bestofculture2022

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares129 Views

    10 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2023

    by

    “Succession” returns, the Spider-Verse spawns a sequel, Kelela hits the road and Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut with “Creed III.”Miguel and Carlos CevallosMargaret LyonsThe Scheming Roys of “Succession” ReturnBrian Cox as Logan Roy in Season 4 of “Succession,” which returns to HBO in the spring.Macall Polay/HBOWhile there are no sure bets in television, and plenty of once-great shows have fallen into bland disarray, I am counting the days until “Succession” comes back for its fourth season. (HBO says it will air in the spring.) Oh, I can hear the jangly piano theme now, and just knowing that the bereft and broken Roys, their gorgeously cruel dialogue and endless, joyless quests for power will soon be back on my screen fills me with elation. God, I hope Kendall sings in front of an audience again, and Greg stammers his way into failing up somehow, and Gerri and Roman’s erotic entanglement deepens and Shiv continues her reign of ecru terror. Logan will be grumbly! Connor will be a dingus! Tom will be in hapless agony! And I will be so, so happy, reveling in the show’s mastery of tension, its push-pull of crumbling and coalescing.Maya PhillipsThe Spider-Verse Slings Into a SequelBefore Michelle Yeoh faced off against Jobu Tupaki and her everything bagel of oblivion in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and before Doctor Strange fought bizarro Strange with weaponized music notation in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” in 2018 “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” provided a much-needed shock to the multiverse concept in film. Though it introduced a whole gang of Spider-people, each with his or her own unique back story, universe and aesthetic, “Spider-Verse” made plenty of space for its protagonist, Miles Morales, a young Afro-Latino Spider-Man whose heartfelt, humorous character arc, along with the film’s stunning animation and killer soundtrack, wasn’t lost even amid the infinite vastness of the multiverse. In June the sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” will offer a more mature Miles and a new cast of Spider-variants voiced by a stellar cast, including Issa Rae as an Afro-wearing Spider-Woman, Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk and Oscar Isaac as Spider-Man 2099.Jon ParelesKelela Hits the Road With Her Avant-Garde R&BThe singer and songwriter Kelela has floated on the avant-garde fringe of R&B since she released her first mixtape, “Cut 4 Me,” in 2013. Working with some of the most innovative producers around, Kelela often places her voice within eerie electronic backdrops, creating unexpected intimacy in virtual realms. But she has been elusive. She released her only full-length album, “Take Me Apart,” in 2017, and re-emerged with a few singles in 2022, starting with the enigmatic “Washed Away” and moving toward dance music and pop with “Happy Ending” and “On the Run.” Those songs are previews of her second full-length album, “Raven,” which is due in February, followed by a club tour — titled “Rave:N”—- that brings her to Webster Hall in New York on March 17. Both should reveal her latest convolutions and innovations.Mike HaleTwo Spins on the Mystery of the WeekNatasha Lyonne plays the crime-solving heroine of Peacock’s “Poker Face,” created by Rian Johnson.Phillip Caruso/PeacockTwo new crime dramas are taking different approaches to a venerable format, the mystery of the week. Fox’s “Accused” (Jan. 22) is a pure anthology, with 15 self-contained episodes set in different locales and featuring different casts. This presumably expensive venture — a lot of actors, including Wendell Pierce, Margo Martindale, Michael Chiklis, Rhea Perlman and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, need to be paid — is a joint venture of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa (“Homeland”) and David Shore (“House”). Peacock’s “Poker Face” (Jan. 26), on the other hand, achieves its episodic structure by putting its crime-solving heroine on the road, where she finds new mysteries to tackle each week. Created by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) and starring Natasha Lyonne, it also requires an extensive cast, which includes Adrien Brody, Cherry Jones, Chloë Sevigny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Nolte and the busy Rhea Perlman.Jesse GreenA Rare Revival of a Hansberry DramaLorraine Hansberry, photographed in her apartment in 1959; her play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” will be presented at BAM beginning in February.David Attie/Getty ImagesOnly two plays by Lorraine Hansberry were produced during her short lifetime. “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959, was the big deal: an instant classic, forever revivable. But “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which opened on Broadway in 1964 and closed days before she died in 1965, has barely been seen again. Now it will be, in a starry production (Feb. 4 through March 19) directed by Anne Kauffman for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan play a bohemian Village couple — much like Hansberry and her husband, Robert Nemiroff — struggling to align their racial, sexual and cultural positions within the treacherous crosscurrents of contemporary politics. In some ways a Black critique of white liberalism, it leaves no group unscathed in its portrait of do-gooders doing what, for Hansberry, they do best: making a mess with the best of intentions.Salamishah TilletMichael B. Jordan Gets Back in the RingShot on IMAX cameras, “Creed III” promises to get extremely close to the frenzied action of a boxing match. Michael B. Jordan, making his directorial debut, is back as the light heavyweight champion Adonis “Donnie” Creed, now a thriving family man with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter (Mila Davis-Kent). While Sylvester Stallone doesn’t star in this installment of the franchise, Jonathan Majors plays Donnie’s childhood friend Damian, who leaves prison after nearly two decades and turns into his fiercest competitor. Both men are among the most charismatic, talented and nuanced actors of their generation and I expect they’ll deliver some powerful performances inside and outside the ring. Look for the movie on March 3.Zachary WoolfeA New Staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the MetA design sketch for a new staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera, with Piotr Beczala in the title role.via Metropolitan OperaOf the core repertory, the 25 or 30 titles at the center of the Metropolitan Opera’s history, none has been absent from its stage longer than Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” This is strange, since “Lohengrin” is probably the most performed Wagner work worldwide; it’s done all the time. But the Met’s radically minimal, painstakingly still Robert Wilson production posed extreme demands on singers and technicians alike, and was last seen in 2006. So it’ll be a major event when, on Feb. 26, the opera finally returns to New York in a new staging, directed by François Girard, whose thoughtful “Parsifal,” set in a stylized present day, was a success. (His muddled “Der Fliegende Holländer” early in 2020, less so.) Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts a cast that includes the plangent tenor Piotr Beczala in the title role, the budding Wagnerian Tamara Wilson as Elsa, Christine Goerke as the aggrieved Ortrud, Evgeny Nikitin and Günther Groissböck.Gia KourlasPina Bausch Takes a Trip to BrazilIn “Água” by the choreographer Pina Bausch, Tsai-Chin Yu, foreground, spins with Nicholas Losada behind her.Ursula KaufmannThe choreographer Pina Bausch found inspiration in places and in cultures in the latter part of her career, transforming those experiences into shimmering, visceral dances. While they don’t have the darkness and bite of her earlier works, they do have the potential to wash over you like a vacation — albeit one in the theater. This spring, from March 3 to 19, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host one such trip to Brazil. In “Água,” created by Bausch during a 2001 residency, the radiance of the landscape is celebrated with voluptuous, exuberant dancing and sumptuous color. It’s been six years since Tanztheater Wuppertal, now under the artistic direction of Boris Charmatz, a French experimentalist, performed at the Academy. As usual with a Bausch work, the hair will flow, the dresses will shimmer and the soundtrack will be eclectic. This one includes music by PJ Harvey, St Germain and Tom Waits. Strap yourself in.Jason FaragoTangled Webs of Modern Invention at the GuggenheimGego installing “Reticulárea” at Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in 1969.Fundación Gego; Juan SantanaHer birth certificate read Gertrud Goldschmidt — but the German-born Venezuelan artist always preferred Gego, a shrinking of her first and last names that reverberated with an art of slender brilliance. Born to a Jewish family in Hamburg in 1912, she studied architecture before fleeing to Caracas in 1939, and only in her 40s did she begin gathering copper wires, aluminum rods and plastic dowels into striking yet splintery abstract clusters. Beguiling and forbidding by turns, her works could be suspended like a mobile, or stream from the ceiling, or else could propagate across a room like a massive spider’s web. On one point Gego was uncompromising: These metal assemblages were not sculptures, she insisted, but “drawings without paper” that took a very different route to abstraction than the clean geometries many other Latin American artists favored. (They’re also delightfully resistant to social media transmission, their finely interlaced wires beyond the ken of even the highest-resolution cameraphone.) “Gego: Measuring Infinity,” opening March 31 at the Guggenheim, will fill the museum’s white spiral with her spindly aggregations — and, amid extreme refugee crises in both Europe and Venezuela, her themes of fragility and enmeshment have lost none of their force.Jason ZinomanSara Schaefer Spoofs the Comedy WorldSpoofing the cult of comedy in the language of Scientology, the wry, incisive stand-up Sara Schaefer adopts the pose, jargon and microphone of a guru in her new solo show about how to make it in the stand-up business. “Going Up” (a riff on the Scientology term “Going Clear”), which has been performed a few times but will get a wider hearing in 2023, is ambitious and nimble, sneakily personal with enough inside-baseball jokes to make it a must-see for comedy nerds. The most impressive example of this, and the bit I am most looking forward to revisiting, is when Schaefer illustrates every kind of modern stand-up by doing the same genre of joke, over and over again, in a multitude of styles. It’s a feat of comedy as well as criticism that captures an entire scene in just a few minutes. Her show should be a staple of festivals, but early in the year, it will stop in, among other places, San Francisco, Austin and New York when she performs at Caveat on April 6. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

