Music

After appearing in videos for Beyoncé and Katy Perry, the 30-year-old former model released “Shift,” an R&B album with electronic feels. More

Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsExpressions of FreedomZaq Landsberg’s “Reclining Liberty” will be on view in Morningside Park until April.Zaq LandsbergIn 2005, Zaq Landsberg created a new nation in rural Utah called Zaqistan, on the premise that our ideals around governance were worth re-evaluating. In Harlem’s Morningside Park, his yearlong installation “Reclining Liberty” — a 25-foot-long Buddha-like version of the Statue of Liberty — is another re-examination, this time of a quintessential American symbol. More

The Met Orchestra’s return, an opera from Paris and a Philip Glass circus work are among the highlights.With in-person performances just beginning to return in many places, here are 10 highlights of the online music content coming in June. (Times listed are Eastern.)Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Met OrchestraAvailable through June 4; dallassymphony.org.One of the most dramatic musical coups of the pandemic came a month ago, when players from the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra — which went unpaid for nearly a year — traveled to Texas to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was a reunion with Fabio Luisi, who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years and is now the music director in Dallas. The filmed result is fresh, vivid and cumulatively quite moving. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Circus Days and Nights’June 1 at noon; malmoopera.se; there are several more livestreamed performances through June 13.Circus juggling was one of the highlights of Phelim McDermott’s recent staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten.” Might that have given Glass a new idea? Whether it’s coincidence or not, his latest stage work — a collaboration with the librettist David Henry Hwang and the circus director Tilde Bjorfors — is being advertised as a “never-before-seen fusion of circus and opera,” streamed live from the Malmo Opera in Sweden. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Desert In’June 3 at noon; operabox.tv; available indefinitely.Filmed opera continues to take pandemic-prompted steps forward, including this pivot to episodic narrative. Available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv platform, “Desert In” is an eight-part mini-series in which a married couple runs what is described as “a mysterious motor lodge where guests pay to be reunited with lost loves.” (The episodes, projected to last between 10 and 20 minutes each, will roll out on a weekly basis, two at a time.) The rotating creative team is promising, with composers like Nathalie Joachim and Nico Muhly taking turns writing episodes, for a cast that includes the star mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. SETH COLTER WALLSDetroit Symphony OrchestraJune 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available through June 17 and 18.Kent Nagano, an insightful and dynamic conductor, is presenting two 45-minute programs with the Detroit Symphony — both of which, in characteristic Nagano style, offer intriguing pairings of old and new. On June 3 he leads Toshio Hosokawa’s Percussion Intermezzo from “Stilles Meer,” an opera written in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, alongside Schubert’s ebullient Fifth Symphony. The next day he pairs Britten’s “Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury” with Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Britten,” before concluding with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with the elegant pianist Gilles Vonsattel as soloist. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdam Barnett-Hart of the Escher String Quartet, which livestreams a program of Bartok and Sibelius on June 10.Ian Douglas for The New York TimesEscher String QuartetJune 10 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through June 17.Scheduled for December of last year, before the pandemic intervened, the exciting Escher String Quartet performs live from the Rose Studio under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The program opens with Bartok’s final quartet, first performed in 1941 and a work that arrestingly combines aching grief — his mother died and World War II was grimly unfolding — with teeming intensity. The concert ends with Sibelius’s unconventional and engrossing “Voces Intimae” in five movements, written in 1909. It’s the “kind of thing,” Sibelius wrote of this work, that “brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” ANTHONY TOMMASINIKronos FestivalJune 11 at 10 p.m.; kronosquartet.org; available through Aug. 31.Global in scope, this is the first of three meaty streamed programs which, together with some ancillary offerings and films, make up this intriguing festival of new work presented by the Kronos Quartet and its creative foundation. The premieres include music by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mahsa Vahdat; other pieces are by Clint Mansell, Jlin and Pete Seeger (his sadly ever-relevant “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Le Soulier de Satin’June 14; chezsoi.operadeparis.fr; available indefinitely.As the summer sun invites you outside, the last thing you may want is to stare at a screen for over six hours. But if you have the patience — or if a rainy day keeps you indoors — set aside time for the Paris Opera’s latest premiere: the third in its cycle of works inspired by French literature, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie’s third opera. It’s an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling drama “Le Soulier de Satin” (“The Satin Slipper”) — in preview clips rich with misty orchestration and long melodies — directed by Stanislas Nordey, conducted by its composer and starring the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and the mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux. JOSHUA BARONE‘Terra Nova’June 17 at 7:30 p.m.; 5bmf.org; available through Dec. 31.Those passing by the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza on a hot recent Saturday afternoon could experience an unexpectedly sophisticated new song cycle musing on the tangled history of exploration and colonization. Written by the bookish performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical and played with the quartet Hub New Music, the sometimes propulsive, sometimes sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing, and foundered only in two long, talky sections at the end. It will be released for streaming in a version filmed at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. ZACHARY WOOLFETo close her time as composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony, Missy Mazzoli has planned two streaming concerts.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCSO SessionsJune 24 at 12:01 a.m.; cso.org/tv; available through July 23.Missy Mazzoli closes her tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s composer in residence with two rich streaming programs of new and recent music. This, the second of the concerts, includes the premiere of Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” which draws on different mourning traditions and is scored for vocal quartet, winds, brass and percussion; there are also works by Gilda Lyons, David Reminick and Tomeka Reid on offer. (The first program, which goes online June 10, is no slouch, either, featuring pieces by Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith and Mazzoli herself.) ZACHARY WOOLFEPhilharmonia OrchestraJune 24 and 25 at 2:30 p.m.; philharmonia.co.uk; available until Sept. 16 and 17.One of the great partnerships in music — the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra in London — ends in June with Salonen’s final concerts as principal conductor. (Rest assured, the group seems in good hands with his successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali.) Both programs are meaty affairs: one beginning with Beethoven’s First Symphony and ending with Sibelius’s Seventh, bookends to Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman) and Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments”; and the other surveying Bach through the eyes of 20th-century artists, along with the premiere of Salonen’s “Fog,” adapted for orchestra, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida the tantalizing soloist. JOSHUA BARONE More

