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The tour’s fun house stage The tour’s fun house stage “Lose Control” (2005) “Lose Control” (2005) Another look from the Out of This World tour Another look from the Out of This World tour Elliott’s “sexy hip-hop” outfit Elliott’s “sexy hip-hop” outfit Elliott’s ‘Out of This World’ stage design Elliott’s ‘Out of This World’ stage […] More
Teodor Currentzis, whose MusicAeterna receives funding from a Russian state bank, has eluded censure at the prestigious Salzburg Festival.When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the classical music world’s reaction was swift. Artists with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin, or those who had publicly supported his war efforts, were dropped by orchestras and opera houses across the West.One person who seemed to elude such punishment, though, was Teodor Currentzis, who is leading concerts and a production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria. More than two years into the war, his continued presence there is frustrating to many, raising uncomfortable questions about what is acceptable in service of music.Currentzis, who was born in Greece, was given Russian citizenship by Putin’s government in 2014, the year Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula. Two decades ago, he founded MusicAeterna, a small musical empire that started as an orchestra and now includes a choir and dance company in St. Petersburg.MusicAeterna doesn’t have any direct affiliation with Putin, but it came under scrutiny after the 2022 invasion because of support from the state-controlled VTB Bank (which has been penalized by the United States), as well as other government-related donors. Currentzis has been silent about the war, neither denouncing Russia nor supporting Ukraine.And he has lost some work as a result. Earlier this year, the Wiener Festwochen in Austria canceled an appearance by him and the German SWR Symphony Orchestra after fierce criticism from the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv, who appeared at the same festival with Ukrainian musicians.Salzburg has stood by Currentzis but not by his Russian musicians. The “Don Giovanni” here is a revival of a production that originated in 2021, with him conducting. Then, the pit ensemble was MusicAeterna. Now it’s Utopia, the all-star group, in the spirit of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, that he started in 2022; pointedly, it is based in Western Europe.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
Mariko Silver, a former president of Bennington College, will take the reins of the organization as it seeks to expand its audience and increase fund-raising.Mariko Silver, a prominent leader in education, government and the nonprofit sphere, will serve as the next president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, the organization announced on Wednesday.Silver, who previously led Bennington College in Vermont and the Henry Luce Foundation in New York, will succeed Henry Timms, who left last month after five years in the job.She will take the reins of Lincoln Center as it works to broaden its audience, navigate an uncertain economy and push through an ambitious plan to tear down the barriers between the center and the surrounding neighborhood. She will also help shape its programming; the center has recently shifted away from classical music in favor of genres like pop, hip-hop, social dance and comedy.“Lincoln Center is the beating heart of New York City,” Silver said in an interview. “I’m incredibly excited to get going and do the work of bringing more beauty, more joy, more art and more human feeling into the world.”The appointment is a milestone for Lincoln Center: Silver, 46, whose father is Jewish and mother is Japanese American, will be the first woman of color to serve as president and chief executive. It is also a homecoming of sorts: Silver grew up a few blocks from the center and studied dance and theater as a child.Steven R. Swartz, the president and chief executive of Hearst, who serves as chair of Lincoln Center’s board, said the organization was impressed by Silver’s record as a nonprofit executive. At Bennington, where she was president from 2013 to 2019, she oversaw the largest capital campaign in the school’s history, raising more than $90 million. She also serves as chair of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s board and was an official at the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration.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
For a new collection with the brand Wildfang, the Blondie singer took inspiration from a personal wardrobe she cultivated by dressing “as daring as you could.”A designer lives inside Debbie Harry. She’ll tell you so herself.As the lead signer of the pop-punk band Blondie, iterations of which have been performing for six decades, Ms. Harry has assembled her own stage wardrobe, a rough-hewn bricolage of shredded prom dresses, spandex bodysuits, fishnet arm warmers and skin-baring vintage castoffs.“I’ve always fiddled around and tried to make statements out of combining things that normally would not be looked at,” she said. “That was the fun — to make it as rock ‘n’ roll and as daring as you could. It was part of the expression of breaking out.”Since forming Blondie in the 1970s with the guitarist Chris Stein, her onetime boyfriend, Ms. Harry has rarely drifted out of public consciousness. In recent years, she has released a memoir and, with her band, albums featuring new music as well as classic songs like “Heart of Glass,” the disco track that helped make Blondie a household name. It has been covered by younger performers like Miley Cyrus, who, in a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone, credited Ms. Harry with blazing a path for new generations of artists.To some, Ms. Harry’s image as the Blondie front woman has been as influential as the band’s music. Her rocker style was the basis for a new collaboration with Wildfang, a brand in Portland, Ore., which this month released a small collection inspired by pieces that the 79-year-old singer pulled from her closet.Pieces in Ms. Harry’s Wildfang line are inspired by items from her own closet.Nicholas O’Donnell/WildfangThe collection includes a suit jacket and trousers, two shirts and a sweatshirt. Those items, priced from about $45 to $200, make liberal reference to Ms. Harry’s familiar wardrobe staples — and to her raw, tear-down-the-barricades sensibility.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
