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      Review: Sounds and Styles Playfully Collide in ‘Only an Octave Apart’

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      This show brings together two convention-inverting artists: the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond and the opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo.“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be normal?” Justin Vivian Bond, the doyenne of downtown cabaret, asks the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo a few songs into their show, “Only an Octave Apart,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.The gag, of course, is that both Bond and Costanzo — whose pristine and ethereal voice has been heard at venues like the Metropolitan Opera and the Palace of Versailles — are utterly singular artists.Bond, 58, is a veteran and pioneer of alternative live performance, polished in appearance but satisfyingly rough in voice and manner, a diva whose response to having seen it all is both a yawn and a wink. Costanzo, 39, who will return to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Met this season, has demonstrated a voracious appetite for mashing up disciplines. Perhaps that is in response to the limited countertenor repertoire, “music written before 1750 or after 1950,” as he has said.Their teaming up came about by chance and circumstance, they banter in “Only an Octave Apart.” Costanzo recalls seeing one of Bond’s shows at Joe’s Pub and professing instant fandom; Bond remembers thinking Costanzo was hot. They became fast friends, and their relationship led to the St. Ann’s performance, which takes its name from a TV special the soprano Beverly Sills and the actress Carol Burnett recorded at the Met in 1976, in a campy meeting of so-called high and low culture.Conceived with and directed by Zack Winokur, “Only an Octave Apart” feels like something between “Honey, I Shrunk the Opera” and oversized cabaret. Or an operatic highlight reel wedged into a freewheeling stage revue. Or an improvised set of concept singles. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. The uneasiness of its hybrid form is part of the point, and reflective of its stars’ convention-inverting talents.Costanzo, left, and Bond in the show, which teases out the obvious humor and dissonant beauty in their sounds.Nina WesterveltA ventriloquist-style number inspired by “Singin’ in the Rain,” for example, plays off their bucking of gendered expectations: Costanzo sings from behind the curtain while Bond lip-syncs, aligning his countertenor with Bond’s high-feminine presentation. Then they switch. (“Act butcher!” Bond barks.)The show finds both obvious humor and a dissonant beauty in combining sounds. Under Thomas Bartlett’s brilliantly agile music direction, nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats. The stars’ voices at times collide to strange, glorious effect (as in a languid take on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March”); or they playfully intersect in ways that throw their differences into sharp relief.Bond thrills most in haunting ballads that animate the eerie exigencies of isolation (“Me and My Shadow”) and the melancholy in holding onto hope (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). Cutting a glamorous figure beneath worshipful lighting by John Torres, Bond issues an enchanting warble, its gravelly depths echoing with comfortable wisdom.Costanzo also dazzles in solos that showcase his rich yet delicate voice, which glints and swoops like intricately painted blown glass. Before performing Lizst’s arresting art song “Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,” Costanzo explains that it’s about despair, from poetry that Goethe is said to have carved into stone as he died alone.If the show speaks to the moment, it does not seem by design. The organizing principle of non sequiturs (“We’ve sung about flowers and water, now how about leaves?”) is charming to a point, though ultimately comes at the expense of assurance and momentum.Bond, a seasoned stage personality, is at ease riffing off the cuff and ribbing an insider crowd — but feels rather far away peering over the nine-piece orchestra, with a hand shielding the glare. Costanzo’s element is vocal storytelling; he’s less at ease, however, as a co-host, even though he’s clearly game.Their self-mythologizing repartee (an avant-garde legend and an opera star walk into a bar …) keeps the audience at a guarded remove, while the songs yearn for connection. It’s a paradox starkly rendered in fabric by the first of Jonathan Anderson’s costumes, velvety-soft, floor-length gowns that jut out at harsh angles, like front-turned bustles whose bell curves have been replaced by blunt machetes.Bond and Costanzo are extraordinary artists, though it’s not until the night is nearly over that they allow us to see them as vulnerable ones, too. “Only an Octave Apart” was meant to be a live show, then an album; the pandemic forced them to work in reverse. They poured themselves into creating this odd and beguiling record, they say, over the worst of the past year.Now onstage, they seem electrified, their nerves raw and frayed, dazed to be in communion again — in other words, more like the rest of us than they’d dare to let on.Only an Octave ApartThrough Oct. 3 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 90 minutes. More

