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      Book Review: ‘Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,’ by Staci Robinson

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      Access to the late rapper’s journals gives Staci Robinson’s authorized biography a rare intimacy, without delving deeply into his music.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography, by Staci RobinsonLast month, after 27 years, a suspect was charged in the murder of Tupac Shakur. A firecracker and crusader as sharp as he was brusque, Tupac reached megastar status in 1996, when his fourth studio album, “All Eyez on Me,” went five times platinum. Often hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was a magnet for controversy during his life, and became a martyr for hip-hop militance after his death.Though anticipated by those familiar with the case, the arrest may provide long-awaited closure that aptly comes in conjunction with Staci Robinson’s poignant “Tupac Shakur.”The Tupac story has been told many times over, but this is the only authorized biography, meaning Robinson was granted nearly unprecedented access to the Shakur family and to Tupac’s many journals and notebooks. Along with scores of interviews, the book is stuffed with photocopies of the rapper’s personal writings. As if tucked between the pages, these hand-scrawled poems, raps and musings provide windows into his mind.For Robinson, this is a personal undertaking. She and Tupac were in the same high school social circle in Northern California, and over time she fielded calls to work on writing projects for him. With Shakur’s aunt she collaborated on “Tupac Remembered,” a 2008 collection of interviews, and was an executive producer on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” the 2023 docuseries about the rapper and his mother.Robinson writes in an introduction that she took up the biography at Afeni’s request in 1999, but that the project was put “on hold” a few weeks after she submitted the manuscript. Called on decades later to complete the work, Robinson spends its pages advocating not only for Tupac’s integrity, but for the spirit of Black resistance he embodied.“He wanted to relay stories that needed to be told,” she writes. “It was time to tell the truth about America’s history, about its dark past and especially about the oppression and disparities that were plaguing communities.”“Tupac Shakur” is a touching, empathetic portrait of a friend. Even familiar stories achieve new intimacy at closer range. And small moments help clarify longstanding narratives, coloring in the outlines of this well-known tale of the actor-rapper-activist who died at 25. The book attempts to contextualize the sadness and paranoia beneath the charisma; throughout his life, we learn, “van Gogh would come to be a touchstone for Tupac.”As in “Dear Mama,” Robinson’s biography sees the rapper’s legacy as inextricable from his mother’s, and the book begins not with Tupac, but with Afeni — her exposure to racism in the Jim Crow South, her arrest in New York as a member of the Black Panthers and her standing trial while pregnant.Afeni, we are told, was the bedrock of Tupac’s moral mission. “Ingrained from birth and into his upbringing were both Afeni’s fears and her dreams for her son — the expectation that he would carry on her dedication to the Black community and the will to help others achieve freedom from oppression,” Robinson writes.The book posits that Tupac inherited an antagonistic relationship with the police from the Shakurs — his mother, her first husband, Lumumba, and Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu. Yet it astutely chronicles his life as a microcosm of the ongoing Black American struggle. Robinson often draws direct parallels between Tupac’s creative life and his run-ins with law enforcement. She notes that he was assaulted by Oakland police officers only weeks after shooting the video for “Trapped,” a diatribe against police brutality; filming on the 1993 movie “Poetic Justice,” in which he starred, was put on pause during the L.A. riots.Black cultural responses to injustice were early fuel for a sensitive, boisterous would-be artist. We hear of him furiously riding his tricycle around the apartment as Gil Scott-Heron plays on the turntable; he “entered a new realm” portraying 11-year-old Travis Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun” at a Harlem fund-raiser for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.We get what feel like firsthand peeks into his turbulent rise to stardom, too; Robinson recounts how his mother would send Tupac traveling with care packages that included condoms, vitamins, prayer cloths and phone numbers for bail bondsmen.Though there are frequent references to his prolific output, “Tupac Shakur” doesn’t focus much on music, which undersells him as an artistic genius. The book mostly considers his songs as ways to explain his behavior; it is not overly concerned with how they were made or whether they succeeded aesthetically. Lyrics either underscore a caring nature or are vehicles for public controversy.In this way, the narrative plays into a longstanding Tupac binary — the sensitive revolutionary and the hair-trigger thug — though it insinuates the latter was primarily a construction of a sensationalist press. And while offering a valiant defense, Robinson excuses Tupac of many provocations. It spends very little time on his 1994 sexual-abuse conviction, and absolves the rapper in an earlier incident at an outdoor festival that left a 6-year-old boy dead, even though the gun in question was registered to him. It doesn’t even consider that he might be culpable, accidentally or by proxy.Robinson does not stand at a historian’s distance. Her writing radiates admiration, and at times she even speaks on Tupac’s behalf. Even so, this is far from hagiography. At its best, the book feels like a plea to re-examine the world that made Tupac Shakur so angry.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography | By Staci Robinson | 406 pp. | Crown | $35 More

