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      Overlooked No More: Sylvia Rexach, Puerto Rican Singer and Composer

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      She was especially known for reinventing boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love — amid Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A woman positioned close to a microphone announces a title into the silence, as if preparing to read a poem: “En Mis Sueños” (“In My Dreams”). A guitarist plays a precise and dramatic introduction to a bolero.At modest volume, the woman, Sylvia Rexach, begins to sing, with a smoky voice and non-virtuosic authority. She describes a fantasy loop in which an ex-lover briefly visits her in her dreams, leaving behind a “wake of love” (“estela de amor”). The dream will return again when she wants it to, which she will. She may not want more than the fantasy. (She may even want less: to be free of repetitive desire.) There is no sense of possession nor, really, of loss. There will be no reciprocity in this relationship, and she seems not only to accept the situation but to be an adept within it, a powerful expert.This description could pertain to more or less every track on “Sylvia Rexach Canta a Sylvia Rexach,” a luminous, séance-like record made in a San Juan studio in July 1958 by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, then 36, and her friend the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The tempos remain similar, as do the images and themes: moons, night and oblivion; celestial flashes; troublesome desire; waves and what they leave behind.The album, after it was released in the mid-1960s by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña — a government-funded operation and the island’s equivalent to the Smithsonian Institution — was barely distributed outside Puerto Rico and has only recently appeared on streaming services. It is the only commercially issued recording of Rexach performing her own songs, and it was not even intended as such: It was a reference document for posterity attesting to how her songs should sound, made at the behest of the studio’s owner. It includes “Olas y Arenas” (“Waves and Sands”), “Alma Adentro” (“Inner Soul”) and “Y Entonces” (“And So”), which over the years have been taken up by other performers in many styles.Rexach (pronounced reck-SAHTCH) was a gifted composer of boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love in slow 2/4 time. The bolero began in Cuba at the end of the 19th century and gained popularity across Latin America in the late 1920s. But by the ’40s and ’50s it could reflect a more modern sensibility, one in tune with the wild subconscious. It could just about accommodate someone like Rexach, an artist to the core, “una bohemia” — not a casual description but a committed identity.“It meant that she liked the nightlife, and sang with her friends in groups, and saw the sun come up,” her daughter, the actor and singer Sharon Riley, said in an interview.There had been important female bolero composers before Rexach, most famously María Grever of Mexico. But Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century created particularly difficult circumstances that forced women artists like Rexach and the poet Julia de Burgos to invent their own tradition.The eminent musicologist Cristóbal Díaz Ayala described Rexach as virtually unclassifiable within the Latin American music of her time. Her lyrics projected a frank sexuality and a near-indifference to shame. They could look like passionate resignation, or calm defiance. “I am the sand that the wave never touches,” she laments in “Olas y Arenas.”She could destabilize and diffuse what the scholar Elaine Enid Vázquez González has called “the boleristic ‘I’”: In her songs, the narrator’s desire doesn’t entirely travel outward toward its object, as had been common in bolero lyrics. It travels inward, more toward her own memory and the senses. The listener follows it there.Rexach was 36 when she recorded an album with the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The songs on that record have been performed by many other musicians, including Linda Ronstadt and Tito Rodríguez.Archivo General de Puerto RicoSylvia Regina Rexach González was born on Jan. 22, 1922, one of seven children of Julio Rexach, who was of Catalan descent and ran Farmacia Rexach, a drugstore next door to the family’s home, and María Teresa González, a society woman and organizer of annual carnival activities. Her well-to-do family lived in Santurce, the district east of San Juan’s Old City known for its density of musicians and artists.At Central High School in Santurce, Sylvia proved an indifferent student but one who was indispensable to the school’s performing-arts programs. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, while on a school outing, she played her song “Di Corazon” (“Tell Me, Heart”) on a piano at the Escambrón Beach Club. The bandleader Rafael Muñoz, who was on a break from rehearsing for an evening performance, heard it and asked her who wrote it. Her father signed a contract on her behalf with the publishing company Peer International, and Muñoz recorded the song before Rexach finished her junior year.In 1943 she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps for three months, working as a desk clerk. Around this time, while publicizing a brand of rum outside a grocery store, she met Bill Riley, an Army cook from Connecticut. They fell in love, quickly married, had three children and were legally joined for 13 years, mostly unhappily, with a long separation toward the end. According to Sharon Riley, her father was often violent with her mother, especially when both had been drinking.In the 1940s and ’50s, Rexach worked in clubs as the leader of the vocal group el Combo Las Damiselas (later known as el Combo de Sylvia Rexach) and with musical-theater revues, both on the island and occasionally in New York City. She helped form a publishing organization through which she advocated for composers’ rights; wrote scripts for radio and television comedy shows, as well as advertising jingles for aspirin and detergent; and wrote a cultural criticism column for El Diario de Puerto Rico, praising the unsung and the local while reacting against exploitative business practices.She also raised her children as a single mother, and she wrote songs. About 50 have been published, though a friend, the singer José Luis Torregrosa, believed that many more “were left on the tabletops of the cafes where we were drinking.” Several were recognized during her life through versions by well-known singers — particularly Lucho Gatica’s “Y Entonces,” released in 1959 — but many more came later, as performed by Tito Rodríguez, La Lupe, Cheo Feliciano and others. The song “Alma Adentro” alone has passed through many sensibilities: Linda Ronstadt covered it on her Grammy Award-winning 1992 album, “Frenesí,” as did the New York-based jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón in 2011. on a record named after the song. Miramar, the bolero revivalist band with roots in Puerto Rico, researched her life before creating their own subtle version, included on their album “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach,” released in 2016, which drew some attention to the composer in the United States. And the Spanish singer Angela Cervantes and the Cuban jazz pianist Pepe Rivero recently released their own version, spreading her work to audiences that barely knew her music.Aspects of Rexach’s life have created around her an aura of tragedy. But those who knew her spoke