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      The Score of Final Fantasy Gets Its Due at the Concert Hall

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      The beloved music for this video game and others have been covered on YouTube for years. Now some are performed at classical music’s grandest venues.LONDON — At a recent concert here, the bows of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra rose and fell like the mighty sword of Sephiroth, the silver-haired villain of Final Fantasy VII. Onstage, a 32-person choir thundered the antagonist’s name: “Sephiroth!”The audience in the 19th-century theater burst into applause when it recognized the opening notes of “One-Winged Angel,” a battle theme from the game that merges Latin opera, influences from Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and caustic rock music.Almost 6,000 people of all ages attended this Final Fantasy VII Remake concert at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, which showcased the soundtrack to the seventh installment of the hugely popular Japanese video game.Aine McColgan dressed in cosplay for the concert.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesCharlotte Ball as the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesA group of concert goers dressed as Final Fantasy VII characters, including Rufus Shinra, Cloud Strife and Scarlet.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAt the concert, the two worlds of gaming and classical music merged, and while some concertgoers wore suits and bow ties, others dressed in cosplay as their favorite characters from the game.Charlotte Ball, 27, attended the evening dressed as the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife, an ex-soldier and mercenary. She spent hours laboriously researching and designing her costume, a sleeveless turtleneck with embroidered brown braces, one shoulder of armor made from foam, and a short-haired blond wig that could easily belong to a member of BTS.“Whenever I hear its music, it brings me back to when I was a kid,” Ball said of the game. “It’s a homage to my childhood.”The audience burst into applause when it recognized the opening notes of “One-Winged Angel,” a battle theme from Final Fantasy.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesFinal Fantasy VII was released in 1997 on PlayStation, and has now been bought more than 11 million times across all major platforms. The enormous popularity of its electronically synthesized score by Nobuo Uematsu evidences the huge impact video game music can have.The Final Fantasy games have an interactive, role-player format, which immerses gamers in the journeys of its heroic protagonists. These journeys are interwoven with music throughout, like a film score. As a result, “you do not just watch a game. You play it, you feel it, you embody it,” said Melanie Fritsch, a professor in media and cultural studies at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Sometimes, people start crying when there is a good moment in a game that’s nicely implemented with the music.”Because of this emotional connection, the influence of these scores extends far beyond the games themselves. Since 2007, there have been more than 200 official Final Fantasy concerts across 20 countries, according to Square Enix, the company behind the game.At the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony this summer, athletes marched to songs from popular games including Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy, music described by its organizers as “a quintessential part of Japanese culture that is loved around the world.”Uematsu, now 62, single-handedly composed the first nine installments of Final Fantasy scores, creating music that remains a nostalgic rabbit-hole for many fans. A self-described musical omnivore without formal musical training, Uematsu’s work draws on influences from an eclectic mix of progressive rock, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Celtic and classical music.But video game scores have often been dismissed by devotees of mainstream classical music. Even in Japan, the birthplace of modern video game music, “up until after the millennium, it was regarded as a lesser type of music,” said Junya Nakano, 50, the co-composer of the Final Fantasy X soundtrack.Yoko Shimomura, a prolific