      by

      Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Best Classical Music of 2022

      by

      Fresh takes on Mozart, Dvorak and Debussy, and newer works by Dewa Alit, Kate Soper and Caroline Shaw are among our favorite recordings this year.Dewa Alit: ‘Likad’“Chasing the Phantom”; Dewa Alit and Gamelan Salukat (Black Truffle)Dewa Alit: “Likad”Black TruffleThis Balinese composer combines two different gamelan scales in his latest project. Just as you start to grasp the harmonic implications, his ensemble begins navigating virtuoso rhythm changes. Recommended if you like innovative tunings, torrid riffing, blooming transitions of percussive color, or hip-hop beat-tapes. SETH COLTER WALLSAnonymous: ‘Orante Sancta Lucia’“Mother Sister Daughter”; Musica Secreta; Laurie Stras, director (Lucky Music)“Orante sancta Lucia”Lucky MusicMusica Secreta — its name inspired by the mystery still surrounding works written by and for Renaissance and Baroque women — is pressing into tantalizingly early repertoire from around the turn of the 16th century, including this “Vespers of St. Lucy” and other rare polyphonic settings of psalm antiphons (chants sung alongside psalm verses) believed to have originated in Italian convents. ZACHARY WOOLFEBach: ‘Erbarme dich’“Matthäus-Passion”; Lucile Richardot, mezzo-soprano; Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)Bach: “Erbarme dich”Harmonia MundiIt’s been a good year for Raphaël Pichon and his period ensemble Pygmalion: critically adored opera stagings and excellent recordings, including one for the pantheon of “St. Matthew Passion” accounts. Hear how, alongside precision, the purity of sound — in the strings, and in Lucile Richardot’s robust yet smooth tone — maintains rending beauty and a softly dancing lilt. JOSHUA BARONEBeethoven: Variation 24, Fughetta (Andante)Beethoven: “Diabelli” Variations; Mitsuko Uchida, piano (Decca)Beethoven: Variation 24, Fughetta (Andante)DeccaMitsuko Uchida playing Beethoven: It’s a self-recommending prospect, really. Still, it’s a mark of this pianist’s surpassing artistry that her “Diabellis” prove so unerringly fine. There is elegance, of course, and sensitivity; a wink or two of wit even breaks through, though Uchida is not exactly looking for laughs. What is so striking, rather, is how scrupulously she rethinks each variation, even as she ensures that each finds its rightful place in the whole. DAVID ALLENGeorges Bizet: ‘La fleur que tu m’avais jetée’“Arias”; Jonathan Tetelman, tenor; Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria; Karel Mark Chichon, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Georges Bizet: “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée”Deutsche GrammophonOn his debut album, Jonathan Tetelman lavishes his sumptuous tenor and almost poetic attention on classic Romantic and verismo arias. For the “Flower Song” from “Carmen,” Tetelman cushions the contours of his phrases, hooks into high notes without breaking the musical line and nails the diminuendo on the high B flat. OUSSAMA ZAHRConnie Converse: ‘One by One’“Walking in the Dark”; Julia Bullock, soprano; Christian Reif, piano (Nonesuch)Connie Converse: “One by One”NonesuchAt last we have a solo album from Julia Bullock. As debuts go, it’s eclectic and understated, and astonishing for its intensity of feeling with such restraint — perhaps most so in “One by One.” This track, by the pioneering but elusive singer-songwriter Connie Converse, is here whispered and prayerful, with the intimacy and elegance of an Ivesian parlor song. JOSHUA BARONEAnthony Davis: ‘Shoot Your Shot!’“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Odyssey Opera Chorus; Gil Rose, Conductor (BMOP Sound)Anthony Davis: “Shoot Your Shot!”BMOP SoundIn which a young Malcolm Little — not yet surnamed X — receives a tour of Boston while listeners get a sense of what makes Davis one of today’s great opera composers: Simultaneous warmth and apprehension in lines for Malcolm’s sister Ella hint at both spirituals and Berg. Yet her warnings collide with a pool hall hustler’s even more compelling pitch, eloquent and brash in the manner of Mingus. SETH COLTER WALLSDebussy: ‘Pelléas part ce soir’“Pelléas et Mélisande”; Vannina Santoni, soprano; Alexandre Duhamel, baritone; Jean Teitgen, bass; Les Siècles; François-Xavier Roth, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)Debussy: “Pelléas part ce soir”Harmonia MundiCloser and closer to our own time stride François-Xavier Roth and the period-instrument players of Les Siècles, and on, too, toward ever more revealing interpretations. Supporting somewhat lighter voices than the norm, Les Siècles’ gut strings and piping winds give Debussy’s more delicate writing a glinting fragility, his outbursts of violence a raw savagery. This is “Pelléas” not as a mystery play, but as an unsparingly forceful drama. DAVID ALLENDvorak and PUBLIQuartet: Improvisations on String Quartet No. 12, Allegro ma non troppo“What Is American”; PUBLIQuartet (Bright Shiny Things)Dvorak and PUBLIQuartet: Improvisations on String Quartet No. 12, Allegro ma non troppoBright Shiny ThingsDvorak’s “American” quartet has elicited dozens of winning, faithful recordings. This one has other goals. As the performers improvise around the original material, they attain a communion with Dvorak’s love of Black American music that most other interpreters fail to achieve. SETH COLTER WALLSJulius Eastman: ‘Stay On It’“Julius Eastman, Vol. 2: Joy Boy”; Wild Up (New Amsterdam)Julius Eastman: “Stay On It”New AmsterdamThe Los Angeles ensemble Wild Up has embarked on a series of recordings of the once-forgotten music of Julius Eastman (1940-90). The second installment closes with the bright party of “Stay On It,” a paean to community that veers between precision and lush chaos: troubled by shadows but ultimately, patiently, quietly triumphant. ZACHARY WOOLFEMary Halvorson: ‘Side Effect’“Amaryllis”; Mary Halvorson Sextet; Mivos Quartet (Nonesuch)Mary Halvorson: “Side Effect”NonesuchAfter spending part of the pandemic studying up on string quartet writing, this guitarist and composer collaborated with the Mivos Quartet on two enjoyable albums released this year. For this exultant and meticulously patterned work, Halvorson invited the string quartet into her standing sextet of improvising players, creating her richest ensemble sound yet. SETH COLTER WALLSHenze: ‘Tristan’s Folly’“Tristan”; Igor Levit, piano; Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Franz Welser-Möst, conductor (Sony)Henze: “Tristan’s Folly”SonyAnother astonishing recording from the pianist Igor Levit, “Tristan” is bookended by Liszt and includes dreamlike solo transcriptions of the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” Prelude. But the album centers on Hans Werner Henze’s postmodern “Tristan” (1973), which musters piano, tape and orchestra to reckon with the Germanic tradition, furthering Liszt, Wagner and Mahler’s bendings of time and harmony. ZACHARY WOOLFEKorngold: ‘The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex’ Overture“Hollywood Soundstage”; Sinfonia of London; John Wilson, conductor (Chandos)Korngold: “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” OvertureChandosIt would be easy to argue that a track from any of the five sensational recordings John Wilson and his elite Sinfonia of London have released this year