condensed here into a final composite track, “Message From the Streets”) that writhe and heave but fix a steady gaze on the world. The act of bearing witness becomes a means of unmaking, and maybe building anew. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOUpper Wilds, ‘Love Song #5’Dan Friel has been making noisy rock — frenetic guitar abetted by over-the-top electronics — since he founded the band Parts & Labor in the early 2000s. He’s still at it in his current band, Upper Wilds, and “Love Song #5,” from an album due in July titled “Venus,” comes on as a whirlwind. As he sings about how love changes nothing and everything at once, a stereo blitz of distorted strumming, whizzing arpeggios and screaming sustained tones insists how much it matters. PARELESGriff, ‘One Foot in Front of the Other’Griff, an English pop singer, songwriter and producer who won this year’s Brit award as rising new star, sounds optimistic despite herself with “One Foot in Front of the Other,” which will be the title song of her mixtape due June 18. Sure, her first steps are tentative as she recovers from a breakup — “Things just take longer to heal these days” — but her perky keyboard tones and a chord progression that descends but soon bounces back all insist that she’ll thrive, and soon. PARELESKidd G, ‘Break Up Song’Recently, the emo-rap-influenced country singer Kidd G announced a partnership with the Valory Music Co., a division of the country powerhouse Big Machine Label Group. It was a seeming acknowledgment that his most viable path forward would run through Nashville — or at least near it. And indeed, he is slowly homing in on a version of his hip-hop that’s structured more like contemporary country music. On “Break Up Song,” the guitars are fuller, and his rapping has less residue of Juice WRLD than his earlier songs. The laments are pure country, too: “I wiped your footprints off the window of my truck.” CARAMANICAFoy Vance, ‘Sapling’A songwriter from Northern Ireland who’s fond of vintage American soul music, Foy Vance has collaborated with Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys and Kacey Musgraves. On his own, he harks back to Van Morrison’s better days, grainy and impassioned. Many of his previous songs have been folky and rootsy, but “Sapling” deploys electronic illusions as well. He strives to draw benevolence out of his own imperfections and regrets — “Am I strong enough?” he wonders — as patient piano chords open into vast reverberations. PARELESOhGeesy featuring DaBaby, ‘Get Fly’A union of one of hip-hop’s most stoic rappers and one of its most excitable. In this partnership, OhGeesy (formerly of Shoreline Mafia) pulls DaBaby into his patient tempo, a surprise victory. CARAMANICAMasayoshi Fujita, ‘Morocco’“Morocco” is from the new album, “Bird Ambience,” by Masayoshi Fujita, a Japanese vibraphonist and composer who constructs meditative pieces with a Minimalistic pulse — layers of vibraphone lines with fleeting apparitions of percussion and sustained brass tones. Every layer is melodic; follow any one closely, and it turns out to be far less repetitive than it seems at first. PARELESDave Holland, ‘Gentle Warrior’On his new album, “Another Land,” the eminent bassist Dave Holland teams up with the guitarist (and former “Tonight Show” musical director) Kevin Eubanks, a longtime Holland confidante, and the drummer Obed Calvaire, a newer collaborator. Holland is a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and former Miles Davis accompanist whose career has skipped around from jazz-rock fusion to the avant-garde, often lingering in the spaces in between. On “Gentle Warrior,” the one track on “Another Land” penned by Calvaire, the drummer works across the full range of his kit, getting his cymbals to speak to one another; Holland takes a bass solo that’s endowed with lyrical flair, and pries at the piece’s complex five-beat rhythm. RUSSONELLO More

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      A Beloved London Concert Hall Grows Bold as It Turns 120

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      Smart choices in the pandemic mean that the Wigmore Hall is reopening in a more confident position than many other British venues.LONDON — “Welcome!” said John Gilhooly, the general director of the Wigmore Hall, standing in front of the auditorium’s small circular stage. The audience applauded wildly — for a crowd of chamber music fans.It was May 23, and the first Sunday morning concert since the pandemic had closed down the hall last March. “I like to choose something special for each performance,” said Gilhooly, 47. “The Elgar Quintet you will hear today was premiered in this hall on the 21st of May, 1919, when the country was coming out of another major crisis.”The Wigmore is emerging from its most recent crisis with aplomb. As an early adopter of livestreamed concerts at the beginning of the pandemic, it won large dividends of good will and public donations. Whereas many small performing venues in Britain are reopening nervously after six months of forced closure, the Wigmore Hall is confidently poised to celebrate its 120th anniversary with an ambitious program, starting Sunday.The hall has occupied a special place in music lovers’ hearts since 1901, when it was opened as a recital hall by the German piano manufacturer Bechstein, which had a showroom next door. The discreet wooden doors under an art nouveau canopy that lead into the 540-seat hall, with its red plush seats, marble, gilt and dark wood panels, are a portal to another era.Probably the most important chamber-music venue in Britain, the Wigmore has an intensely loyal London audience that filled the hall for most of the 500-plus concerts a year it was staging before last March.The German piano manufacturer Bechstein opened the Wigmore Hall as a recital space in 1901.Kaupo Kikkas, via Wigmore HallJohn Gilhooly, the hall’s general director, became its executive director at 27 and took the top job five years later.via Wigmore HallBut even the best-loved British concert halls and theaters have been in peril since the onset of the pandemic, with revenues reduced to zero, costs still to be met and anxieties about the future running high. Live shows for reduced audiences opened briefly in the fall, only to close again in early December. Venues then remained shut until May 17, when they were allowed to open with limited capacity.If all goes according to plan — and given concern about new coronavirus variants circulating in Britain, it might not — full houses will be possible after June 21, according to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Even then, most halls won’t open at full capacity.