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      How California Became America’s Contemporary Music Capital

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      On the eve of a sprawling new festival, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and others recount how the state reinvigorated classical music.Nobody will be able to take in the entire California Festival, a statewide series of classical music events spanning 650 miles with such density that some nights will have 10 or more performances happening at once.The festival, Nov. 3 -19, was conceived by the music directors of the state’s three largest orchestras: Esa-Pekka Salonen of the San Francisco Symphony, Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony. But it grew to contain nearly 100 partnering organizations, who are presenting a host of world premieres and programs of contemporary music under the festival’s banner.It’s an overdue pat on the back for a state that has long encouraged new music, providing freedom and a sense of possibility that has made it the center of gravity for composers who work with a spirit of innovation, a long list that includes Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros in the past, and Terry Riley and John Adams today.Much has centered around distinct communities in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. “Those of us who make music in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the city’s orchestra’s for 25 years, “are blessed with an audience that comes to the concert hall more to discover the world than to escape it.” That was one reason he championed what he called American mavericks.Further south, Los Angeles became a microcosm of the California spirit, with sky-high ambition and musical curiosity that was cultivated by power players like the commission-happy philanthropist Betty Freeman and the strong-willed Philharmonic leader Ernest Fleischmann. And Dudamel brought pop-star power to the orchestra before, in a jolt to the city, he announced this year that he would leave for the New York Philharmonic in 2026.Ara Guzelimian, who grew up in Los Angeles and now leads the Ojai Music Festival nearby, described California’s classical music culture as “the lingering positive presence of the pioneers heading West and looking to escape a kind of conformity” before adding: “That’s sort of romanticized, but I think the reality is that a lot of good work has been done by individuals and institutions to develop that.”Here are edited interviews with some of those people, who shared their ideas about the diffuse histories and beliefs that brought about the California Festival.Far From EuropeMATTHEW SPIVEY (chief executive of the San Francisco Symphony) This goes back to the émigré composers, what Stravinsky and Schoenberg were doing in Los Angeles. You have this European tradition that felt like it was being evolved into a new, American version.ARA GUZELIMIAN The East Coast has historically been weighed down by facing the Atlantic and Europe. But here, there hasn’t been the same glare of the spotlight of everything having this kind of weight of being on the record. So, there’s just been a lot more freedom to experiment and move away from any sense of orthodoxy.JOHN ADAMS (composer who lives in Berkeley) When I arrived, there was a far out community mostly centered around Mills College [in Oakland]. Robert Ashley was the guru. There was a lingering scene of academia composers, sort of the last echoes of the Schoenberg-Sessions influence. But at the same time, there was this very romantic myth about San Francisco, and when I got there, I felt it was very open and gave me the freedom to experiment, which I just didn’t feel in the East.From left, Rafael Payare, Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas.A Hungry AudienceMARTHA GILMER (chief executive of the San Diego Symphony) People are always looking for the next and the new, so it is a canvas in which to create.JEREMY GEFFEN (executive and artistic director of Cal Performances) This is an enormous state. There’s a whole part of life outside the metropolitan areas, which is what attracted Lou Harrison and others. And there are smaller orchestras that are just as adventurous, because that is the standard.GUZELIMIAN As a teenager, I saw Julius Eastman not in some isolated, alternative venue, but with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. I saw Stravinsky at a concert of “Les Noces.” I saw Lawrence Morton’s Monday Evening Concerts. And I saw Xenakis because that was a completely normal thing to do. Here’s the great secret of arts management: Organizations create their own audience expectations. You can’t blame a so-called conservative audience.Why CaliforniaGUZELIMIAN I’ve rarely experienced the arts here as having a critical mass as they do in New York City, in which randomly on a subway or walking down the sidewalk you overhear people talking about an opera they’ve seen, or a play, or whatever show at MoMA that’s “unmissable.” That has incredible virtues, but in a funny way it can create a constraint. Whereas on the West Coast, it’s not as pervasive, not as self-conscious. So, there’s room for an imaginative venture to kind of make a go of it. Now, L.A. is bursting with new music groups and series, and to me the height of that spirit in New York is more historical. It doesn’t feel that its bursting at the seams.ADAMS I was really struggling, because back East [he grew up and was educated in New England] there was enormous prestige granted to the sort of Elliott Carter brand of composition back in the ’70s, and I had absolutely no interest in it. But the composers I knew of in California gave me more of a sense of freedom and permission to experiment.ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Many composers came here to find themselves, to find their language. And, as opposed to the East Coast and Europe, there has never been a sense of mainstream modernism, of what new music should be.The Bay AreaDEBORAH BORDA (longtime chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who worked earlier with the San Francisco Symphony) I got to the San Francisco Symphony when I was 27 [in the mid-1970s], and there was almost no contemporary music. But then came Edo de Waart, and he was really a devotee of new music. We brought John Adams, who was doing New and Unusual Music concerts, we brought in Diamanda Galás, you name it. We did a lot of Louis Andriessen music, like “De Staat.” Sometimes the audiences would boo and hiss his music, but he would come out and laugh in his ripped jeans.ADAMS There was a lot of talk about a West Coast aesthetic, and I suppose that included composers like Daniel Lentz and Terry Riley, and for sure Lou Harrison. I made my own synthesizer, which was a really West Coast thing at the time, and I think the person that did most creatively was Ingram Marshall. He made this amazing amalgam of Balinese influences and these wonderful rich drones and himself singing at what we called performance sites, which were usually just someone’s garage; we didn’t have the term “pop-up.”PAMELA Z (composer and performer) I moved to San Francisco in 1984, and I distinctly remember being excited by the broad range of new music and performance scenes. There were all these different factions: the improvisers, the instrument-builders, the avant-garde contemporary music, people who were doing performance art and people who were doing live performance with electronics, like Diamanda Galás. I was interested in all those different scenes, and I wanted them to be in the same room with each other. I started doing these events called Z Programs, that were almost like an avant-garde variety show. And when Michael Tilson Thomas was at the San Francisco Symphony, he was always interested in opening up things more. So there were connective tissues across the city.From left, Claire Chase, the Rady Shell in San Diego and the composer John Adams.San DiegoCLAIRE CHASE (flutist) I grew up in north San Diego County, and went to public schools where there was no music program. A lot of my musical education happened instead at the San Diego Youth Symphony, which is, I think, a really important cultural organization. It has this storied and really progressive history. California is this maze of contradictions. It has this D.I.Y. fervor — and I don’t mean in the corporate, Silicon Valley co-opting of that word — that gave birth to and sustains every artistic organization: Asian Improv Arts, the Tape Music Center and Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley’s “In C” being a totally D.I.Y. concert.I have these beautiful memories of Pauline barefoot with her accordion embodying this you-can-be-whatever-you-want-to-be feeling that’s so typically Californian and beautiful and true. She was this queer iconoclast doing her thing but also community building.GILMER When I was going to move out here, someone told me, “Whatever you can dream, it’s possible.” I really think that’s true. I don’t know where else I could have opened the Rady Shell [an open-air stage on the San Diego Bay] and started a hall renovation within five years.RAFAEL PAYARE And anyone can see