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    Review: A Case for Understated Majesty at the Philharmonic

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    A new piano concerto written for Emanuel Ax, and an old symphony by Rachmaninoff, reward close listening in a program conducted by Eun Sun Kim.I always wince when people say they like classical music, “but not the new stuff.”Comments like that are not only shortsighted — the old stuff was, in its time, of course new and often radical — but they also don’t take into account how varied contemporary music is, and how much of it is actually quite easy to love.Take Anders Hillborg’s second piano concerto, “The MAX Concerto,” which had its local premiere with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday. Programmed somewhat arbitrarily between works by Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, it was more entertaining than either of them, and just as well crafted.First performed in October in San Francisco, the concerto acknowledges the lineage of its genre with playfulness and reverence, and showcases Emanuel Ax, the soloist for whom it was written, by matching and pushing his brand of modest, underrated virtuosity. Likable without being eager to please, thrilling without shameless dazzle, it is, like Ax, enjoyable simply because it’s excellent.And, crucially, Hillborg’s concerto works regardless of how familiar a listener is with his music, or any classical music for that matter. You could be aware of the piece’s form — its nine evocatively titled sections, performed as a single, 21-minute movement — or smile at “MAX,” a contraction of “Manny Ax.” You could pick up on the opening passage’s nod to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, or a later suggestion of Bach. Or you could just sit back and sense, intuitively, the genial majesty and pleasure coursing through it all.One of the great nice guys in music, Ax is a pianist who, over his five-decade career, seems to have made no enemies while sitting quietly, comfortably near the top of his field, whether as chamber partner to Yo-Yo Ma or as a champion of contemporary works premiering a new concerto by John Adams — “Century Rolls,” whose section “Manny’s Gym” is one of the single most beautiful movements written in our time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ John Adams Goes Conventional

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      This composer’s latest stage work, at San Francisco Opera, is his most straightforward, but also his least inspired.SAN FRANCISCO — John Adams’s operas have never been ordinary.His first two, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” broke ground by treating events from recent history with enigmatic new poetry. The stage works that followed over the next 30 years included a reflection on the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, an adaptation of an Indian folk tale, and, since 2000, four pieces with patchwork librettos drawn from a broad assortment of sources: ancient and modern, poetic and prose.Adams infused the eclecticism — and the sometimes anti-dramatic artificiality — of these texts with music of fast-shifting colors and energy, of tenderness and unexpected, haunting effects. If the works varied in impact, none were like any other composer’s.But with “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premiered on Saturday at the start of San Francisco Opera’s centennial season, Adams, 75, has finally become conventional.He has done the same thing as many composers before him for his first opera created without the collaboration of the director and writer Peter Sellars, who for better and worse pressed him toward that quiltlike method of libretto-writing. Adams has chosen a great, eminently sturdy play from the past — in this case, Shakespeare’s tragedy of love and war — and trimmed it to a more manageable size, adding just a scattering of interpolations from other sources.The result is the clearest, most dramatically straightforward opera of his career — and the dullest. “Antony and Cleopatra” has the least idiosyncrasy of his nine stage works so far, and the least inspiration.With almost three hours of music, it slumps to a subdued finish. It could be described in a line from the play that was cut for the opera: “She shows a body rather than a life, a statue than a breather.”That sense of not quite coming to life, of not fully inhabiting the play through music, begins at the start. With the two lovers and their attendants crowded into Cleopatra’s bedroom, we are unceremoniously shoved into frenetic activity both onstage and in the orchestra — as if to prove that the work is, as Adams writes wishfully in a program essay, his “most actively dramatic.”But with the pace so breathless from the opening bars, and with the focus seemingly on getting as much text out of the singers’s mouths as possible, we are never able to really sit with the two main characters and feel the depth of their bond.Paul Appleby, center left, as Caesar, shaking hands with Finley. From left: Hadleigh Adams (Agrippa), Elizabeth DeShong (Octavia) and Philip Skinner (Lepidus) look on.