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      Sofia Gubaidulina, Composer Who Provoked Soviet Censors, Dies at 93

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      Sofia Gubaidulina, a Tatar-Russian composer who defied Soviet dogma with her openly religious music and after decades of suppression moved to the West, where she was feted by major orchestras, died on Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93. Carol Ann Cheung, of Boosey & Hawkes, Ms. Gubaidulina’s publisher, said the cause was cancer.Ms. Gubaidulina (pronounced goo-bye-doo-LEE-na) wrote many works steeped in biblical and liturgical texts that provoked censors at home and, beginning in the final decade of the Cold War, captivated Western audiences. She was part of a group of important composers in the Soviet Union, including Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, who found disfavor with the authorities but acclaim abroad.She explored the tension between the human and the divine, and sought to place her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of repairing what she believed to be the broken bond between man and God. Using musical terms, Ms. Gubaidulina often spoke of her work bringing legato, a sense of connected flow, into the fragmented “staccato of life.”Soloists who performed her work, among them the violinists Gidon Kremer and Anne-Sofie Mutter, often spoke of the emotional intensity that the music required. Conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit and Kurt Masur, were strong advocates for her music.Folk traditions also fascinated Ms. Gubaidulina, who credited her Tatar roots with her love for percussion and shimmering sound colors. She favored soft-spoken or tenebrous instruments including the harp, the 13-stringed Japanese koto and the double bass.Ms. Gubaidulina in 2009 at a music festival in Berlin. She credited her Tatar roots with her love for using percussion in her compositions.Kai Bienert/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sofia Gubaidulina Was Both Fully Modern and Sincerely Spiritual

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      Sofia Gubaidulina’s work, with its thorniness and religious themes, put her at odds with the Soviet government.The Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on Thursday at 93, was that rare creature: an artist both fully modern and sincerely spiritual. “I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said in a 2021 interview.That is hardly a universal worldview these days. The era of Palestrina and Bach, who aimed to glorify God with their work, is centuries past. Music that is adventurous, religious and great is unusual in our secular time, and some of the most significant was written by Gubaidulina.Hers was never a soothing or tuneful faith. Her music is darker and more bracing than that of, say, Arvo Pärt, whose minimalist spirituality has been co-opted for meditation playlists.Gubaidulina’s work is not the kind of thing you put on during morning yoga. She makes sounds of struggle and disorder; of awaiting some signal from beyond with hushed anxiety; of the strenuous attempt to bridge the gap between humans and the divine. Transcendence, if and when it arrives, is hard won.Inspired by Psalm 130, “De Profundis” (1978), a wrenching solo for the bayan, the Russian accordion she loved, begins in the instrument’s depths and rises to harshly radiant heights. Stark focus suffuses “The Canticle of the Sun” (1997), written for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a small choir and percussion, and based on a song by St. Francis praising God. Her grand St. John Passion (2000) has apocalyptic force.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mercedes’s Most Affordable Sedan Will Be Electric

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      The German luxury carmaker said its latest compact sedan solved problems that had kept people from buying electric vehicles.Mercedes-Benz said on Thursday that the latest version of its least expensive sedan would be available first as an all-electric car and then as a hybrid. And the company will no longer sell a gasoline-only version of the car.That’s a big break from how Mercedes and other established carmakers have typically operated. Until recently, most automakers adapted vehicles designed for fossil fuels to be powered by batteries. The Mercedes sedan, the CLA, which the company unveiled in Rome with the rapper will.i.am, is an example of how at least some established carmakers are developing electric cars first, then adapting them for customers who still want a gasoline engine.The CLA, the first of more than two dozen Mercedes vehicles that will use the same basic technology, is a sign that many global carmakers are placing a priority on electric vehicles even as Republicans in the United States try to roll back Biden-era legislation that was intended to promote battery technology.Yet faced with uncertain demand for electric vehicles and unpredictable government policies, Mercedes is tempering its bets by offering hybrids, which pair traditional gasoline engines with relatively small batteries and electric motors.“If the world is not dominant electric by 2030, we as Mercedes-Benz, as an established manufacturer, we cannot walk away from a significant part of our revenues,” Ola Källenius, the chief executive of Mercedes, said in an interview in Rome. “So indeed, you could call it a hedge.”Mercedes did not disclose a price for the new CLA, but said it would be affordable for owners of the current version, which starts at $45,000 in the United States. Eventually some of the components from the car will be used in sport utility vehicles and a station wagon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Interview: Tori Amos on Her Children’s Book and Her Reading Life

