Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Spotify Defends Handling of Joe Rogan Controversy Amid Uproar

      by

      The company released earnings figures a week after Neil Young and others pulled their music to protest what they called vaccine misinformation on Rogan’s podcast.As Spotify released an earnings report Wednesday underscoring the importance of podcasts to its business model, company officials said that they did not expect their subscriber numbers to be affected by the uproar over accusations that its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, had spread misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines.The company has been embroiled in controversy since Neil Young removed his music from the streaming platform last week, citing Rogan’s podcast and calling Spotify “the home of life- threatening Covid misinformation.” Joni Mitchell and several other artists and podcasters followed suit amid widespread calls on social media to boycott the company. Officials responded by publishing the service’s platform rules and saying that Spotify would begin adding content advisories to podcasts about the coronavirus.But in an earnings call on Wednesday afternoon, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive and co-founder, said that the company’s expectations of premium users in the current quarter did not anticipate “churn” caused by the controversy over “The Joe Rogan Experience.”“In general, what I would say is, it’s too early to know what the impact may be,” Ek said in the call. “And usually when we’ve had controversies in the past, those are measured in months and not days. But I feel good about where we are in relation to that and obviously top line trends looks very healthy still.”Ek defended the measures the streaming service is taking to combat misinformation, and spoke of “supporting greater expression while balancing it with the safety of our users.”“I think the important part here is that we don’t change our policies based on one creator nor do we change it based on any media cycle, or calls from anyone else,” he said. “Our policies have been carefully written with the input from numbers of internal and external experts in this space. And I do believe they’re right for our platform. And while Joe has a massive audience — he is actually the number one podcast in more than 90 markets — he also has to abide by those policies.”Spotify has been facing pressure over Rogan’s podcast since late December, when a coalition of 270 medical professionals published an open letter criticizing an episode featuring an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who had been previously banned from Twitter for repeatedly posting misinformation about Covid-19. The letter said Rogan had a history of propagating “false and societally harmful assertions” about the virus, including discouraging vaccination among young people and promoting an unproven treatment for the virus, and called on Spotify to “establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation.”The situation reached a boiling point when Young announced he would be removing his catalog, leading several artists to follow, including Mitchell and the guitarist Nils Lofgren. The R&B artist India Arie said Tuesday that she, too, would be pulling her music from the service, citing Rogan’s comments on race. And on Wednesday several of Young’s former bandmates, David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills, asked their record labels to remove their recordings from Spotify.Pushback also came from several of the company’s other high-profile podcast hosts. On Saturday, Brené Brown, the influential author and host of the Spotify exclusive podcasts “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead,” said she would pause releasing new episodes. On Monday, another popular Spotify podcast, “Science Vs.,” said it would cease publishing new episodes other than those meant to “counteract misinformation being spread on Spotify.” In recent days, the podcast hosts Mary L. Trump, Roxane Gay and Scott Galloway have also said they would either remove their shows from the platform or cease publishing.The company reported strong performance overall in the fourth quarter of 2021, including year-over-year growth in both paid subscribers — up 16 percent for a total of 180 million — and monthly active users — up 18 percent for a total of 406 million. It also said revenue from advertisements had reached a record 15 percent of total revenue. Podcasts — Spotify says there are now over 3.6 million episodes on its platform — have been an important part of its revenue strategy.Whether that trajectory will continue is uncertain. The company’s stock dropped in after-hours trading.“Obviously, it’s been a few notable days here at Spotify,” Ek said during the call. He added that “there’s no doubt that the last several weeks have presented a number of learning opportunities.” More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Private Data Shows Broadway’s Hits and Misses After Reopening