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAnd without the strength of their relationship being convincingly depicted, the precipitous ups and downs of that relationship lose their stakes, despite the baritone Gerald Finley’s weathered authority and the soprano Amina Edris’s focused vigor. (Edris deserves special credit for stepping in when Julia Bullock, for whom the role of Cleopatra was written, withdrew because of her pregnancy.)Largely eschewing arias, duets and other ensembles — its source is a play with notably few soul-baring soliloquies — “Antony and Cleopatra” skates along the emotional surface as it tries to keep up with the fast-moving story, lacking the expansive dives into thoughts and feelings that are the glory of Adams’s best work.So we never really feel we know these characters, though we see a lot of them: Despite the condensed form, this is a sprawling plot. Antony’s passion for Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, has upset the fragile balance of power in the Mediterranean world, with Caesar — his younger partner in ruling Rome — using it as a pretext to make war against him. Shakespeare’s genius was to make the lovers’ pairing, a union of two seen-it-all cynics, bracingly yet realistically volatile, with jealousy, betrayal and reconciliation from both sides.It is an unwieldy piece to wrangle into musical shape. An “Antony and Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Burdened by an extravagant Franco Zeffirelli staging, it was a notorious fiasco, but a revision — recorded, if infrequently performed — revealed a lushly perfumed, viably dramatic score.In that revised form, Barber’s “Antony” is nearly an hour shorter than Adams’s. Perhaps the main trouble with this new opera is simply the amount of text still in it — especially given the problems inherent in setting Shakespeare’s verse, which is so virtuosic that it’s barely legible when sung. If you catch it in the supertitles, a line like “Gentle Octavia, let your best love draw to that which seeks best to preserve it” is a challenge to grasp at a glance.Adams has long rightly been regarded as a master of intriguing orchestration, but his work here is surprisingly bland. Wisps of cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer with a tinny yet silky sound, would have more interest if that instrument hadn’t become something of his go-to evocation of the ancient Mediterranean: It is also a central feature of the passion oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” (2012) and the violin concerto “Scheherazade.2” (2015). Interludes bridge many of the scene changes, but even if these are generally bustling, they tend to feel like vamping, oddly characterless.There are some effective touches, particularly in more shadowy passages that the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, revels in without losing the pulse. Octavia — Caesar’s sister, who has been married to Antony in a last-ditch effort to cool the hostilities — replies to Antony after their wedding in vocal lines surrounded by an instrumental halo of hovering prayer, mysterious and alluring. The opening of the second act aptly depicts the stunned aftermath of Antony’s military disaster, with the mellow music for Cleopatra’s entrance having a dreamlike, distant suggestion of a foxtrot.Appleby’s Caesar rallies the crowd in a hectoring empire-building monologue.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaBut the tenor Paul Appleby’s bright stamina can’t keep his big speech late in the work — an empire-building monologue whose text is taken from John Dryden’s translation of “The Aeneid” — from being hectoring. And while Alfred Walker and Hadleigh Adams are both firm as aides to the Roman rulers, the bass-baritone Philip Skinner, as Lepidus, is alone in the cast in his ability to sing both richly and with perfectly intelligible diction.The inoffensive staging, by Elkhanah Pulitzer (who also consulted with Adams on the libretto alongside Lucia Scheckner), sets the opera not in ancient times but in the 1930s or so, with Art Deco elements and slinky gowns (by Constance Hoffman) winking at the glamorous Hollywood adaptations of the Cleopatra story.Mimi Lien’s spare set, starkly lit by David Finn, hides and reveals playing spaces as it opens and closes like an aperture, with some large structures looming in the back that recall the pyramids. Bill Morrison has contributed lyrically grainy black-and-white film projections of scenes including a sail on the Nile and a crowd ready to be whipped into frenzy by a dictator.This loose association of Caesar with later authoritarian leaders is pretty much the opera’s only contemporary resonance. After decades of pointedly political work with Sellars, in which those resonances could sometimes feel suffocating, Adams seems more than happy to make an opera that’s not “about” anything other than its plot.The outcome of that experiment is thin. But hopefully this is a transitional work for Adams, away from those patchwork pieces with Sellars and toward other styles of libretto, adapted or original, more compelling than this.“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said in a recent interview. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”Unfortunately, compared with those earlier works — among them true glories of opera history — “Antony and Cleopatra” is a dreary disappointment.Antony and CleopatraThrough Oct. 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco; sfopera.com. More

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      John Adams, an American Master at 75

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      BERKELEY, Calif. — “I have to apologize,” the composer John Adams said as he approached his car. “The front seat was torn up by a bear.”Patches of the passenger seat were slashed open, revealing the stuffing inside. Bears aren’t a hazard in the hilly neighborhoods of “the People’s Republic of Berkeley,” as Adams wryly referred to his town, but they are in the Sierra Nevada, where he sometimes retreats to work at his cabin.One night, while Adams was in the mountains with his dog, Amos, beer exploded in the car’s trunk because of the altitude, and a bear wreaked havoc trying to get a taste. “It’s probably a problem that Stravinsky didn’t have,” he said.Adams and Stravinsky might not have that in common, but they share much else: a recognizable yet constantly evolving musical language; a body of work across a wide breadth of genres and forms; and, above all, something close to supremacy in the classical music of their time. And, at 75 — the same age as Stravinsky when he took a stylistic turn for his late masterpiece “Agon” — Adams is making a swerve with his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premieres