us at the Shell because it’s outside in the park. We are rehearsing, and there’s someone walking their dog.Building in Los AngelesSALONEN When I did my debut with the L.A. Philharmonic [in 1984], I’d never been to this country. They put me up in the Biltmore, which in those days had a suite with a grand piano. I tried to go for a walk, and the doorman said, “Shall I call you cab?” I said I’d just stroll around a bit, and he said, “I don’t recommend that.” Anyway, there was an older cellist who came up to me after the second rehearsal and said, “Welcome to your new home.” I started coming back every season, and when André Previn stepped down, there was this letter from the board that modestly said they would like to develop the L.A. Phil into the world’s best orchestra, would I like to be a part of that process?One morning much later, when I was living in Santa Monica, I got up really early, and my kids were still asleep. I sat in the kitchen, made myself a coffee and thought, What is this weird feeling? And I realized: I’m happy. I feel free, not straight-jacketed by some kind of European, dusty modernist discourse.BORDA There was a real community around music in Los Angeles. In the audience you’d see composers. You’d see Annie Philbin, who runs the Hammer Museum. You’d see politicians.SALONEN Somebody who has to be mentioned in all this is Betty Freeman [who died in 2009 and was an influential donor behind the Los Angeles music scene]. She was quite spiky. She would call me and say: “I heard your new chamber piece. Utter rubbish. Would you like to come over for dinner?” But she did commission quite a lot of stuff, and was behind the scenes supporting composers when they fell on hard times.THOMAS ADÈS (composer) Betty picked me up from LAX my first time in L.A. She sped out to wow me with Los Angeles in those first hours. We were on our way to visit David Hockney, and we were driving past the Hollywood Bowl when I saw a sign that said, “Thomas Adès, Piano.” Then I stayed with her, and not only did she have these [Joseph] Cornell boxes that she got directly from Cornell, but I also knew that this was the house where she had salons with Nancarrow, or Stockhausen and Boulez. So, in a way, I had this impression of Los Angeles as avant-gardist more than any of the reasons other people go to live there.She had very strong taste. She used to put Post-it notes on everything; one on a CD said “BORING” and another said “I DON’T LIKE THIS.” She was bracing, but could get away with it because she was also so sweet. I came back, year after year, and bought a house there, and I would trace it all back to her.FRANK GEHRY (architect) Betty didn’t want me to do Walt Disney Concert Hall, but she did invite me to her house for dinner. The person who got me involved with that project was Ernest Fleischmann [who ran the Philharmonic from 1969-1998]. He asked me to do the competition, and of course I was excited to do it. There was a lot of anti-Frank sentiment, because I worked with plywood, chain link and corrugated metal. But we proved them all wrong.SALONEN (who inaugurated Disney Hall in 2003) The timing was a bit problematic, because the L.A. riots happened in ’92, and in the aftermath the idea of building a sensational concert hall in Downtown L.A. didn’t feel like a huge priority. But the hall changed everything. Now, if you ask people about any kind of visual idea of L.A., it’s the hall. Any action scene in L.A. in a movie, at least one car chase goes by the hall.And for me, I started to understand how much nonverbal messaging there is in a building. It was open from the street level, so it was warm and inviting, and it was complex but not incomprehensible. And there’s this kind of amazing feeling of unity; the geometry is such that everybody inside the hall sees a bunch of other people at all times. It also sounds pretty good. For me, it’s still the reference for balance and sound, and it will be so until the end of my days.From left, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pamela Z and Walt Disney Concert Hall on its opening night.Los Angeles TodayBORDA We started the Green Umbrella [free-form contemporary music concerts], and had Steven Stucky and John Adams as partners for contemporary music. Steve and Esa-Pekka were extraordinarily close; they spent hours eating together, and drinking together, and talking about music and life. It was very difficult for Esa-Pekka when Steve passed on [in 2016]. Now you have Wild Up and other small groups. And you have what Yuval Sharon has done with opera. The Green Umbrella concerts are still going. There’s an appetite for all this.YUVAL SHARON (founder of the Industry opera company in Los Angeles) What drew me to L.A. was the possibility of smaller, more nimble, freer, more entrepreneurial endeavors to move with some fluidity in and among the community. When I think of L.A., I think of this John Cage book, “Silence,” in which he talks about having an interaction with a European composer who was deriding him: “How could you write so much serious music away from the center?” And Cage [who came of age in Southern California] says, “How can you write such serious music so close to the center?” That was in the 1950s, but I think there’s an element of that ethos that’s still there today.GUSTAVO DUDAMEL (who succeeded Salonen at the Philharmonic in 2009) I was a huge admirer of this orchestra and of Esa-Pekka. Los Angeles is about new things. It’s a place that every day is getting built. It’s very open all the time to new things, and I’ve loved having a relationship with John Adams, who brings these very young composers to be part of the programming of this orchestra.ADAMS Well, I think Los Angeles is teeming with composers. I wish there was that level of creativity and activity in the Bay Area.And in San FranciscoSPIVEY Knowing that Michael Tilson Thomas was going to be stepping down after 25 years at the helm, and all that he had accomplished, there was a sense that those were going to be some difficult shoes to fill. We wanted someone who was not only a great conductor, but also a great orchestra builder. And Esa-Pekka is one of those people.SALONEN Honestly, the optics of a major U.S. orchestra hiring a 60-year-old Finnish guy who’s been around the block a few times, I thought: That in itself is not sensational news. But we talked about bringing in collaborative partners [eight artists who include Chase, the composer Nico Muhly, the computer scientist Carol Reiley and more], who would energize the thinking of the orchestra.ADAMS There are still some wonderful composers from the Bay Area. So when Esa-Pekka came, and the symphony appointed their collaborative artists, and they were pretty much from New York or Europe — flying in and flying out — that was really an insult to California culture.SPIVEY Whether it’s successful or not, we’ll learn from what happens.A New FestivalPAYARE California has, all the time, been nurturing the music of the future. But everyone has been doing it on their own, which is why it was good to do the California Festival.SALONEN We are collectively proud of what has happened in California and what has kept happening, and the California Festival is a manifestation of that. And of how much there is. It’s interesting that there’s no real school. You could say that this is the birthplace of minimalism. I was talking with Terry Riley on Zoom, and I asked him if “In C” was a reaction against East Coast, European modernism. He said: “No, not really. It was more about psychedelic drugs.” I thought, Oh, he kind of nailed it, that lack of pretension here.Always ChangingGEFFEN Something that I worry about is that this state has become so expensive. We’ve already seen this in the Bay Area, that the freelance scene is not full because we’ve lost so many people to the cost of living.BORDA I think the most powerful force for good and innovation is Esa-Pekka. That gives me hope for the north. And for the south, I think what’s embedded there already won’t go away; the history of Los Angeles is reflected in that integration of different art forms and excitement at the new.ADÈS More than in London or New York, I still have a feeling that in California I’m just left to get on with things. A lot of that world of Ernest and Betty have moved on, but it’s evolved into something else. I don’t know if I’m a part of it or not, but whatever attracted me in the first place is still there, that expansion of my molecules that I instantly felt.SHARON This is a moment of real — if we want to put it euphemistically — transition. It’s not just California. Listening to my colleagues on a national level, I think that we have to redefine classical music’s role for contemporary society, and there are a lot of growing pains associated with that. Everyone has seen attendance down, and donations down, across the board. I do think that the ethos of Los Angeles will make things easier to adapt than elsewhere. The L.A. Phil is going through tremendous change in leadership. This is the moment for that attitude and perspective, the time for that push forward to show the way. It’s an opportunity for California to lead, but it’s not going to be easy. More