of a different set of qualities, including hilarity, bravery and loyalty.Archivo General de Puerto RicoRexach died on Oct. 20, 1961, of stomach cancer. She was 39.Her position in history remains unfixed — somewhere between institution and cult, often rediscovered and sometimes not discovered at all. A Telemundo mini-series about Rexach’s life, broadcast in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s and starring Sharon Riley, told her story in dramatic tones. There have been two theaters named for her in San Juan; the current one, inside the Centro de Bellas Artes, Puerto Rico’s major arts center, is built roughly on the site of her family’s old house. A well-researched Spanish-language biography, “Sylvia Rexach: Pasión Adentro,” by Virianai Rodríguez Santaliz, was published in Puerto Rico in 2008, but it has not been translated into other languages and has gone out of print.Rexach was a woman of integrity who continues to resist easy definition and enshrinement. She was melancholic, and aspects of her life have created around her an aura of tragedy: her troubled marriage and divorce; her long illness; her son Billy’s opiate addiction and prison time in New York City; her early death at the Women’s Hospital of Santurce.Yet those who knew her well, as detailed in Santaliz’s biography, have stressed a different set of qualities: hilarity, bravery, generosity, loyalty, perfectionism. Marta Romero, one of her bandmates in el Combo Sylvia Rexach, once called her “a volcano of mercy in constant eruption.” The great songwriter Tite Curet Alonso also compared her to nature, calling her “a true cultural bruma.” The word “bruma,” which she used in “Olas y Arenas,” means mist, and implies that she has become part of the atmosphere. More

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      Paul T. Kwami, Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Longtime Director, Dies at 70

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      He took the storied Black musical group to new heights, including its first Grammy win and a National Medal of Arts.Paul T. Kwami, the longtime director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who cemented the ensemble’s reputation as one of the country’s premier interpreters of African American spiritual music, died on Saturday in Nashville. He was 70.His wife, Susanna Kwami, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not provide a cause.The Fisk Jubilee Singers put Nashville on the musical map long before the city became famous for its honky-tonks and slide guitars.The group, based at Fisk University, a historically Black institution that was founded a year after the Civil War, was originally intended as a fund-raising tool; it toured the country in the 1870s to bring in money for the struggling college.The group, many of whose members were formerly enslaved people, was among the first to perform spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and “Wade in the Water,” songs that many white audiences had never heard, especially in the North.Their first tour, in 1871, earned enough money to retire the school’s debt, pay for a 40-acre parcel of land north of downtown Nashville and erect the school’s first permanent building, Jubilee Hall. They sang for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House and performed for six weeks in New York City.“They used the power and beauty of their music, and the beauty of their singing, to win the love of people,” Dr. Kwami said in a radio interview in February.A native of Ghana and a Fisk graduate, Dr. Kwami continued that tradition when he took over as the group’s music director in 1994.The Jubilee Singers performing at Fisk University in Nashville this June. Under Dr. Kwami’s direction, the group recently won its first Grammy Award.Jason Davis/Getty ImagesHe insisted that the singers — eight men and eight women, all Fisk undergraduates — keep to a rigorous rehearsal and touring schedule. He also made sure that they understood not just the history of Fisk and its musical heritage, but the roots of the songs they sang.Spirituals, he told them, played many roles in slave communities. They could be lamentations or celebrations; at the same time, they could serve as a means of stealthy communication, spreading news outside the ken of white slavers.“He made us understand the language of love that was in the middle of those spirituals,” Michangelo Scruggs, who was a Jubilee Singer from 1993 to 1996, said in a phone interview. “A spiritual is not just a song. It’s a communication. It talks about the struggles and how slaves were able to overcome their struggles, whether it was through the end of slavery or whether it was even through death.”Dr. Kwami also impressed upon his students the African roots of the music they sang. In 2007, he took the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Ghana to perform during the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence; while there, they visited the grave of the Black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was also a Fisk graduate.Under Dr. Kwami’s direction, the Jubilee Singers recorded several albums and also appeared on albums by other artists, some of them outside the group’s usual gospel and spiritual fare. They were featured alongside Neil Young in “Heart of Gold,” a 2006 concert documentary directed by Jonathan Demme and recorded at the renowned Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, where the singers performed regularly.“Reverence was a huge thing for him, but in that reverence he was open to going into places that the group had never gone before,” Ruby Amanfu, a Nashville-based singer and Dr. Kwami’s niece, said in an interview.In 2000, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame. In 2008, Dr. Kwami appeared on the group’s behalf at the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts, the country’s highest award for cultural achievement.In 2020, the Fisk Jubilee Singers released “Celebrating Fisk!,” an album of 12 songs recorded at the Ryman featuring guest appearances by musicians like Ms. Amanfu, Keb’ Mo’ and Lee Ann Womack. It won the group its first Grammy Award, for best roots gospel album.That year, Dr. Kwami told NPR: “When I remember the life stories of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, some of whom were slaves, some who did not know their parents and yet left this rich legacy for us, if they were to come back today, I am sure they will be very happy that we are still singing the Negro spirituals and also still talking about them.”Dr. Kwami inside Jubilee Hall at Fisk University, named after the Jubilee Singers, last year.William DeShazer for The New York TimesPaul Theophilus Kwami was born on March 14, 1952, in Amedzofe, a small Ghanaian mountain town about 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital, Accra. His father, Theophilus Kwami, was a music teacher and a farmer; his mother, Monica Rosaline (Dikro) Kwami, raised him and his six siblings.When Paul wasn’t picking coffee on his family plantation, he was sitting with his father at his piano, learning the basics of music theory. He decided to follow his father into music education, studying for two years at a teachers college; in 1982, he received a bachelor’s degree in music education at the National Academy of Music in Ghana.He returned home to teach and play the organ at his local church, but a chance encounter with a missionary from the United States introduced him to the idea of continuing his education at Fisk. Although he had grown up listening to gospel music on the radio, he had never heard of the university or its heralded singing group.He left his job and family in Ghana and moved to Nashville, with the intention of rounding out his education and then returning home. Instead, a friend persuaded him to join the Jubilee Singers, who were under the direction of his mentor at the time, McCoy Ransom.He stayed in the United States after graduating from Fisk with a second bachelor’s degree, also in musical education, in 1985. He received a master’s degree in the same subject from Western Michigan University in 1987, then worked for a music publishing company in Nashville before returning to Fisk, and the Jubilee Singers, in 1994. He received a doctorate from the American Conservatory of Music in 2009.Along with his wife, Dr. Kwami is survived by his daughter, Rachel Kwami; his sons, Paul E. Kwami and Delali Kwami; his sisters, Ruby F. Kwami, Patricia S. Kwami and Joan A. Kwami; and his brother, Dickson K. Kwami. More