      by

      Big shows did well when they returned in the fall after the long pandemic shutdown but new plays struggled, previously undisclosed industry data shows.During the long dark months when the coronavirus pandemic kept Broadway shuttered, a hypothesis took hold in parts of the industry: Once theaters reopened, the audience would include more New Yorkers and fewer tourists, and the result could be a more receptive marketplace for ambitious new plays.It did not turn out that way.Previously undisclosed data about the financial performance of individual Broadway shows reveal that the fundamental modern economics of the industry, in which big brands dominate and adventurous new works struggle to break through, were reinforced, rather than upended, as the industry reopened last fall.The good news: In the months between the reopening of Broadway and the upheaval caused by the arrival of Omicron, the biggest prepandemic hits were doing reasonably well. The disappointment: Many new and unfamiliar plays, including a much-heralded wave of work by Black writers and a pair of experimental plays by white writers, struggled to sell tickets, much as plays have often done in recent seasons.The information about the shows’ financial performance was collected by the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and theater owners, and distributed to the association’s membership in mid-January. The League, in a break with past practice, has decided not to make show-by-show box office data public this season, saying the circumstances are so unusual that the data cannot fairly be compared to that of other seasons, but The New York Times has obtained access to the numbers.The data, which begins in mid-September, when some of the biggest musicals reopened, runs only through Dec. 12, just before a spike in positive coronavirus tests among theater workers forced as many as half of all Broadway shows to cancel performances. In the weeks since, Broadway has taken a tumble — even though the wave of cancellations has stopped, attendance has been soft and multiple shows have closed.Before Omicron hit, Broadway’s return was going better than some had feared, especially for big-brand musicals. Plays had a harder time.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut before the Omicron variant, Broadway’s box office was doing far better than pessimists had feared, given the dearth of visitors and office workers, ongoing concerns about public health, and uncertainty about the effect of vaccine mandates and mask requirements. During the final week covered in the data — the week that ended Dec. 12 — about one-third of the shows running grossed more than $1 million, which has often been seen as a sign of strength. Among them: the musicals “Hamilton,” “Wicked,” “The Lion King,” “Moulin Rouge!,” “Tina,” “Six,” “Aladdin,” “The Book of Mormon,” “Hadestown” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and the plays “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Lehman Trilogy.”Notably, the club of top grossers included two newcomers, “Six” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” both of which were well-reviewed, small-cast shows that were in previews in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and then finally opened last October. “Six” is still running on Broadway; “The Lehman Trilogy” ended its Broadway run as scheduled on Jan. 2 and on March 3 it plans to begin a monthlong run in Los Angeles.Also noteworthy: “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which during the pandemic shutdown was trimmed from a two-part play to a more traditional one-part show, appears, at least initially, to have benefited from the reconstructive surgery. The shorter version impressed critics and reduced running costs, and its weekly grosses in early December were about $1.7 million, which is significantly better than it was doing during that same period in 2019.During the industry’s best fall stretch — Thanksgiving week — “Hamilton” grossed over $3 million, and “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” each grossed over $2 million.The effect of the Tony Awards, which were held Sept. 26 in an effort to showcase the reopening of Broadway, is difficult to discern. “Moulin Rouge!,” which won the best musical Tony, sold well through the fall, but less well than it had in the fall of 2019 (the week before Thanksgiving last year, the musical grossed $1.5 million; during that same week in 2019, it had grossed $2 million).The fall was especially tough for plays, which often struggle in an era when Broadway is dominated by big musicals. Critically acclaimed plays like “Pass Over,” “Is This a Room” and “Dana H.” played to houses that were at times between one half and two-thirds empty.The average ticket prices for all the new plays other than “The Lehman Trilogy” were well below the industry average, suggesting that the plays were resorting to steep discounts. During Thanksgiving week, the average ticket price at “Hamilton” was $297, while at “Chicken & Biscuits” it was $35.Other than “Lehman,” the strongest selling of the new plays was “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which grossed over $400,000 in some weeks. It has since closed, as has every other play that was running on Broadway last fall other than “Cursed Child.”There were also, as there always are, musicals that struggled too. The new musical “Diana,” which opened to harsh reviews and closed a month later, played to 51 percent capacity houses and grossed $374,000 (for seven performances) during the week that ended Dec. 12. “Girl From the North Country,” which has closed but says it plans to reopen in the spring, played to 47 percent capacity audiences that week and grossed $310,000, and “Flying Over Sunset,” which ended its run early, played to 69 percent capacity audiences and grossed $323,000 that week.“Jagged Little Pill,” the musical featuring songs by Alanis Morissette, did better than those shows, but not well enough to sustain a long run. The show was playing to houses that were about four-fifths full in the late fall, and it grossed $768,000 the week of Dec. 12. It closed a week later.Broadway is now in the midst of a particularly grim winter, and there are currently only 19 shows in the 41 theaters, which is lower than it has been for years. But producers say their daily wraps (that’s their net ticket sales) are picking up and they are optimistic about spring; there are already 14 openings scheduled in April. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Joni Mitchell Plans to Follow Neil Young Off Spotify, Citing ‘Lies’