should be on this list, but every time I play this Korngold, I find it hard to move on to anything else. The virtuosity Wilson lavishes on a composer he is determined to restore to stature is stunning, no matter how many times you hear it. DAVID ALLENAndrew McIntosh: ‘Little Jimmy at the End of Winter’“Little Jimmy”; Yarn/Wire (Kairos)Andrew McIntosh: “Little Jimmy at the End of Winter”KairosNamed for a campsite in California where Andrew McIntosh made field recordings a few months before it was devastated by a fire, “Little Jimmy” (2020) folds those recordings of birds and wind into alternately shimmering and chalk-hard music for piano-percussion quartet. The natural world is wondrous, McIntosh suggests, but also stark, lonely and fragile, even threatening. ZACHARY WOOLFEMendelssohn: String Quartet No. 1, Andante espressivoMendelssohn: Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1; Quatuor Van Kuijk (Alpha Classics)Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 1, Andante espressivoAlpha ClassicsThe latest Quatuor Van Kuijk recording, the first in a promised survey of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, is, like the group’s previous outings, vigorously and precisely executed, and — without cluttering affect — expressed with refreshing, sometimes revelatory, straightforwardness. Particularly in the slow movement of the Op. 12 Quartet in E flat, whose direct phrasing has an irresistibly simple, moving sweetness. JOSHUA BARONEMozart: Piano Sonata No. 16 in C, AndanteMozart: The Piano Sonatas; Robert Levin, fortepiano (ECM)Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 16 in C, AndanteECMAn impossible challenge: Choose a single track from the dozens in Robert Levin’s tirelessly lively, eloquent collection of Mozart’s piano sonatas, recorded on their composer’s own fortepiano. But, to pick almost at random, the slow movement from the “Sonata Facile” (K. 545) demonstrates the sensitivity, sustained legato and dashing embellishments that characterize Levin’s whole, sprawling set. ZACHARY WOOLFEMozart and Vikingur Ólafsson: ‘Laudate Dominum’“From Afar”; Vikingur Ólafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)Mozart and Vikingur Ólafsson: “Laudate Dominum”Deutsche GrammophonVikingur Ólafsson has emerged in his recordings as not only one of the most thoughtful pianists of our time, but also one of the finest arrangers. Something of anti-Liszt, he humbly translates the essence of each work, such as in his treatment of Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum,” whose flowing melody over an arpeggiated accompaniment could pass for one of the composer’s delicate sonatas. JOSHUA BARONEPejacevic: Symphony in F Sharp Minor, FinaleDora Pejacevic: Piano Concerto and Symphony in F Sharp Minor; BBC Symphony Orchestra; Sakari Oramo, conductor (Chandos)Pejacevic: Symphony in F Sharp Minor, FinaleChandosSakari Oramo has long been a friend to the hardly heard, and it is to his credit that he is now lending his persuasive skills to the effort to bring female composers to greater prominence. His righteous advocacy certainly blazes for the Croatian Dora Pejacevic, who died in 1923 at just 37; her bold symphony, finished in 1920, might be in the Dvorakian tradition, but Oramo leaves you in no doubt of its fundamentally adventurous spirit. DAVID ALLENRossini: ‘Céleste providence’“French Bel Canto Arias”; Lisette Oropesa, soprano; Saxon State Opera Chorus Dresden; Dresden Philharmonic; Corrado Rovaris, conductor (Pentatone)Rossini: “Céleste providence”PentatoneA peerless bel canto interpreter, the soprano Lisette Oropesa combed through her bread-and-butter repertoire to come up with an album’s worth of material in French, her favorite language to sing. In this showstopper from Rossini’s elegant comic opera “Le Comte Ory,” Oropesa’s classy singing sneaks subtle flecks of color into fiendish runs taken at the speed of light. OUSSAMA ZAHROthmar Schoeck: ‘Liebesfrühling’“Elegie”; Christian Gerhaher, baritone; Basel Chamber Orchestra; Heinz Holliger, conductor (Sony Classical)Othmar Schoeck: “Liebesfrühling”Sony ClassicalThe baritone Christian Gerhaher mumbles, sighs and occasionally sings full out amid the stark, transfixing musical landscapes of Othmar Schoeck’s orchestral song cycle “Elegie.” “Liebesfrühling” turns the metaphor of spring inside out, locating in its verdancy memories that cause anguish, as Gerhaher’s voice rises to a pained pitch suffused with light. OUSSAMA ZAHRSchubert, arranged by Liszt: ‘Der Doppelgänger’“Mein Traum”; Stéphane Degout, baritone; Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)Schubert, arranged by Liszt: “Der Doppelgänger”Harmonia MundiThe conductor Raphaël Pichon’s brilliantly curated album with Pygmalion and the baritone Stéphane Degout, “Mein Traum,” is a marvel of sustained tension in melancholy hues. “Der Doppelgänger” exemplifies their shared purpose: Singer and orchestra, breathing as one, crescendo ever so slowly into a climax of uncanny horror. OUSSAMA ZAHRCaroline Shaw: ‘How Do I Find You’“How Do I Find You”; Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano; Kirill Kuzmin, piano (Pentatone)Caroline Shaw: “How Do I Find You”PentatoneThe mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke kicks off her album about the pandemic with the emotional wreckage of the title track by Caroline Shaw. Over a simple sequence of diatonic chords, played with compassion by the pianist Kirill Kuzmin, Cooke describes a couple circling their feelings with an amber-toned voice suspended between tears and solace. OUSSAMA ZAHRKate Soper: ‘The Understanding of All Things’“The Understanding of All Things”; Kate Soper and Sam Pluta (New Focus)Kate Soper: “The Understanding of All Things”New FocusIn Kate Soper’s playfully searching album, she doesn’t reach some universal understanding. Instead, her title track’s fragmented telling of a Kafka story, recounted through vocalise and Laurie Anderson-like elevated speech over the sound of a spinning top, seems to make a statement, but with the syntax of a question. Figuring out what to make of that is part of the fun. JOSHUA BARONEStrauss: ‘Macbeth’“Richard Strauss: Three Tone Poems”; Cleveland Orchestra; Franz Welser-Möst, conductor (Cleveland Orchestra)Strauss: “Macbeth”Cleveland OrchestraThere is no more glorious demonstration than this of what makes the partnership between the Cleveland Orchestra and its music director so special. Listen closely to any section of the orchestra, and you will hear playing that is little short of immaculate; draw back to listen to the whole, and you will find Welser-Möst, at his most direct, turn a Strauss piece that most conductors ignore into a minor masterpiece. It’s exhilarating. DAVID ALLENZimmermann: ‘Alagoana,’ IV. Caboclo“Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Recomposed”; WDR Sinfonieorchester; Heinz Holliger, conductor (Wergo)Zimmermann: “Alagoana,” IV. CabocloWergoAfter World War II, the modernist composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann produced orchestral arrangements of French chansons and Villa-Lobos for West German radio. The conductor (and oboist) Holliger has rescued those sparkling adaptations from oblivion. Crucially, he also provides fresh looks at Zimmermann originals like “Alagoana,” with its funhouse-mirror reflections of Villa-Lobos (and Milhaud). SETH COLTER WALLS More