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      in Theater

      Under the Radar to Return, With New Partners

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      The festival of experimental work is planning a citywide event at multiple venues in January, after the Public Theater declined to fund the 2024 iteration.When the Public Theater announced in June that it had placed the Under the Radar festival on indefinite hiatus, its founder, Mark Russell, did not know if he would be able to find another home for it. The Public cited financial reasons for the decision; other institutions were facing similar struggles. But today Russell, in association with ArKtype, a production company specializing in new work, announced that Under the Radar, New York’s foremost festival of experimental performance, would return in January.In contrast to the central hub that the Public provided, this new iteration, which will run Jan. 5-21, will take place at 10 partner venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Some, like Japan Society, will present a single show, and others, such as Lincoln Center and La MaMa, will host two or three. The festival will also co-sponsor a symposium dedicated to the challenges facing arts presenters.To continue the festival, Russell contacted old friends and longtime funders. He approached several theaters and universities in the hopes that they could take it on. But none were able to do so, especially on such short notice. Still, plenty of theaters offered partnerships. Eventually, he and ArKtype settled on this decentralized model, with Russell ceding artistic control to these new collaborators.“I love my programing, but I’ve had 18 years of that,” he said. “Now I have a dozen curators.” He has given himself a new title, festival director, in place of artistic director. “It’s bigger than me,” he said of the festival, which is supported by grants, private donations and contributions from partners. “So we made something bigger.”Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is one new partner. St. Ann’s had hosted the first Under the Radar Festival, in 2005, and Feldman hurried to support this new version. She also had a work in mind: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano,” a challenging piece of dance theater, told in four 45-minute segments, that takes place inside a glass box.“We felt like the festival would be the right place for it,” she said in a recent phone interview.Julia Mounsey and her collaborator Peter Mills Weiss have presented work at three previous festivals. They were in rehearsals for a new piece last spring when they learned that Under the Radar might not take place. Mounsey had to go for a walk “because I was so upset,” she recalled during a recent phone interview. She said she felt profound relief about the festival’s rebirth. Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York will host Mounsey and Weiss’s new show, “Open Mic Night.”She will miss the centrality of the Public. “It was great for connecting with people and meeting people,” she said. “But there’s also something exciting about it being spread out.”Russell hasn’t given up on the idea of a festival hub. “If I could find a nice large bar in the center of all this, that would be great. But right now, it has to be what it has to be,” he said. “People are going to have to run all around the city, but they’ll be able to get the Under the Radar experience.” More