José Mauro’s first LP, originally released in 1970, became a cult classic. Far Out Recordings is now putting out its follow-up under very different circumstances.In 2016, the British record label Far Out Recordings reissued the debut album by José Mauro, a mysterious Brazilian singer and guitarist whose 1970 LP, “Obnoxious,” had become a cult classic in his home country and with the famed crate diggers Madlib, Floating Points and Gilles Peterson. The album’s press materials noted that the conditions of Mauro’s death, presumed to have occurred in the 1970s, were unexplained. Maybe he perished in an auto accident, or was killed by the military for making what they thought were protest songs.Just one thing, though: Mauro is still alive.He never tangled with Brazil’s military dictatorship and didn’t craft anything close to political music, though his radiant art was seen as an escape. “I was a student, a music student who devoted himself to composing. Simple as that,” Mauro, 72, wrote in an email through a translator. “Nature, that was my thing. Nature and beauty.”On Friday, Far Out, which specializes in Brazilian music, is returning to Mauro’s catalog, reissuing his second and only other album, “A Viagem Das Horas” (“The Journey of the Hours”) — a masterful blend of psychedelic folk and orchestral soul that, while recorded along with Mauro’s debut, wasn’t originally released until six years later. Where “Obnoxious” offered a more straightforward set of guitar-driven bossa nova, the follow-up represented a musical and spiritual awakening for Mauro and his songwriting partner, Ana Maria Bahiana, an author and journalist now living in Los Angeles. Its arrival has forced the label, and others who presumed Mauro dead, to reckon with their mistake.“From a label standpoint, we genuinely believed Mauro was gone, that’s all there is to it really,” Joe Davis, Far Out’s founder, wrote in an email. “There was no reason for us to believe otherwise at the time. As soon as we heard that he was alive, we stopped everything until we spoke with him.” He said the revelation explained the five-year pause between the reissues.Nobody is quite sure why rumors about Mauro’s death began. “I cannot fathom how it came about,” Mauro wrote. “I sort of disappeared due to the vast gap between recording and releasing the albums. But there was no reason to think that I had died!”Davis said that the label learned of Mauro’s supposed demise in 1994, when Mauro’s old producer, Roberto Quartin, informed him of a possible catastrophe involving the singer. “He said he was told that maybe he had a serious motorcycle accident and passed away but wasn’t 100-percent sure,” Davis wrote. Because no one knew where Mauro was — not even the musicians he recorded with — “it led us to believe that was probably the case,” Davis added. (Quartin died in 2004.)But Bahiana knew that wasn’t true. “A motorcycle is the last thing he would have because he hated speed,” she said in a phone interview. “He would drive his father’s car at 20 kilometers per hour.” There was talk that he was arrested and tortured, but “none of this happened,” she said.Bahiana contacted Far Out after the label reissued “Obnoxious”; she knew Mauro was alive but didn’t know where. They eventually contacted Mauro through his nephew, David Butter, who helped facilitate the reissuing of his uncle’s music, and learned Mauro was living on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, spending his days reading and talking to friends.Mauro’s story began in a farmstead in Jacarepaguá, in the West Zone of Rio. He was raised in a musical household; his father liked to sing and his great-grandfather was a small-town maestro. Mauro started playing the accordion when he was 6; nine years later, he was given an acoustic guitar, even though he wanted a piano. “My father was not able to buy one at the time,” he wrote. He fell in love with the guitar and studied piano at ProArte, a prestigious music school in Rio.His guitar teachers included the Brazilian luminaries Baden Powell, Roberto Menescal and Wanda Sá, and he learned how to compose songs from Wilma Graça, the noted concert pianist. At ProArte, Mauro infused classical elements into his guitar playing, taking his music from an understated rustic style and giving it a more robust sound. He fell in love with music and didn’t turn back.