Music

“Safaera” arrives in the middle of Bad Bunny’s second album, “YHLQMDLG,” like a gut punch of memory. The mood is early to mid-2000s: the hard-snapping vintage reggaeton production redolent of the Luny Tunes’ pioneering “Mas Flow” compilations; the tinny, wobbly melody line familiar from Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On”; the guests, Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow, flashes from the genre’s past.Bad Bunny, the most modern — and sometimes postmodern — of the current generation of Latin pop stars, is finding grounding in yesteryear.This is a very particular response to a very intense arc of fame. In the last four years, Bad Bunny has become a signature pop star, a Puerto Rican singer-rapper fluent in reggaeton, Latin trap, pop-punk and beyond. On his last album, “X 100PRE” from 2018, he embraced broad collaboration and experimentation. The genre-surfing was pointed, an example of what happens when you want both to challenge expectations and to make overtures to the rest of the world.But the strikingly good “YHLQMDLG” (which stands for “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” translation “I Do Whatever I Want”) moves in a different direction, looking deep inside the genre’s long history and proposing that there is enough information in the past on which to build a whole worldview.ImageBad Bunny’s “YHLQMDLG.”ImageJ Balvin’s “Colores.”This richness stands in contrast to the approach of the Colombian reggaeton superstar J Balvin, who just released his sixth album, the affable but slightly numbing “Colores.” Balvin was a key player in the Colombian reanimation of reggaeton in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and has become perhaps the genre’s most visible star thanks to his wide-ranging collaborations (with Beyoncé and Cardi B, among others). His mechanisms are straightforward and legible — if Bad Bunny has been the tastemaker ambassador, Balvin has been the glossy centrist. Both were guests during the Super Bowl halftime show in February, a sign of their increased visibility on bigger and bigger stages.“Colores” — every track is named for a color — is a shiny reaffirmation of the steps that have made the reggaeton revival part of the broader global pop conversation over the past few years. The production is buoyant and polished, using reggaeton as a skeleton for ambitiously scaled club-pop. Sometimes there are left-field flourishes, like the kazoo-ish buzz running through “Amarillo,” or the ethereal whistles on “Arcoíris,” a collaboration with the Nigerian Afrobeats progressive Mr. Eazi.But by and large, these are polite songs, and familiar, too. Balvin is a sweetly elegiac singer — see especially “Azul,” where he stretches out soft vowels like taffy — but his rapping is largely blank.What makes these songs really travel is Balvin the hypercolor character — a dazzler in outrageously rare sneakers, chicly proportioned clothes, hair whatever color will be popular next month. His album art is by Takashi Murakami, that empty aesthete signifier who favors exuberant simplicity. And so it is with Balvin.See, for example, the Busta Rhymes-esque video for “Blanco,” a flashy achievement in set and costume design that outpaces the song itself, one of the better ones on this album, full of cheeky reverb and sticky chants.Balvin manages a touch of nostalgia as well on “Colores,” especially on “Negro,” a sneaky, grimy song that harks back to when reggaeton was flirting with hip-hop in the late 2000s. But looking backward isn’t really his thing.Though their approaches can be at odds, Balvin and Bad Bunny are friends and collaborators. Last year they released a “Watch the Throne”-style album together, “Oasis.” It was a mixed bag, full of soft-punch production and especially light on Bad Bunny’s dynamism. It was like watching a racecar stuck in midtown traffic.On “YHLQMDLG,” Bad Bunny returns to genuinely radical fifth-gear pop, almost entirely within the framework of reggaeton then-and-now. “Bichiyal” is of-the-moment, à la Balvin. “Ignorantes” features Sech, and with its pleasantly loping beat is a fitting complement to the Panamanian singer’s 2019 hit “Otro Trago.” On “Puesto Pa’ Guerrial,” Bad Bunny teams with the rising star Myke Towers for a muscular duet. (Towers recently released his second and best album, “Easy Money Baby,” a promising hybrid of reggaeton and hip-hop.) And the crescendo of hard-rock guitars at the end of “Hablamos Mañana” shows Bad Bunny still winking at the world outside reggaeton’s doors.