at San Francisco Opera on Sept. 10 ahead of future productions, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.There is an easy argument to be made that Adams is the greatest living American composer. He is an artist for whom Americanness truly matters, as much as the tradition of Western classical music — both heritages treated not with nostalgia, but with awareness and affection. Whose DNA carries traces of Beethoven and Ellington, Claude Debussy and Cole Porter. Whom younger composers regard with a mixture of awe and fondness, and who, in turn, is quick to give advice and life lessons. And who has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley said, “a force for social commentary.”That corner of Adams’s output, which began in 1987 with “Nixon in China,” has never been mere art for art’s sake. “Nixon” — an essential American opera of the last 50 years, along with Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” and Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” — made myth of recent history. Even more immediate was “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991), an account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, which had happened just six years earlier. “Doctor Atomic,” from 2005, reached farther back to meditate on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project; and in 2017, “Girls of the Golden West” revisited a 19th-century California with eerily coincidental connections to the Trump era.“Doctor Atomic” had its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2008. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times“Nixon in China,” Adams’s first opera, at the Met in 2011.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAdams has brought contemporary politics “into the cultural sphere,” said Finley, the bass-baritone who originated the role of Oppenheimer, and opened discussion “about the role of opera and music in society, and who we are as people.”As the classical music world celebrates Adams’s 75th year — not least with a new 40-disc box set of collected works from the Nonesuch label — and San Francisco Opera (itself marking a milestone of 100 seasons) prepares for the premiere of “Antony and Cleopatra,” he was understandably anxious during a recent hike in Tilden Regional Park.He followed a ridge trail that, to the left, revealed a vista of the foggy San Francisco Bay, with the peak of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County emerging from the clouds, and, to the right, sun-streaked hills and valleys leading to the distant Sierras. In between pointing out a bunny or sharing a story about Amos and coyotes, he — a composer who cares about public reception and reviews — said that while the new opera was at least obliquely relevant, in the way that Shakespeare tends to be, he worried people would be expecting something like “Nixon.”“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”COULD ADAMS BE ANYTHING other than a deeply American composer? “Not with my name,” he said with a chuckle. But that name — John Coolidge Adams — “so blue-bloodedly Yankee in its import,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” “was in fact a conjunction of a Swedish paternal grandfather and a maternal grandfather I never knew.”Born in Massachusetts and raised around New England, with a singer for a mother and clarinetist for a father, he grew up around big band music and the Great American Songbook alongside symphonic classics. On the family turntable he listened to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and an album called “Bozo the Clown Conducts Favorite Circus Marches,” conducting along with a knitting needle.Adams with music for “Antony and Cleopatra” at his longtime home in Berkeley, Calif.Marissa Leshnov for The New York TimesBy adolescence he aspired to composing, while playing clarinet and formally learning to conduct. During one formative summer, he saw the film adaptation of “West Side Story.” “It was the moment,” he wrote in his memoir, “when I felt most aroused to the potential of becoming an artist who might forge a language, Whitman-like, out of the compost of American life.”That did not come easily during his years at Harvard University, where he studied with teachers including Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici and Roger Sessions, in the spirit of the mid-20th century high modernism that was fashionable around composers of the Darmstadt School. On the side, Adams continued with the clarinet, subbing at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including at the American premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” Aaron Copland, Adams wrote, once heard him play and remarked, “Yeah, the kid knows his stuff.”After college, Adams moved to the Bay Area — his first views of the untamed California coast later found their way into “The Dharma at Big Sur” (2003) — and took a teaching job while programming concerts packed with works by avant-gardists like John Cage, Robert Ashley and Ingram Marshall. He also toiled away at electronic music, blending it with acoustic sounds in “American Standard,” from 1973; the middle movement, “Christian Zeal and Activity,” stretches a hymn melody to glacial beauty alongside, on Edo de Waart’s recording with the San Francisco Symphony, a looping sermon.“Phrygian Gates,” a Minimalist yet sprawling piano solo from 1977, is Adams’s first mature work. More accomplishments quickly followed, like “Shaker Loops” and the chronically underrated “Common Tones in Simple Time” — which, he wrote in his memoir, summed up the goals of Minimalism in its title alone, and served as a farewell to the “chaste, scaled-down aesthetics of that particular style.”He wasn’t long for the Minimalism of Glass and Steve Reich, two composers a decade older than him. “I felt that in obeying that kind of rigor, there wasn’t a lot of potential for not only emotional surprise and emotional expression, but also formal flexibility,” Adams said. “I wanted to make a music that had potential for surprise, because that’s always what we’re looking for in any kind of artistic experience.”You can hear, in Adams’s strain of Minimalism, a harmonic language that grabs listeners by the heart, and a gift for layering lyricism with the style’s trademark pulses, as in “Harmonium” (1981). Robert Hurwitz, the longtime president of Nonesuch — who brought Adams to the label and created the new box set — said that while Glass and Reich “looked at music a different way,” Adams was continuing the path of music in the 20th century.