video game composer.Osamu NakamuraNobuo Uematsu, who single-handedly composed the first nine installments of Final Fantasy scores.David Wolff-Patrick/Redferns, via Getty Images“There are some melodies I composed almost 30 years ago I’ve almost forgotten,” the composer Junya Nakano said. “But fans are still playing them.”Kosuke Okahara for The New York TimesGrowing up as a video game fan who also had classical music training, Nakano aspired to join the early generation of game composers, like Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama.For the tenth installment of Final Fantasy, Nakano worked with Uematsu on the game’s score. Released in 2001, it was the first game in the franchise to use voice actors for its characters. The challenge for Nakano was to compose the music, along with Uematsu and Masashi Hamauzu, with only a “very rough outline” of the narrative for each movie scene. “We really had to create music based on our imagination,” Nakano said. Along with its sequel, Final Fantasy X sold more than 14 million copies.Writing video game scores isn’t always respected by those in the classical music fields. After majoring in piano at the Osaka College of Music, Yoko Shimomura, 53, applied for a job as a video game composer, a career path that her professors discouraged, she said.“Adults in my generation back then had little awareness about game music,” Shimomura said in a video interview. “So they had no concept to compare it to whatsoever.”But Shimomura went on to become one of the most prolific female video game composers in the world. Her magnum opus is the eclectic score for Kingdom Hearts, first released in 2002, which combines her signature piano, opera and opening music sung by the Japanese American singer, Hikaru Utada.Outside of Japan, the “hegemonic thinking” that elevated classical music at the expense of video game compositions has also persisted, according to Fritsch, the media and cultural studies professor.“There is so much music out there in the world that is not composed by white males with wigs. And it’s good music,” said Fritsch, who also works in ludomusicology, a nascent field of academic research dedicated to the study of video game music.Since 2007, there have been more than 200 official Final Fantasy concerts across 20 countries.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe first installment of Final Fantasy, released in 1987, used technology that initially meant the music was limited to a handful of electronic sounds. As the technology of the game systems evolved, the music metamorphosed with it. The arrival of Final Fantasy VIII in 1999 allowed Uematsu to use recordings from a live orchestra and choir for the first time. “The fans were always aware of the quality of music,” Nakano said.Online, those fans are now giving the music new life. Previously, illegal MP3 downloads, expensive CD imports from Japan and sheet music were the only way video-game-music enthusiasts could replay their favorite songs. Now, a community of fans post videos to YouTube of covers, tutorials and their own compositions, providing a way into the often inaccessible world of classical music.“There are some melodies I composed almost 30 years ago I’ve almost forgotten,” Nakano said, “But fans are still playing them.”For 18 years, Kyle Landry has created piano arrangements of music from various anime, video games and movies on YouTube, gaining more than 700,000 followers. Shimomura’s music, and Uematsu’s in particular, have been gold mines of inspiration.“Nobuo Uematsu’s compositions have been touching my life since 2003, and contributed much inspiration for me over the years,” said Landry.Among the most prolific cover artists is the mysterious “Zohar002,” a Japanese pianist whose covers of music from Chrono Trigger — a 1995 RPG game considered the greatest of the 16-bit era — enticed a huge following on YouTube from 2007, until the account was mysteriously removed, sparking mournful odes to Zohar002’s brilliance, and rumors that they were in fact the game’s composer, Yasunori Mitsuda.“I never dreamed such a great variation would be created by so many fans,” Shimomura said of the online renditions, adding that some fan compositions were better than the originals. “It’s a really great honor for me to say that people love my music.”Hisako Ueno contributed reporting. More