“YHLQMDLG” is a long album, perhaps slightly overlong — “La Zona,” “Vete” and others slide by inoffensively. But the high points are rousing. “La Santa,” a collaboration with Daddy Yankee, a superstar of reggaeton’s first global breakthrough, is stirring, with mellow Drake-style production topped with tart back-and-forth rapping. “Yo Perreo Sola,” about an empowered woman on the dance floor, manages big-club grandeur without sacrificing the pointedness of the reggaeton underpinning (though the female duet partner, Nesi, isn’t credited). “Está Cabrón Ser Yo,” with Anuel AA, is moody, brawny Latin trap.Throughout the album, Bad Bunny finds contemporary ways to deliver old ideas. Tainy, who produced several of its songs and is a graduate of the genre’s mid-2000s renaissance, has a similar idea on his recent album “NEON16 TAPE: The Kids That Grew Up on Reggaeton,” which pairs current performers with classic-minded beats. Now more than ever, Spanish-language stars are being offered the world. But they’ve always had it.Bad Bunny“YHLQMDLG”(Rimas Entertainment)J Balvin“Colores”(Universal Music Latino) More

After over a decade as music director of the Paris Opera, the conductor Philippe Jordan is preparing to enter a new phase of his career at the Vienna State Opera. He bids farewell with the same work that won over the French capital’s audience in 2010: Wagner’s “Ring.”A new staging of the tetralogy by Calixto Bieito has been scheduled to begin this season and continue in the fall before it unfolds under Mr. Jordan’s baton as a mini-festival in November and December. It takes place despite a loss of over 16 million euros ($17 million) because of strikes over retirement reform that forced the company to withdraw two new productions next season.The company has also made available on its website until Sunday a replay of an earlier production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which Mr. Jordan was to conduct at Palais Garnier (three other productions were canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak). Until May 3, viewers will also have the opportunity to experience a full cycle of Tchaikovsky symphonies that Mr. Jordan recorded with the house orchestra in 2017-18.Known as much for his versatility and rigor as an ability to balance the theatrical with musical considerations, the 45-year-old (son of the conductor Armin Jordan) is credited with raising standards in the pit during his Paris tenure. But it is with Wagner perhaps more than any other composer that the Swiss native has made his mark, from noted appearances at the Bayreuth Festival in 2012 to the Metropolitan Opera last year.Starting this fall, when Mr. Jordan takes over as music director in Vienna, he will devote the bulk of his energy to activities at the State Opera. Alongside the “Ring,” he is scheduled to conduct only two concerts in Paris next season (as a further sign of commitment to his new post, he will end his position as principal conductor of the Wiener Symphoniker in 2021).Mr. Jordan said in a telephone interview that “it is best to leave on a high note”: “Although I would have been happy to spend another 10 years in Paris — with this wonderful orchestra, with these two houses, in this wonderful city — I think I gave everything I could. It is also important to get new stimulation and develop myself further.”The following interview was translated from German. It has been edited and condensed.What qualities does the house orchestra in Paris bring to Wagner, and on what aspects have you worked over the years?Not everyone may share my opinion, but my feeling is that Wagner should not necessarily be played heavy and German. We know that he spent a great deal of time in Paris, which was the mecca of opera culture.A French orchestra has per se more transparency and clarity than a German orchestra. The winds are more flexible and smoother. But also the strings, since they are not played as intensively, provide an opportunity for the singers not to constantly have to force [their voices].Nevertheless, one shouldn’t work with a French orchestra on French but rather German qualities. They don’t lose their French qualities as a result. That was our collaborative work; it developed increasingly into the orchestra’s DNA.How has your perspective on the “Ring” changed over the years?A lot has changed because I was in Bayreuth in the meantime. One learns there to conduct Wagner differently than one otherwise would — above all, the “Ring” and “Parsifal.” That lies with the acoustics. The proportions between the woodwinds and horns — which are usually too loud in the pit — and the strings are ideally balanced. One gets a very different feeling for the relief of the score.The other thing is the sense of tempo. Most conductors, myself included, tend to bathe themselves in the sound. In Bayreuth, one notices that it doesn’t carry if a tempo is too slow.To what extent do you adapt to a given director?A conductor and director have to work with mutual respect. It should always be music theater — music stands in the foreground — and nevertheless it should be good theater.I have never worked with Calixto