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      His Conducting Wasn’t Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth.

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      Michael Gielen’s precise, intellectually charged work made him one of the most stimulating maestros of the 20th century. Now a set of 88 CDs offers the deepest insight yet.Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.“He looks like an academician,” Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielen’s New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. “His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.”A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler “was almost painfully literal.”“A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give,” he added.Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: “Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.”These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, “If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.”Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw” between its slow movement and its “Ode to Joy” finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.“Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth,” Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. “And that’s not always pleasant.”Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw”Gunter Reich, speaker; Stuttgart Radio Symphony (SWR Music)Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed “Michael Gielen Edition” from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductor’s work, from Bach to Zimmermann.Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 — and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 — in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found “eating well, or taking a good shower,” than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielen’s was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a répétiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Colón, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the “gigantomania” of Wilhelm Furtwängler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in 1950.Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.Lamentably little of Gielen’s operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater — or “director’s theater,” in which the director’s vision tends to dominate — hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could.Manfred Roth/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesFor Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Webern’s “Six Pieces” and Schubert’s “Rosamunde”; put Schoenberg’s more classically-inclined works next to Mozart’s more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenberg’s Expressionist monologue “Erwartung” before Beethoven’s “Eroica.”Gielen’s other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). “Putting on a wig doesn’t make me an 18th-century man,” he wrote in his memoirs.Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an “objective” interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahler’s Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielen’s conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielen’s predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music — one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. López’s astonishing “Dome Peak” and “Breath — Hammer — Lightning,” comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume — is a despairingly intense affair. Ligeti’s Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)But Gielen’s approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama” has never sounded so glorious.Gielen’s ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them — including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted — above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielen’s once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composer’s controversial metronome markings.That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethoven’s scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the “Eroica” was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a “new social existence” around individual dignity in its finale — he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly — the Fifth Symphony he believed a “terrible awakening.” The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but “affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror.” If his 1997 recording does not fully convince — it sounds empty, even barren — you suspect it’s not supposed to.Beethoven’s Fifth SymphonySWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. “You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century,” he wrote near the end of his autobiography.All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer. More

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      Coachella Will Return Without Masks or Vaccines Required

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      When the Coachella outdoor music festival returns for the first time in two years this April, performers will be greeted by a sea of unmasked — and potentially unvaccinated — fans, as the struggling concert industry stirs back to life.On Tuesday, organizers said that attendees will not be required to wear masks or be vaccinated or tested for the coronavirus at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which drew up to 125,000 fans a day to Southern California and was one of the biggest music festivals of the pre-pandemic era.“There is no guarantee, express or implied, that those attending the festival will not be exposed to Covid-19,” Goldenvoice, a division of the global concert giant AEG Live, said on the Coachella website.Goldenvoice noted, however, that the festival’s Covid policies may change “in accordance with applicable public health conditions.”Goldenvoice also said that Stagecoach, a country music festival in Southern California, also said on Tuesday that there would be no requirements for guests to be masked, vaccinated or tested. The festival was set to run for three days at the end of April and the beginning of May.It has been a turbulent two years for the concert and touring industries, as a number of events were canceled because of the virus. In the last year, since the Covid vaccine became widely available, organizers have grappled with decisions over whether to hold the events at all and whether to require masks, vaccines and testing.Over four days last summer, the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago ran at full capacity, with its 400,000 attendees being required to show either proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test. According to data released by the city after the festival, infection rates among the concertgoers were very low.Coachella did not run in 2020 or 2021, and was canceled three times over the pandemic, including a rescheduled date in the fall of 2020.Before the pandemic, Coachella, which is widely seen as a bellwether for the multibillion-dollar touring business, had put on a show every year since 1999 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio. It typically runs over two weekends in April.The organizers of Coachella announced in January, after weeks of speculation, that the festival would be back this year. It is set to be headlined by Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Kanye West. More

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      ‘Oscar Peterson: Black + White’ Review: Never Mind the Talking Heads