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      Art Rosenbaum, Painter and Preserver of Folk Music, Dies at 83

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      As an artist and exponent of American traditional songs, he sought to blur the lines between outsider and insider art, and became a guiding force in the Athens, Ga., scene.ATLANTA — Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, Ga., his adopted hometown. He was 83.His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was complications of cancer.Art Rosenbaum’s passion for documenting a broad range of American musical traditions as they were passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms expanded upon the famous field recording work of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, another high-profile 20th-century champion of folk music. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Seeger had once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.”Mr. Rosenbaum called it “good advice, and the kick in the rear that got me going.”“Outside Carnesville,” oil on linen, 1983-84. Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, as he did here, with Mabel Cawthorn on the banjo.Art RosenbaumIn 2007, the Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Mr. Rosenbaum’s trove, “Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” which won a Grammy Award for best historical album.The pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “an indispensable counterpoint to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music,’” a reference to the 1952 song compilation that remains a canonical touchstone for folk musicians.Like Mr. Smith, the bohemian polymath who compiled the “Anthology,” Mr. Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where his energetic paintings, often depicting the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an influence that resonated far beyond the classroom.Michael Stipe, the visual artist and singer with the Athens rock band R.E.M., who was a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s in the early 1980s, said Mr. Rosenbaum’s goal “was to blur the lines between what is outsider and insider, and to bring together this untrained music and art with trained music and art, and acknowledge that each have immense power, and that they’re not that far apart.”A portrait of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. singer, a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s, as well as a subject of his paintings.Art Rosenbaum, Collection of the Peasant CorporationArthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on Dec. 6, 1938, in Ogdensburg, N.Y., in St. Lawrence County. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged her children’s artistic inclinations. His father, David Rosenbaum, was an Army pathologist who sometimes sang what his son described as “Northern street songs.” Arthur later recorded one of these songs, his father’s a cappella version of the ribald 18th-century Child ballad “Our Goodman,” and included it in the 2007 box set.The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, entranced by traditional music, absorbed the Harry Smith anthology and the contemporary folk stars of the day. In high school he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize money on a five-string banjo. He went on to become a pre-eminent expert on traditional banjo playing and tunings and to record several albums.In the mid-1950s Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, then the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, earning an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University. In the summers he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began making recordings of nearby field workers from Mexico and the American South.In 1958, Mr. Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded in Indianapolis a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, whom he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” Back in New York, as Mr. Rosenbaum was fond of recalling, a fellow roots music obsessive named Bob Dylan would pester him for any details he could muster about Mr. Blackwell’s life and playing style.“Shady Grove,” 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum sought out traditional Black and white musicians, revealing a shared cultural history.Art RosenbaumIt was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark, who became his wife and lifelong collaborator. She survives him.In addition to her and his son, Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by a sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, a writer; and a brother, Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist.After eight years of teaching studio art at the University of Iowa, Mr. Rosenbaum in 1976 took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. With Athens as a home base, he and Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum continued making field recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, and giving the musicians they met opportunities to play before new audiences.“As these traditional musicians were identified and then brought out,” said Judith McWillie, an emerita art professor at the university, “and as there were more festivals and opportunities for them to play, people began to envision an identity for Georgia that was somewhat different from the one that it had. This was the 1970s, and coming off some extremely difficult times in the South.”Folk music, she said, revealed a shared cultural history: “The musicians Art brought out were Black and white.”In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of stories and songs by Howard Finster, the self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “man of visions” whose work has become indelibly associated with 20th-century Georgia after its use on album covers by R.E.M. and the band Talking Heads.Untitled Diptych, 2014. Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings are allegorical works in which the old and the new cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space with modern-day hipsters.Art RosenbaumHe also recorded the McIntosh County Shouters, an African American group from coastal Georgia who performed the “ring shout,” which Mr. Rosenbaum described as “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion and expressive and formalized dancelike movements.” The ring shout, he asserted, was “the oldest African American performance tradition on the North American continent.”Brenton Jordan, a member of the group, said of the Rosenbaums, “It’s their legwork that actually kind of introduced the McIntosh County Shouters to the world.” He noted that the ring shout, once on the verge of extinction, has in recent years been performed by his group in Washington at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.The Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. With drawings of the performers by Mr. Rosenbaum and photos of them by Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum, it depicts a place and a culture that seems beguilingly out of phase with modern life.Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loose allegorical works in which the old and the new clash and cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space on the canvas with modern-day hipsters, skateboarders and documentarians (often Mr. Rosenbaum himself).As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. At times his work recalls the painting of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist. Some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s works are large murals on historical themes.Pete Seeger once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.” That advice set him on a decades-long project of seeking out unrecorded musicians.via Rosenbaum familyBeginning in the late 1970s, Athens saw an explosion of forward-thinking rock musicians, many of whom, like Mr. Stipe, had ties to the Georgia art school. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passions always ran to traditional music, but he remained an inspiration for contemporary musicians.Lance Ledbetter, the founder and co-director of the Dust-to-Digital label, recalled Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant, idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, speaking of Mr. Rosenbaum, quoting him as saying:“When you move to Athens, and you hear about this guy who plays banjo and knows all of these songs, you just follow him around like a puppy dog. And I’m not the only one who did that.” More

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      Irene Papas, Actress in ‘Zorba the Greek’ and Greek Tragedies, Dies at 96

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      She was best known for commanding movie roles in the 1960s but received the greatest plaudits for playing heroines of the ancient stage.Irene Papas, a Greek actress who starred in films like “Z,” “Zorba the Greek” and “The Guns of Navarone” but won the greatest acclaim of her career playing the heroines of Greek tragedy, died on Wednesday. She was 96.The death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry in an email. He did not know the cause of death, but in 2018, it was announced that Ms. Papas had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in the 1960s. In “The Guns of Navarone” (1961), filmed partly on the island of Rhodes, she played a World War II resistance fighter who dared to do what a team of Allied saboteurs (among them Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn) would not: shoot an unarmed woman because she was a traitor.In “Zorba the Greek” (1964), with Mr. Quinn, she was a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers because of her choice of lover. In Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), set in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, she played Yves Montand’s widow, who evoked the film’s meaning with one final grief-ridden look out to sea.But in the same decade, she was making her name in Greek film versions of classical plays, often directed by her countryman Michael Cacoyannis, who also directed “Zorba.” She played the title characters in “Antigone” (1961), Sophocles’s tale of a woman who pays dearly after fighting for her brother’s right to an honorable burial; and in “Electra” (1962), in which she and her brother plot matricide. She was also Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in “Iphigenia” (1977), the drama of a daughter offered as human sacrifice.In 1971, she received the National Board of Review’s best actress award for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women.” Her co-stars were Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave.Ms. Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chiliomodi, Greece, a small village near Corinth, and grew up in Athens. She was one of four daughters of two schoolteachers and entered drama school at age 12. By the time she was 18, she had already played both Electra and Lady Macbeth. But her first professional stage role, in 1948, was as a party-hopping society girl in a musical.She made her film debut the same year, in Nikos Tsiforos’s drama “Hamenoi Angeloi” (“Fallen Angels”), and appeared in 14 films during the 1950s — some American, some European — before her breakout role in “The Guns of Navarone.”Ms. Papas with James Darren, center, and Anthony Quinn in “The Guns of Navarone” (1961). Everett CollectionThe director Elia Kazan is often credited with discovering Ms. Papas. On a 1954 trip to the United States, she read a scene from “The Country Girl” for him. The following year, she was given a seven-year contract by MGM, although she made only one film under it: “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956), a western starring James Cagney.Ms. Papas’s other films included “Bouboulina” (1959), in which she played an 18th-century Greek revolutionary heroine; “The Brotherhood” (1968), as a Mafia wife (to Kirk Douglas); “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), as the discarded Catherine of Aragon opposite Richard Burton’s Henry VIII; and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987), based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez.The Greek tragedies were the focus of her New York stage career as well. She made her Broadway debut in 1967 in “That Summer — That Fall,” based on “Phèdre,” playing a passionate second wife in love with her stepson (Jon Voight), but the production closed after only 12 performances. The following year, she was Clytemnestra in a Circle in the Square production of “Iphigenia in Aulis.” She returned to Circle in the Square as the title character, a woman who kills her own children, in “Medea” (1973) and as Agave, who mistakenly kills her own son during an orgy of drugs, drink and violence, in “The Bacchae” (1980).She was also a singer. She made two albums of Greek folk songs and hymns, “Odes” (1979) and “Rapsodies” (1986), and created something of a scandal with vocals that were condemned by some as lewd on “666,” the 1971 album by the rock group Aphrodite’s Child.Ms. Papas had strong political feelings about her country and made them public. In 1967, she risked her citizenship by calling for a “cultural boycott” of Greece after a military junta took control, saying “Nazism is back in Greece” and describing the country’s new leaders as “no more than a band of blackmailers.” Although Ms. Papas spoke in interviews about a desire to give up acting and a regrettable tendency to be too obedient to directors, she continued film acting well into her 70s. Her final screen appearances included “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which she played Drosoula, the formidable mother of Mandras (Christian Bale), and “Um Filme Falado” (“A Talking Picture”), Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 meditation on civilization, in which she portrayed a privileged actress sailing the Mediterranean.She married Alkis Papas, a director and actor, in 1947, and they divorced four years later. A brief 1957 marriage to José Kohn, a producer, was annulled. She never married again.She is survived by her nephews, the spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry said.Having played all those characters from ancient Greece, Ms. Papas had a worldview that took thousands of years of history and philosophy into account. “Plato made the first mistake,” she told Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times in 1969, lamenting an unnecessary delay in the scientific revolution. “He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man.” More