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      Kenneth Force, the ‘Toscanini of Military Marching Bands,’ Dies at 83

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      Captain Force was part of the pomp and ceremony at 10 presidential inaugurations, and for 45 years he taught midshipmen to revere traditional military music.Kenneth Force, who as the leader of the Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band from 1971 to 2016 was one of the nation’s foremost experts in the art of military pomp, died on Oct. 7 in Rye, N.Y. He was 83.A former student of his, Marianne Lepre, said the death, at a long-term nursing facility, was caused by respiratory failure brought on by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Military music arose historically as a means of communicating orders to troops, but it has long since become a ceremonial custom, with trumpet-tooting and drum-rolling tunes like “Hail to the Chief” and “The Red, White and Blue.”A military man might say that Captain Force exerted full-spectrum dominance over this territory.At one time or another, he conducted the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which performs for the president; the band of the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry battalion; the bands, in Britain, of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, Welsh Guards and Royal Marines; and the Dutch Royal Military Band.He performed at 10 presidential inaugurations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s.“It’s not likely anyone is keeping score,” Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in an Our Towns column in 2009, “but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands.”Captain Force at the Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island in 2009. He lived on its grounds for decades.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe earned that distinction principally as director of music at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., on Long Island. His band members were not aspiring musicians; they were midshipmen training to receive Bachelor of Science degrees, U.S. Coast Guard licenses and officers’ commissions. At inaugurations, the student musicians got to play while marching past a presidential reviewing stand.“I always tell the midshipmen that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” ” Captain Force told The Times.At each inauguration, his band blared the classic 19th-century song of the marines, “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”“What we do doesn’t change,” he said. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”Captain Force kept tradition alive in several ways. He rearranged old band tunes for modern instruments — work he compared to repairing antiques — and he composed new political homages, including “First Lady March” and “Presidential Pets March” (which includes barks and meows).Captain Force composed marches of his own, including the “Presidential Pets March,” complete with barks and meows.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe and his band were sought after by organizers of great American events. They played at Miss America pageant parades, atop the Brooklyn Bridge for its 100th anniversary, on the field during World Series, on the courts of the U.S. Open after 9/11, and aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 when it carried World War II veterans to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.In 1989, The Times credited Captain Force with making his band sound like “a giant walking organ.”Kenneth Richard Force was born on March 24, 1940, in Queens, where he grew up, to Alvina and George Force. His father was a banker.Ken got his musical training playing trumpet in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, in Broadway pit bands and in the band of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.His fascination with military music dated to one night in 1959, when he was in the First Army Band, headquartered on Governors Island in New York. His bandmaster instructed the group to play louder than usual, since three British bands were coming to visit. They began blasting away on “Colonel Bogey on Parade.”Over the din, Captain Force clearly heard a British drum major shout, “By the cen-terr! Quick march!”Then a band of Royal Marines appeared in pith helmets, each stomp of their marching feet clearly audible.Captain Force was in awe, he later told The Times. He asked a British band director if he had a manual.“Manual?” the man responded. “It’s 300 years of tradition!”Captain Force received a bandsman’s diploma from the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington in 1958, a bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1964, and a master’s degree from the same institution the next year. He wrote his master’s thesis on British military bands.Captain Force in an undated photo. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age,” he said. United States Merchant Marine AcademyOn one occasion, in the late 1990s, he waged a battle that united his passions for military music history, preservation and teaching.He had long considered “Over There,” George M. Cohan’s ode to the American doughboys of World War I, the second-best patriotic song of the 20th century, behind only Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As it happened, Cohan’s former home, where he had written “Over There,” lay just a few minutes away from the Merchant Marine Academy — but the old mansion was about to be demolished.Captain Force began what Newsday in 1999 called a “zealous campaign” to have Cohan’s home designated a landmark.“If you tear down the house, you’d be tearing down part of the soul of America,” he told The Times the same year.He had the midshipmen play “Over There” in view of people filing into a local landmarks commission hearing, and he inspired his students to show up at meetings to espouse his cause.They saved the property.“Now I can take my kids here someday when I come back for homecoming,” Lester J. Snyder, a senior from Illinois and a midshipman trumpeter, told The Associated Press shortly afterward. “I’ll be able to share this with the next generation, and maybe they will get to know something about the feeling of duty and honor to your country.”Captain Force’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a stepson, John Uribe, and two step-grandchildren. He lived on the grounds of the Merchant Marine Academy for decades and in recent years lived in an apartment across Long Island Sound in Port Chester, N.Y.Captain Force generally did not criticize United States leaders in public. But he did make an exception for Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1977 to abjure the traditional pomp of an inauguration parade by walking along Pennsylvania Avenue rather than riding in a limousine.“I know he didn’t want ruffles and flourishes and ‘Hail to the Chief,’” Captain Force told The Times in 2009. “He said it was too pompous. And the country didn’t like that. People think the president deserves special music.“People like ceremony,” he continued, “and no one does it better than a band. When you lose your ceremony, you lose a lot.” More