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      in Theater

      Rochester Fringe Festival Returns With a Program of Free Spectacles

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      With its commitment to presenting free spectacles, the event has become one of the country’s more prominent multidisciplinary events.Sweaty venues roughly the size of a walk-in closet. Eye-catchingly daft titles. Lampposts all but sagging under the weight of promotional fliers. Drunken Shakespeare mash-ups and earnest solo shows. Volunteers shooing audiences onto the street in order to air out those closet-size venues before the next performance, and the one after that, and the one after that.These are among the standard ingredients for fringe festivals, the multidisciplinary showcases that have become economic drivers in cities looking to replicate the pell-mell, “Wait, did I sleep last night?” energy of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.The Rochester Fringe Festival, which runs through Sept. 23 at 34 different venues, has all of the above features, with shows like “Shotspeare,” “A Jewish Woman Walks Into a Maloca” and “A Nerdy Gay Juggling Show” nestled alongside headliners like Garth Fagan Dance and Tig Notaro. And for this year’s iteration that list also includes acrobats and a grand piano dangling off a hot-air balloon.Those last two attractions, both courtesy of the French company Cirque Inextremiste, point to one aspect that sets the nonprofit Rochester Fringe apart from similar festivals: a commitment to free spectacles that have in the past lured crowds of 15,000. “Nobody else has these huge free public events, at least not in the United States,” said Xela Batchelder, the executive director of Fringe University, which sets up college classes at fringe festivals in Edinburgh and elsewhere.Past iterations have featured Bandaloop dancers rappelling down a 21-story skyscraper, the white-knuckle choreography of Streb Extreme Action, and an all-but-unclassifiable street parade of enormous fish puppets courtesy of the French troupe Plasticiens Volants.“We’ve gotten pretty good at working with the Rochester Police Department,” said Erica Fee, artistic director of the festival, which in just 12 years has become one of the country’s more prominent fringe events. (While the sheer number of performances and venues can make precise bookkeeping tricky, Batchelder estimates a total number of audience members and paid tickets comparable to those of more established festivals in Hollywood, Orlando and Philadelphia.) “But working out the logistics for a 60-foot whale puppet was a new one for everyone.”Among the complications for this year’s festival? “Exit,” a new Cirque Inextremiste work stemming from the company’s residency in a Nantes mental hospital, in which aerialists perform stunts using that hot-air balloon. Fee, who frequently travels to Europe in search of Fringe-worthy pieces, saw the piece in southern France in 2019 and immediately booked it for the 2020 festival. But Covid and then Covid-related travel restrictions prevented “Exit” from making the trip to upstate New York until now. This Friday and Saturday it will serve as the centerpiece of a variety of events in downtown Rochester’s Parcel 5 outdoor space.Ephemeral monuments: For Craig Walsh’s latest outdoor installation project, the faces of three Rochester residents, including Patricia McKinney, a parent liaison at a local elementary school, are being projected on three trees downtown every evening of the festival.Erich CampingUnfortunately, Parcel 5 sits just a few feet atop an underground garage, which makes digging stanchions for a hot-air balloon tricky. And the dangling grand piano was far less contentious than a much smaller stage prop, according to Yann Ecauvre, the Cirque Inextremiste artistic director.“It is forbidden to have a gun on the stage here. I thought, ‘But this is the U.S. There are guns everywhere here,’” Ecauvre said. “So now we use a banana gun.”Even with the balloon tethered for the duration of “Exit,” the elements play a major role on any given night. “It’s like two different shows depending on whether it is windy,” Ecauvre said. “If the wind is a monster one night, we just have to tame it.”Fee said that sort of flexibility comes with the Fringe territory, especially in the wake of the logistical headaches that came with planning a virtual Fringe during the pandemic.“We still have to plan four festivals at once,” she said. “Having lived through Covid and done an online festival, that mentality will probably never go away.”Batchelder of Fringe University says this mentality has helped fringe festivals, which typically have less fixed overhead and more topical programming, survive and even thrive in the post-pandemic cultural landscape. “They are nimbler in terms of advance planning, and they can often do better when these other groups struggle.”Even the seemingly more staid offerings require some legwork. Take “Monuments,” the latest iteration of the Australian artist Craig Walsh’s outdoor installations. As he has done around the world over the past 30 years, Walsh filmed the faces of three Rochesterians — among them the Seneca/Haudenosaunee storyteller Ronnie Reitter — and is projecting them as ephemeral monuments on three trees in downtown Rochester each night of the festival.“We had to audition trees!” Fee said. More

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      in Movies

      At Venice Film Festival, Trapped Women and Controlling Men

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      This year’s lineup includes films from Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Bradley Cooper in which female characters squirm under the thumbs of egocentric men.The press room at the Venice Film Festival has to be the most beautiful film festival press room in the world. Taking over the third floor of the imposing Palazzo del Casinò, the main atrium is a gargantuan, triple-height space carpeted in soft cream, with columns clad in marble extending up past Murano glass chandeliers, and floor-to-ceiling windows hung with gold-sheened drapes giving way to a sparkling blue sea. On a clear day — which it almost always is — you imagine that, were it not for the curvature of the earth, you could see forever. Or at least to Croatia.It is an eternal contradiction that this lofty space should be peopled with dozens of perspiring journalists hunched over their laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like birds beating their wings against the bars of a particularly gilded cage. Or maybe such dark thoughts in a such a light-filled structure — designed by the architect Eugenio Miozzi in 1938 to embody the monumentalist fantasy of Mussolini’s fascist regime — are a symptom of a festival lineup that, this year, features a profusion of stories about women similarly chafing against the restrictive, but often luxurious, enclosures built by controlling men.Some of these men were towering real-life figures. Penélope Cruz turns in the standout performance in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” as the long-suffering wife of the Italian motoring magnate (Adam Driver), and Carey Mulligan does much the same as Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia in “Maestro,” directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. In both these cases — and arguably to the detriment of both well-made but strangely evanescent films — the portrayal of genius pales in comparison to the portrait of a woman who supported and nurtured that genius, even when it threatened to engulf her. in “Ferrari,” Penélope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari, the wife of the Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari.Lorenzo SistiOf two memorable scenes in “Maestro,” only one — Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 — is about his music. The other is a lacerating domestic argument in the couple’s bedroom, during which, in every shaking nerve, Mulligan embodies the resentment of a bright, ambitious woman whose devotion to and indulgence of her famous spouse has cost her so much of herself.The life-draining capacity of egocentric men is even more strikingly literalized in Pablo Larraín’s mordant, monochrome “El Conde,” in which the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is recreated as a 250-year-old vampire. In Larraín’s scabrous, grisly alternate history, Pinochet is a decrepit immortal, drowning in self-pity since faking his death to evade justice. And Pinochet’s wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) is imagined as his equal, or even his better, in sheer perversity; much of the misery the terrorized nation experienced under the dictator is suggested to have been at her behest.But although that gives Lucía, who constantly petitions her husband to bite her so that she too can live out her depravities forever, a degree of apparent agency, that is robbed from her in one brief scene where “The Count,” as he likes to be called, casually trades her off to his obsequious Renfield-style butler (Alfredo Castro). The Count is then free to pursue an affair with a nun, including fantasy play that involves her dressing up as Marie Antoinette. (The Count has been obsessed with the ill-fated Queen of France ever since, in one of the film’s most provocatively gruesome early scenes, he licked the guillotine blade that severed her slender neck.)Marie Antoinette is perhaps the ultimate emblem of decorative married womanhood. And of course, she was the title star of a previous film from Sofia Coppola, whose Venice-competing “Priscilla” is yet another tale of a woman’s tentatively self-engineered escape from the influence of a dominant man.Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny as Elvis and Priscilla Presley in “Priscilla.”Philippe Le SourdBased on, and clearly in deep sympathy with, Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” the film follows the famous couple’s relationship, from their first meeting when then-Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was just 14 years old and living on a U.S. Army base in Germany, to the moment, almost a decade-and-a-half later, when Priscilla Presley drove through the gates of Graceland for the last time as the house’s mistress.This is unmistakably a Sofia Coppola movie, in its luxuriant feel for fabrics and facades, but as in “Marie Antoinette,” here the surfaces become the substance. It is a story about how, especially to a naïve teenager, the trappings of an outwardly tantalizing lifestyle can be sprung upon you like a trap.During their first tearful goodbye in Germany, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) makes the schoolgirl Priscilla promise to “stay exactly the way you are.” But the banner film investigating the icky desire on the part of some men to keep their womenfolk infantilized is Yorgos Lanthimos’ joyously macabre “Poor Things.” The biggest hit of Venice so far, it is deeply — if twistedly, and often hilariously — concerned with the idea of female emancipation, as Bella, played by a riveting, inventive and highly physical Emma Stone, shucks off the psychological bondage first of her adoptive father (Willem Dafoe) and then of her caddish, pompous lover (Mark Ruffalo).Even the film’s hyperreal aesthetic, in which Lisbon and London are depicted by intricate, steampunky set-builds with lurid computer generated skies and seas, reinforce the concept: The film’s self-consciously airless and artificial universe makes the vigor of Bella’s adventures in sex and self-discovery all the more striking.In “Poor Things,” Emma Stone plays Bella, a woman trying to unburden herself from both her adoptive father and her vain lover.Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesThere are still more women trapped under the thumbs of domineering men dotted throughout the lineup, most notably in two black comedies that both feature contract killers (another feature of Venice 2023, if you also take David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the Liam Neeson thriller “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” into further account).Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” stars and is co-written by Glen Powell, who deserves to leap up to major-league stardom on the back of this effervescently amoral exaggeration of a real-life story: Gary, a diffident English professor who moonlights as a fake hit man, finds love getting in the way of his mission when an abused wife, Madison (Adria Arjona), tries to enlist his services. She is driven to it as a means to escape. But the murder-solicitation in Woody Allen’s French-language “Coup de Chance,” is far less morally defensible, prompted by jealousy and again, a loss of control, as the possessive rich-guy Jean (Melvil Poupaud), discovers that his young, vivacious wife (Lou De Laâge) has taken a lover.“Coup de Chance” is, in some respects a return to form for Allen, even if one suspects that some of its breeziness is down to the attractive cast compensating for the staleness of Allen’s recent English-language quippery by mercifully speaking in French. (Native French speakers of my acquaintance tell me that the dialogue, to their ears, sounds similarly unnatural.)But it does feel more current than most of Allen’s recent output, not least in how it syncs up neatly with this Venice edition’s chief preoccupations: hit men and trapped women, and all the poor things who find themselves in plush Central Park or central Paris apartments, in press room palaces or fantastical Lisbon hotels, surrounded by luxury, but longing to be free. More