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      Ramsey Lewis, Jazz Pianist Who Became a Pop Star, Dies at 87

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      His 1965 recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” brought him to a place few jazz musicians reached in that era: the Top 10.Ramsey Lewis, a jazz pianist who unexpectedly became a pop star when his recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” reached the Top 10 in 1965 — and who remained musically active for more than a half century after that — died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 87.His death was announced on his website. No cause was given.Mr. Lewis, who had been leading his own group since 1956, had recorded with the revered drummer Max Roach and was well known in jazz circles but little known elsewhere when he and his trio (Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums) recorded a live album at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in May 1965. The album included a version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which had been a hit for the R&B singer Dobie Gray just a few months earlier, and which was released as a single.Instrumental records were a rarity on the pop charts at the time, jazz records even more so. But its infectious groove, Mr. Lewis’s bluesy piano work and the ecstatic crowd reaction helped make the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s rendition of “The ‘In’ Crowd” a staple on radio stations and jukeboxes across the country. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — eight points higher than the Dobie Gray original had reached.Two more singles in a similar vein quickly followed: covers of “Hang On Sloopy,” which had been a No. 1 hit for the McCoys in 1965, and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” “The ‘In’ Crowd” won Mr. Lewis the first of his three Grammy Awards. (The others were for the 1966 album track “Hold It Right There” and a 1973 rerecording of “Hang On Sloopy.”)Mr. Young and Mr. Holt left in 1966 to form their own group and had hit singles of their own. Mr. Lewis carried on with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White, later a founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, on drums. That trio had a Top 40 hit in 1966 with a version of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”That record proved to be the end of Mr. Lewis’s career as a purveyor of Top 40 singles, but it was far from the end of his career as a jazz musician. Over the years he would record scores of albums, in contexts ranging from trios to orchestras to collaborations with his fellow pianist Billy Taylor and the singer Nancy Wilson, and he was a constant presence on the Billboard jazz chart.There was always more to Mr. Lewis than his soulful hits suggested; he was a virtuoso with a thorough grasp of the harmonic complexity of modern jazz and a smooth touch reminiscent of earlier jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. But his success on the pop and R&B charts — where he returned in 1974 with “Sun Goddess,” an album partly written and produced by Mr. White and featuring members of Earth, Wind & Fire, on which Mr. Lewis played electric keyboards — led some jazz purists to view him with skepticism.That skepticism was long gone by 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor for a jazz musician.Mr. Lewis in an undated photo. He once said he had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesCommenting on the perceived conflict between “jazz as entertainment and jazz as art” in a 2007 interview with DownBeat magazine, Mr. Lewis noted, “Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.” He himself, he said in another interview, had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.”In announcing his Jazz Master honor, the N.E.A. pointed to Mr. Lewis’s eclecticism, praising him for a style “that springs from his early gospel experience, his classical training and a deep love of jazz.” It also acknowledged him as “an ambassador for jazz,” citing his work both in academia (he had taught jazz studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago) and in the media: In the 1990s he began hosting a syndicated weekly radio program, “Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,” and in 2006 he hosted a public television series of the same name, which featured live performances by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Tony Bennett and many others.At around this time he also began composing large-scale orchestral works. His “Proclamation of Hope,” written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where he was artistic director of the jazz series, and performed there by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009.Mr. Lewis found the challenge of composing that work daunting, he told The Associated Press, until he “threw away the thought of Tchaikovsky and others and sat at the piano and started improvising.” As a result, he said, “I was able to compose from my spirit rather than from my intellect.”In 1995, Mr. Lewis formed Urban Knights, an all-star ensemble with an ever-changing lineup of musicians who, as he himself had long done, straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. The group, whose lineup at various times included the saxophonists Grover Washington Jr., Gerald Albright and Dave Koz, released seven albums, the most recent in 2019.Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago, one of three children of Pauline and Ramsey Lewis. His father worked as a maintenance man.Ramsey began taking piano lessons when he was 4 — he recalled his teacher telling him, “Listen with your inner ear” and “Make the piano sing” — and was soon playing piano at the church where his father, who encouraged his interest in jazz, was choir director.He attended DePaul University in Chicago but did not graduate; his career as a professional musician had already begun before he enrolled. While still a student at Wells High School, he had joined a local seven-piece jazz band, the Clefs. When four members of the band were drafted, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young became the Ramsey Lewis Trio.The trio signed with Argo Records, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based blues label Chess, and released their first album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentle-Men of Swing,” in 1956. The trio became a fixture on the Chicago nightclub scene, and many other albums followed, as did engagements at Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. But the group remained relatively unheralded beyond Chicago.That changed with “The ‘In’ Crowd.”Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Janet; his daughters, Denise Jeffries and Dawn Allain; his sons, Kendall, Frayne and Bobby Lewis; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His sons Ramsey Lewis III and Kevyn Lewis died before him.During the pandemic, Mr. Lewis presented a monthly series of livestream performances. An album drawn from those performances, “The Beatles Songbook,” is slated for release in November.While in lockdown he also wrote a memoir, “Gentleman of Jazz,” in collaboration with Aaron Cohen. It is scheduled for publication next year. More