The tradition of performing the anthem took off because people wanted to express their own love of country — not outsource it to guest stars.It was the first game of the 1918 World Series. The Chicago Cubs were playing the Boston Red Sox in Chicago. The country had entered World War I the previous year, so the baseball season leading up to this series had been cut short — men of draft age had been given a deadline to join the war effort.During the seventh-inning stretch, the military band in the stadium tried something new. The song they played was an old one, and it had been played at baseball games before — typically on special occasions, like opening day. But it had been recently rearranged by a team that included the renowned John Philip Sousa. When the band broke into this new version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was no script to follow; everything was improvised. Players took off their hats and faced the flag. Fred Thomas, an active-duty sailor who played for the Red Sox, struck a military salute. As for the audience: “First the song was taken up by a few,” The Times reported, “then others, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the very end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.”The moment was powerful enough that the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” again at the second game of the series, and again at the third. When play moved to Boston, the band there played it, too — now at the beginning of the game, and accompanied, in one case, by the presentation of wounded soldiers who had been given tickets. The song has been played at every World Series game since. In 1931, it became the nation’s official anthem. By World War II, the spread of electronic public-address systems meant it could be performed — and eventually sung — at every professional baseball game, not just those where someone hired a band.Today it is a fixture at most all American sporting events, professional and amateur alike. (In many countries, the national anthem is typically played only before international competitions.) Promising young vocalists sing it at local games. Celebrities vie to perform it at high-wattage events like the World Series and the Super Bowl. What was once a novel, improvised wartime gesture has become a ritual — something we expect as a matter of course.It is a tough gig, whatever the circumstances. The song’s melody is notoriously difficult to belt out. Amateur singers are cut plenty of slack — it’s the spirit that counts — but pop stars are held to a high standard. We ask them to apply their talents to stir us into special contact with our own love of country. But we ask them to do so as part of big-budget, for-profit spectacles, in a media culture that valorizes novelty over tradition.Anthem fails constitute a subgenre of their own.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
The musician, 25, has paired raw honesty with synth-pop and R&B. On her third album, “Buzz,” she moves toward West Coast folk-rock and explores fresh heartbreak.Niki — the Indonesian pop songwriter Nicole Zefanya — was 11 years old when she saw a Taylor Swift documentary that changed her life. “That memory is just a core memory of mine,” she said.Swift’s 2010 “E! True Hollywood Story” pointed Niki toward the kind of career she could have herself, one that now encompasses songs that have been streamed hundreds of millions of times and concerts that turn into fervent singalongs. Her third full-length album, “Buzz,” will be released Friday, followed by a world tour that comes to Central Park SummerStage on Sept. 13.“I’m from Jakarta and somehow I’ve made it all the way here,” Niki said via video from her Los Angeles apartment. “Sometimes it is just mind-boggling how this is the story I get to tell.”Niki, 25, casual in a pale-gray sweatshirt with blond streaks in her dark hair, was speaking from a room that held electric and acoustic guitars, ring lights for video shoots, a high-quality vocal microphone and a stolid upright piano. One of its creaky pedals is heard on “Paths,” a gracious, low-fi post-breakup song on “Buzz” that muses, “Though it didn’t last, I hope our paths cross again.”There’s now an entire songwriting generation of Swift disciples — among them Olivia Rodrigo, Clairo, Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams — who have learned to conjoin self-expression, craftsmanship, ambition and diligence while navigating studios, stages and social media. What these musical progeny have in common — even those from half a world away — are both an artistic spark and a firm work ethic.Many of the songs on “Buzz” are about turning endings into new beginnings.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWe 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
Celebrate the timeless rock ‘n’ roll tradition of a lead singer cuing up a guitarist by listening to tracks from the Pixies, the Runaways and Jimi Hendrix.Black Francis of the Pixies showed love to bandmates.Rob Verhorst/RedfernsDear listeners,It would be difficult for me to pick a favorite moment on the Pixies’ bizarro 1989 masterpiece “Doolittle” — a consistent favorite album of mine since I first heard it as a 15-year-old who had very recently learned what “Un Chien Andalou” was. But if you insist, I’ll zoom into the album’s dead center, in the middle of Track 7, when the lead singer Black Francis issues a command from the eye of the storm, intoning like his life depended on it, “Rock me, Joe.” On cue, the band’s guitarist Joey Santiago then lets out a brief but thoroughly face-melting solo.This is the Pixies’ take on one of my favorite little rock ’n’ roll traditions: A lead singer saying something cool to a guitarist in order to cue up a solo. Today’s playlist is a celebration of this time-honored custom, containing nine variations on this theme.In “Monkey Gone to Heaven” (and several other tracks on this playlist, from the Runaways, MC5 and Gram Parsons) a solo cue is a way for a vocalist to shout out a guitarist by name, sharing a fleeting bit of the spotlight. Other times, as on Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “The Losing End (When You’re On),” it’s a way of getting some spontaneous energy onto a studio track. I’ve even included two tracks where the singer cues himself to solo, in third person. Talk about multitasking.Consider this your cue to press play.Guitar!,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Pixies: “Monkey Gone to Heaven”This is one of the great solo throws of all time. It’s also worth mentioning that in the version of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” that appears on the live radio compilation “Pixies at the BBC,” Francis offers a slight variation: “Rock me, Joseph Alberto Santiago.” Just in case there was any confusion as to which Joe he was talking to.▶ 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
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, will extend his contract and lead Wagner’s four-opera epic, in a production staged by Yuval Sharon.Wagner’s “Ring” cycle is a mammoth undertaking for any opera company: a four-opera, 15-hour epic that features a cast of warriors, gods, giants and dwarves and some of the most daunting music in the repertoire.The Metropolitan Opera said on Tuesday that it would again stage opera’s most ambitious work, starting in the 2027-28 season, the company’s first new production of the “Ring” cycle in nearly two decades. And a familiar face will be on the podium: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director since 2018, who is extending his contract through 2030.The production, which will be staged by the visionary theater director Yuval Sharon, is to feature the soprano Lise Davidsen, one of opera’s brightest stars, as Brünnhilde.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said the company had decided to stage a new “Ring” in part for Nézet-Séguin.“Every music director of a major opera company expects and deserves to have a ‘Ring’ cycle,” he said. “It’s the crowning achievement, the biggest thing you can do in opera.”Nézet-Séguin, 49, whose new contract covers a six-year term, said he was looking forward to the “Ring,” calling it an “extremely intimate affair.”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