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      Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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      Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More

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      Bob Jones, Behind-the-Stage Force at Newport Festivals, Dies at 86

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      For decades he helped shape Rhode Island’s venerable folk and jazz events, presenting stars and unknowns alike. One colleague called him a “test pilot of jazz.”Bob Jones, who began as a volunteer at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s before rapidly gaining the trust of its impresario, George Wein, and going on to produce the event over two decades, died on Aug. 14 in hospice care in Danbury, Conn. He was 86.His daughter Radhika Jones said the cause was complications of dementia.Mr. Jones spent a half-century with the folk festival, held every summer in Rhode Island, as well as with its companion, the Newport Jazz Festival, and other events produced by Mr. Wein. He was there when Bob Dylan outraged purists by going electric at the 1965 folk festival, and he helped persuade Mr. Wein to resurrect the festival in 1985 after a 16-year hiatus.In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (with Nate Chinen, 2003), Mr. Wein, who started the jazz festival in 1954 and the folk version in 1959, called Mr. Jones “an indispensable member of the hierarchy of Festival Productions,” his company.Mr. Jones in 1995 with George Wein, the producer of the Newport festivals. Mr. Wein called Mr. Jones “an indispensable member of the hierarchy of Festival Productions.”Collection of George WeinLike many of the people who worked for Mr. Wein, who died in 2021, Mr. Jones performed a variety of tasks for the folk and jazz festivals. Early on, he was in charge of arranging housing for performers and getting them to the stage on time.“Our closest call this year was Miles Davis,” he told The Newport Daily News in 1966. “He arrived at the field less than 10 minutes before he was to appear onstage.”For two years in the 1960s, Mr. Jones traveled around the South and Canada in search of new talent for the folk festival with the folklorist and mandolin player Ralph Rinzler.“They found these people who weren’t in the music business, who were playing on back porches and at house parties,” said Rick Massimo, author of “I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival” (2017). “What still reverberates today is how they helped rediscover Cajun music, which wasn’t well known or appreciated outside Louisiana.”Mr. Jones and Mr. Rinzler’s roadwork led to an infusion of artists at the 1964 folk festival, including the singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood, the banjo player Frank Proffitt, the balladeer Almeda Riddle, the bottleneck guitarist and blues singer Mississippi Fred McDowell and the fiddler and singer Glen Ohrlin.Mr. Jones was also the road manager for international tours, arranged by Mr. Wein, that featured Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington in the 1960s and ’70s and Sarah Vaughan in the ‘80s.“Bob was an intelligent and low-key person who was unfazed by chaos and worked really well with artists,” Mr. Chinen, the editorial director of the public radio station WRTI in Philadelphia, said in a phone interview. “So you can imagine he was the right type of person to take Monk around the world.”Robert Leslie Jones was born on May 11, 1937, in Boston. His father, Edward, was an electrician, and his mother, Florence (Foss) Jones, was a homemaker.He entered Boston University’s junior college in 1956 and received his associate arts degree two years later, around the time he moved with his sister Helen into an apartment above Cafe Yana, one of the coffeehouses at the heart of the Boston-Cambridge area’s folk music scene.He was intrigued by the music, and, having some talent, began performing, favoring Woody Guthrie songs like “Do Re Mi.” He also took on the background role of organizing hootenannies, and found he enjoyed it.He withdrew from Boston University’s bachelor’s degree program in 1960 and was soon drafted into the Army; a conscientious objector, he served stateside as an Army medic. After his discharge, he continued to play music in the Boston area.In 1964, he was featured, along with Phil Ochs, Lisa Kindred and Eric Anderson, on an album, “New Folks, Vol. 2,” released on the Vanguard label. Mr. Jones in performance at Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., in 1968. He was a folk singer before he began his long career behind the scenes.Charlie FrizzellOnce he joined Mr. Wein’s staff in about 1965, Mr. Jones became involved in nearly everything in the Wein empire, including the Grande Parade du Jazz in Nice, France, and the Kool Jazz Festivals — stadium shows around the country that he ran from 1976 to 1985 as technical producer from a base in Cincinnati.In 1985, Mr. Jones became the top producer of the Newport Folk Festival, which had been dormant since 1969, following the gate-crashing that had disrupted that year’s jazz festival, when rock acts like Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone joined the bill. The jazz festival moved to New York City in 1972, where it continued under various names for three decades. (Mr. Wein brought jazz back to Newport in 1981, but the folk festival did not revive as quickly.)In his book, Mr. Wein credited Mr. Jones — with part-time help from his daughters, Radhika and Nalini — with helping to restore the folk festival to life. Asked what she and her sister, both teenagers at the time, had done, Radhika Jones, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, said, “My guess is that George saw that a younger generation was enthused by it, which gave him a sense that this was something that would draw an audience.”The festival lineup that year included Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, Doc and Merle Watson, Arlo Guthrie, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. A year later, the festival became a platform for a future star: the bluegrass singer and fiddler Alison Kraus, who was 15.Mr. Jones was long immersed in the jazz festival, as a producer and production manager, with Mr. Wein retaining the title of lead producer. He was also involved in the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as Jazz Fest, which Mr. Wein also produced.“Bob was like a test pilot of jazz, always smooth and calm,” Quint Davis, the current producer and director of Jazz Fest, said. “His brain was like a Univac. He had all the knowledge to make a show work.”Mr. Jones’s active involvement in production ended in early 2004 with a diagnosis of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which left him mostly paralyzed and breathing through a ventilator. He recovered enough to stay on as an adviser and mentor through 2009; his daughter Nalini, who had been his assistant, became an associate producer and helped run the folk festival from 2004 to 2009.When Mr. Jones was able to return to the Newport site in August 2004, he was carried onto the stage by a forklift.“He loved logistics,” Nalini Jones said, “and he looked delighted.”Mr. Jones at Newport in 2015. His active involvement in production ended in 2004 with a diagnosis of Guillain-Barre syndrome.Alan NahigianIn addition to his daughters, he is survived by his wife, Marguerite (Suares) Jones; his son, Christopher; three grandchildren; and his sisters, Helen von Schmidt and Marcia McCarthy.In 1984, Mr. Jones sang at Symphony Hall in Boston at a reunion concert of performers who had worked at the storied folk music venue Club 47. Billed as Robert L. Jones, he was on a program with Richie Havens, Tom Rush and others.“We were stunned,” Radhika Jones said. “I was 12 at the time, but we really didn’t realize he’d been a performer. He’d sung to us, and we listened to folk music at home.“It was really special to see him onstage. This was a part of him we started to discover.” More