Bieito, but after seeing [his production of Aribert Reimann’s] “Lear” at Garnier, it was clear to me and Stéphane Lissner [director of the Paris Opera] that this is an exciting aesthetic. He is not someone who presents a finished concept that rather brings evocations that result in an overall picture.I am also very pleased that we are trying to cultivate a new generation of Wagner singers — not no-names, but people who are fresh. Iain Paterson is still a relatively new Wotan, Martina Serafin a new Brünnhilde. Of course we also have Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek, which I am very happy about in “Die Walküre.”How have you been affected by the strikes? Is this a warning to the rest of Europe?As a foreigner in this country, it is hard for me to offer an opinion. But I stated in a public letter to the culture minister that the higher the retirement age, the more the quality of the musicians suffers. Most of all with instruments like solo horn or solo trumpet or choral singers.One can say that there are such conditions abroad, but I think this is part of the quality that this system guarantees — that we could always have the best people at the right age.In Vienna, the role of music director is being redefined so that you will be more involved in overall management. What challenges lie ahead there?The challenge is how to manage a repertory company, where one presents up to 60 titles a year. In Paris, it is about 20. How does one deal with the limited rehearsal situation? How does one manage the ensemble?And of course there is this wonderful orchestra, which has a very different playing tradition. There is a lot to discover, and I am very much looking forward to it.In the coming years, the Vienna State Opera has to open itself to a bigger audience. One has a very faithful audience, and a tourist audience, but more young people have to be drawn in. More

Since 2016, Jessie Reyez, a Canadian songwriter whose parents came from Colombia, has built a fervent audience for songs that delve into loyalty and betrayal, ambition and obstacles, heartbreak and vengeance — songs that map the messy, volatile mood swings of 21st-century romance. The 2016 single that brought her international attention, “Figures,” is a ballad built on doo-wop guitar picking that veers between anger and tears; it has been streamed more than 63 million times on YouTube alone.From the beginning, Reyez, 28, has come across with palpable sincerity and a sense of emotional transparency. “I’ve always made it a point to be authentic,” she said via FaceTime from her home in Toronto, wearing a nondesigner T-shirt with a cartoon montage of movie gangsters. Her luxuriant long black hair was gathered on her head in two asymmetrical poofs. Reyez doesn’t strike simplistic pop poses; she doesn’t present herself as an inspirational superwoman or a sexual dynamo, a creature of pure affection or of long-suffering self-pity. Ambivalent impulses flicker constantly through her lyrics and flaunt themselves in her voice, which can be sweet or raspy, childishly innocent or acidly scornful. Her music, though it’s categorized as R&B, pulls together the impulses of folky singer-songwriters and syllable-spitting rappers as well as pop melody and hip-hop impact.The fans who eagerly sing along at Reyez’s concerts see their own growing pains in hers. That reaction can still surprise her. “I never really made music for other people,” she said. “I always made it selfishly. I always made it in my bedroom by myself.” But seeing people connect with tracks she made to soothe herself has changed her outlook: “It helps me feel like I’m doing something right, you know?”“Gatekeeper,” which appeared on her 2017 EP “Kiddo,” bluntly describes her music business #MeToo encounter with a producer who claimed to be interested in her voice: “30 million people want a shot/How much would it take for you to spread those legs apart?” she sang. She not only made a music video of the song itself, but also a 13-minute film dramatizing the incident.Reyez wrote “Far Away,” released in 2019, about a faithful long-distance romance, only to realize after she finished writing the song that certain lines jumped out at her: “You’re still waiting for your papers/Been feeling like the government wants us to break up.” The song’s video showed wrenching images of an immigration raid and family separations. “I felt motivated to want to make something that would act as a conduit for empathy, as a window for anybody who’d never been through it,” she said.Reyez released her EPs in 2017 and 2018; the second, “Being Human in Public,” was nominated for a Grammy for best urban contemporary album. She also had guest spots on songs by hitmakers like Romeo Santos (singing in Spanish), Calvin Harris and Eminem, who returned the favor by appearing on the new album as the