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      The flashing fingers of this jazz piano icon, and his mesmerizing tracks, are all the perspective we need.At one in point in “Oscar Peterson: Black + White,” Barry Avrich’s documentary about the Canadian jazz pianist, Billy Joel is raving about the speed of Peterson’s hands on the piano. “You’d try to watch what he was doing,” he explained, “but it’s a blur.”True enough, but completely redundant: We’re already watching Peterson’s hands flash across the keys, in the crisp archival concert footage Joel is talking over. The breathless praise adds nothing; in fact, it distracts from the pleasure of seeing a jazz great perform. As a recent viral tweet skewering this music-doc convention sarcastically pointed out, we don’t need a bunch of interviews with experts “to put the band in historical context.” Seeing Peterson play is more than enough.“Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance. The footage of Peterson at work is an infinitely better testament to that brilliance than words of admiration from artists he influenced. What’s more, the relevance of the interviewees varies wildly. Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock are understandable. But if, like me, you wonder why we’re hearing so much from Randy Lennox, a pretty nondescript corporate media executive, stay through the credits: he’s one of the film’s producers. If you don’t already believe Oscar Peterson was a genius, I doubt he’ll be the one to convince you.Oscar Peterson: Black + WhiteNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Tops Billboard Chart for Fifth Week

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      Propelled by streams of the hit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the album notched the most weeks at No. 1 for a soundtrack since Disney’s “Frozen.”Another week, another No. 1 for Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack.The album, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, continues its blockbuster run on Billboard’s chart by notching its fifth week at No. 1, beating out new releases by Yo Gotti and Mitski.Propelled by the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” which remains the most-streamed song in the United States on Spotify — as well as a popular TikTok meme — the “Encanto” soundtrack had the equivalent of 110,000 sales last week. That was down just 2 percent from the week before, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.“Encanto,” released nearly three months ago, has held the top spot every week this year except one, and posted steady numbers. Its total this week includes 135 million streams — last week it was 140 million; the week before, 139 million — and 17,000 copies sold as a complete package. It is the first soundtrack to earn at least five weeks at No. 1 since Disney’s “Frozen,” which enjoyed 13 times at the top in 2014.This week, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is also No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart for a third time.Also this week, “DS4Ever” by the Atlanta rapper Gunna rises one spot to No. 2 on the album chart, while the veteran Memphis rapper Yo Gotti opens at No. 3 with “CM10: Free Game,” his highest chart position.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” a chart mainstay for more than a year now, holds at No. 4, and “Laurel Hell” by Mitski, a star indie singer-songwriter, opens at No. 5, a career high. More

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      For Three Avant-Garde Musicians, It’s Time for Pop

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      New albums by Jeff Tobias, Joseph White and Dave Ruder all have some experimental edges. But they also have catchy hooks.In his recent documentary about the Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes depicted both poles of that group’s creativity. There were moments featuring collaborations with experimental composers like La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, but also passages of fairly pure pop bliss.Subsequent generations of musicians in New York have demonstrated similarly diverse creative practices — take a trio of recent recordings produced by artists in their late 30s who are based in Brooklyn and Queens.Jeff Tobias’s “Recurring Dream,” Joseph White’s “The Wagging Craze” and Dave Ruder’s “not Great” all have some avant-garde edges. But they also have hooks — of the kind I’ve found myself humming on the subway in recent weeks. The new works don’t herald a total break with any of these composers’ past, noisier, more abrasive efforts. The present material is just what they happen to be up to right now.

      Recurring Dream by Jeff TobiasConsider “Our Very Recent Past,” the first track on Tobias’s set, which he released on his own label in January. Over a repeating, fuzzed-out keyboard figure, this multi-instrumentalist initially uses a mellow approach to vocals, suggestive of the gentler corners of indie rock. But the lilting melody is in productive tension with the grim lyrics, nearly every word drawn out as though it were a somber proclamation: “By the time we figured out who the real fascists were, it was too late.”And then within that same first minute, there’s an entrance worthy of stadium rock, as Tobias’s stentorian yet sumptuous bass clarinet tone joins the arrangement. (The drumming, by Nick Podgurski, also summons you from your seat.) If the lyrics’ probing political sobriety might come across as something of a bummer, the music’s rousing invention is a kind of reminder not to curdle into passive cynicism.The album only becomes more playful as it progresses, even as the tight focus on contemporary ills hangs around. A track like “Transparency” has a touch of piano-driven rock ’n’ roll swing to it, but also a brief section of scorching reed textures — a nod to Tobias’s experience working in punk and free-jazz outfits. (Tobias will a lead a full band in this material at Roulette on March 1.)In an interview, he described the song “We’re Here to Help” — which follows a series of characters suffering from “money sickness” — as an “expropriation anthem,” even as it offers a modicum of pity for the greedy. The subjects include a financial wizard who pays no taxes — “his money lived in museums / his money lived on a dot / somewhere in the ocean” — as well as a woman who intends to “work around human rights” but winds up a consultant instead. (“Incidentally she never helped a single person,” the singer dryly observes over an up-tempo beat.)“I work on music, I work odd jobs, and I drink coffee and read the news until my head explodes,” Tobias said with a laugh in the interview. “So the lyrics are what’s on my mind, really and truly.”But, he added, when it came the music, “I was just enjoying myself; I was having a blast.”A live performance of Joseph White’s “The Wagging Craze,” which has recently been released as a recording.Ben AronsA similar sense of delight permeates “The Wagging Craze,” a theatrical piece White performed as a one-man show at Ars Nova in 2019. On the recording, released in December on the Gold Bolus label, there’s joy to be had in listening for the steadily morphing electronic music underneath the narration. Its fictional story revolves around a male-bonding exercise at college fraternities in the 1960s — involving a “a very complicated system of pulleys and levers” — that manages to attract the critical scrutiny of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.Structured around a series of faux-redacted documents, what White calls a radio opera has some compelling tunes. As Lyndon B. Johnson shifts away from his typically hard-driving Congressional negotiations, he also starts to record his own pop songs, like “New Motion.” Here, the president muses about loosening his grip on political power: “Let the world spin / let Nixon win / ’cause I’m a man with a body / and no one can stop me / with my wagging gang of guys, no misfortune can top me.”