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      Dancing Till Dawn at a Music Festival in Albania

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      More than a dozen sweaty people in various states of undress giggled as a capoeira instructor directed us to crawl around on the floor. Make eye contact, he told us as we tried to follow the flow of one another’s bodies. But it was hard not to stare at the sparkling blue Ionian Sea.On one side of an open-air pavilion in Dhermi, a village on the Albanian Riviera, those waters glimmered under the summer sun, free of the yachts that crowd the Croatian and Greek shorelines to the north and south. On the other side, palm trees dotted the landscape. Behind them loomed the lush, green Ceraunian Mountains.A sound check interrupted the class, an abrupt reminder of the larger reason we capoeira novices had gathered: Kala, a weeklong music-and-wellness festival. I was part of a crowd of about 3,500 mostly young people, resplendent in transparent flare pants, crop tops and cowboy boots, who had descended on Dhermi in late May and early June to sway and spin in the moonlight, hypnotized by the beats, and to pack our days with Kundalini yoga, breath work, massage and capoeira classes.Across four stages, D.J.s like Hunee and Antal, CC:Disco!, Grace Sands and Daphni performed nightly, spinning techno and electronic beats mixed with funk, disco, jazz and more. A fifth stage, open during the daytime, beckoned from Gjipe, a canyon with soaring red cliffs, a short, scenic boat ride away.Dhermi is becoming a popular stop on the festival circuit, offering beautiful beaches and delicious, inexpensive food. Residents often join in the fun, blasting their own music from balconies and cars at night.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesIn Dhermi, restaurants served fresh, delicious seafood and drinks at reasonable prices. Kala’s weeklong packages, which included tickets and accommodations, started at $370. (Similar U.S. festivals this year charged about $200 to $400 for a two- or three-day ticket, without lodging.) Residents joined in the fun, blasting their own music from bars, cars and balconies at night. And in the morning, some hung-over revelers were surprised to find themselves face to face with wandering goats on the village streets.“I’ve gone from Ibiza, which got really built up, to Croatia, which got really busy. And I’ve spent a lot of time in India, and now Goa is super busy, too. And Greece is so expensive now,” said Annabel Turbutt-Day, 38, a corporate affairs director from London who drove to Kala from Tirana, Albania’s capital, with her partner and three friends. “Albania is still a little bit undiscovered, and a bit more affordable.”By day, Kala attendees sunbathed, attended wellness programs like Kundalini yoga and capoeira classes, or took boats that shuttled them from the Yacht Club bar, above, to the beachside stage at Gjipe Canyon.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesFrom hermit state to hot spotSince its debut in Albania in 2018, Kala has helped drive a boom in international tourism in Dhermi. Three more events have joined Dhermi’s summer dance card, with support from Mainstage Festivals, the company that runs Kala, including the upcoming Ion Festival, which takes place there from Sept. 6 to 13. The tourism season in Dhermi, which used to last about six weeks, now runs from the end of May through September.Dhermi’s landscape was integral to Kala’s appeal: The beaches where people sunbathed during the day turned into parties that lasted till sunrise — and the cycle repeated every day.Each open-air stage was its own little world — a cozy cove, a platform jutting into the sea, a vast space surrounded by palm trees. When I got tired of bobbing my head to the music in one spot, I could weave down the street through shouting, laughing festivalgoers and slip into a different crowd swaying to a different set.The beach at Gjipe, a scenic canyon a short boat ride away from Dhermi that hosted performances during the day. The other four stages in Dhermi came alive after sundown.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesA beach in Dhermi, part of the Albanian Riviera, a stretch of pristine sand that has opened up to the world only in the last quarter-century, after Albania overcame an iron-fisted Communist leader and then civil unrest.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesSpontaneous parties formed in the streets, too. One evening, after hours of dancing, I devoured a slice of pizza while watching a trio of locals and visitors join hands and spin in a circle, first to Albanian songs and then to Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”Dhermi’s rising popularity has mirrored Albania’s as a whole. In 2022, a record 7.5 million people visited the country, spending around $3.1 billion, compared with 6.4 million and $2.4 billion in 2019, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Environment. And in the first three months of 2023, Albania experienced a 54 percent jump in visitors compared with the same period in 2019, according to the World Tourism Organization.John Gómez performing at the Gjipe stage. Dhermi began to take off as a music hot spot about 15 years ago when international D.J.s accepted invitations to perform at local clubs, leading up to the first Kala, which took place in 2018.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesMany of those tourists head straight for the resort towns and beaches of the Albanian Riviera, which are drawing European sun-and-sea seekers who find the Greek island of Corfu and Dubrovnik, Croatia, too expensive and crowded. On Instagram and TikTok, influencers compare Albania’s seascape to that of the Maldives or Bali.At the same time, history buffs are flocking to Albania’s ancient Greek and Roman ruins, Ottoman-era architecture and the tens of thousands of repurposed concrete bunkers built by Enver Hoxha, who ruled the formerly Communist country with an iron fist for four decades. UNESCO World Heritage sites like the prehistoric ruins of Butrint and deep, ancient Lake Ohrid add to the attractions.Outdoorsy types come to bicycle along the wild Vjosa River and hike in the Albanian Alps. Nearly 300 government-certified agritourism operators offer farm tours, wine tastings and homemade meals at properties growing cherries, walnuts, plums, quince and more.D.J. Joy Orbison spinning for revelers in Dhermi. The beaches where people sunbathed during the day turned into parties that lasted till sunrise, and the cycle repeated itself daily.