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      Mable John, Soul Singer With a Star-Studded Résumé, Dies at 91

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      She was one of the first female acts signed to Motown, and her career later intersected with Isaac Hayes and Ray Charles. But she eventually heeded a higher calling.Beyond her many other accomplishments — collaborating on a hit single with Isaac Hayes, singing backup for Ray Charles — Mable John earned a place in the music pantheon as one of the first female artists signed to the Motown Records empire, which altered the face of pop music in the 1960s.But none of it might have happened if Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, had not needed a ride.Ms. John was an aspiring blues singer working for a Detroit insurance company owned by Mr. Gordy’s mother, Bertha, in the 1950s when she found herself serving as the de facto chauffeur for the future music mogul, a former Lincoln-Mercury assembly line worker who had sky-high ambitions as a songwriter and music impresario and was hustling around town looking to conjure hits.It did not take long for him to recognize the vocal power of the woman behind the wheel. Before long, with Mr. Gordy serving as her pianist and mentor, Ms. John joined the Detroit nightclub circuit.“I was groomed for a full year before I did anything anywhere,” she later said, “because that was Berry’s motto — he wanted to make you an act, not a gimmick.”As a pioneering Motown act, Ms. John never churned out hits like those of Stevie Wonder, the Supremes or other stars of the Motown roster. But her influence on music was soon felt.With a voice that could reach breathy depths and then soar to the upper registers, Ms. John moved on to Stax Records in Memphis, known for an earthier kind of R&B, where she scored a hit single in 1966 with “Your Good Thing (Is About to End),” a wistful ballad of heartache that was later covered by Lou Rawls, Bonnie Raitt and others. She eventually spent more than a decade as a member of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’s backing vocal group.Ms. John signed with Stax Records in 1966. A publicity photo from the label misspelled her first name.Stax Museum of American Soul MusicMs. John died on Aug. 25 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91. Her death was confirmed by her nephew Keith John, a longtime backup singer with Stevie Wonder.“She was definitely R&B royalty,” said the author David Ritz, who has written biographies of Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and others, and who collaborated with Ms. John on a series of semi-autobiographical novels centered on an R&B singer turned minister.In broad terms, Ms. John’s musical odyssey might be seen as a metaphor for the Great Migration of Black Americans who fled the South in the middle decades of the 20th century, looking for opportunity in the North. She was born in Bastrop, La., on Nov. 3, 1930, the eldest of 10 children of Mertis and Lillie (Robinson) John, who moved the family to Cullendale, Ark., shortly after her birth. When she was 12, her father left a grueling job at a paper mill and moved the family to Detroit in search of a better life. He found work in an automobile factory.With its swelling Black population, Detroit was a hotbed of African American music, and it became an ideal place for people to pursue their musical ambitions. Lillie John led a family gospel group, and by the mid-’50s Mable’s younger brother William had found fame as a singer under the name Little Willie John, scoring multiple R&B hits with songs like “All Around the World,” “Need Your Love So Bad” and “Fever,” which hit No. 1 on the R&B charts in 1956 and later became an enduring anthem of desire for Peggy Lee.With her sights on a music career of her own, Ms. John was soon singing, in a voice both sassy and vulnerable, at hallowed Detroit clubs like the Flame Show Bar, where she opened for Billie Holiday shortly before her death in 1959.Her career ambitions, and her decision to tour with her famous brother, got her booted from a statewide Pentecostal choir. “They disapproved of the music,” she said in a 2008 interview with The Guardian. “I had gone over to the Devil.”But she was on her way. In 1959, Mr. Gordy formed his landscape-altering sister labels, Tamla and Motown, and he soon signed Ms. John, who recorded “Who Wouldn’t Love a Man Like That,” written by Mr. Gordy and others, in 1960.A handful of singles over the next few years failed to make a splash. By 1966, Ms. John was living in Chicago and married to a preacher, and she told Mr. Gordy that she wanted to be released from the label. In a 1999 interview with the magazine, “Living Blues,” she recalled telling him: “The direction the company is going into, I don’t think I can measure up, because I’m not a pop singer. I’m a blues singer.”Her career, however, was far from over. She moved on to Stax, Motown’s bluesier rival, which proved more amenable to her musical vision.“At Motown, they gave you your songs and told you how to dress and how to dance,” Tim Sampson, the communications director of the Soulsville Foundation, which operates the Stax Museum in Memphis, said in an interview. “At Stax, they just brought you in and said: ‘Tell us your story. What makes you happy? What makes you sad? That’s what your music is going to be.’”Before long, Ms. John found herself meeting with two of the label’s top songwriters, David Porter and a not-yet-famous Isaac Hayes. In search of a song to record, she told them about an early marriage to an unfaithful man. As she spoke, Mr. Hayes began to play the piano, and Mr. Porter began to scribble lyrics.Ms. John in 2019 at the premiere of the Showtime documentary “Hitsville: The Making Of Motown.” She was one of the Motown Records empire’s first female artists.Leon Bennett/Getty Images“I had no idea how the music or the melody should go,” she told The Guardian. “I just knew it was a story that was inside of me. It was a pain, and it needed to get out. And when we got finished that night, we had ‘Your Good Thing (Is About to End).’”The song reached No. 6 on the Billboard R&B chart, but her tenure with Stax was brief. In 1969, she joined Ray Charles as a backing vocalist.Living up to Mr. Charles’s exacting musical standards was an accomplishment in its own right, Mr. Ritz said: “He was an uncompromising taskmaster in terms of musical excellence. You played the wrong stuff and you were out.” Ms. John, who had a strong moral sense and whose nickname was Able Mable, he added, also did her best to steer the band away from the temptations of the road.For Ms. John, her years with Mr. Charles were an opportunity to expand her musical horizons.“At the beginning, I thought I could only sing gospel,” she said in a 2007 interview with NPR. “With Berry Gordy, I found out I could sing the blues. I went to Stax, and I find out I could sing love songs. I got with Ray Charles, and we sang country — everything. And we could play to any audience. I wanted to sing what was in my heart to everybody that loves music, and Ray Charles was the place for me to be, to do that.”Ms. John’s survivors include a son, Limuel Taylor; a brother, Mertis John Jr.; and several grandchildren.She continued to perform off and on over the years. She also wrote three novels with Mr. Ritz: “Sanctified Blues” (2006), “Stay Out of the Kitchen” (2007) and“Love Tornado” (2008). And she dabbled in acting, portraying a seasoned blues singer in John Sayles’s 2007 film, “Honeydripper.”But Ms. John also felt a higher calling. She followed the stage-to-the-pulpit path taken by the likes of Little Richard and Al Green, and founded a small Baptist ministry in Los Angeles that organized food and clothing drives for the homeless.In a sense, she might have been heeding the wisdom that she recalled Billie Holiday imparting to her long ago: “Baby, if you intend to make it in this business, there is one thing you’re going to have to remember. You’re going to have to know when you’ve given enough, and then you have to stop.” More