    • 63 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Best TV Episodes of 2022

      by

      TV in the streaming era is an endless feast. This year, series like “Barry,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Pachinko,” “Station Eleven” and “This Fool” offered some of the best bites.TV can be a lot of different things these days. So can a TV episode: It can be a “chapter” of a visual novel, a revelatory stand-up special or a straight-up sitcom installment.You’ll find all of those and more in our choices of some of the best individual pieces we’ve sampled this year. Television in 2022 may have been all about the binge, but sometimes what you remember most about a feast is simply that one perfect bite. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Amber Brown’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 3: ‘No Place Like Two Homes’Aw man, I loved this light tween drama about a sixth grader whose parents are newly divorced. In the show’s third episode, Amber (Carsyn Rose) is trying to build up the courage to audition for the school play — she hopes to follow in her father’s drama-club footsteps so they can bond more now that he’s moved back to town. “Do you think he likes me?” she asks her best friend. Of course, her friend says. He’s your father; he loves you. “Well, I know he loves me,” Amber replies. “I just wonder if he likes me.” It’s this kind of brutal, beautiful poignancy that makes the show so special. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) MARGARET LYONS“710N,” from the third season of “Barry,” included some of the year’s most thrilling action sequences.HBO‘Barry’ (HBO)Season 3, Episode 6: ‘710N’More than one scene from this stunner — a high-speed motorcycle chase through a traffic jam, a high-firepower shootout at a car dealership — would have been the high point of any other series. But there was more to “710N” than simply showing off Bill Hader’s directing chops. The action sequences, simultaneously thrilling, slapstick and bathetic, served the larger purpose of “Barry,” to tell the story of an antihero without celebrating his antiheroism. (Streaming on HBO Max.) PONIEWOZIK‘Black Bird’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 4: ‘WhatsHerName’Dennis Lehane’s mini-series was a showcase for the fine and distinctive actor Paul Walter Hauser, who plays Larry Hall, a convicted kidnapper and suspected serial killer who is close to having his convictions overturned and walking free. It is nominally the story (based on an autobiographical novel) of another convict, played by Taron Egerton, who makes a deal to befriend Hall and compromise him. But Hauser’s soft, sibilant, weirdly sexy performance is all that matters. In the fourth episode, Hall is put in charge of cleaning up after a prison riot (itself a shocking yet poetic spasm of violence, as directed by Jim McKay), and Hauser conveys a deep, narcissistic satisfaction that puts cleanliness next to beastliness. (Streaming on Apple TV+) MIKE HALEShauna Higgins, left, and Dearbhaile McKinney in “Derry Girls.” An episode this season flashed back to when the parents on the show were rebellious teens.Netflix‘Derry Girls’ (Netflix)Season 3, Episode 5Lisa McGee’s rowdy Northern Irish comedy used a high school reunion to turn its clock back from the 1990s to the 1970s, visiting the adolescence of its Derry Mums. The half-hour brought in a new cast to play its adult characters as punk-era teens, but McGee established such a voice and sense of character over three short seasons that you could instantly recognize the elders in their younger versions (and see their daughters in them as well). The tart, heartfelt episode underscored how teenage rebellions, like some political ones, cut across generations. PONIEWOZIK‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ (FX on Hulu)Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Me-Time’This limited series worked hard to re-create the pyrotechnics of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel, from the upside-down shots that mimicked the topsy-turvy imagery of the book cover to a copious use of voice-over. (Brodesser-Akner, who created the series and wrote this episode, is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.) Here, it pulled off the novel’s signature reversal — telling the title character’s divorce story from the perspective of his wife — using the tools of the screen, in particular a wrenching performance by Claire Danes, an emotional volcano who has rarely erupted better. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal’ (Adult Swim)Season 2, Episodes 7-9: ‘The Colossaeus’ (parts I, II and III)In its second season, “Primal” expanded its scope and time frame, dipping into 19th-century England for an episode and introducing various other clans to our cave man and dinosaur protagonists. But it was this three-part blood bath, culminating in a triumphant slave rebellion at sea, that exemplified the show’s tender nuance and also its unrelenting savagery. It was a reminder that while cartoon violence can be exhausting and meaningless in live-action shows, it can still be mesmerizing and meaningful when done where it belongs. “Primal” is almost entirely wordless, and its characters rarely rely on gesture; instead, their ideas are communicated through expression, breath and attention. And yet, few other shows are able to capture passion and pain with such precision, an entire life story told through one furrowed brow. (Streaming on HBO Max.) LYONSIman Vellani, right, with Aramis Knight, plays a teenager with superpowers in “Ms. Marvel.”Disney+‘Ms. Marvel’ (Disney+)Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Time and Again’This “Spider-Man”-like series about Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a Jersey City 16-year-old in a working-class immigrant family who discovers that she has superpowers, is the most charming and likable of the Marvel shows for Disney+ so far. The obligatory flashback episode revealing how Kamala came by her powers was set during the partition of India and Pakistan; the incorporation of that fraught history could easily have led to something labored and stiff, but in the hands of the writer Fatimah Asghar and the director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy it was ingenious and surprisingly moving. (Streaming on Disney+) HALE‘Pachinko’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 7The penultimate episode of this Min Jin Lee novel adaptation, set in and around the 1923 Yokohama earthquake, is staggering in its scope and rendering of cataclysm. But it’s equally, quietly devastating in how its expands the depiction of a key character: Koh Hansu (Lee Minho), introduced in the series as a menacing, charismatic gangster. Laying out how he began as a young math tutor with hopes for a legitimate life, then fell onto his path through disaster and circumstance, “Chapter 7” connects him to the series’s other Korean exiles making hard choices in an unwelcoming Japan. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) PONIEWOZIK‘Rothaniel’ (HBO)A lot of “confessional” comedy has ground itself into a rut in recent years. But the comedian Jerrod Carmichael breathes new life into the paradigm with this lyrical and restrained special, in which he comes out as gay and explores his fraught relationship with his family. Carmichael weaves together sorrow and humor, insight and fear, love and disappointment, unraveling family secrets and allowing for messy and unresolved truths to all exist at once. (Streaming on HBO Max.) LYONSAn episode of “The Simpsons,” seemingly about Lisa and Bart in the scouts, gave way to a rapid-fire series of gags.Fox‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)Season 34, Episode 3: ‘Lisa the Boy Scout’A seemingly routine episode of “The Simpsons” is hijacked by hackers (wearing masks that are a frightening combination of Guy Fawkes and Homer Simpson) who demand a $20 million ransom; until it is paid, they will broadcast a stream of “Simpsons” outtakes “so ill-conceived, so idiotic that their exposure would destroy the value of the very I.P. itself.” Luckily, no one pays, and we get to see a lovingly assembled panoply of blackout sketches, written by Dan Greaney and directed by Timothy Bailey, ranging across 34 seasons of characters and animation styles. One highlight: a two-hander for the Sea Captain and Groundskeeper Willie whose dialogue consists entirely of “Yar” and “Aye.” (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Slow Horses’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Bad Tradecraft’Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, “Slow Horses” — set in a fictional MI5 office where out-of-favor agents pass their time doing busy work — is in one sense a sendup of John le Carré’s moody, cerebral tales of the postwar British intelligence services. But it’s also a completely credible spy thriller, with complicated, believable twists and well executed action. The first season’s third episode, written by Will Smith and directed by James Hawes, best encapsulated the show’s seesawing mix of sardonic humor, deft characterization and sometimes brutal suspense. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) HALE‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max)Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Dr. Chaudhary’TV’s sweetest apocalypse story began just before the holidays last year, so it was the gift that kept on giving in early 2022. The penultimate episode, which found Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) impersonating a doctor in a big-box-store-turned-birthing-center, was an inventive expression of the show’s oddly hopeful vision: the first sparks of humanity’s future being kindled amid the mundane ruins of its past. Like the traveling actors who make the backbone of this story, Jeevan puts on a performance that ends up becoming real and restorative. (Streaming on HBO Max.) PONIEWOZIKAn episode of “This Fool” used “Austin Powers” references to make a point about the importance of change.Hulu‘This Fool’ (Hulu)Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Sandy Says’The closing seconds of this episode-long homage to “Austin Powers” were perhaps the most satisfying payoff I saw this year. “Sandy Says” exemplifies the tricky tone “This Fool” is able to strike, combining the structure of traditional sitcoms with the style of auteur comedies, hitting a sweet spot of goofy and clever. Luis (Frankie Quinones), newly out of prison, is in annoying-eighth-grader mode with his constant “Austin Powers” references, and the episode is packed with shagadelic Easter eggs before Luis explains part of why the movie means so much to him. “I’m tired of wasting time living in the past,” he says. “Ideally, we’ll change. The world is ever-changing, homey. I gotta change with it. That’s what ‘Austin Powers’ is all about. You know, I used to think that movie was a comedy. But now I know, it’s a tragedy.” (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONS‘This Is Us’ (NBC)Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Don’t Let Me Keep You’“This Is Us” did a lot of traveling over its six-season run — through multiple family trees, across the divide of death, from the future to the deep past. But it was often at its best when focused on one story, here Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) trip to Ohio to attend his mother’s funeral and reckon with the legacy of his abusive father. It’s a showcase for Ventimiglia, who anchored a big-feeling show through his reserved portrayal of a father, husband and son driven to fix things. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK More

    • 63 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Best of Late Night 2022