“I think whether or not he was influenced at different points by Steve and Phil,” Hurwitz added, “he passed through those in the way that Picasso passed through Cubism or Stravinsky passed through Neo-Classicism. He is of the moment, and yet his music is always his own.”Adams was most brazenly idiosyncratic, and surprising, in his 1982 work “Grand Pianola Music,” which begins in comfortable, Minimalist territory before giving way to a cascading excess and a sweeping melody both familiar and unplaceable. The piece left early listeners perplexed — or angry at what they perceived as a thumbed nose at the hyperseriousness of modernism. It wasn’t a joke, though: It was a glimpse of a more honest voice in the making, one that would bloom with the symphonic “Harmonielehre” and “Nixon.”Adams also diverged from other Minimalists in his medium: At the time, they largely operated outside institutions, writing for their own ensembles and performing in lofts and galleries. But Adams’s music was popular among orchestras and institutions, and he brought Minimalism to the concert hall in the process.“The thing that he did is, I think, the hardest thing to do,” said the composer Nico Muhly. “Which is to take the influences of — let’s pretend that it’s a kind of American Minimal tradition — and the time space that you find in Wagner, and figure out how to make those things live next to each other, to work together.”As Adams’s more personal style developed, it carried traces of the Western classical tradition — with the colorist acuity of Debussy and the American vernacular of Ives and jazz — in a way that could be mistakenly labeled postmodern but isn’t. The composer Dylan Mattingly said that Adams brings an element of the familiar into his work with sincerity because “John just loves that music, and so he’s interested in writing music that uses the instrument of the orchestra, while still being totally revolutionary and totally exploratory.”Whiffs of popular idioms in, say, “The Chairman Dances” (1985) were a clear break from the Darmstadt School brand of modernism that had dominated Adams’s youth — the music of composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen — but had begun to be overtaken by Minimalism and a broader return to tonality. And it coincided with what Adams called “one of my Saul on the road to Damascus moments,” when he started reading Dickens novels in his 30s.“The first thing that struck me was that there was a person making great art,” Adams recalled. “I mean, sometimes terrible, sappy sentimentalism, but you turn the page as fast as you can. And, like Tolstoy or Victor Hugo, he was writing important work with social connections or social influence. They had enormous audiences. I thought about our time; we composers have sort of surrendered that to pop music.”A pop star Adams isn’t, but he is one of the few composers who approaches that status, second only, perhaps, to Glass. And from that perch he has, in the vein of his literary heroes, written music of conscience and consequence. Alongside exercises in form and timbre, like the Violin Concerto (1994) and, more recently, “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” (2019), have been “On the Transmigration of Souls,” Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and collaborations with the director Peter Sellars that explored contemporary social issues through classic lenses: “El Niño” (2000), a Christmas oratorio with the mastery of Handel’s “Messiah,” or the “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” a retelling of the Passion from 2012.Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock in “Girls of the Golden West” at San Francisco Opera in 2017.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAlong the way, Adams has also provided an invaluable service to the next generations of composers. He doesn’t teach, but he curates concerts, championing younger artists, some of whom he has helped as a mentor, like Mattingly and his peer Gabriella Smith, who said, “I hardly know any composers who have not been influenced by his music.”Adams is known to look at scores and give frank, productive feedback, but also lessons applicable beyond the work at hand. Smith described their time together as “more like hanging out,” but also a confirmation that her two biggest interests — music and nature — could coexist, as they do in Adams’s life. He got her thinking, she said, “about what it would be like to have my own, unique compositional voice.”Mattingly said that Adams once responded to a piece of his by pulling out a Mahler score and talking about the physicality of it. Mattingly eventually realized the conversation was about how music could be embodied. Adams was pushing him to think about “music as the amorphous, invisible thing that it actually is,” Mattingly said, “instead of as specific durations and straight lines. I remember thinking about it nonstop for months, and then creating something that was way more compelling afterward.”