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      Qué pasa cuando una minivan se transforma en una máquina musical

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      En una bochornosa tarde de agosto en Randalls Island, me encontraba en un campo de Honda Odysseys y CR-Vs, carros equipados con filas de tweeters y subwoofers: altavoces especializados de altas frecuencias y de subgraves. Las bocinas estaban colocadas en los techos de los automóviles o alineados en los maleteros de los vehículos como artillería […] More

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      A Record Store Obsession That's Adventurous and Soothing

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      ‘The trick to crate digging is to simply go at it: Dive into the sections, flip through the jackets and trust your gut.’I was stuck trying to write in my Brooklyn apartment, overthinking a sentence as usual.In these moments I turn to my records.For inspiration, I tend to need music from some faraway place and time. Perhaps an underground spiritual jazz reissue from 1974 or an Afro-disco record from ’80. Something with noticeable ringwear and audible crackles. Maybe even a pop or two. I’ve learned that this is the music that people come back to decades later. These are the songs you hear in a bar or a film and try to Shazam before the final note fades.On this day I also needed some air, so that meant walking 15 minutes to Head Sounds Records in Fort Greene to plow through the stacks. I went right for the jazz section, and that’s when I saw it: Pharoah Sanders, “Live at the East,” released on Impulse! Records in 1972 — nine years before I was born. I had to snatch it before some other crate digger scooped it up.Pharoah did the trick. The hypnotic swing of the opening track, “Healing Song,” was the meditative balm I needed to quell my writer’s block.But it’s not just the music that heals; the practice of discovering it to begin with, especially when it’s on vinyl, works wonders, too. Whenever life gets heavy, I go to the record store.The fact that shops like Head Sounds and Academy Records Annex in Greenpoint have survived the pandemic and, in some cases, are even thriving, speaks to the heart of New York City, a place that accepted me with no strings attached.“A turntable is there for you to sample the work,” Mr. Moore writes. “But the trick to crate digging is to simply go at it.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesI’m from Landover, Md., a small town outside Washington, which also counts the comedian Martin Lawrence, the boxing legend “Sugar” Ray Leonard and the basketball great Len Bias as natives. I grew up in a musical family with a mother who played all kinds of pop, funk and soul around the house; a grandmother who loved traditional gospel; and aunts, siblings and cousins who embraced everything: a homegrown strain of funk called go-go, rap groups that were new at the time like De La Soul and N.W.A., R&B luminaries like Al Green and Marvin Gaye, and pop superstars like Madonna and David Bowie.My cousin Eric, a D.J., had an ear for buzzing underground musicians. In the late 1980s, fresh off a trip to California, he told us about a guy named MC Hammer who was making noise in the Bay Area. Around 1994, he popped in a cassette of this rapper from Chicago named Common Sense. By the time he had shortened his name to Common, his star was rising in underground hip-hop.Indirectly, Eric and the rest of my family were teaching me the concept of crate digging. While it was fine to like what I heard on the radio, there was less-heralded talent that deserved the same attention. I walked that perspective through high school and into my career as a music journalist, author, editor and curator.Long before I moved here in 2016, I’d hop buses to New York City to dig for records. It seemed there weren’t that many shops to choose from. It was the mid-2000s, music streaming was starting its domination of the industry, and many mom-and-pops were being forced to close.“Record stores as we know them are dying,” Josh Madell, co-owner of Other Music in Downtown Manhattan, told The New York Times in 2008. “On the other hand, there is still a space in the culture for what a record store does, being a hub of the music community and a place to find out about new music.”Mr. Madell, whose store eventually closed in 2016, was onto something. Just as record stores were failing, vinyl also started to make a curious comeback. The Recording Industry Association of America found that the shipment of LPs jumped more than 36 percent between 2006 and 2007. There was no clear-cut answer for the resurgence. Fellow heads will tell you there’s nothing like analog sound. While digital music sounds cleaner, vinyl sounds warmer and fills the room. There’s also nothing like poring over the album jacket and diving into the liner notes. It’s a time capsule.When New York City became the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, local record store owners found themselves in familiar territory: Even though vinyl sales had surpassed CD sales last year for the first time since the ’80s, would the record shops, along with many of the city’s other indie storefronts, survive? Turntable Lab, a niche record shop in Manhattan’s East Village, closed its doors that year to focus on online sales. Other stores like Academy and Limited to One, also in the East Village, managed to keep their leases, but pivoted to online sales to make ends meet.Nowadays, crate digging is done as much online as it is off. A stroll through the virtual music emporium Bandcamp can unearth everything from South African boogie to forgotten ambient. But clicking around doesn’t replace the act of visiting your favorite record store and discovering a rare find that either you’d been looking for, or didn’t know you needed until you saw the cover. Every place is different: Where Head Sounds is in the back of a barber shop, Academy is a vast spot with a bit more dust on the album jackets.A new shop, Legacy Records, just opened on Water Street in Dumbo. I visited a few weeks back and landed an original copy of the Fugees’ 1996 album “The Score.”Store employees tend to let you do your thing. A turntable is there for you to sample the work, and of course they’re around to answer whatever questions arise. But the trick to crate digging is to simply go at it: Dive into the sections, flip through the jackets and trust your gut. More often than not, you can judge the music by its cover (if a band from the ’70s had the word “Ensemble” in its name, the album is probably great).In a time where we’re all trying to navigate space and distance (or just being in public again), the idea is to foster community around music, even if the spirit of competition is still there. I wanted to get the Pharoah album before anyone else got it. That I could be the one talking about it was an incentive.For me, crate digging is preservation. It takes me back to my childhood in Landover, to playing my cousin’s EPMD albums when he wasn’t looking, and dropping the needle on De La’s “3 Feet High and Rising” at my aunt’s house when heads were still trying to fathom the group’s psychedelic blend of hip-hop (they’re also the subject of my next book). Buying records to share with the world is what I’m supposed to do. I’m just paying it forward like my family taught me.Marcus J. Moore is the author of “The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.” More