      The Wagging Craze – Original Cast Recording by Joseph WhiteThe president’s little aria has a finger-snapping charm, as well as flights of complexity. As Johnson starts to free associate about “boys smoking reefer, burning sage / naked girls shaking bells / indulging in strange smells,” White deviates from his established chord and rhythm patterns. In an email, he said, “My freewheeling approach to songwriting, and interest in looking under the hood of traditional masculinity, flow from the belief that we should have the freedom to crack open these formal structures and see if they’re really still necessary.”Ruder, a composer and performer who also runs the Gold Bolus label, said that his early looks at White’s songs have been useful for his own process, as he was working on his own new material. He released “not Great,” his latest collection of songs, late last fall. Humor and structural invention play crucial role here, too, though with more inward cast than the albums by Tobias and White.

      not Great by Dave RuderOn a track like “Pious Rious,” pop culture ephemera is collected and jettisoned over strings, keyboard, clarinet and some syncopated guitar: “We got erased while watching old movies / The heroes were stupid / Archetypes ever-present and unavoidable / So we taped them over / With reruns of ‘She-Ra’ / This time I’ll be Skeletor.”Ruder said in an interview that while he sometimes writes with the hopes of creating a pop megahit, he keeps finding that “things just can’t be simple. The verse has to have one extra bar the second time it happens, and the next time it’s just got to have one random bit of 2/4 in there.”That’s all to the good. We already have a Max Martin, after all. But Ruder’s songs — like those of Tobias and White — fill a niche in the experimental music realm. And they enhance a listener’s appreciation of these artists’ other pursuits: Tobias’s scabrous improvised saxophone duets with Patrick Shiroishi, Ruder’s writing for detuned guitars, White’s sound-walk collaborations with the singer Gelsey Bell.When I started listening to these records, I wasn’t aware of the extent of the cross-pollination among them. Ruder provides guest vocals on Tobias’s album, and released White’s on Gold Bolus. But the associations go deeper. In our interview, Tobias described how, early in his time studying at Brooklyn College, he saw a mysterious ad for a musical collective. It simply read: “Sweat Lodge thinks you’re cool.”When Tobias went to a Sweat Lodge performance, he found that the collective included Ruder and White. Both of them were engaged in the performance of an experimental Alvin Lucier piece, across multiple floors of a stairwell in the building.“These are my people,” Tobias recalled telling himself. “This is the crew doing the work that I want to be around.”That crew’s warm, welcoming approach is still an attractive proposition for new listeners. More

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      To Lure Back Audiences, Spoleto Festival Plans an Ambitious Season