“THE MOST TEDIOUS THING an artist can do,” Adams said, “is brand himself or herself.” If there’s a genre in which this most applies to him, it’s opera. Although all his stage works are on some level political, they occupy distinct sound worlds. In “Nixon,” created with the librettist Alice Goodman and Sellars, the mode was, Adams wrote in his memoir, “Technicolor orchestration.” But when the team reunited for “Klinghoffer” — their triumph, though, as a magnet for controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that is virtually impossible to produce in the United States — the text called for “something that was intensely poignant and lyrical, but also violent,” Adams said.Adams and Sellars assembled the libretto for “Atomic” from found texts. Critics called the result of their method undramatic, but the work has been increasingly accepted in recent years, in part because of a 2018 recording that, with the soprano Julia Bullock as Kitty Oppenheimer, brought the dramaturgy more into focus. Such a turnaround has yet to come for “Girls of the Golden West,” whose libretto had few fans, despite a lean, focused score that will have its moment in the sun when the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents it in concert in January.John Adams with his dog, Amos, in Tilden Regional Park, where they take daily walks.Marissa Leshnov for The New York Times“Antony and Cleopatra” is a departure in more ways than one. Its libretto is almost entirely chipped from the Shakespeare original, in collaboration with Lucia Scheckner and Elkhanah Pulitzer, who is directing the premiere in San Francisco. And as such, it is a work of written-through drama, rarely pausing for reflection and moving propulsively toward its tragic climax.The title roles were written with Finley and Bullock in mind (along with Paul Appleby, another Adams veteran, as Caesar); Bullock, though, is pregnant and withdrew from the San Francisco run, so Cleopatra will be sung by Amina Edris. During recent rehearsals, the orchestra and cast were settling into the score, whose breakneck pace is set from the start by “archetypal” rhythms, Adams said, that may remind listeners of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Wagner’s Nibelheim music from “Das Rheingold.” The vocal writing, meanwhile, largely follows the pace of speech like Debussy in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” or Janacek in his operas.“He really went from the words,” said Eun Sun Kim, the opera company’s music director, who is conducting the run. “It’s really about storytelling, but he also challenges us to be precise and at the same time musical.”As in Adams’s partnership with Sellars, the production’s concept seems conceived alongside the development of both the libretto and score. Pulitzer said that their entry point was “manifestations of Cleopatra, mostly through the lens of Hollywood, whether it’s Liz Taylor winking at the camera or the de Mille ‘Cleopatra’ integrating glamour and ancient Egypt.” That led them to the idea of movie palaces and news reels, which were then woven into the show.The approach is one way to bring the opera’s themes to the fore — principally, its depiction of one nation’s fall and the rise of another. “We all worry that America is in decline with Donald Trump and this horrible polarization,” Adams said. “I thought the dichotomy between Rome, which is ascendant, and Egypt, which is in decline, is very much a contemporary topic.”During the hike in Tilden, Adams followed a lot of reflections on the new opera with a “we’ll see.” Unsure of what audiences will think of it, he also doesn’t know what a success now would mean for the future. “I keep a mental picture of Meyerbeer,” he said, referring to the once ubiquitous and now rarely heard 19th-century composer, “just to remind myself: Here today, gone tomorrow.”He brought up about a performance that he conducted recently, of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, with the Juilliard Orchestra. At one point, near the end, he got “this absolute chill running up my back.”“A chill is not the right word, because it was warm,” he continued. “It was just the feeling having a genuine, deep experience with a great creation. I know that it’s impossible not to sound trite, but that’s something that makes life and culture worth it. So, if somebody has an experience like that at some point from a piece of mine, then that’s all I really care about.” More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2021

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      In a year that offered glimmers of hope across the world of arts, these performers and creators rose to the occasion.Olivia Rodrigo, members of the cast of “Reservation Dogs” and a scene from “Sanctuary City.”Clockwise from left: Mat Hayward/Getty Images; jeremy Dennis for The New York Times; Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe cultural world began to sputter back to life this year, and in turn, so did many of us — slipping out of our sweats and into movie theaters, clubs and Broadway shows. Even for those who were less confident rubbing (or bumping) elbows in public, artists brought us plenty of joy in the safety of our home. It may not have been the beforetimes, but in 2021, these artists and creators from across the arts gave us a fresh outlook.Pop MusicOlivia RodrigoFor those of us over 30, Olivia Rodrigo seemed to come out of nowhere with her colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” a heartbreak ballad that dropped in January and stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks. But for a younger audience, Rodrigo, 18, was familiar from her time as a Disney child star. Despite that pedigree, she didn’t drag along a squeaky clean image.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic at The New York Times, called “Sour,” her debut album from May, “nuanced and often exceptional,” deploying “sweet pop and tart punk equally well.” He called Rodrigo, a California-raised Filipino American, “an optimal pop star for the era of personalities, subpersonalities and metapersonalities.”As Rodrigo told GQ magazine in June, “Something that I learned very early on is the importance of separating person versus persona. When people who don’t know me are criticizing me, they’re criticizing my persona, not my person.”Olivia Rodrigo’s colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” stayed at the top of the charts.Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IheartmediaTelevisionLee Jung-jaeBlood-drenched, brutally violent entertainment is rarely synonymous with nuanced, complex performances. But in Netflix’s “Squid Game,” a dystopian thriller from South Korea that became a global streaming sensation, Lee Jung-jae, 49, pulled off just that. As the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a gambling addict who is deeply in debt, he gives a wrenching and surprisingly subtle performance as he battles his way through unspeakable horrors.But Lee, a model-turned-actor who has starred in several hit Korean films like last year’s gangster drama “Deliver Us From Evil,” doesn’t play Gi-hun as a hero or a villain, a bumbling fool or a savvy con man. “Gi-hun’s emotions are very complicated,” Lee told The Times in October.“Squid Game,” he went on, “is not really a show about survival games. It’s about people.”TheaterThe Authors of ‘Six’In October, “Six” became the first musical to have its opening night on Broadway since the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. An exuberant and cheeky pop musical about the wives of Henry VIII, it brought much-needed fun and noise to the stage — thanks to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who wrote the book, music and lyrics. (Moss also directed the show with Jamie Armitage.)The hit show is “a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past” that “turns Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives into spunky modern-day pop stars,” as Jesse Green, the theater critic at The Times, and Maya Phillips, a critic-at-large, put it. Think Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, whom the leading divas were in some ways modeled after.Marlow came up with the idea for “Six” while daydreaming during a poetry class at Cambridge University, where he and Moss, now both 27, became fast friends. “This,” Moss told The Times in 2019, “is obviously the craziest thing that’s ever happened to us.”MoviesAunjanue EllisIn 1995, The Times called Aunjanue Ellis an up-and-comer for her role in the Shakespeare Festival production of “The Tempest” in Central Park. Ellis “projects nearly as much force offstage as she does in character as Ariel,” the article read. That fire hasn’t wavered in the years since, whether on film —“Ray,” “The Help,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” — or on TV in “When They See Us” and “Lovecraft Country,” both of which earned her Emmy nominations.Now, in the movie “King Richard,” Ellis delivers a megawatt performance as Oracene, the mother of Venus and Serena Williams (opposite Will Smith as Richard) — turning a supporting role into a talker and generating Oscar buzz.In an interview this fall, Ellis, now 52, talked about what makes her say yes to a role: “Can I do it and not be embarrassed and stand by the fact that I’ve done it?” she says she asks herself. “Is it fun to play and am I doing a service to Black women?”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Classical MusicEun Sun Kim“An artist is never satisfied,” said Eun Sun Kim after the San Francisco Opera’s production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” on Oct. 14 — despite an extended ovation and shouts of “Bravo!” from the audience.After all, Kim — the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States and the first Asian to take on such a role, a monumental appointment that became official in August — has a lot on her plate. Not only is she grappling with the company’s financial fallout from the pandemic, she inherited the opera’s previous problems, like declining attendance.“It’s a hard job, it’s a big job, whether you’re a woman or a man,” she told The Times in October. “I want to be seen just as a conductor.”Kim, 41, whose conducting debut in the states was in 2017 with the Houston Grand Opera production of “La Traviata,” is aiming to broaden the art form’s appeal in the digital age. The company hopes her appointment will do the same; there were advertisements featuring her image with the words “A new era begins” around the city.“Opera is not boring or old,” she said in October. “It’s the same human beings, the same stories, whether it was 200 years ago or nowadays.”Eun Sun Kim, the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States, at the San Francisco Opera in October.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesArtJennifer PackerLast year, Jennifer Packer, 37, a painter who depicts contemporary Black life through atmospheric portraits and still lifes, told The Times that she’s driven by thoughts of “emotional and moral buoyancy in the face of various kinds of impoverishment and de facto captivity.”Now, that perspective is on display in her biggest solo exhibition, “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show includes about 30 of her works from the past decade, including the painting “A Lesson in Longing,” which was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial — as well as works that speak to Black lives lost to police brutality. Her largest painting, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!),” referring to Breonna Taylor, was created during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.In reviewing Packer’s Whitney exhibition for The Times, Aruna D’Souza wrote that no other artist right now is doing as much as Packer “to make those who have been rendered invisible — on museum walls, in public culture, in political discourse — visible.”MoviesCooper HoffmanIn “Licorice Pizza,” the new comedy-drama-romance from Paul Thomas Anderson, Cooper Hoffman plays an unlikely teenage hero. Cooper, 18, is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s muse before the actor’s death in 2014. Before this movie, Hoffman had never really acted, except with Anderson in something akin to home movies, he said during a press