“It has been a much longer and more intense struggle than any of us had feared,” said Gillian Moore, the director of music at the Southbank Center, a London performing arts complex. “The economics are really challenging, but we can’t immediately go to full audiences, because we need to see how everything will work logistically.”Gilhooly, who was born in Limerick, Ireland, and trained there as a singer, became the executive director of the Wigmore Hall at 27 and then its general director five years later. And while he might not give the impression of a risk-taker, throughout the pandemic he has been decisive about getting musicians into the hall — many of them famous, but some lesser-known — and daring in his programming.Beginning last June, the Wigmore Hall presented free daily concerts from the empty hall, livestreamed by the BBC. Over the past year, through opening up and locking down, the Wigmore has streamed 250 programs by 400 artists, including major London-based artists like Mitsuko Uchida, Iestyn Davies and Stephen Hough. The concerts were acclaimed by classical music enthusiasts as a beacon of light in a somber time.“People wrote to me from all over the world,” said Hough, whose opening recital on June 1 garnered about 800,000 live views. “The return of live music was a symbol, like Myra Hess giving concerts at the National Gallery during World War II.”The Wigmore was able to get off the starting blocks quicker than most because Gilhooly and his board had invested in sophisticated cameras and recording equipment in 2015, when they began to broadcast a concert every month. It was a quietly progressive step for an organization that exudes an air of staid tradition, and last year’s decision to broadcast free concerts even more so.Mitsuko Uchida perfroming at the Wigmore Hall in March.via Wigmore HallThe Wigmore receives a subsidy of 300,000 pounds from the British state, but raises most of its own £8 million — about $11 million. It gets just over half of its income from the box office (when there isn’t a pandemic), and most of the rest from fund-raising.“The Wigmore have been fantastic leaders in terms of online activity,” said Kevin Appleby, the concert hall manager at the 350-seat Turner Sims in Southhampton, England. “But there is the inevitable question of how you monetize it.”“Do you keep the online model? A hybrid model?” Appleby added. “Will part of the audience, especially older people, not come back if they can watch at home?”Gilhooly said that even though the livestreamed concerts were free to watch, they had brought money and attention to the hall. The recitals have had about seven million views online from around the world, and grateful contributions have poured in: “a million pounds in £20 increments, and quite a few bigger amounts from individuals and foundations,” Gilhooly said. The Wigmore hall’s paying membership has increased from 10,000 to 15,000, and it now has 400,000 people on its mailing list.The soprano Gweneth Ann Rand, one of the Wigmore Hall’s associate artists, performing in the auditorium in October 2020.via Wigmore HallThis growth was wasn’t hampered, Gilhooly said, by more adventurous programming, including the work of the little-known Black American composer Julius Eastman and concerts by contemporary music groups like the Hermes Experiment and Riot Ensemble. “I lost fear about people objecting to more experimental programs, because I wasn’t having that direct contact with audiences,” he said, adding that regular subscribers whom he considered musically conservative often liked those concerts.To mark the hall’s upcoming anniversary, Gilhooly recently announced the appointment of nine new associate artists, including sarod players, viola players, saxophonists and a performer of the sarod, an Indian stringed instrument. He also outlined plans for a series of concerts focusing on music from Africa.“He is introducing the audience to new musical worlds, which takes knowledge, courage and vision,” said Gweneth Ann Rand, a soprano who is one of the new associates.Yet none of these innovations and successes will necessarily shield the Wigmore Hall from the uncertainty around the future of the performing arts in postpandemic Britain. As Angela Dixon, the chief executive of the Saffron Hall, a 740-seat concert space in southern England, put it, “You end up spending money in order to be open.” Social distancing rules mean that the Saffron Hall can only sell a fraction of its seats.“When you are reliant on people buying tickets for half your annual expenditure, you can’t afford to let people forget about you,” she said.A socially distanced audience in the venue in September 2020. At full capacity, it seats 540 people.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGilhooly said that his core audience was mostly vaccinated and returning to in-person concerts. (Because of social distancing, demand now outstrips availability, and tickets are being allocated by ballot). But he concurred that if the June 21 opening up is pushed out much further, classical music in Britain will be in trouble. “There has been so much suffering in the industry already,” he said, “particularly for freelancers who fell between the cracks.”For the start of the Wigmore Hall’s 2021-22 season in September, Gilhooly said he had “A, B, C and D scenarios.”“The best-case going forward,” he said, “is that we open on Sept. 1 with full houses and a really ambitious eclectic season. Our stage is a tiny space, but a place I can dream up huge ideas.” More