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      The performing arts group in Charleston, S.C., will host 120 events in May and June, its first full season since the start of the pandemic.After two years of disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C, announced on Friday an ambitious season that it hopes will bring audiences back to live performances.The season, the first under Spoleto’s new general director, Mena Mark Hanna, will feature more than 120 opera, theater, dance and music performances across 17 days in May and June. The highlights include the world premiere of “Omar,” an opera by the musician Rhiannon Giddens about a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807.Hanna, the first person of color to lead Spoleto in its 45-year history, said the group hoped to offer a platform to overlooked artists.“We want art to be more than something that expresses received traditions, or something that is a reinforcement of a received canon,” Hanna, the son of Egyptian immigrants, said in an interview. “We want art to have this potential to bridge differences through its transformational power.”Other highlights include the premiere of “Unholy Wars,” an opera by Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese American tenor, which tells the story of the Crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective, drawing on music by early Baroque composers. “The Street,” a new work for harp by the composer Nico Muhly will have its American premiere at the festival, featuring text by the librettist Alice Goodman.The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Spoleto Festival in 2020. Last year, the festival returned with a pared-down season; ticket sales were down 70 percent compared with before the pandemic amid lingering concerns about the virus.Hanna said he was optimistic audiences would return in force this year as the Omicron variant recedes. The festival plans to require audience members to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, and to wear masks.“This is truly about us saying to the world, ‘We have wanted this, we have needed this,’” he said. “That sense of collective catharsis is something that we missed and, even more now than ever, need because of the virus.”He noted that one of the planned works this season is a new production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” led by the director Yuval Sharon, that unfolds in reverse, with one if its main characters, Mimì, dying of tuberculosis at the outset of the opera. The reordered opera ends with cheerier scenes of friendship and revelry from the first act.“The first act is really about renewal and love and youthfulness,” Hanna said. “I see that as a metaphor of moving away from the darkness of the pandemic.” More

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      Hear Lata Mangeshkar in These Four Streaming Films

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      Because Mangeshkar lent her voice to several generations of Bollywood stars, these movies double as a highlight reel for Hindi cinema.They called her the Queen of Melody.Lata Mangeshkar, the Bollywood singer who died on Sunday at 92, left behind a monumental body of work in a career that began in 1942, when she was just 13. Her singing for films, which continued until 2015, spanned numerous regional-language industries, but she defined mainstream Hindi cinema in a way few artists have. (Another artist who did, Mangeshkar’s sister Asha Bhosle, is also a playback singer.)Mangeshkar lent her angelic voice, with its four-octave range, to several generations of stars, from Madhubala in the horror classic “Mahal” (1949) and the historical epic “Mughal-e-Azam” (1960) to Hema Malini in the crime comedy “Dream Girl” (1977) to Madhuri Dixit and Karisma Kapoor in the romantic drama “Dil To Pagal Hai” (1997). In “Dil To Pagal Hai,” her recognizable voice emanates from both actresses, sometimes in the same scene, but this double duty isn’t distracting. With thousands of songs to her name, she was as common to Indian audiences as close-ups and scene transitions, accepted as a crucial element of cinematic language.Four of her most successful films are available to stream. Given the breadth of her career, they effectively double as a highlight reel for the history of Hindi cinema. An introduction to its riches would be nearly impossible without her.‘Awaara’ (1951)Stream it on MUBI; buy or rent it on Amazon Prime.Raj Kapoor’s “Awaara” straddles the line between art house and blockbuster. It was both a Grand Prix nominee at the Cannes Film Festival and an enormous financial success, a huge hit not only in India, but also in China and the Soviet Union.A false-imprisonment story with social reform on its mind, “Awaara” cemented Hindi cinema’s lasting theme of romance across economic lines, told here through Kapoor’s trenchant mix of gritty melodrama and lavish musical scenes. Mangeshkar, who provides the singing voice for the actress Nargis, captures the giddy excitement of new love in “Jab Se Balam Ghar Aaye” (“Ever Since My Beloved Returned”), which she deepens into intoxicating passion in “Dam Bhar Jo Udhar Munh Phere” (“If You Turn Away for a Moment”), an intimate duet with the renowned singer Mukesh.Mangeshkar’s vocals are just as suited to the story’s dreamlike turn in “Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi” (“My Stranger Came Home”), in which she projects an operatic longing. The film runs the stylistic gamut, and her dynamic voice aids in its transformations.‘Sholay’ (1975)Buy or rent it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube.Ramesh Sippy’s musical “western” “Sholay” had a fabled theatrical run of nearly six years. Its box office success is partially owed to its musical set pieces composed by R.D. Burman.“Holi Ke Din” (“On the Day of Holi”), a colorful explosion set during the Hindu spring festival, is both a celebratory respite between violent action scenes and a romantic tête-à-tête between the roguish Veeru (Dharmendra), whose singing is voiced by Kishore Kumar, and the feisty Basanti (Hema Malini), voiced by Mangeshkar. Basanti struck a chord with audiences not only for her fast-talking bravado, but also for a memorable act of sacrifice: To save Veeru from a callous bandit, she agrees, in an act of heroism distinct to the Indian musical, to dance on broken glass in “Haa Jab Tak Hai Jaan” (“As Long As I Live”), which Mangeshkar sings lovingly and fearlessly.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More