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesToday’s tourist-friendly environment stands in sharp contrast to the Albania of the early 1990s as it emerged from four decades of isolation as one of the poorest countries behind the Iron Curtain. An economic crisis and a near descent into civil war followed. In early 1997, during a popular uprising, an estimated 550,000 weapons were looted from armories and at least 2,000 people died as government forces cracked down and insurgents battled. The United Nations finally sent in a multinational force to restore order. But all this left Albania with a reputation as a crime-ridden, dangerous country.“The image of Albania was not the real one,” said Mirela Kumbaro, the country’s minister of tourism and environment. “It was only the bad parts.” Now, Albania want to show its “real face,” she said.“Kala is one of our best ambassadors,” said Ms. Kumbaro, who had dropped by the festival for a news conference, following in the footsteps of other officials, including Prime Minister Edi Rama, who showed up to the first Kala in 2018 and later sent a pallet of free beer.An influx of foreign visitors has brought prosperity to Dhermi even as the crowds have occasionally tested locals’ patience and raised concerns about damage to the environment.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesGratitude and growing painsDevelopment in the Dhermi area has accelerated at a breakneck pace: Half of the adjacent village of Drymades seems to be a construction site. The influx of foreign visitors to a place that only a few decades ago was sealed off to the world has brought both prosperity and challenges.“It’s been a 100 percent transformation,” said Erjon Shehaj, 46, whose family opened a 10-table restaurant in Dhermi in 2016. “When we started, there was nothing.” Today, they own and operate the Empire Beach Resort, a luxury hotel on the same land where the small restaurant once stood. The resort hosted the biggest stage of the festival and was booked solid all seven days.“I’ve never encountered so many tourists in Albania,” said Anisa Koteci, 33, a lawyer, who was born in the country then emigrated with her family to London when she was 8. Returning to Albania for Kala for the first time in four years, she said, has been “a bit of a shock to the system.” The abundance of foreign visitors made her excited and happy, she said, but she also worried that Albania might become known as just a party destination. She called the wave of tourism a “stress test” for her homeland.In Dhermi, the electricity or water was sometimes turned off at hotels without warning, and bathrooms in restaurants and bars were left uncleaned for long stretches. On the second day of the festival, one local shopkeeper wiped her brow and grumbled as she surveyed an endless line of impatient bathing-suit-clad tourists waiting to buy chips, water, beer and sunblock. She was running the grocery store and the adjacent currency exchange alone, she explained, because her brother had stayed up all night registering local SIM cards for tourists.The flood of visitors is also raising fears about possible harm to the region’s flora and fauna. In the city of Vlore, about an hour’s drive from Dhermi, an airport construction project the government promotes as a way to bring more tourists to the Albanian Riviera has faced protests from environmental groups that say it could endanger sanctuaries for birds like flamingos and pelicans.Tomi Gjikuria, 34, an entrepreneur and a D.J. who grew up in Dhermi, said he was happy with all the new business and hoped for more visitors, but wondered how all the new construction would affect the landscape.“When I was a child, there was no tourism,” said Mr. Gjikuria, who operates a campsite called the Sea Turtle Camp on land that his family owns in Drymades.“I have 5,000 square meters where I put a campsite,” he said. “I could have built a casino, but I don’t want to cut down the trees.”During the day at Kala, music and partying gave way to massage and other wellness activities.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesA spirit of hospitalityDespite all the challenges of development, residents of Dhermi have kept the welcome mat out — even if it sometimes has had a few wrinkles.Alan Crofton, the manager and director of Mainstage Festivals, recalled the fall of 2017, when he and Rob Searle, Kala’s creative director, went to Gjipe Canyon to ask the owner of a local campsite if they could use its beach during Kala. The man they met insisted that before they agreed to anything, they needed to break the ice by toasting each other with a shot of raki, a local liquor. One shot turned into several, until finally the man told Mr. Crofton and Mr. Searle — by then quite buzzed — that he would lease them a space for the festival, Mr. Crofton said.But when Mr. Crofton and Mr. Searle returned several months later, they found out that their raki-toasting host was not actually the landowner. He was the security guard who looked after the campsite in the winter.Andrea Kumi, 47, founded Havana Beach Club, a place that helped draw some of the area’s first waves of tourists, after moving to Dhermi, his father’s hometown, when he was 24. Mr. Kumi, who grew up in Vlore and Athens, began inviting world-famous D.J.s to perform at the club about 15 years ago.Sunset from a restaurant in Dhermi. Many festival attendees at Kala contrasted the relatively inexpensive and uncrowded Albanian Riviera with similar areas of Croatia and Greece. “Albania is still a little bit undiscovered,” one visitor said.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesToday, besides the Havana Beach Club, Mr. Kumi owns two other restaurants. As the area continues to change, Mr. Kumi said, everybody is trying their best to be gracious and helpful hosts. As an old saying in Albania goes: “Our house belongs to God and guests.”He illustrated this point with a story. In 2009, Mr. Kumi persuaded the Dutch D.J. Tiësto to perform in Dhermi. There were no luxury hotels, so, eager to please, he rented a three-story, 80-foot yacht for Tiësto to sleep on, but the D.J. started feeling seasick as soon as he boarded.All the hotel rooms in the area were booked with the thousands of guests who’d come to see Tiësto perform, so Mr. Kumi offered up his own bedroom in his family’s house in the hills. Tiësto accepted, and the next day, Mr. Kumi said, the D.J. joined his parents and nephew for homemade pancakes.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Amid Barcelona’s Big Music Festivals, Small Venues Struggle