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      What inspires the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter? Her first picture book, “Tori and the Muses,” offers an answer. In an email interview, she shared how her gently rebellious mother made her a reader. SCOTT HELLERWhat books are on your night stand?“Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals,” by Jamie Sams and David Carson. It’s an interactive book and card set where you can pull a card and read about the healing properties that each animal embodies as it relates to mind, body and spirit. Jamie Sams was of Indigenous heritage, and I feel like some of it was passed down to her as a gift she has channeled for us all.How do you organize your books?Let’s put it this way: Being a librarian is a fantasy of mine. In my album “Tales of a Librarian,” I’m dressed in different imagined librarian costumes, and in the liner notes the tracks are organized by the Dewey Decimal System. My own little libraries don’t have a system, but I have dreams of one! What kind of reader were you as a child?My reading was all inspired by my mother, Mary. My father, a pastor, believed that she was reading me Bible stories. But what she was doing, and I’m convinced this was her rebellion — her Methodist minister’s wife rebellion, because it was difficult to rebel, especially as a minister’s wife in the late ’60s if you wanted to stay married and accepted by the parishioners and society at large — was reading to me from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?“Growing Up,” by Russell Baker, which I got a few years ago from my friend Mary Ellen Bobb. I’d never heard of Baker and I couldn’t put the book down. The way he could tell the story of his life made me feel like I knew everybody in it by the time I finished. I grew up in Baltimore and he put the city in a different light for me: more like a shining city on a hill.What’s the last great book you read?I’m rereading “Landmarks,” by Robert Macfarlane. The way this man writes about landscapes, particularly in the U.K., makes the wild tracks and the sea roads come alive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ahead of World Tour, Blackpink’s Members Venture Out On Their Own

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      On new solo releases, Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé each face a choice: double-down or retreat from their roles in the smash K-pop girl group.As K-pop supergroups go, Blackpink was — remains? — a supernova. In the late 2010s, it released a series of EPs and singles that emphasized maximalism and pandemonium. Its songs were huge, and pugnacious, and rowdy — a bit of a rejoinder to some of the delicate girl groups that preceded it, and a bit of a taunt about just how much mayhem a pop hit could contain.Blackpink was also utterly modern — though functionally split between its true singers, Rosé and Jisoo, and its rappers, Lisa and Jennie, there was a surprising amount of vocal versatility across all the group members. Their flexibility kept the group’s music nimble and unpredictable — ideas arrived at warp speed, and departed almost as quickly.After a few years, though, Blackpink’s chaos began to rattle and rankle a bit — its hugeness in sound, and also in global success, threatened to topple the empire.And so there was a hiatus, albeit a brief one, that’s now ending with the release of solo projects by all four members, in advance of a reunion tour that begins in July. (Reunions aren’t what they used to be — the group last toured in 2023.)In theory, the albums should be an opportunity to underscore what each of the four does best, and an opportunity to expand on the roles they played in the group — and sometimes the new releases do. But more often, holding the albums side by side tells a story about record label ambitions and the more legible parts of K-pop’s genre cross-pollination more so than the artistic ambitions of each member.Lisa and Jennie, most responsible for Blackpink’s signature attitude, are reckoning with similar pressures on their new albums, both of which nod to the sound that made the group erupt while attempting to chisel out a path forward.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Ravel Work Premieres at the New York Phil After Nearly 125 Years