      by

      Joni Mitchell said Friday that she would remove her music from Spotify, joining Neil Young in his protest against the streaming service over its role in giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.Mitchell, an esteemed singer-songwriter of songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” and whose landmark album “Blue” just had its 50th anniversary, posted a brief statement on her website Friday saying that she would remove her music from the streaming service. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” she wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”Her statement adds fuel to a small but growing revolt over Spotify, with few major artists speaking out but fans commenting widely on social media. The debate has also brought into relief questions about how much power artists wield to control distribution of their work, and the perennially thorny issue of free speech online.Spotify took Young’s music down on Wednesday, two days after he posted an open letter calling for its removal as a protest against “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Spotify’s most popular podcast, which has been criticized for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.He did so after a group of hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts had asked Spotify to take down an episode of Rogan’s show from Dec. 31 that had featured Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease expert. The scientists wrote in a public letter that the program promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines.”Mitchell is the first major artist to follow Young, after a couple of days of speculation and rumors on social media.Young and Mitchell have a deep history together. Both are Canadians who helped lead the singer-songwriter revolution in Southern California in the late 1960s and 1970s.On Spotify, Mitchell is listed as having 3.7 million monthly listeners, with two of her songs — “Big Yellow Taxi” and “A Case of You” — getting over 100 million streams.While few other major artists have spoken out so far, Young’s stance has resonated widely with fans. Twitter was dotted with the announcements of listeners saying they were canceling their subscriptions, and screenshots from Spotify’s app showed a message from its customer support team saying that it was “getting a lot of contacts so may be slow to respond.” Spotify has not said how many customers canceled their subscriptions.Tech rivals have also pounced on the controversy, with SiriusXM restarting a Neil Young channel and Apple Music calling itself “the home of Neil Young.”In a statement on his website on Friday, Young reiterated his objections to Rogan’s podcast and took a swipe at Spotify’s sound quality. He also said he supported free speech.“I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship,” it said. “Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information.” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      The Met Opera Never Missed a Curtain. It Hopes Audiences Rebound.

      by

      On Saturday evening, if all goes as planned, the Metropolitan Opera will celebrate a milestone: reaching a long-planned midwinter break without having had to cancel a single performance, even as the pandemic created havoc backstage.As the Omicron variant spread through the city in December and January, the virus upended the Met’s operations, with at least 400 singers, orchestra players, stagehands, costume designers, dancers, actors and other employees testing positive, according to a snapshot of cases provided by the Met on Friday.But there are encouraging signs that at the opera house, as in the city, the recent surge has peaked and cases are falling dramatically again.During the first week of January, as cases were reaching new heights in New York, more than 100 employees at the Met tested positive, including six solo singers and five members of the children’s chorus. By last week, the total number of positive cases among the Met’s large roster of employees had fallen to 22, about the same number as in early December, and there have been eight positive tests so far this week.Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said that during the worst days of Omicron, he worried the company might run out of personnel and be unable to perform. But the Met’s strict safety protocols, which included vaccine and mask mandates and regular testing, provided some assurance, he said, that nobody would become seriously ill.“I knew that if we could just keep bringing in reserves, as well as getting people back to work as soon as they had cleared the quarantine period, we would be able to keep performing,” Gelb said. “Our struggle to keep the Met up and running in the face of Covid became a unifying force for the entire company as we battled a common enemy.”The Met never missed a downbeat or a curtain, even as the Omicron variant wreaked havoc across the performing arts — resulting in the cancellation of scores of Broadway shows, concerts and dance performances.The virus has taken a toll on attendance this winter, across the performing arts.On Broadway, just 62 percent of seats were occupied the week that ended Jan. 9; in the comparable week in the January before the pandemic, 94 percent of seats were filled. Last week, after many of the weakest shows closed and others reduced their prices, 75 percent of all seats were filled but overall box office grosses were down.At the Met, where 77 percent of seats were filled the week of Dec. 18, attendance dropped precipitously as the virus surged, bottoming out at 44 percent in mid-January, before beginning to rise again.Now the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, will have some time to ride out the next phase of the pandemic: It is about to take a long-scheduled break from performing for much of February, before returning on Feb. 28 with a starry new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Putting on opera in a pandemic is not easy: The soprano Rosa Feola, right, wore a mask as she was fitted for a costume for “Rigoletto” designed by Catherine Zuber, left.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe company decided back in 2018 to institute a midseason break, long before the coronavirus emerged. The idea was to stop performing in the middle of winter, when sales are generally weakest, and to add more performances in the late spring, moving the end of the opera season to early June from May. The first midwinter break was supposed to take effect in the 2020-21 season — the season lost to the coronavirus.Now — as the recent surge in cases has left performing arts organizations facing alarmingly low attendance — the Met will have nearly a month off.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 5Omicron in retreat. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Citing Pandemic, This Year’s Obie Awards Will Include Streaming Theater