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      On a recent Friday night, a few dozen 20-somethings piled into Sidecar, a well-known concert venue in downtown Barcelona.The small space, with a low vaulted ceiling, was only half-full, but onstage, the singer Íñigo Merino and his band were determined to show their audience a good time. The crowd sang along to Merino’s catchy pop songs, which he interspersed with anecdotes, jokes and personal stories.“Music used to be just a hobby, but when I wrote this song I started thinking ‘Why not give it a chance? It could be something beautiful,’” he told the crowd, to cheers of “Bravo!” Then he launched into “El Último Portazo” (“The Last Door Slam”).Barcelona is known around the world for its nightlife, and huge festivals like Primavera Sound and Sónar — which begins Thursday and runs through Saturday — draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city each year. Yet small and medium-sized concert venues are struggling.Capturing the performance at Sidecar in Barcelona on a recent Friday night.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York Times.The singer Íñigo Merino performing at Sidecar.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York TimesThe Association of Concert Venues of Catalonia, a trade body, estimates that in the past 20 years, 220 nightlife venues have closed in Barcelona and the surrounding metropolitan area. In a city of 1.6 million people, the total estimated capacity of its 198 music venues is less than 50,000, the venues association says.And local musicians say they are running out of places to play.The number of visitors to Barcelona soared in the past two decades, resulting in complaints about noise and overcrowding from residents. Under the left-wing mayor Ada Colau, the city has prioritized locals’ quality of life, limiting the number of tourist-related businesses, including nightlife venues, that can open in many parts of town.“The city doesn’t issue licenses to set up new concert venues, and the existing ones are under threat and disappearing,” said Carmen Zapata, the manager of the venue association. “Barcelona has four music schools, and lots of musicians graduate every year, so we need small and medium-sized venues to absorb this whole scene.”Thanks to its weather and beaches, the city has become a popular location for music festivals. Last summer, five big festivals took place in the city. Those events, which were attended by more than 800,000 people, received funding from City Hall and the regional government of Catalonia. Festivals like that are able to pay artists much bigger fees and demand exclusivity in the region, sometimes even for Spanish artists.“Spain never had a very established culture of concert venues like in other countries, and now it has become a country of festivals and mega-festivals,” said Coque Sánchez, who runs Freedonia, a nonprofit music venue in the Raval neighborhood. “We also know that there are now artists who go straight from Spotify to performing in festivals, without passing through concert venues.”“We are passionate about live music, but nobody does this because they make a lot of money,” said Sidecar’s programming manager.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York TimesSidecar, the concert venue, celebrated its 40th birthday this year and is beloved by locals for its programming of mostly Spanish and Catalan indie-rock bands. But like many other live venues in Barcelona, it also puts on club nights, with D.J.s rather than bands, in order to survive. Fátima Mellado, who is in charge of production and programming at Sidecar, said hosting concerts was not a sustainable business model.“We are passionate about live music, but nobody does this because they make a lot of money,” Mellado said.In the neighborhood of Gràcia, the venue Heliogàbal has been booking emerging bands since 1995. The acts that have performed in a tiny corner of the bar include Rosalía, the Barcelona singer who went on to become a global pop sensation. She played at Heliogàbal in 2015, two years before she released her debut album.“We have never wanted to grow because we prefer this small format,” said the owner, Albert Pijuan. “It’s a completely different experience. You get goose bumps because you’re so close.”Despite its popularity over two decades, the venue almost closed down in 2016 when it received hefty fines for staging concerts without a license. It survived thanks to a City Hall initiative called Espais Cultura Viva (Live Culture Spaces), a new venue classification that makes it legal for existing bars, restaurants, bookshops and other small venues to host live music performances — but only until midnight, and only if they meet a series of requirements, including soundproofing.“The aim is to legalize these venues that are providing a cultural service,” said Daniel Granados, a cultural official in City Hall. He said around 25 establishments had signed up since the program was introduced in 2019.Heliogàbal, in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona, has been booking emerging bands since 1995.Enric Sans/HeliogàbalPijuan said he had invested hundreds of thousands of euros in soundproofing and other upgrades to Heliogàbal, around half of which was funded with subsidies from the city and regional governments. The venue also has commercial sponsors, which help it stay afloat, and has even started hosting daytime concerts during “vermut,” the traditional pre-lunch apéritif hour. But he said these measures were not enough to guarantee the venue’s future. “We can’t understand why we are still struggling after 28 years of having shown that our project is attractive,” he said.Pijuan said he felt that having supported so many local musicians in their careers, venues like his should receive more recognition and government support. “When posidonia disappears, there is no life left, the sea is dead,” he said, referring to a protected Mediterranean sea grass that flourishes off Catalonia’s coast. “Small venues play this role in the musical ecosystem.” More