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      Marsha Hunt, Actress Turned Activist, Is Dead at 104

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      She seemed well on her way to stardom until her career was derailed by the Hollywood blacklist. She then turned her attention to social causes.Marsha Hunt, who appeared in more than 50 movies between 1935 and 1949 and seemed well on her way to stardom until her career was damaged by the Hollywood blacklist, and who, for the rest of her career, was as much an activist as she was an actress, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 104.Her death was announced by Roger C. Memos, the director of the 2015 documentary “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.”Early in her career, Ms. Hunt was one of the busiest and most versatile actresses in Hollywood, playing parts big and small in a variety of movies, including romances, period pieces and the kind of dark, stylish crime dramas that came to be known as film noir. She starred in “Pride and Prejudice” alongside Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in 1940, and in “The Human Comedy” with Mickey Rooney in 1943. In later years, she was a familiar face on television, playing character roles on “Matlock,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and other shows.But in between, her career hit a roadblock: the Red Scare.Ms. Hunt’s problems began in October 1947, when she traveled to Washington along with cinematic luminaries like John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as part of a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. Their mission was to observe and protest the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating what it said was Communist infiltration of the film industry.Many of those who made that trip subsequently denounced it, calling it ill-advised, but Ms. Hunt did not. And although she was never a member of the Communist Party — her only apparent misdeed, besides going to Washington, was signing petitions to support causes related to civil liberties — producers began eyeing her with suspicion.Ms. Hunt, second from left, with other members of the Committee for the First Amendment in Washington in October 1947. (Among the others pictured are John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, center, and Danny Kaye, sixth from right.) Her political activism led movie studios to stop offering her work.Associated PressHer status in Hollywood was already precarious when “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet containing the names of people in the entertainment industry said to be Communists or Communist sympathizers, was published in 1950. Among the people named were Orson Welles, Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein and Marsha Hunt.By then, she had won praise for her portrayal of Viola in a live telecast of “Twelfth Night” in 1949. At the time, Jack Gould of The New York Times called her “an actress of striking and mellow beauty who also was at home with the verse and couplets of Shakespeare.” Her star turn in a 1950 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Devil’s Disciple,” the second of her six appearances on Broadway, had been the subject of a cover article in Life magazine. Yet, the movie offers all but stopped.In 1955, with little work to keep her at home, Ms. Hunt and her husband, the screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr., took a yearlong trip around the world. As a result of her travels, she told the website The Globalist in 2008, she “fell in love with the planet.”She became an active supporter of the United Nations, delivering lectures on behalf of the World Health Organization and other U.N. agencies. She wrote and produced “A Call From the Stars,” a 1960 television documentary about the plight of refugees.She also addressed issues closer to home. In her capacity as honorary mayor of the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles, a post she held from 1983 to 2001, she worked to increase awareness of homelessness in Southern California and organized a coalition of honorary mayors that raised money to build shelters.Ms. Hunt with Franchot Tone, left, and Gene Kelly in the 1943 movie “Pilot No. 5.”Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), via IMDbMarcia Virginia Hunt (she later changed the spelling of her first name) was born in Chicago on Oct. 17, 1917, to Earl Hunt, a lawyer, and Minabel (Morris) Hunt, a vocal coach. The family soon moved to New York City, where Ms. Hunt attended P.S. 9 and the Horace Mann School for Girls in Manhattan.A talent scout who saw her in a school play in 1935 offered her a screen test; nothing came of the offer, but that summer she visited her uncle in Hollywood and ended up being pursued by several studios. She signed with Paramount and made her screen debut that year in a quickly forgotten film called “The Virginia Judge.”She was soon being cast in small roles in a dizzying array of films. In “Easy Living” (1937), starring Jean Arthur, she had an unbilled but crucial part as a woman who has a coat fall on her head in the last scene. Bigger roles soon followed, especially after she joined Hollywood’s largest and most prestigious studio, MGM, in 1939.In 1943, she was the subject of a profile in The New York Herald Tribune that predicted a bright future. “She’s a quiet, well-bred, good-looking number with the concealed fire of a banked furnace,” the profile said. “She’s been in Hollywood for seven years, made 34 pictures. But, beginning now, you can start counting the days before she is one of the top movie names.”It never happened. In the aftermath of the blacklist, however, she began working frequently on television, appearing on “The Twilight Zone,” “Gunsmoke,” “Ben Casey” and other shows. She remained active on the small screen until the late 1980s.Her only notable movie in those years was “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971), an antiwar film written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, also a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, in which she played a wounded soldier’s mother.Ms. Hunt at her home in Los Angeles in 2007. She began working frequently on television in the wake of the Hollywood blacklist and continued acting until the late 1980s.Nick Ut/Associated PressMs. Hunt’s marriage to Jerry Hopper, a junior executive at Paramount, ended in divorce in 1945. The following year, she married Mr. Presnell. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1986. She is survived by several nieces and nephews.Ms. Hunt’s commitment to political and social causes did not diminish with age.In a 2021 interview with Fox News, she dismissed the notion that celebrities should avoid speaking out on political issues (“Nonsense — we’re all citizens of the world”) and explained what she considered to be the essential message of the documentary:“When injustice occurs, go on with your convictions. Giving in and being silent is what they want you to do.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      Lars Vogt, Acclaimed Pianist and Conductor, Is Dead at 51