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      María Mendiola, Half of a Chart-Topping Disco Duo, Dies at 69

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      “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” which she and a fellow ballet dancer recorded under the name Baccara, became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s.MADRID — María Mendiola, a member of the Spanish duo Baccara, whose “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s, died here on Sept. 11. She was 69.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her family. They did not give the exact cause, but said that she had been dealing with a blood deficiency for two decades.Baccara, the duo of Ms. Mendiola and Mayte Mateos, achieved instant fame with “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” the first song they ever recorded, which was released in 1977 and went on to become the most successful disco song by a female duo. It sold about 18 million copies worldwide and topped the charts in Britain, Japan and several other countries.Ms. Mendiola and Ms. Mateos were dancers with the company of Spain’s national television broadcaster when they met. At the suggestion of Ms. Mendiola, who thought that their careers would last longer if they switched to singing, they left to form their own act, originally called Venus, which began performing in 1976. Their debut, at a club in Zaragoza, was short-lived: The management fired them for being “too elegant” — another way of saying that they refused to do lap dances for the club’s patrons.The duo appeared for the first time on television in 1977. Their breakthrough came that same year following a chance encounter with Leon Deane of RCA Records, who saw them perform in a hotel while he was on vacation in the Canary Islands and suggested that they visit RCA’s recording studios in Hamburg.RCA agreed to produce Baccara’s first album and included “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” an English-language song whose rights the label already owned, although it had not yet assigned it to any of its artists.Baccara spent four years with RCA and released four albums, including several other songs that ranked high on the international charts, although none matched the success of their first hit. The duo also toured worldwide, including in the Soviet Union. In performance, Ms. Mendiola always dressed in white and Ms. Mateos in black.But the two singers had a major fallout in 1980 over who should be the lead voice on their song “Sleepy Time Toy.” Ms. Mendiola filed a lawsuit to block the song, which had just been released and had to be withdrawn from the market.The singers continued their feud and stopped talking to each other, and the composer of most of their songs, Rolf Soja, decided to quit working with them. In 1981, Baccara released their final album with RCA, “Bad Boys”; coming at a time when the popularity of disco music was starting to wane, it was not a big success. RCA did not renew Baccara’s recording contract, and the two singers formalized their split.María Eugenia Martínez Mendiola was born on April 4, 1952, in Madrid. Her mother, Lola Mendiola, was a homemaker; her father, Emilio Martínez, was a police official at the Madrid airport.Ms. Mendiola studied at an Italian school in Madrid and trained to be a ballet dancer at the national school there before joining the Spanish state broadcaster’s dance troupe.Even though both singers were Spanish, Baccara represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision song contest, with a song about a holiday romance called “Parlez-Vous Français?” (Ms. Mendiola spoke five languages, including French.) Luxembourg’s entry finished seventh in the competition.After Baccara broke up, the two singers pursued separate careers. In 1981, Ms. Mendiola formed another duo, New Baccara, with another former ballet dancer, Marisa Pérez. While they never came close to matching the fame of the original Baccara, one of their songs, “Call Me Up,” was a hit in Spain in 1987 and also did well in Germany.Ms. Pérez ended her career in 2008 because of an illness, and a niece, Laura Mendiola, replaced her as Ms. Mendiola’s partner. In 2010, Ms. Mendiola formed a final partnership — Baccara Featuring María Mendiola — with another singer, Cristina Sevilla, who had previously collaborated for six years with Ms. Mateos. Their most recent single, “Gimme Your Love,” was released in 2018.Ms. Sevilla said that she had planned to continue with Ms. Mendiola, but that the pandemic had put their most recent concert projects on hold.“María was a powerful woman, who was always laughing even in the difficult moments,” Ms. Sevilla said. “Apart from being my partner, she was my real friend.”Ms. Mendiola is survived by a son, Jimmy Lim, and three grandchildren.“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” had an unexpected revival, thanks to a Scottish soccer player, Andrew Considine, who had danced to the song at his bachelor party. Last year, a video of him and other players dancing to the song went viral, which inspired a cover version of the song by a Glasgow rock band, the Fratellis. The song also became an unofficial soccer anthem in Scotland, belted out by fans in the stadium during the recent European championships.While Scotland and soccer put Baccara back in the spotlight, Ms. Mendiola told the British news media that she wasn’t impressed by the Scottish version of the chart-topping song. It was, she said, “not my cup of tea.” More