      by

      After a year of significant change, as hosts like Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee signed off, the future of late-night TV has never seemed more uncertain.The landscape of late night has changed significantly since the beginning of 2022, with the departures of several hosts and the end of two weekly shows.With audiences and advertising revenue dwindling, networks are in a precarious place. By the end of the year, the diversity of a format long known as a white-guy haven had dwindled even further, and the future of late night was ever more uncertain amid the growing dominance of on-demand streaming, where topical monologue fodder has little value and talk-show experiments have repeatedly failed.Trevor Noah, for one, was ready to try something else. In November, heshocked viewers and colleagues by saying he would step away from “The Daily Show” after seven years as host. He said that he wanted to devote more time to stand-up, and debuted a new Netflix special and a tour during his last few weeks on air.Noah signed off on Dec. 8 with a tearful exit thanking supporters as well as the Black women who raised him, giving them credit for his success.“I’ve often been credited with, you know, having these grand ideas. People will be like, ‘Oh, Trevor, you are so smart.’ And I’m like, who do you think teaches me? You know? Who do you think has shaped me, nourished me and formed me? From my mom, my gran, my aunts, all these Black women in my life, but then in America as well. I always tell people, if you truly want to learn about America, talk to Black women. Yeah, because unlike everybody else, Black women can’t afford to [expletive] around and find out.” — TREVOR NOAHComedy Central announced that an array of famous funny people will fill in until a permanent replacement for Noah can be found. The guest host lineup includes Wanda Sykes, Chelsea Handler, Kal Penn, Al Franken, Sarah Silverman, D. L. Hughley, John Leguizamo, Hasan Minhaj, Marlon Wayans and Leslie Jones.Noah wasn’t the only host who decided to leave: In April, James Corden announced that he would depart “The Late Late Show” sometime in 2023.CBS hasn’t announced plans for a replacement for Corden, who this fall seemed to be preparing for life after late night by returning to his acting roots. He starred in the Amazon dramedy “Mammals,” which premiered in November.Unfortunately for him, the show’s debut was overshadowed by a slightly ridiculous mini-controversy involving accusations of rude behavior at a restaurant, which Corden eventually was forced to address on air.“I have been walking around thinking that I hadn’t done anything wrong, right? But the truth is, like, I have — I made a rude comment and it was wrong, and it was an unnecessary comment. It was ungracious to the server.” — JAMES CORDENThis year also saw the end of Showtime’s Bronx buddy comedy, “Desus & Mero.” The show shifted its format and time slot several times over four seasons before signing off in July after an apparent falling out between the two co-hosts.Another well-regarded late-night show came to an end in July, albeit involuntarily. TBS canceled “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” which won its second Emmy two months later, in the short-form category.Trevor Noah’s 7 Years on “The Daily Show”The host, who took the reins of the show from Jon Stewart in 2015, exposed America’s many blind spots through witty and passionate commentary.Time to Depart: Trevor Noah announced that he would be stepping down in September, citing a desire for a better work-life balance.Saying Goodbye: In his final episode of “The Daily Show,” Mr. Noah told viewers not to be sad and called the night “a celebration.”An Outsider: The talk-show host, who grew up in South Africa and represented a part of the world often neglected by American news, helped his audience see through his eyes.His Best Moments: Noah’s comic perspective set him apart from other late-night hosts. Here are the highlights.At the Creative Arts Emmy ceremony, where that award was announced, the staff expressed hope that the show would be picked up elsewhere. So far there have been no takers, and Bee’s departure leaves Amber Ruffin as late night’s sole female host, with her “Amber Ruffin Show” maintaining its Friday night spot on Peacock.Which leaves the broadcast big guns, the white guys, most of whom will be under contract for several more years. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are all staying put for now, and will likely spend 2023 desperately trying (and often failing) to make jokes about anything other than the former president.Insurrection reflectionThe fallout from the Capitol riot has been a late-night focus all year, with Colbert going live after the first night of televised hearings held by the Jan. 6 committee. Colbert presupposed the hearings would be “this summer’s most compelling drama,” but the hosts decided the proceedings just weren’t hot enough for prime time.“What they need to do, you want people to watch in America, is you have to spice things up. You know, have a kiss cam going for the witnesses. Yeah, get Shakira to do a halftime show.” — TREVOR NOAH“The hearing is being produced by a former ABC executive, which is why it’s being marketed as, ‘Extreme Takeover: Capitol Building Edition.’” — JAMES CORDENNot long after the hearings began in June, some “Late Show” staff members were arrested at the Capitol complex while filming a segment featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and the comedian Robert Smigel, who voices the puppet, but the charges were dropped in July.“The Capitol Police are much more cautious than they were, say, 18 months ago, and for a very good reason. If you don’t know what that reason is, I know what news network you watch.” — STEPHEN COLBERTTrump TVTrump may have left office in 2021, but he continued to be a part of the news cycle even beyond his involvement with Jan. 6. Topics like his continued denial of the election results and his company’s fraudulent tax schemes frequently dominated late-night monologues, the hosts unable to resist low-hanging fruit like the news, in February, that he had been dropped by his longtime accounting firm.“Now he’s going to need someone else to do his taxes. I suggest H&R Cellblock.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I’d say he needs a good lawyer, but that’s been true for a while now.” — SETH MEYERSHosts also kept on top of news out of Mar-a-Lago, particularly the revelation, in August, that Trump had taken classified documents from the White House and kept them for himself. (He claimed he had “declassified” them.)“Let me just break down Trump’s defense: He says the F.B.I. planted fake evidence to frame him, and now he wants them to return the fake evidence. Even O.J. is like, ‘Yo, bro, you wildin.’” — DESUS NICE, guest hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“How do you explain this to our allies? ‘Don’t worry, Prime Minister, your country’s nuclear secrets are perfectly, safely stored at the Mar-a-Lago waffle bar between the syrup and the Nutella bucket.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Imagine being a guest at Mar-a-Lago and using the bathroom, and out of the corner of your eye you just notice something and are you like, ‘Hang on, is that — is that Norway’s nuclear codes?’” — JAMES CORDEN“Trump’s argument is that you can just declassify things in your mind. It’s officially declassified as long as you believe it’s declassified. That’s according to Trump’s new legal adviser, Tinkerbell.” — SETH MEYERSTrump’s 2024 campaign announcement was both expected and lackluster, something Kimmel called “the moment none of us have been waiting for.” It was quickly followed by his widely covered dinner with Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.“Now, just in case ‘Holocaust denier’ doesn’t get the point across, Fuentes is not a good guy. He has spread antisemitic conspiracies, he is considered a white supremacist by the Anti-Defamation League, attended the Unite the Right in Charlottesville in 2017 and the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6. That is the alt-right EGOT, as in, EGOT zero hugs as a child.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“You know it’s a bad sign when Kanye West is only the third most controversial person at your dinner table.” — JIMMY KIMMELBrace for impactWith Georgia a key state in the midterms, Noah took “The Daily Show” to Atlanta for a week of shows, with guests like Stacey Abrams, the ultimately unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor. Noah’s monologues were more like his stand-up than his usual desk fare, suggesting the stage is where he truly shines.While some midterm candidates attempted to distance themselves from Trump, others embraced the association, which didn’t always work out. Late-night hosts homed in on two such candidates in particular: Dr. Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker.“On the bright side, Dr. Oz now can go back to doing what he does best, which is analyzing the shape and color of our stool.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“A former girlfriend of Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker claimed in a new interview that Walker paid for her to get an abortion in 2009. And the only way that will hurt him with Republicans is if some of that money went to pay down her student loans.” — SETH MEYERSA ‘devastating’ decisionReproductive rights were a hot late-night topic in 2022, spurred by the leak of a Supreme Court decision challenging Roe v. Wade and then the eventual ruling, in June, overturning it. Chelsea Handler, guest hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” discussed her abortions during her monologue, while Meyers brought on Alexis McGill Johnson, the CEO of Planned Parenthood, to discuss the decision’s implications and potential solutions with three of the show’s female writers.Samantha Bee delayed a summer hiatus and went on air while she had Covid to address the “devastating” decision.“It’s not just about voting in November. It’s about doing everything in our power to help vulnerable people access abortion across state lines. And we have to raise hell in our cities, in Washington, in every restaurant Justice Alito eats in for the rest of his life. Because if Republicans have made our lives hell, it’s time to return the favor.” — SAMANTHA BEEReclaiming her timeKimmel has been a champion of Quinta Brunson, reuniting the “Abbott Elementary” creator and star with her inspirational sixth-grade teacher in an early 2022 episode. But when Kimmel appeared at the Emmys, many viewers were less than thrilled with his refusal to leave the stage during a bit that took time and space away from Brunson’s big win for outstanding writing for a comedy series.Kimmel then apologized to Brunson on his show, offering her the chance to interrupt his monologue and continue delivering her thank-yous.Alternative viewsNoah scored a coup near the end of his run on “The Daily Show,” landing the first sit-down interview in which Will Smith substantively discussed his Oscars slap of Chris Rock. But it was Noah’s frank discussion of the late Queen Elizabeth II that illustrated just how different a perspective he brought to late night. While hosts like Corden, a Brit, gave sad remembrances of the matriarch upon her death, Noah addressed how the British Empire’s colonialism affected people in Africa and India and shaped their perceptions of her reign. “You can’t expect the oppressed to mourn the oppressor,” he said.“And I know some people would say ‘Look, Trevor, the queen wasn’t really in charge. She’s just a figurehead. You can’t blame her for the atrocities the British Empire committed.’ Yeah, fair enough, but you also understand in her entire reign, she never repented, she never once made amends, right? There wasn’t even one, like, Notes app apology on her Twitter — nothing!” — TREVOR NOAHBest of the restThe Jimmys played a joke on their audiences, switching shows for April Fools’ Day and pranking fans.“Hi, I’m Jimmy. Please, please settle down, you’re going to offend the other Jimmy.” — JIMMY FALLON, hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“We swapped everything — we swapped shows, bands, even wives. Bad news, Nancy, Fat Jimmy’s coming home.” — JIMMY KIMMEL, hosting “The Tonight Show”Corden took “The Late Late Show” to London, where he invited Lizzo for a spin on “Carpool Karaoke.” It was a memorable installment of the segment viewers will surely miss most when Corden leaves next year.Finally, Jon Batiste, a five-time Grammy winner, sat down for the Colbert Questionnaire before taking what was described at the time as a hiatus from his post as the “Late Show” bandleader.Batiste ultimately decided not to return to the show, his TV home for seven seasons. It was one more late-night departure in a year largely defined by them. More