      by

      The Obie Awards, an annual ceremony honoring theater work performed Off and Off Off Broadway, this year for the first time will consider digital, audio and other virtual productions.The awards administrators decided to expand their scope in recognition of the adaptations made by many theater companies during the coronavirus pandemic, which prevented most New York theaters from staging in-person performances for at least a year, and in many cases considerably longer. Numerous theaters pivoted to streaming, and some experimented with audio.“We wanted to make sure that the work that did happen was eligible,” said Heather Hitchens, the president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing, which presents the awards. “The Obies respond to the season, and to the evolving nature and rhythms of theater.”This year’s Obie Awards are expected to take place in November, which would be 28 months after the last ceremony, reflecting the extraordinarily disruptive role the pandemic has played in theatermaking. The ceremony will consider productions presented by Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theaters between July 1, 2020 and Aug. 31, 2022.The exact date for the ceremony has not been chosen, but Hitchens said she expects it to be in-person (the last one was streamed) and she expects it to have a host (or hosts).This year’s Obie Awards will be the first presented solely by the Wing, which also founded and copresents the Tony Awards. The Obies were created by The Village Voice and first presented in 1956; in 2014, as The Voice struggled, it entered a partnership with the Wing to preserve the ceremony, and now The Voice has granted the Obies trademark to the Wing, Hitchens said.The Obies, always a mixture of prestige and quirkiness, have long been distinguished by their lack of defined categories — each year, the judges decide what works to recognize, and for what reason. This year’s awards will be chaired by David Mendizábal, who is one of the leaders of the Movement Theater Company, and Melissa Rose Bernardo, a freelance theater critic. The judges will include David Anzuelo, an actor and fight choreographer; Becca Blackwell, an actor and writer; Wilson Chin, a set designer; Haruna Lee, a playwright; Soraya Nadia McDonald, the culture critic for The Undefeated; Lisa Peterson, a director and writer; Heather Alicia Simms, an actor; and Kaye Voyce, a costume designer. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Los Angeles Is Changing. Can a Flagship Theater Keep Up?