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      Listen to the Essential Terence Blanchard

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      Spike Lee scores, daring jazz: Here are highlights from the varied career of the composer of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera.Like Wayne Shorter — to whom his newest album, “Absence,” is dedicated — Terence Blanchard is the rare jazz star whose renown as a composer almost overshadows his reputation as a daring and stylish improviser. Almost.Blanchard, whose opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, rose as a jazz phenom in the early 1980s, taking over the trumpet chair in Art Blakey’s fabled Jazz Messengers after Wynton Marsalis left. Barely 20, he was a double threat even then: writing compositions of coiled energy and smartly woven rhythmic interplay, and improvising fiercely, cutting sharp turns and slipping into sly glissandos.He soon became Spike Lee’s musical other half, a relationship that helped to make film scoring into a primary vocation. And in the 21st century, he’s established himself as one of jazz’s most respected educators and spokesmen. Here are a few highlights from his discography.‘Ninth Ward Strut’ (1988)Throughout much of the 1980s, Blanchard led a band along with the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison — a fellow 20-something New Orleans native and Jazz Messenger — that became one of the standard-bearing groups of jazz’s Young Lions movement. In “Ninth Ward Strut,” Blanchard pays tribute to his hometown’s signature sound with a swinging second-line rhythmic underpinning, while pushing his own identity as a composer. The track is rhythmically suspenseful and harmonically jagged in a way that would become characteristic.‘The Nation’ (1992)Spike Lee tapped Blanchard to record the trumpet parts for Denzel Washington’s character in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), including on the film’s title tune, which became a kind of Young Lions-era classic. Lee soon began asking Blanchard to write scores — and he hasn’t stopped. “Malcolm X” (1992) was one of the first films Blanchard did, exploring an expanded palette of choral harmonies, strings and brass. He rearranged the music for jazz sextet soon after, and recorded it as “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite,” a restless and ambitious album for Columbia Records.‘A Child With the Blues’ (1997)Blanchard recorded this track with the neo-soul doyenne Erykah Badu for the soundtrack to “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” librettist Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 film “Eve’s Bayou.” Bantering with Badu, he pulls sassy glissandos from the horn and pushes her into pitter-patter rhythmic exchanges. (It later reappeared on a deluxe edition of the album “Baduizm.”)‘Dear Mom’ (2007)After scoring “When the Levees Broke,” Lee’s 2006 documentary about Hurricane Katrina, Blanchard adapted his compositions into a suite, as he had with the “Malcolm X” music. He released the results as “A Tale of God’s Will” the following year.Katrina was deeply personal for Blanchard, whose mother lost her home in the storm. Adoration and enervation course together on “Dear Mom,” as Blanchard plays a pas de deux with a large string section. The album won Blanchard the second of his five Grammys, for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.‘Can Anyone Hear Me’ (2018)For years, Blanchard has put a premium on working with younger musicians, and in his current quintet, the E-Collective, he’s assembled a wrecking crew of cutting-edge improvisers who regularly reimagine how jazz-rock fusion might work. On “Can Anyone Hear Me,” from a recent live album, Blanchard’s horn is encased in an electric bodysuit of distortion and effects, but the precision and counter-intuition of his soloing shines through. More

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      Carmen Balthrop, Soprano Known for Joplin Opera Role, Dies at 73

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      After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More

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      Bicycle Diaries: Cruising With the ‘American Utopia’ Family