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      The Best Genre Movies of 2022

      by

      We look at the best in horror, science fiction, action and international films, all available to stream.Ready to go some gooey or gory places? Or see an expert performer navigate action films in an original way? Or perhaps you’d like to explore two knockout docs from around the world? Our genre movie streaming columnists have made their picks for the best of the year. Some movies you will have heard of. Others will be new to your view. Either way, prepare to head out on adventure with these across-the-spectrum offerings.Science FictionFor David Cronenberg, the call is always coming from inside the house: It is the body that attacks, betrays, seduces, takes over. Impervious to the subjects agitating current science-fiction movies (alternative universes, artificial intelligence, a dying Earth), the Canadian director went back to familiar turf with his latest, in which people mutate in unpredictable ways. Cronenberg has always known that the true frontier is not space but the evolution of flesh, consciousness and machine.In “Crimes of the Future,” Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) keeps growing new tumors that his acolyte, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), excises in public, via a repurposed autopsy device. The visual effects are not much more sophisticated than those in the director’s similarly themed “Videodrome” (1983) and “Existenz” (1999), but the squishy organic feel is exactly what makes the new film stand out from run-of-the-mill C.G.I. fests. That and, of course, its tone, coldly detached and darkly comic, as exemplified by Kristen Stewart’s deliciously arch turn as a fan of Tenser’s body artistry.“Everyone wants to be a performance artist these days,” we are told, and the movie zeros in on our narcissism, need for attention and terminal cynicism. Beyond the gross-out close-ups of puckering organs, what is most striking here is a rare cinematic quality nowadays: perversity. — ELISABETH VINCENTELLIStream “Crimes of the Future” on Hulu.HorrorRegina Lei in “The Sadness.”Fredrick Liu/Machi Xcelsior Studios/Shudder/AMCMy favorite horror movies this year laid off the flashy effects and instead gave me the unshakable willies the unshowy way: with creeping dread and uncertain stillness. That’s how “Watcher,” “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “The Innocents” did it.But oh man, “The Sadness.” Rob Jabbaz’s transgressive zombie film was bombastically directed and exhaustingly gory — in other words, the year’s most gloriously brutal horror-watching experience.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.It’s set in Taipei, where two young lovers (Berant Zhu and Regina Lei) fight to reunite after a contagion turns people into sexually voracious flesh destroyers. The carnage almost never lets up, and it’s jaw-dropping to watch — like when the hungry infected turn a crowded subway car into a preposterously blood-slick Slip ‘N Slide. This scene, like the film overall, is demented and repulsive but also — and here’s the curveball — uncompromisingly feminist. It’s not easy to get a message across when the mayhem surrounding it is this maximalist, but Jabbaz figured it out.Listen to me carefully: If you’re at all iffy about being grossed out, stay away from this film. But if your constitution is solid, I dare you to jump into its exquisitely gruesome, grimly satirical maelstrom. — ERIK PIEPENBURGStream “The Sadness” on Shudder.ActionZoë Kravitz in “KIMI.”Warner Bros.Between Matt Reeves’ gripping neo-noir “The Batman” and Steven Soderbergh’s unnerving surveillance thriller “KIMI,” this year the actress Zoë Kravitz ruled the action genre. Her reign is uniquely impressive when one considers the disparate requirements of each role.As Selina Kyle/Catwoman in “The Batman,” the agile, shadowy equal to the caped crusader, she moves with a slender yet muscular physicality. As seen in her knowing runway stride, sultry possibilities become real and hand-to-hand confrontations are rendered acrobatic as Kravitz gracefully leaps and dives against thugs.Playing Angela, a blue-haired tech employee confined to her home office in “KIMI,” the actress turns in her former fluidity for an antisocial rigidity as she becomes the target of a predatory company intent on covering up the crime she discovered. In contrast to the skintight leather suit she wears as Catwoman, Kravitz packs a different but no less formidable punch in her long loose coat as she evades her pursuers during a series of arresting chase scenes.And yet, what binds these seemingly conflicting performances is how Kravitz’s expressive eyes translate the assuredness of Catwoman and the savviness of Angela. They’re a confirmation of her range as today’s premiere Black woman action hero. — ROBERT DANIELSStream both “The Batman” and “KIMI” on HBO Max.InternationalYoung residents of Paris’s suburbs in the documentary “We (Nous).”MubiEvery month, as I compile international films for my column, I am confronted with the arbitrariness of the boundaries that determine what we consider familiar and foreign, the home and the world. My two favorite films this year, both documentaries by women, challenge these delineations. In “A Night of Knowing Nothing” by Payal Kapadia, a fictional voice-over narration, chronicling the dissolve of the speaker’s inter-caste relationship, coalesces a series of twilit scenes of college life in India that range from nocturnal revels to protests against an increasingly repressive government. Culminating with CCTV footage of baton-wielding police descending upon a library full of students, the film shatters the fictions of democracy: The will of the people means little to the weapons of the state.In Alice Diop’s “We,” a train route that connects Paris’s suburbs to the city center forms the spine for the film’s intimate, itinerant glimpses of the working-class immigrants who live on the outskirts of France’s capital. Diop’s cinematic map bursts the contours of French identity and recenters them around those relegated to its margins.Each film, a whole fashioned from disparate pieces, offers an allegory for the nation itself, as a collective forged out of solidarity rather than superficial similarities. — DEVIKA GIRISHStream “A Night of Knowing Nothing” on the Criterion Channel. Stream “We” on Mubi. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Quinta Brunson, Jack Harlow and More Breakout Stars of 2022

      by

      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At BuzzFeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.The Highlights of 2022, According to Our CriticsCard 1 of 3Salamishah Tillet. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      The Breakout Stars of 2022

      by

      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At Buzzfeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.Now, the laid-back Harlow, 24 and a Kentucky native, had his first solo No. 1 hit, the Fergie-sampling “First Class,” from his second major-label album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” which dropped in May. In November, he earned three Grammy nominations, including for best rap album. And in October, he served as both host and musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”“I’m looking to get away from rapping in a way where people can marvel at it and more something we can all enjoy together,” he told The Times this year.Soon, Harlow will star in a remake of the 1992 film “White Men Can’t Jump.”ArtTiona Nekkia McCloddenThe artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden in her studio; she had three major presentations of her work in New York this year.Hannah Price for The New York TimesOver the last few years, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, 41, “has emerged as one of the most singular artists of our aesthetically rich, free-range time,” Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The Times, wrote in her review of McClodden’s exhibition “Mask/Conceal/Carry,” a meditation on guns shown at 52 Walker in TriBeCa this year. Smith called it a “brooding beast of an exhibition, bathed in blue light.”And that was only one of three major presentations of McClodden’s work in New York in 2022. At the Museum of Modern Art, she presented a room-size fetish-themed tribute to Brad Johnson, a Black gay poet who died in 2011. At the Shed, she celebrated the groundbreaking 1983 festival Dance Black America with a program that included custom dance floors and video portraits of dancers.McClodden, who was a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial (she won the Bucksbaum Award), emerged as a filmmaker before expanding to boundary-pushing art installations.Amid the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and counter protests, she decided to learn how to shoot guns, an activity that bore “Mask/Conceal/Carry.” “The statement is that I’m in the world, I didn’t try to run away from my position in this world, and I wanted to be able to defend myself,” she told The Times this summer.TheaterJulie BenkoA scene from the Broadway musical “Funny Girl” with Jared Grimes, left, as Eddie Ryan and Julie Benko as Fanny Brice.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022Few can say they’ve seized an opportunity like Julie Benko, whose monthlong summer run as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” changed a lot for the actress-soprano who stepped into the role full-time between Beanie Feldstein and Lea Michele in the highly talked-about production. But even that degree of pressure didn’t weigh her down.“When you get the chance to play such an amazing role, there’s no need to take it too seriously,” Benko told the Times. “You just have to enjoy it.” Now, Benko has the title of “alternate” in “Funny Girl,” not “understudy,” performing the lead in most Thursday night shows (with an extra performance on Monday, Dec. 26, and for a full week in late February).Benko, 33, had understudied several roles before “Funny Girl,” including in the national “Spring Awakening” tour in 2008, and later in the “Les Misérables” tour, where she worked her way up to Cosette, the protagonist, from roles like “innkeeper’s wife.”In December, she will be performing at 54 Below in New York alongside her husband, the pianist Jason Yeager.Classical MusicDavóne TinesThe bass-baritone Davóne Tines performs a scene in “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” by Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition,” Oussama Zahr, a classical music critic, wrote recently in The Times when reviewing “Recital No. 1: MASS,” the bass-baritone’s personal and thoughtfully arranged Carnegie Hall debut“I really like structures,” Tines, who is in his mid-30s, told The New Yorker of “MASS” last year. “The ritualistic template of the Mass is a proven structure — centuries of culture have upheld it. Anything that I put into it will assume a certain shape. And what I put into it is my own lived experience.”Accolades for Tines have been mounting, including for, this fall, his performance in a staged version of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” at the Park Avenue Armory; and for “Everything Rises,” his collaboration with the violinist Jennifer Koh, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.In the work, Tines and Koh recount their complicated relationships with classical music as people of color. “I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines sings. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”DanceCatherine HurlinThe ballerina Catherine Hurlin, who was recently promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater, in “Of Love and Rage,” by Alexei Ratmansky at the Metropolitan Opera House.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesShe may only be 26, but the ballerina Catherine Hurlin has been ascending for more than half of her life. As a girl, she secured a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Not long after, she became an apprentice with the A.B.T., then a member of the corps de ballet and eventually a soloist in 2018.Then this summer, she was one of three dancers promoted to the role of principal.“The simple serenity of Hurlin’s face, framed by cascading curls, is riveting, as is the daring amplitude of her expressive, singular dancing,” Gia Kourlas, the dance critic of The Times, wrote in June of Hurlin’s performance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Of Love and Rage.”And in July, when Hurlin made her debut in the double role of Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” Kourlas called her “the future of Ballet Theater, the kind of dancer who has a fresh take on story ballets.”Her nickname? Hurricane. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Notable Boxed Sets of 2022: Pop, Rap, Soul, Jazz and More