      by

      LOS ANGELES — For 55 years, the Center Theater Group has showcased theater in a city that has always been known for the movies. Its three stages have championed important new works — “Angels in America,” “Zoot Suit” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” to name three of its most acclaimed offerings — while importing big-ticket crowd pleasers from Broadway (coming this spring: “The Lehman Trilogy”).But this Los Angeles cultural institution is at a crossroads as it goes through its first leadership change in 17 years, and confronts questions about its mission, programming and appeal in a changing city, all amid a debilitating pandemic.Michael Ritchie, the organization’s artistic director, announced last summer that he would retire nearly 18 months before his contract ended in June 2023; he stepped down at the end of the December, citing the need for the organization to move in a new direction in response to social changes and debate about the theater’s future. The organization, which is a nonprofit, is using the transition to consider how to adjust to what is sure to be a very different post-Covid era — a sweeping discussion that theater administrators said would involve some 300 people, including its board of directors, staff, actors, director and contributors.“At the age of 50, you start to think about the next chapter,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director of the Center Theater Group. “There’s so much happening now. Coming out of a pandemic. Coming out of a period of a racial crisis. Years of inequity.”“We are no longer your mother’s C.T.G. anymore,” she said.The obstacles are considerable.The Ahmanson Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, had to cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” in December.Ryan MillerLike theaters everywhere, Center Theater Group — the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown, and the Kirk Douglas Theater 10 miles to the west in Culver City — is grappling with empty seats, declining revenues and the coronavirus. The Ahmanson cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” with Bradley Whitford in December, canceling 22 performances after positive coronavirus tests in the cast and crew at the height of what in a normal year would have been a holiday rush.The cancellation cost the Center Theater Group $1.5 million in lost revenues, including ticket returns. That came after the organization was forced to make millions of dollars in spending cuts over the course of the pandemic, cutting its staff to 140 this season from 185 and reducing its annual budget to $47 million for this fiscal year, $10 million less than the budget for the fiscal year before the pandemic.And the theater group is struggling to adjust to sweeping reassessments of tradition that have emerged from social unrest across the country over the past two years. It was reminded of this new terrain by the uproar that greeted the announcement of a 2021-22 season for the Taper and the Douglas, 10 plays that included just one by a woman and one by a transgender playwright. Jeremy O. Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” which was on the schedule, announced that he would withdraw his play from the season before agreeing to go forward only after the Taper pledged to program only “women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights” next season.The Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture since the Mark Taper Forum, above, and the Ahmanson opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center.Tom BonnerThe Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture for decades.It “is still the flagship theater company of L.A.,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater, an influential small theater on the East Side of the city. “I think it’s at a moment of reckoning, like everything that is theater in Los Angeles. The C.T.G. is the bar that we compare ourselves to. They set a standard for L.A., not only for ourselves but for the country.”The Music Center, the sprawling midcentury arts complex on top of Bunker Hill, across from Frank Gehry’s billowing Walt Disney Concert Hall, is at the center of cultural, arts and society life in Los Angeles. The project was driven by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the cultural leader who was the wife and mother of publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and also houses the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was the site of the Academy Awards off and on from 1969 to 1999. “Before the Music Center, it was really a cultural wasteland,” Marylouise Oates, who was the society columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s, said, referring to the city.Theaters across the country are struggling to find the balance between pleasing and challenging their audience as they confront declining ticket sales and the threat of competition in the form of a screen in a living room. Theater here has also long existed in the shadow of Hollywood, to the annoyance of those involved in what is by any measure a vibrant theater community.“I don’t see how anyone can say it’s not a theater town,” said Charles Dillingham, who was the managing director of the Center Theater Group from 1991 through 2011.The Kirk Douglas Theater, in a former movie palace in Culver City, opened in 2004.Craig SchwartzFor its first 40 years, the theater group’s personality — adventurous and daring more often than not — was forged by Gordon Davidson, who was recruited by Chandler to be the first artistic director at the Taper. He was of a generation of force-of-nature theater impresarios, like Joseph Papp in New York and Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis.“I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper. “I’ll never forget Gordon sitting down, taking out his buck slip and saying, ‘What do you need?’”The Taper opened with the “The Devils,” by the British dramatist John Whiting, about a Catholic priest in France accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun. The subject matter caused a rustle, but Chandler, who died in 1997, stood by Davidson.“She wasn’t always happy,” said Judi Davidson, who was married to Gordon Davidson, who died in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. You tell which plays I should come to and which plays I shouldn’t come to.’ ”The Taper staged “Zoot Suit,” by Luis Valdez, in 1978, a rare production of a work by a Latino writer, which went on to Broadway; as well as a full production of both parts of “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, in 1992, before it moved to Broadway. “I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper.Jay Thompson In recent years, the theater has come under criticism for too often catering to an older audience hungry for the comfort of familiar works. Still, under Ritchie, who declined a request for an interview, it presented the premieres of acclaimed works, including “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which had its world premiere at the Douglas before moving to the Taper.Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” said the Center Theater Group had responded quickly when he objected to the overwhelmingly male lineup of writers. “When I raised my issues and pulled my play, they didn’t act defensively,” Harris said. “They acted. Other places would have let the play move on and figure out a way to blame me.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Lucy Rowan Mann, Doyenne of a Prime Classical Music Prize, Dies at 100