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      Our intrepid reporter and photographer biked through Queens with David Byrne and some of his castmates ahead of their return to Broadway. Then the skies opened up.On a dock in Queens, David Byrne’s musical bike gang was gearing up to go.“Are we ready?” Byrne called.It was a Saturday in late August, and the gang — three percussionists, a guitarist, a bassist and me, along with a daredevil photographer and lighting assistant — were sitting astride bicycles as Byrne, our fearless two-wheeled leader, outlined the plan.He wore a brimmed, pith-style helmet and a tour guide’s relaxed confidence: He’d done this route before, from Astoria to Flushing. The destination was the Queens Night Market, a paradise of global food stalls at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. He’d already been talking up a ceviche stand and the all-women samba drumline he’d seen the last time he’d pedaled through.The market, in its diversity, “is really extraordinary,” he said — the kind of endeavor that seems like an antidote to our current social divisiveness. “In that context, you really go, ‘OK, this is not impossible, we can do this.’” It’s a message of community-as-uplift that Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman, has been big on recently, with his hit theatrical concert “American Utopia,” a mostly joyous pilgrimage through his music. Even the act of extreme weather that ultimately derailed our ride didn’t curb his ability to find revelation locally.From left, the percussionists Tim Keiper, Jacquelene Acevedo and Daniel Freedman. “We would go on these adventures,” Acevedo said of the rides with Byrne. “It’s great. You come back six hours later, exhausted, like, ‘Where did I go?’”Byrne is, of course, a devoted cyclist: He’s written a book about it, and even designed bike racks; last week, he took an e-bike to the Met Gala (so he wouldn’t get sweaty!) and checked his helmet at the door. In the Before Times, I could sometimes clock the velocity and verve of my nightlife by how frequently I intersected with him speeding to some event along the Williamsburg waterfront bike path. He was easy to spot, often dressed in somehow still-pristine white — as he was on this evening, stepping off the East River ferry in white pants, a blue guayabera shirt and brown fisherman sandals. His whole crew, castmates from “American Utopia,” had been onboard, too.On the dock, he gave a few general instructions — hang a left at the big brick building, “go down for, like, a couple miles; should I say when our next turn is? Sixty-first, we make a right” — and then we peeled off. In interchanging pairs or spread out, our expedition took up half a city block. “Riding in New York is — hoo-hoo!” trilled Angie Swan, the guitarist, who had moved here from Milwaukee to work with Byrne and was now dodging through a crowded bike lane.From left, the guitarist Angie Swan, Byrne, Freedman, Keiper and the bassist Bobby Wooten III. The band members got matching folding bikes during their tour.It was the weekend before rehearsals began for the Broadway return of “American Utopia.” But the cast had already been convening throughout the pandemic for these miles-long, leisurely (or not) bike rides around town, led by Byrne, who is 69 and has the stamina of an athlete and the curiosity of a cultural omnivore. Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island: He traversed the city a couple of times a week at least, trailing bandmates alongside him.“That kind of pioneering spirit that he has in music is the same as he has in his bike rides,” Jacquelene Acevedo, a percussionist and Toronto transplant who lives in Manhattan, said as we pedaled along, passing beneath the rumbling train and only-in-Queens intersections like the corner of 31st Avenue and 31st Street. She said she got to know the city on these socially distanced rides. “We would go on these adventures,” she said. “It’s great. You come back six hours later, exhausted, like, ‘Where did I go?’”From left, Freedman, Byrne and Swan. They landed in Flushing Meadows Corona Park with the rest of the group as the sun was setting.That Saturday, we pulsed through Jackson Heights toward Corona — two neighborhoods, Byrne observed later, that had been hit hard, early on, by the coronavirus — and saw the city’s rhythms change. We spun through families barbecuing on pedestrian blocks and dinged our bells along to the streetside cumbia and reggaeton. It was, in a word, glorious.We might’ve blown a few stoplights, too, and caused some double-takes as Cole Wilson, the photographer, and his assistant, Bryan Banducci, cycled ahead of the group but peered backward to get their shot. Byrne was always in the lead; as soon as traffic disappeared, he removed his helmet, revealing his signature silver coif.By the time we landed in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the