      by

      Anniversary editions (from Norah Jones and Neil Young), a dive into the hip-hop underground (via C.V.E.) and rediscovered live jazz (from Elvin Jones and Charles Mingus) arrived in 2022.In the archives of recorded music — and now video — there’s always more to discover (or exploit). This year’s boxed sets revisit blockbuster albums and go nationwide with local scene stars. The New York Times has already featured some major archival collections from bands like the Beatles, Blondie and Wilco. Here are more deep dives.Albert Ayler, ‘Revelations’(Elemental Music; four CDs or download, $58)Albert Ayler’s mid-60s work, once controversial, is now jazz canon. But the later phase of the saxophone radical’s brief career, when he experimented with funk and blues, and incorporated vocals from his partner Mary Maria Parks, is still overlooked. This set, the first complete issue of two July 1970 concerts at the French modern-art center the Fondation Maeght, expands prior versions by more than two hours — and makes a strong case that Ayler was in peak form here, just months before his death at age 34. On the ballad-like “Spiritual Reunion,” he caresses and adorns a prayerful melody atop gorgeous accompaniment from the pianist Call Cobbs, making even his quavering shrieks on the horn sound loving, while on “Desert Blood,” Ayler, the bassist Steve Tintweiss and the drummer Allen Blairman artfully frame a Parks song before embarking on an improvisation that suggests a softer yet still-incandescent version of the flame the saxophonist lit on his early classics. HANK SHTEAMERThe Beach Boys, ‘Sail On Sailor — 1972’(Capitol; six CDs, $150; five LPs and 7-inch EP, $179.98)1972 was a year of upheaval for the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson, the group’s mastermind, had grown withdrawn, leaving most of the songwriting to the other band members while Carl Wilson largely took over production. Two South African musicians, Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, officially joined the band. The two Beach Boys albums that were completed in 1972, “Carl and the Passions — ‘So Tough’” and “Holland” — still got their singles (“Marcella” and “Sail On, Sailor”) from Brian Wilson. But the other members’ broad and sometimes confused ambitions were clear in songs with elaborate structures and lyrics about topics like spirituality and colonial genocide — determinedly grown-up songs, not would-be hits. The much expanded boxed set includes an exhilarating full-length 1972 Carnegie Hall concert, songs in progress, a cappella mixdowns and a worthy, much-bootlegged “Holland” outtake, “Carry Me Home,” that laments mortality with lush harmonies. JON PARELESC.V.E., ‘Chillin Villains: We Represent Billions’(Nyege Nyege Tapes; LP, $20)The unrelenting weirdness of the Los Angeles hip-hop underground in the mid-1990s gave birth to an almost unending variety of techniques and characters. Among the most signature was C.V.E. — Chillin Villains Empire — a relatively unheralded crew affiliated with the fertile scene at the Good Life Café. This anthology collects songs from 1993 to 2003, some released and some not, that show off just how experimental C.V.E.’s primary members Riddlore?, NgaFsh and Tray-Loc were. With their bizarre cadences, unusual word pairings and unexpectedly punchy storytelling, they sound like close cousins to the freaky styles of Freestyle Fellowship, the scene’s pre-eminent eccentrics. JON CARAMANICAGuns N’ Roses, ‘Guns N’ Roses — Use Your Illusion I & II Super Deluxe’(UME/Geffen; 12 LPs, one Blu-ray and a book $499.98; seven CDs, one Blu-ray and a book $259.98)In 1991, no band was bigger than Guns N’ Roses, and on the two albums it released that year, “Use Your Illusion I” and “II,” it showed. Here was a group grappling with ambition using several different, sometimes competing tactics — songs that had the feverish intensity of metal, songs that touched on politics, songs that ran nine minutes long. These multiplatinum albums are epically unkempt, for better and worse — it doesn’t get much blowzier, and it doesn’t get much more rollicking, or arrestingly melodramatic. This doorstopper release is a sprawling boxed set for a sprawling pair of albums (remastered for the first time from the original stereo masters). There’s a book rich with ephemera, oodles of trinkets, recordings of two live shows, and a Blu-ray of one of those: from a bruising, chaotic jam at the Ritz in New York in 1991, a warm-up show for the Use Your Illusion Tour (even though the group hadn’t yet finished recording the albums). For capturing this era of this band, this excess is appropriate, but also telling. Implosion was around the corner — these albums would be the last full-length releases of original music it would put out for 17 years. CARAMANICAElvin Jones, ‘Revival: Live at Pookie’s Pub’(Blue Note; digital album, $12.99 to $17.98; two CDs, $29.98; three LPs, $54,98; three LPs and test pressing, $224.98)Elvin Jones’s elemental brand of swing, bashing yet balletic, propelled John Coltrane’s band for five magical years in the early to mid-60s. As Coltrane’s music grew more abstract, and, according to Jones, “hectic,” the drummer took his leave in 1966. The New York club gigs documented on “Revival” — recorded the following year, less than two weeks after Coltrane’s death — play like a manifesto of the bandleading philosophy that would define the rest of Jones’s lengthy career: Assemble a sturdy group — here featuring the saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell; the obscure pianist Billy Greene, with Larry Young subbing on one tune; and the bassist Wilbur Little — put together a well-balanced set list of standards and originals and get down to business. Jones’s turbulent drive on Farrell’s “13 Avenue B” and way-behind-the-beat lope during “On the Trail” demonstrate why many consider him jazz percussion’s all-time heavyweight champ. SHTEAMERNorah Jones, ‘Come Away With Me (20th Anniversary)’(Blue Note; three CDs, $39.98; four LPs, $179.98)The hushed jazz-country-folk-pop amalgam of “Come Away With Me,” the debut album that became a blockbuster for Norah Jones, didn’t come out of nowhere. She had to home in on it along a winding path that led through music school, New York City jazz-brunch gigs that people talked through, homesickness for country music from her childhood in Texas, demos she made with songwriter friends in New York City and all-star recording sessions in a mountainside mansion near Woodstock, N.Y. Those sessions, rejected by Blue Note Records before Jones tried again with her friends and made her hit album, are unveiled on the expanded reissue of “Come Away,” and they reveal an artist quietly finding her own voice: one of elegant modesty. The rejected sessions, newly released, offer a lesson in musical chemistry. With musicians who were skillful but not her regular collaborators, Jones both deferred too much to her better-known accompanists and pushed her voice a little too hard. Although there are luminous moments, like her versions of Horace Silver’s “Peace” and Tom Waits’s “Picture in a Frame,” the results were capable but not quite right. PARELESPeggy Lee, ‘Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota (Expanded Edition)’(Capitol; CD, $13.98)Peggy Lee aficionados know that one of the hidden gems in her vast discography is her 40th record, and her last for her longtime label Capitol, “Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota.” (Yes, that’s Lee’s civilian name and her place of birth.) “Norma” is a mature work, born of the same lived-in ennui that had made “Is That All There Is?” an unexpected hit in 1969, when Lee was almost 50. “Norma” flew under the radar and remained out of print for decades, but half a century after its initial release, it can at last be properly appreciated. It is a stirring and remarkably melancholic album that gives voice to grief and isolation through Lee’s wrenching performances of “It Takes Too Long to Learn to Live Alone” and “Superstar,” at the time a recent hit for the Carpenters. Artie Butler’s arrangements are sublime, giving Lee’s anguish plenty of dramatic flourish. The seven bonus tracks are illuminating if not revelatory, largely alternate vocal takes, though Lee’s poignant song from the 1972 movie “Snoopy Come Home” is included. The rerelease’s main aim, though, is not to excavate old material but to introduce new listeners to “Norma Deloris Egstrom,” and one of her great works. LINDSAY ZOLADZGalcher Lustwerk, ‘100% Galcher’(Ghostly International; CD, $14; two LPs, $27)The most rewarding aspect of “100% Galcher,” the breakout mix by the house music producer Galcher Lustwerk, is its utter patience. On tracks like “I Neva