      by

      With her husband, the violinist Robert Mann, she mentored young classical musicians and administered the Naumburg Foundation’s storied annual awards.Lucy Rowan Mann, whose guidance of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and its influential awards helped propel a raft of major classical music careers for 50 years, died on Jan. 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.The cause was Covid-19, her daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta, said.Ms. Mann was the executive director of the foundation, which she ran with her husband, Robert Mann, who was its president and the founding first violinist of the renowned Juilliard String Quartet. She handled administration and fund-raising, while Mr. Mann, who died in 2018 at 97, focused on the musical aspects of the competition and on the judging.But Ms. Mann, who started at the Naumburg Foundation in 1972 and continued until this year, did more than office work. She scheduled performances for the young Naumburg winners, did publicity for them and even arranged travel. The couple were a well-oiled machine; Carol Wincenc, who in 1978 won the inaugural Naumburg Competition for flute, said in an interview that the Manns exhibited “teamwork of the highest order.”Naumburg winners who have gone on to prominent careers include, in addition to Ms. Wincenc, the violin soloists Leonidas Kavakos and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; Frank Huang, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic; the pianists Andre-Michel Schub, Stephen Hough and Anton Nel; the clarinetist Charles Neidich; and the cellist Colin Carr. Singers who have won include Julia Bullock, Dawn Upshaw and Lucy Shelton.Music competitions are often key pieces in building a career, offering prize money, concert dates and public validation, but they can be rife with pressure and are often criticized for valuing technical brilliance over personality.But, as Mr. Mann wrote in The New York Times in 1985, “a competition is as musical, humane and culturally meaningful as it wants to be.” Ms. Mann’s administration and care for the competitors lent that humanity, colleagues and musicians said.The Naumburg Foundation, established in 1925, started administering annual awards in 1926. Robert Mann himself won a Naumburg Award for violin in 1941.The awards categories rotate among instruments each year. Initially, they included pianists, cellists and violinists, but the competition has expanded to include vocalists, chamber ensembles and flutists, and it also features other instruments on a rotating basis. The 2022 Naumburg Competition will be for saxophonists.First-prize winners receive $25,000 and two New York recitals and have a work commissioned for them.Ms. Mann made it part of her mission to push for greater awareness of 20th-century American composers. In her office at the Manhattan School of Music, where the Naumburg Foundation is based, she was known to stage birthday celebrations for contemporary composers, bribing students with candy to encourage them to attend and learn more about musical history.Lucille Ida Zeitlin was born on June 20, 1921, in Brooklyn. She and her two siblings were raised by their mother, Rose Kuschner. Their father, Irving Allen Zeitlin, was a nightclub manager. “My father was a scoundrel and a womanizer,” Ms. Mann told The Times in 2013. “He was never around.”She attended public high school in Brooklyn and went on to Brooklyn College to study acting, but dropped out and moved to Washington. There, she studied drama under Walter Kerr, who was teaching at the Catholic University of America and later become a theater critic for The Times. During World War II, Ms. Mann worked in secretarial roles at the War Department and elsewhere.Her marriage to Mark Rowan, who served in the Army and later became an English professor, ended in divorce after eight years.She returned to New York and in 1947 and became the manager for concerts at the Juilliard School. She met Mr. Mann while also managing the Juilliard String Quartet. They married in 1949.In addition to their work at the Naumburg Foundation, the Manns performed together in the Lyric Trio: Ms. Mann narrated folk stories from Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen over music played by Mr. Mann and the pianist Leonid Hambro. Eric Salzman, reviewing a Lyric Trio concert at Carnegie Hall for The Times in 1962, called their performance “witty, pointed and delightful.”Their son, Nicholas Mann, who is also a violinist, occasionally performed with them as part of the Mann family-centered Baca Ensemble, for which Robert Mann composed. In a 1986 Times review of a performance by the group at Carnegie Hall, Allen Hughes wrote, “Miss Rowan is a persuasive reader, Mr. Mann’s scores are serious and well-wrought, and words and music coexisted amiably in these performances.”Ms. Mann was also an artist: She began painting as a hobby but became more serious about it later in life, culminating in retrospectives of her bright abstract works at the Tenri Cultural Institute in Manhattan in 2017 and 2019.In addition to her two children, she is survived by five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      'Peter Grimes' Review: Opera Stars Take On an Omicron-Battered Vienna