event in November. “It was on a very lower scale, with an iPhone and his kid,” Hoffman joked, referring to Anderson’s child. “I would always play the bad guy, and his kid would beat me up, and it was good fun.”In her review of the film, Manohla Dargis, co-chief movie critic at The Times, said that Anderson’s love for Cooper’s character, Gary, is special — “as lavish as that of an indulgent parent.” His affection for Gary, she continued, “is of a piece of the soft nostalgic glow he pumps into ‘Licorice Pizza.’”Cooper plays opposite Alana Haim, who also had no acting experience before “Licorice Pizza.” The pair had met briefly through Anderson several years ago, she told The Times, never thinking their paths would cross again. As soon as they read together, though, Haim recalled, “It was like, oh, we’re a team. We can take on the world together.”Cooper Hoffman, foreground, stars in “Licorice Pizza,” which was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.Melinda Sue Gordon/MGMDanceLaTasha BarnesLaTasha Barnes — a leader in the dance forms of house, hip-hop and the Lindy Hop — bridged worlds this year. Barnes is “a connector, or a rather a re-connector,” Brian Seibert wrote in the Times. In particular, she works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers (like herself) to their jazz heritage. To watch her dance, Seibert said, “is to watch historical distance collapse.”Barnes, 41, has been admired in dance for years, but it was her showing in “The Jazz Continuum” (the show she presented at Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum in May and later at Jacob’s Pillow) and her appearance in “Sw!ng Out” (the contemporary swing-dance show that debuted at the Joyce Theater in October) that caught the attention of many. In November, she won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer.Discouraged by dance teachers at a young age because of her body type, Barnes pivoted to gymnastics and track and field; at 18, she enlisted in the Army. She later weathered athletic injuries, as well as a broken hip, back and wrist after being hit by a car. Despite it all, her zeal for dance continued.“I was always looking at myself as the perpetual outsider,” she told The Times, “without realizing that it was actually the reverse.”The dancer LaTasha Barnes works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers to their jazz heritage.Cherylynn Tsushima, via The BessiesTelevisionThe Cast of Reservation Dogs“Reservation Dogs,” a dark comedy about four teenagers living on a Native reservation in Oklahoma, is a game-changer. That’s how one of its stars, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, described it, and he wouldn’t be alone. The series, from FX on Hulu, is the first on TV with an entirely Indigenous writer’s room and roster of directors. That backbone allows the undeniable synergy among its core cast members — Woon-A-Tai, Devery Jacobs, Lane Factor and Paulina Alexis — to flourish.On previous sets, Jacobs said she was “literally the only Native person for miles.” The industry “should feel embarrassed that 2021 is a year for firsts for Indigenous representation,” she went on.For Alexis, her acting dreams once felt so impossible, she felt embarrassed to tell anyone about them, she told The Times. “There was no representation on TV. I didn’t think I would make it.” Now she has a role in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and will star in a second season of “Reservation Dogs,” which was renewed in September.The stars of “Reservation Dogs,” a groundbreaking show from FX on Hulu: from left, Paulina Alexis, Lane Factor, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Devery Jacobs.Jeremy Dennis for The New York TimesPop MusicMickey GuytonAfter Mickey Guyton was nominated for three Grammys in November, she told The New York Times, “I was right.” She was referring to her instinct for the direction of “Remember Her Name,” her debut full-length release. “This whole album came from me and what I thought I should release,” she said, “and that’s something I’ve never done.”In January, alongside major players like Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, she will have three chances to win: for best country album, best country song and best country solo performance (for the title track). Last Grammys, she became the first Black woman to be nominated for a solo country performance award for the track “Black Like Me.”Guyton, 38, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville, with song titles like “Different” and “Love My Hair.”“What’s being played on country radio has been played on country radio for the last 10 years — I can’t do that,” she told Jon Caramanica of The Times in September. “I can’t do it spiritually. I can’t write songs that don’t mean something.”The country singer Mickey Guyton, performing in New York in December, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesTheaterSharlene CruzIn September, amid theater’s reopening, “Sanctuary City,” a play from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, resumed Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Like much of Majok’s work, it takes on the “plight of undocumented immigrants, with a glowering side-eye cast on the rest of us,” as Jesse Green of The Times put it in his rave of the play.Sharlene Cruz brings to life the smart, impulsive G — performing opposite Jasai Chase-Owens as B, both playing undocumented teenagers. Cruz, who is in her 20s, renders her character smartly, impulsively and with a lot of subtext. “Impulsiveness can just seem stagy — youth, a caricature,” Green told this reporter, but Cruz gets the rhythm right and is disciplined enough to put that quality in service of the character’s goals.As those goals change — G ages a few years in the play — Cruz convincingly shows how that impulsiveness hardened into hotheadedness, and youth into something that’s not quite maturity.Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens play undocumented teenagers in “Sanctuary City” at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArtPrecious OkoyomonPrecious Okoyomon, 28, a multidisciplinary artist and poet who has only been exhibiting for a few years, creates massive site-specific installations using organic materials. “I make worlds,” Okoyomon, who won the Artist Award at Frieze New York this year, told The New York Times Style Magazine. “Everything, every portal I make, is its own ecosystem.”Okoyomon, who lived in Lagos, Nigeria, as a child before moving to Texas and then Ohio, added: “I attach myself to materials such as earth, rocks, water and fire because these are things I can’t control on my own.”As part of the Frieze win, Okoyomon conceived and presented a performance-based installation at the Shed titled “This God Is A Slow Recovery,” which focused on communication or the lack thereof. “It’s about destroying our language, building it up, crashing the words into each other,” Okoyomon said. “How do we create the language to get to the new world?”This month, Okoyomon won a Chanel Next Prize, a new award from the French fashion brand established to nurture emerging talent, nominated by a group of cultural figures and selected by the jurors Tilda Swinton, David Adjaye and Cao Fei.DanceKayla FarrishIn September, the dancer and choreographer Kayla Farrish — teaming up with the jazz, soul, and experimental musician Melanie Charles — transported Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn to a vivid scene of grace and power.The performance — as part of the platform four/four presents, which commissions collaborations among artists — was “sweeping and robust work braiding music and spoken word with choreography” that encompassed the best of technical dance and athletic drills, said Gia Kourlas, the dance critic at The Times.The result turned its five dancers — Farrish, 30, was joined by Mikaila Ware, Kerime Konur, Gabrielle Loren and Anya Clarke-Verdery — into a vibrant union of musicality, tenderness and power,” Kourlas wrote. 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      Review: In Her Met Debut, a Conductor Leads a Fresh ‘La Bohème’

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      Eun Sun Kim, who recently made history at the San Francisco Opera, had an auspicious arrival at the podium in New York for Puccini’s classic.Giacomo Puccini’s beloved “La Bohème,” with its lyrically rich and deftly written score, has the makings of a surefire opera. Yet the music is full of traps for a conductor, especially when it comes to pacing and rhythmic freedom; give singers too much expressive leeway, and things can easily turn flaccid.Even in a good performance of this well-known staple, it’s hard for a conductor’s work to stand out against the singers’ voices, which usually claim our attention. But on Tuesday, when “Bohème” returned to the Metropolitan Opera — in Franco Zeffirelli’s enduringly popular production, and with an appealing cast in place — the star of the evening was the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, in her Met debut.Last month, Kim made history at the San Francisco Opera as the first woman music director of a major American opera company. And at the Met this week, she did the job with musicianly care, assured technical command, subtlety and imagination. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard Puccini’s score so freshly played.On one level, Kim’s achievement was all in the details. From the opening measures of Act I, set in a cramped garret shared by the story’s struggling artists, Kim took a vibrant tempo held just enough in check to allow for the crisp execution of dotted-note rhythmic figures, sputtering riffs and emphatic syncopations. In the playing she drew from the orchestra, which sounded alert and at its best, she teased out distinct thematic threads while letting skittish, colorful flourishes work their magic and then waft away.Tuesday evening’s Rodolfo, the tenor Charles Castronovo, who sang with beefy sound and a touch of impetuousness, clearly likes to take ample time to deliver ardent melodic phrases. Kim gave him breathing room. Yet she showed that even while following a singer sensitively, a conductor can subtly nudge him along so a line does not go slack.She was equally alert to the characteristics of Anita Hartig, as Mimì, a soprano whose bright voice, even when high-lying phrases had metallic glint, came across with tremulous, affecting vulnerability. Hartig brought a conversational flow to the aria “Mi chiamano Mimì,” stretching one phrase to express a bashful, intimate feeling and slightly rushing another to convey nervousness. Kim kept the orchestra with her every moment, and the entire scene around that aria — the awkward, nervous exchanges between Rodolfo and Mimì as they first meet — had shape and drive.Kim’s way of conveying the structural elements of the score — which is not just a series of dramatic scenes but, in Puccini’s hand, a composition with an overall form — was just as important as her attention to details. Her work in Act III, the emotional core of the opera, was exceptionally fine. Mimì seeks out Rodolfo’s friend Marcello (the robust-voiced baritone Artur Rucinski) at the tavern where he and Musetta (Federica Lombardi, a vivacious soprano) are now living, to share her despair over Rodolfo’s constant jealousy. The singers were intense in their back and forth, but the long, arching melodic lines that hold this scene together are in the orchestra, and Kim brought them out with tautness and full-bodied sound.The whole cast was strong, including the firm yet warm bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee as Colline and the youthful, spirited baritone Alexander Birch Elliott as Schaunard. There are 14 more performances of “Bohème” this season. The great news is that for all but four of them, Kim will be in the pit.La BohèmeThrough May 27 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More