“Music became an ally, and I was pleased about that,” he wrote. “There was no bigger joy to me than taking the guitar and composing by intuition. Music came to me as a gift, as a natural gift.”Mauro started listening to American singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan, Jim Croce and James Taylor), and to jazz and blues singers (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan). Among Brazilian musicians, he particularly liked the melodic soul that Edu Lobo, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Milton Nascimento were making. The varied influences helped Mauro forge his own sound, meant to elicit peace and contemplation.“My style is very personal,” he wrote. “I’ve always felt like a natural-born musician, carrying songs inside me. I was willing to give my best to the world without relinquishing my composing style.” He wrote songs in his room, looking out the window, staring at the nearby Atlantic Rainforest, where he observed animals, butterflies and birds: “When I felt in a creative mood, I turned the tape recorder on and started composing.”He impressed Quartin, his would-be producer, by playing a waltz he had just composed on guitar after dinner at a mutual friend’s house. Soon after, he was introduced to Bahiana through a friend of hers, and visited his future collaborator at her house in Ipanema. The two started writing hundreds of songs for what would become “Obnoxious” and “A Viagem Das Horas.”“We clicked right away,” Bahiana said. “I loved his music. It was easy for me to find words to his songs.”Quartin, a local producer and label head who’d released some 20 albums through his Forma imprint, selected the songs he liked and put Mauro and Bahiana in the studio with Lindolfo Gaya, who worked on song arrangements and conducted the orchestra. “Obnoxious” was released to little fanfare; Quartin lost interest in putting out “A Viagem Das Horas” and sold it off.“You know the labels that just do ‘Best Songs from the ’40s,’ ‘Your Favorite Jingles,’ that type of thing?” Bahiana said. “He ended up selling the second album to a company like that, who trashed it, basically. And that was the end of the story for us.” Bahiana went back to college and followed her passion for writing. Mauro stayed in Rio, teaching guitar and composing music for theater.Mauro said that the six-year wait between albums broke his will to compose more songs: “It felt like centuries,” he wrote. He has no doubt that he and Bahiana generated enough music to release another two LPs. Dismayed with the industry, he eventually opted for a quiet existence. As he got older, he had to stop playing the guitar altogether: Mauro was diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson’s disease. Now his trembling hands won’t allow him to strum the instrument at all. (“And to complicate things further, people took me for dead,” he wrote.)Despite losing his creative spark, Mauro isn’t focused on regret. That the music still sounds just as vibrant today as it did four decades ago is good enough for him.The same goes for Bahiana, who relishes the purity of the music. “It is his soul talking,” she said. “There’s no gimmicks there, no ‘I’m going to write this because it’s a trend.’ It’s exactly the way we composed, the way we showed his spirit. His heart is there.” More

Moving quickly in the pandemic, a wealthy money manager underwrote performances via a new foundation, with a little help from a violin-obsessed adviser. More

They have sold more records than a lot of pop stars who are much more famous than they will ever be, but they’re still another band from Akron, Ohio. More

The singer is charged with two counts of simple assault in connection with an episode with a videographer during a concert in 2019. More

For its second album, the British band got louder — and quieter, too. More