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      A prelude and dance by the French master recently surfaced in a Paris library. Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel has premiered dozens of pieces in his career.But the score that he was giddily studying on a recent afternoon at Lincoln Center was different: a nearly 125-year-old piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel that had only recently surfaced in a Paris library.“Imagine more than 100 years later discovering a small, beautiful jewel,” Dudamel, the incoming music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, said in an interview at David Geffen Hall. “It’s precious.”On Thursday, Dudamel and the Philharmonic will give the world premiere of the five-minute piece as part of a program celebrating the 150th birthday of Ravel, one of the leading composers of the 20th century, whose works include “Boléro,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “La Valse.”The newly found piece, “Sémiramis: Prélude et Danse,” was written sometime between 1900 and 1902, when Ravel was in his late 20s and sparring with administrators at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition.The work, from an unfinished cantata about the Babylonian queen Semiramis, reveals a young musician still honing his voice and looking to others, like the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, for inspiration. “Sémiramis” lacks some of the lush textures and rich harmonies for which Ravel would become known — he was a master of blending French impressionism, Spanish melodies, baroque, jazz and other music — though there are hints of his unconventional style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Larry Appelbaum, Who Found Jazz Treasure in the Archives, Dies at 67

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      He helped turn the Library of Congress into a leading center for research on the history of jazz, and made some surprising discoveries of his own.Larry Appelbaum, a music archivist who over a long career at the Library of Congress helped make it a leading center for research into the history of jazz, discovering a number of important recordings along the way, died on Feb. 21 in Washington. He was 67.His death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia, his brother Howard said.Mr. Appelbaum specialized in one of the Library of Congress’s most complex tasks: the preservation of recorded speech and music, often involving its transfer from one format to another. As part of that effort, he acquired and processed collections of old recordings, a job that offered no end of drudge work, but also the opportunity for serendipitous finds.His biggest discovery came in 2005, when the library received a large collection of jazz recordings — fragile acetate tapes made by Voice of America at Carnegie Hall in 1957.“There was literally a truck filled with tapes that came to us,” he recalled in an interview for the D.C. Jazz Festival.As he flipped through them, he found one labeled, in pencil, “Thelonious Monk Quartet,” with a few track listings. Interesting, he thought, but not necessarily momentous.“It was only when I put the tape on the machine and started to listen to it that I thought, ‘That’s John Coltrane,’” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Party Like It’s 2009: The Playlist

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      Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” inspired a look back at a time when indie-rock and Auto-Tuned pop mingled, and the lines between the underground and mainstream blurredGrizzly Bear performing at SXSW in 2009.Josh Haner/The New York TimesDear listeners,I spent the weekend reviewing Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” and thinking a lot about 2009, a recent moment the album explicitly references. When I was trying to put my finger on exactly what 2009 sounded like, there was only one thing to do: make a playlist.I graduated from college in the fabled year of “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” — and of the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” — so I attach a lot of emotions and memories to that musical moment. My favorite 2009 albums at the time were a trifecta of stellar and ambitious indie releases that would come to define their era, too: Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest” and Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca.” The line between underground and mainstream music was becoming provocatively blurred, in a way that seems a little quaint today. The writer Andrew Unterberger recently devoted an entire episode of his Billboard podcast to an event that somehow made headlines in 2009: Beyoncé and Jay-Z attending a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Naturally, her cool younger sister, Solange, took them.)You’ll hear Grizzly Bear on this brief tour through 2009, along with higher-profile artists like Miley Cyrus, Jason Derulo and Mariah Carey. This is hardly meant to be a definitive look at the year’s releases, but a quick refresher on what it sounded like to, as I put it in my “Mayhem” review, party like it’s 2009.All up in the blogs,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Phoenix: “Lisztomania”Let’s kick things off with this irresistibly upbeat opening track from the French pop band Phoenix’s 2009 LP, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.” This song prompted one of the more wholesome memes of 2009, when a YouTube creator used it to soundtrack a montage of Brat Pack movie dance scenes. That video became such a sensation that it inspired countless copycat clips — including one featuring a future member of Congress.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More