seething but still attached boyfriend in “Coffin,” a lovers’ quarrel infused with mortality that imagines a coffin “handmade for two.” A picture of it appears on the album cover.Eminem, who discovered Reyez singing “Gatekeeper” on late-night television, said he admires both her directness and her craftsmanship. “She sings from her heart,” he said by phone from Detroit. “She’s writing about [expletive] that she’s been through and stuff like that. But it’s not easy to do what she does, and she makes it look so easy.”He added, “She doesn’t sound like anybody. Her style of singing, the way she enunciates her words and everything, she’s just naturally dope. It seems like she’s not even trying, and she’s that good. Her voice and her cadences don’t sound like anybody I had ever heard before.”This year, Reyez was all geared up to release her full-length debut album, “Before Love Came to Kill Us,” which arrives on Friday. She was treating the album, unlike the songs collected on her EPs, “as a project to be taken in as a whole,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Let me put my phone on airplane mode, let me sage the room, let me grab a bottle of wine or a bottle of whiskey and let me sink into this.’”In years of songwriting, Reyez had reserved some of her darker, more probing songs for this moment. Her fall 2019 headlining tour introduced a devotional, elegiac ballad, “Love in the Dark”; she followed it with “Ankles,” which sneers at a cheating boyfriend’s dalliances over a blend of choirlike vocals and ratcheting drum-machine beats. (Reyez gives a songwriting credit on “Ankles” to her mother, who consoled her after a breakup with a saying in Spanish that other girls “don’t come up to your ankles.”) The plan was to release the LP while she was touring arenas, opening for the teenage superstar Billie Eilish. While rehearsing her new songs for the stage, she decided to overhaul the album, swapping in songs and punching up mixes, giving the music more jolts — and forcing her label and streaming services to scramble with new files.“When I was building the album, I remember hearing from multiple people that it needs to be cohesive, cohesive, cohesive, and I kind of let that get to my head,” Reyez said. “But my entire time as an artist, I’ve always been a child of polarities.” Contrast, she said, is part of who she is. “It’s innately in me to want to yell and love at the same time. I haven’t been compromising this whole time as an artist. Why would I start with my album?”The tour got underway; Reyez was on the road with Eilish in early March when the coronavirus brought nearly all the pop machinery to a halt. Instead of singing in arenas over the coming weeks, now Reyez is at home trying to improve her piano playing.“I feel weird promoting in these times,” she said. “It feels like music is kind of minuscule in comparison to what’s going on.”Facing the prospect of the pandemic, Reyez started having second thoughts about releasing an album called “Before Love Came to Kill Us.” “The whole premise of the album was to motivate people to think about their mortality,” she said. “Now that it’s coming out, at this time, either I’m insensitive or I’m tuned in.”She added: “It messed me up because I was like, ‘I don’t want to seem insensitive, but this has been my reality for a long time.’ Because that’s just the way I’ve grown up. I’ve grown up thinking about death as something that could easily happen tomorrow. But I know that for everybody else, there’s a lot of fear right now.”Reyez put the question to fans on Instagram: Should she postpone the album? The response, she said, was overwhelming. “It was like 3 percent or 4 percent of people saying yes, and everybody else saying ‘[expletive] no! Because the music helps me in these times.”The album plunges into tangled relationships: vituperative and clingy, flippant and desperate, awash in second thoughts. Gentle bossa nova chords accompany Reyez as she sings about murderous jealousy in “Intruders”; “Deaf” is a revenge taunt set to skidding, sliding, disorienting electronics. “Kill Us” moves from a 1950s slow-dance kiss-off to tremulous thoughts of a second chance.There’s also a song in Spanish: “La Memoria,” a mournful reproach to a lover who mistreated her, and a reminder of Reyez’s Latin heritage. “It’s in my face, it’s in my blood, it’s in my dark hair, it’s in my brown skin,” she said. “It’s in the way that my soul lifts up when I hear Colombia. It’s in the way that I hug my mom. My parents purposely kept me connected to our roots, our blood.”Reyez still has misgivings about releasing the album now — not for its music, but for the state of the world. “I’m conflicted,” she said, gazing earnestly in the FaceTime camera and then shrugging. “But I’ve decided I’m putting it out, because indecision never did anything for anybody.” More