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      Piano technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity.Lars Vogt, a sensitive, communicative pianist whose warmth as a collaborator made him an outstanding chamber musician and a conductor of growing stature, died on Monday at a clinic in Erlangen, Germany. He was 51.His manager, Celia Willis, said the cause was esophageal cancer, which Mr. Vogt had learned he had in March 2021. He had spoken frankly about his prospects while continuing to perform, up until a few weeks before his death.“Music is just such an amazing thing. I find that even more in these times, when I spend a lot of time in hospitals and with doctors, and of course wondering how things are going to go,” Mr. Vogt said in an online interview with the pianist Zsolt Bognar in July, “and yet in music you get transported into this world where you forget everything.”Mr. Vogt created and shared those worlds in sublimely free, quite personal detail, and he had little interest in show for the sake of show. His was a “loving” approach to the piano, he told Pianist magazine in 2016, one that tried “to get the sound out of the keyboard, rather than into it.”If the results could sometimes seem idiosyncratic, at his best he played with “a sense of perfect equilibrium, a balance of lines that sounded simple and natural, but could only have been the result of thoughtful calibration,” as Allan Kozinn of The New York Times wrote in a review of a recital in 2006.Technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity — he once recorded an album of pieces written for children — and he eventually unburdened himself of the pressure placed on pianists to memorize the works they learn, so he could perform without the nervousness he had long felt onstage.He took the time to involve himself deeply in the works he played solo, which came mostly from the high Germanic tradition — ranging from Bach, whose “Goldberg” Variations he recorded to acclaim, to contemporary composers like Thomas Larcher. It was the music of Brahms, however, that was always closest to Mr. Vogt, for the solace of its melancholy.Mr. Vogt’s last public appearances, in which he played Brahms, were in June at Spannungen, a chamber music festival that he founded in 1998 that takes place in an Art Nouveau hydroelectric power plant in Heimbach, Germany. (Its name translates to “Voltages” as well as “Tensions.”) And it was in chamber music that he excelled, especially with the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister, the cellist Tanya Tetzlaff.Mr. Vogt recorded Brahms and Dvorak with the Tetzlaffs as a trio and, with Mr. Tetzlaff, set down fervently expressive accounts of violin sonatas by Mozart, Schumann and Brahms. Those exquisite recordings, made for the Ondine label, were widely judged worthy of reference status not because they aimed to be a final word on the works involved, or even appeared to be, but because the audible generosity of their partnership made for a unique focus and intensity.“This is chamber-playing at its most humane,” the critic Richard Bratby wrote of their recording of Beethoven’s Opus 30 sonatas in Gramophone last year, “impossible to hear without feeling a renewed love and admiration for music and performers alike.”It was also as an avowed collaborator, rather than as a more forceful leader, that Mr. Vogt took on conducting, which he decided to explore after stepping in at short notice to lead Beethoven from the keyboard with the Camerata Salzburg early in the 2010s.“There was no conductor, just a very good concertmaster, and it was so much fun, so easy,” he recalled of that concert in an interview with Gramophone magazine in 2017. “I rang my agent afterwards from the taxi to the airport and said, ‘I need to know how far I can go with this. It doesn’t matter which orchestra it’s with, I just love it so much.’”Hired after a single concert, Mr. Vogt became the music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, based in Newcastle, England, in 2015; together, they recorded the Beethoven concertos with a sparkling pliancy and the Brahms with an unusual tenderness of touch. He took the same post with the Chamber Orchestra of Paris in 2020 and remained there until his death.Conducting is “like chamber music,” Mr. Vogt told Gramophone. “I want to encourage the character of the music, encourage people to go to their limits of expression, and ideally get them to the state that they want to do that, enjoy searching to the depths.”Mr. Vogt performing a program of Mozart, Schubert and Brahms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLars Vogt was born on Sept. 8, 1970, in Düren, near Cologne, the third child of Marie-Luise Vogt, a secretary, and Paul Vogt, an engineer who also played soccer to a high standard. He and his siblings learned music as just one of many youthful activities, soccer included.But Mr. Vogt’s first piano teacher saw promise soon after he had started at age 6. He won a national competition for young musicians at 14, and at the same time began studying with the renowned pedagogue Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Hanover University of Music and Drama (now the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media). Their lessons continued informally until Mr. Kämmerling died in 2012, when Mr. Vogt succeeded his teacher as professor of piano at that university.Suitably firmed up technically under Mr. Kämmerling’s demanding tutelage, Mr. Vogt took second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1990. That experience proved as important for the personal relationships it brought as for the international tours that followed.On the podium during the Leeds final for Mr. Vogt’s intelligent if introverted reading of the Schumann Piano Concerto was the English maestro Simon Rattle; their partnership became one of the many friendships through which the pianist thrived musically, not least during a stint in the 2003-4 season as the pianist in residence at the Berlin Philharmonic, which Mr. Rattle then led.Mr. Rattle also planted the seeds that bloomed into Mr. Vogt’s podium career. He told him after a joint appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991 — an American debut in which the pianist “exercised his command with personality and poise” in Beethoven, John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times — that he would be a conductor within a decade.That comment “hit me like a lightning bolt, because I’d never thought of it,” Mr. Vogt told The Scotsman in 2015. “I guess he noticed how curiously I observed what he was doing. I was fascinated at what miracles can be achieved by something that doesn’t — ideally — produce any sound.”Mr. Vogt’s first marriage, to the composer Tatjana Komarova, ended in divorce. He married the violinist Anna Reszniak, the concertmaster of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, in 2017. She survives him, as do his parents; his siblings, Karsten Vogt and Ilka Fischboeck; and his daughters, Emma Vogt, Charlotte Kuehn and Isabelle Vogt, an actress with whom he recorded melodramas by Schumann and Strauss.“He was at once the wildest and most sensitive musician I know,” Mr. Tetzlaff, who performed with Mr. Vogt for 26 years and considered him his “closest comrade,” said of the pianist in an interview with Van magazine shortly after Mr. Vogt’s death.“I’ve met a lot of musicians who have become very successful by talking about themselves, presenting themselves well, and who seem to have no experience with doubt,” Mr. Tetzlaff went on. “But I learned that music can only speak fully in freedom and love. It’s a thing you only experience with very few musicians, artists like Lars.” More