Seen” and “Enterprise,” it’s clear the body is in motion, but there’s an overlay of deep soothing and pensiveness, an almost new age energy. This decade-old mix, which had its premiere in the Blowing Up the Workshop series in 2013 and is completely made up of his original productions, is being properly reissued as individual tracks for the first time now. It’s womb-like and astral, and Lustwerk’s talk-raps, which he casually ladles throughout, are like reassuring commands. CARAMANICACharles Mingus, ‘The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s’(Resonance Records; three CDs, $29.99; three LPs, $74.99)The Charles Mingus sextet featured on these two beautifully captured 1972 live sets from the venerable London club Ronnie Scott’s, intended for official release but shelved because of label limbo, was only intact for a brief stretch. But its chemistry rivals that of the bassist’s greatest groups. On a stunning 35-minute version of the “Mingus Ah Um” classic “Fables of Faubus,” the drummer Roy Brooks and the under-documented pianist John Foster skillfully steer the band between playful abstraction and crackling swing, while on the then-new “Mind-Readers’ Convention in Milano (AKA Number 29),” the saxophonists Charles McPherson and Bobby Jones and the trumpeter Jon Faddis show how fully they’d internalized Mingus’s signature blend of ornate writing and joyous collective improv. SHTEAMERNeu!, ‘50!’(Groenland; four CDs, $54.99; five LPs, $129.99)Among the creators of kosmiche, a.k.a. krautrock, Neu! was probably the most anti-pop of all. Alongside Can, Faust and Kraftwerk — which included the founders of Neu!, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, in an early lineup — Neu! embraced repetition, drones, found-sound noise and studio collaging, creating music in the early 1970s that would influence punk and industrial rock very soon afterward: sometimes raucous, sometimes meditative. The vinyl box collects the three Neu! studio albums from the 1970s; the CD collection also includes “Neu! 86,” which sounded less radical and more jovial, but still contentious. Both sets add a group of newly recorded tributes and remixes from fans including the National and Mogwai — who, try as they might, can’t quite sound as austere or cantankerous as Neu! in its prime, though Idles and Man Man come close. PARELESNancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, ‘Nancy & Lee’(Light in the Attic; CD, $14; LP, $27; cassette, $12; 8-track, $35)After last year’s excellent Nancy Sinatra compilation “Start Walkin’ 1965-1976” comes the first official reissue of what is perhaps the highlight of her discography: the beloved 1968 duet album she made with her frequent collaborator Lee Hazlewood. Lush, cinematic and alluringly strange, “Nancy & Lee” still possesses every bit of its oddball charm; more than 50 years on, it makes the argument not only for Hazlewood’s boundless imagination as a producer, but for Sinatra’s open-mindedness and risk-taking, as she followed Hazlewood down avenues — the trippy “Some Velvet Morning,” for one — less adventurous pop stars would have avoided. The bonus material is scant, but fun: a lounge-y, sultry take on the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and a hammy rendition of the Mickey & Sylvia hit “Love Is Strange.” Of their enduring, opposites-attract sonic chemistry, Sinatra quips in a lively new interview included in the liner notes, “We used to call it beauty and the beast!” ZOLADZ‘John Sinclair Presents Detroit Artists Workshop’(Strut; download, $9.99; CD, $13.99; two LPs, $26)The MC5 manager and White Panther co-founder John Sinclair steps into the role of smooth-voiced jazz D.J. on the intro track to this compilation, the first sampling of live recordings from the archives of the Detroit Artists Workshop, a collective he helped start in 1964 to present local concerts and poetry events. The set, which encompasses 1965 through 1981, features nationally recognized names (including the trumpeter Donald Byrd and the saxophonist Bennie Maupin, both heard in righteously funky settings), but it’s the local luminaries who make this an essential document of a regional scene. The pianist and longtime Supremes musical director Teddy Harris combines big-band-style horns and a hard-grooving R&B rhythm section on “Passion Dance”; the Detroit Contemporary 4 serves up elegant, impassioned post-bop on “Three Flowers”; and the organist Lyman Woodard’s Organization digs into fierce jazz-funk in 5/4 time on “Help Me Get Away.” SHTEAMER‘The Skippy White Story: Boston Soul 1961-1967’(Yep Roc; CD, $15.99; LP, $24.99)Beginning in the early 1960s, Skippy White was — and still remains — an all-purpose cheerleader for Boston’s soul and gospel music scenes: record store proprietor, radio D.J., and when necessary, record label owner and producer. This anthology of long-lost sides captures just a little bit of the music he helped usher into the world, and is accompanied by an extensive historical essay on White’s life and career by Noah Schaffer and Eli (Paperboy) Reed. White’s sonic interests were wide-ranging — there’s dizzying doo-wop from Sammy and the Del-Lards, and also a stretch of intriguing gospel singles including Crayton Singers’s desperate, almost unsteady “Master on High.” That rawness is there, too, on “Do the Thing” by Earl Lett Quartet, an instruction song for the dance floor, or maybe somewhere else. CARAMANICAHorace Tapscott, ‘The Quintet’(Mr. Bongo; download, $5; CD, $10.99; LP, $25.99)Horace Tapscott was a movement unto himself, a pianist and composer who spent decades advocating for Black artists in Los Angeles and mentoring up-and-coming musicians through his Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Documents of his early work are scarce, making this previously unreleased set — recorded at the same session as Tapscott’s thrilling 1969 debut, “The Giant Is Awakened” — especially noteworthy. The music sometimes recalls earlier work by East Coast piano progressives like Mal Waldron or Cecil Taylor (both heard on fine archival releases this year), but Tapscott presents his own unique agenda. On “Your Child,” one of three lengthy, equally excellent tracks here, he plays dramatic, knobby lines that sometimes spiral off into jagged shards, ‌while the alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe‌ shows off the swooping agility and strong emotional charge that would earn him wide acclaim upon his move to New York in the mid-1970s‌. SHTEAMERMarvin Tate’s D-Settlement, ‘Marvin Tate’s D-Settlement’(American Dreams; three CDs, $30; four LPs, $75; four clear vinyl LPs, $85)Marvin Tate, who got his start as a slam-poetry champion, channeled his storytelling skills and multifarious voice — singing, preaching, narrating, taunting, shouting — into D-Settlement, a far-reaching band whose reputation should have extended well beyond its Chicago hometown during the 1990s and early 2000s. This boxed set collects the three albums D-Settlement made before breaking up in 2003, revealing a musical collective that easily vamped its way toward funk, rock, jazz, blues, gospel, reggae, punk, cabaret and more. Tate’s lyrics and delivery could be ferociously direct or sardonically barbed, as D-Settlement’s songs confronted poverty, racism and violence even as they summoned the joys of family and community — echoed in the communal improvisations of an ever exploratory band. PARELESNeil Young, ‘Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition)’(Reprise; deluxe CD boxed set, $49.98; deluxe LP boxed set, $149.98)The mythos of Neil Young’s fourth solo album still looms large in the popular imagination. “Harvest” is the record he made in retreat from fame at his newly acquired rustic Northern California ranch; thanks to its blockbuster success and its No. 1 hit “Heart of Gold,” it subsequently made Young even more uncomfortable with fame than ever before. Fans looking for a trove of demos or unreleased recordings may be slightly disappointed with this 50th anniversary edition, as it contains only three studio outtakes (“Bad Fog of Loneliness,” “Journey Through the Past” and “Dance Dance Dance”) all of which have been floating around in some variation for years. What makes the set worth it, though, are the DVDs, especially “Harvest Time,” a two-hour documentary (directed by Young’s alter ego, Bernard Shakey) that serves as an indelible time capsule of the record’s creation. Also fantastic is the 1971 BBC television recording, included in audio and video versions, of a solo Young, in especially fine voice, debuting some of his works in progress — and a stunned studio audience hearing “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold” for the first time. ZOLADZ More