sun was setting. Byrne led us to his ceviche spot. Moments later, the skies opened up: Tropical Storm Henri, arriving far earlier than the forecast predicted. We were quickly drenched. So, so drenched.A night that was meant to be a dreamy celebration of this multicultural city and its serendipitous connections, experienced from atop a bike seat, wound up in a (very) soggy group subway ride home. But even that became a moment for Byrnian wonder, thanks to a subway preacher and her acolytes, and an unexpected bit of ecstatic dance — the civic and the divine aboard the 7 train. Byrne clocked it all, surrounded by his bikemates.This group of musicians had toured with “American Utopia” when it was a more traditional rock concert a few years ago, and their matching bikes — a folding model made by Tern — came along then, too. The bikes had their own compartment on the tour bus: “Even when we went overseas, the bikes would come,” said Tim Keiper, a drummer. They would sometimes ride 25 miles before soundcheck, added Daniel Freedman, another drummer. (There are more than four dozen percussion instruments in the show.) “David would find the cool thing,” Freedman said, “and be like, there’s a restaurant or a museum or something bizarre, funny — ‘Cumming, Iowa! We’ve got to go!’”For Byrne, the rides kept him “sane on the road,” he told me later, “and inspired and stimulated.”It also gave his cast and crew a connection that was rare among performers. The original run of “American Utopia” ended in February 2020, just before the coronavirus shut down the city’s live performance spaces. During lockdown, Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, saw the “American Utopia” crew a lot more than anybody else, she said. The cast’s emotional closeness onstage? “It’s not acted.”“Bike riding is a nice metaphor,” she added, “because there’s a kinship. There’s a group moving together, but everybody’s in their own space. But there is a unison. It’s a dance, for sure.”Tropical Storm Henri arrived earlier than forecasted. But the group did manage to finally try the ceviche and some of the other fare at the market.Days after drying out from the Queens ride, the group gathered for rehearsals. “American Utopia” is now playing at the St. James Theater, a bigger Broadway venue than its previous home, the Hudson. Parson, a downtown choreographer known for her attention to form and multimedia detail, was thrilled to learn that the stage is a rectangle, as she’d originally envisioned for the piece. “To me, a square shape is a warm shape that faces in, because there’s symmetry on the sides,” she explained. “A rectangular shape implies infinity, because it reaches out on the sides. They’re both beautiful. This show, and David, to me, I associate with a rectangle.”So Parson polished the choreography, much of which is done by the musicians while they’re playing. (Chris Giarmo and Tendayi Kuumba, standouts onstage and in Spike Lee’s filmed version of the show, are the main dancers.) In one rehearsal, Parson directed Byrne to amplify a moment by turning to face his castmates, giving an extra beat of connection there — the pandemic had underscored a theme of the show, “that we’re not atomized entities,” Byrne said. “Being together with other people is such a big part of what we are as individuals.”As a collaborator, Byrne leads with praise. Watching his percussion circle, he danced along with his very core. “I love the first half where you change up the groove, but it still keeps all the momentum,” he told them.In Byrne’s recent eclectic career, “American Utopia,” which will receive a special Tony Award at this Sunday’s ceremony, has taken up a bigger chunk than other projects. It may be because it makes him happier. “It’s a very moving show to do,” he said, “and a lot of fun” — not least because audiences shimmy with abandon a few songs in.And it pulls from the panoply of Byrne’s interests. There’s neuroscience, civic history, and Brazilian, African and Latin instrumentation. The visual and movement references span the world: the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer; ’70s Japanese movies; a Thai king’s coronation; and, after our Queens odyssey, a scene from the 7 train, when a woman pulled out a mic and an amp, plugged in and began proselytizing.Byrne, unrecognized beneath his mask, stood near her, holding his bike. Across the way, her companion suddenly began doing impassioned hand motions that were reminiscent of some “American Utopia” moves, waving and snapping her wrists around her face. “Annie-B should see this!” Byrne said, almost to himself. Someone taped a snippet, and he sent it off to her to check out.“There are no words to describe how adventurous David is,” Parson said. “He always finds the most profound way to interact with a place with his bicycle, and he always invites others, graciously, to join in.” More