      by

      The tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the soprano Lise Davidsen are leading a luxuriously cast revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”VIENNA — Whenever I open Instagram these days, it seems, I’m served an ad for “Hamilton.” Once a destination musical that took months of planning or deep pockets to see, it is now algorithmically spreading the word that last-minute tickets are up for grabs, no #Ham4Ham lottery required.Such is the state of live performance as the Omicron variant upends shows and keeps wary audiences at home.Take the Vienna State Opera, one of the world’s great companies and a major tourist attraction. Forced to close for nearly a week in December because of the coronavirus, it is only now returning to full capacity. Nearly 450 seats (in a house with just over 1,700) were still unsold on Wednesday morning, with mere hours to go until the opening of a luxuriously cast revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” — ostensibly one of the hottest tickets in Europe, featuring the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the fast-rising soprano Lise Davidsen.By curtain time, the house appeared much fuller, but hundreds of tickets remain available for each future performance. It’s easy to see why people might be discouraged, and why the company is practically begging for attendance: Visitors to the State Opera, who are required to wear N95-quality masks inside the building, must also be fully vaccinated and boosted, as well as tested (by P.C.R., pointedly not antigen) for the virus.I wasn’t alone in scrambling to produce all the necessary documents as I entered: an ID, a nontransferable ticket, a certificate of vaccination and a negative test result — which came with a 70-euro price tag because I had traveled from Berlin, where rapid tests are widely available and free, but P.C.R. ones are not.The things we do for opera.And, in this case, for the opportunity to hear Kaufmann in his debut as Peter Grimes, as well as Davidsen in her first staged performance as Ellen Orford — initial impressions of roles these artists are rumored to be taking elsewhere in future seasons, including the Metropolitan Opera.In this production, Kaufmann’s Grimes is literally burdened by ropes.Wiener Staatsoper/Michael PoehnOften stranded by Christine Mielitz’s neon-streaked staging of the opera — a psychologically complex tragedy of provincial cruelty and loneliness — Kaufmann and Davidsen seemed forced to rely on their dramatic instincts rather than a cohesive vision. Although the evening was far from a disaster and was warmly received, neither singer appears to have found a new signature role.Kaufmann, in particular, struggled to trace clearly his character’s decline from social isolation to volatility and suicidal delirium. A fisherman who is believed by mobbish villagers to have killed his apprentices, Grimes carries the weight of perception; in this production, he is literally burdened by ropes and the bodies of the boys who died under his watch. Sounding likewise weighed, Kaufmann mostly sang in shades of weariness, with an overreliance on floated pianissimos punctuated by outbursts more heroic than pained or violent.If this approach — steadfastly resigned rather than mercurial — made for static storytelling, it paid off in Grimes’s climactic mad scene. Having long sulked under a halo of anguish, Kaufmann was all the more moving in this hushed monologue, lending an inevitability to his character’s death.But in this scene, as throughout the opera, Britten scatters spiky marcato and staccato articulation. Kaufmann opted instead for a consistent legato, sometimes at odds with the orchestra and, in extreme cases, slurring phrases into unintelligibility.Ellen Orford requires more modesty than the mighty Wagner and Strauss roles that have swiftly made Davidsen famous.Wiener Staatsoper/Michael PoehnDavidsen’s Ellen is a departure from the mighty Wagner and Strauss roles that have swiftly made her famous. “Grimes” requires comparative modesty, a challenge she met on Wednesday with graceful control — judiciously deploying the reverberation she is capable of when needed to illustrate her iron will in the face of a small town’s rushed judgments, and dropping to a glassy pianissimo in moments of convincing despair. She matched the score’s precise indications with crisp delivery and diction, but also, in Act II, wove a delicately doleful quartet with Noa Beinart as Auntie and Ileana Tonca and Aurora Marthens as the two Nieces.The other star onstage was the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, as Balstrode — who is, aside from Ellen, the only resident of “the Borough” (as the town is called) who treats Grimes with some sympathy. But that was difficult to discern in this performance; Terfel’s robust voice had a touch of wickedness, with smirks here and there that made it seem as though he were encouraging Grimes’s destructive path. It came as no surprise when Balstrode, at last, told the poor Grimes to sink with his boat at sea.Other cast members stood out, for better and worse: the affecting textures of Martin Hässler’s Ned Keene and the dark comedy of Thomas Ebenstein’s Bob Boles; but also the shouty cries of Stephanie Houtzeel’s Mrs. Sedley, an interpretation better fit for Brecht than Britten.The conductor Simone Young shaped enormous peaks and valleys of sound in the orchestra. The great interludes were distinct narratives: the first setting a tone with its chilling thinness, the third angular and balletic, the fifth gently rocking yet tense. And the chorus, monochromatically costumed and often moving in unison, sang with as much richly defined character as any single performer onstage. In Act III, its members truly embodied the destructive power of a determined mob.That scene is one of the most horrifying in opera, a grand climax in a work that, when performed at this level, makes any onerous safety protocol worthwhile. If you can get over that hurdle, there are several opportunities — and many, many tickets — left to hear it for yourself.Peter GrimesThrough Feb. 8 at the Vienna State Opera; wiener-staatsoper.at. More