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      The 45 King, Who Produced for Jay-Z and Eminem, Dies at 62

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      The 62-year-old Bronx native infused a distinctive jazzy flavor in his beats. He contributed tracks to Queen Latifah’s debut album and produced Eminem’s “Stan,” among other hip-hop classics.The 45 King, the influential New York City hip-hop producer who worked with Queen Latifah, Eminem and Jay-Z, died on Thursday. He was 62.Born Mark Howard James, he took the moniker The 45 King because of his fondness for sampling old, obscure records. His death was announced on social media Thursday afternoon by a fellow hip-hop producer, DJ Premier.Information on the cause or place of death were not immediately available. An inquiry sent to James’s manager was not immediately returned.“His sound was unlike any other from his heavy drums and his horns were so distinct on every production,” DJ Premier wrote, referring to James as DJ Mark The 45 King.James, born on Oct. 16, 1961 in the Bronx, was a pioneer in the 1980s New York hip-hop scene and worked with early rap stars like the Funky 4, according to his website. He was known for his jazzy beats, showcased on his first hit track, the highly sampled “The 900 Number,” released in 1987. He slowed down a saxophone solo, “dropped the results over an irresistibly funky break” and the result exploded, according to AllMusic, adding that the horn line was “forever ingrained in the collective hip-hop psyche.”James worked closely with Queen Latifah, a fellow member of the music crew known as the Flavor Unit. James produced the hit song “Wrath of My Madness” on her debut album “All Hail the Queen” in 1989 and also contributed other tracks.“Thank you for teaching me taking me under your wing, teaching me about this thing called hip-hop, and so much more,” Queen Latifah wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.James also produced Eminem’s “Stan,” released on the 2000 album “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The rap tells the story of a perturbed superfan named “Stan” and is set to a throbbing beat sampling Dido’s 1998 track “Thank you.”“I took a first verse and made into an eight-bar hook for Eminem,” James said in a 2021 interview clip posted to social media by Eminem on Thursday.“Legends are never over,” Eminem wrote on X, formerly Twitter.James’s other hits included Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which sampled the musical “Annie” and a remix of Madonna’s “Keep It Together.”James credited much of his success and production style to the time he spent in the 1980s working for DJ Breakout, a Bronx hip-hop luminary.“I like to say I got lucky,” James said in the 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Unique Access Ent. “I was in the right place at the right time.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

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      A huge new performance space in Manchester, England, opened with a show that trumpets the building’s possibilities, but doesn’t push any boundaries.There was a sense of momentous occasion on Wednesday at the opening of the new Aviva Studios performance space in Manchester, England. Political and cultural figures made sweeping declarations: This was Britain’s most significant cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in London over 20 years ago; the largest government investment in the arts since forever; the most important new theater space in Europe; and a generator of work, well-being and regeneration in Britain’s underserved north.“It’s a big day not just for Manchester, but for the U.K.,” said Lucy Frazer, Britain’s culture secretary, at a news conference several hours before the opening performance of “Free Your Mind,” a large-scale spectacle directed by Danny Boyle that inaugurated the building.The 144,000-square-foot Aviva Studios (named for an insurance company that gave around 35 million pounds, or $43 million, to the project) is the new home of Factory International, the organization that produces the Manchester International Festival. The building was designed with multipurpose and multidisciplinary intent by Ellen van Loon from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, costing “around £240 million,” or $290 million, according to a spokesman for the venue.There is a conventional 1,600-seat theater (“the Hall”) and a 700-foot long, 226-foot high performance space (“the Warehouse”) that can accommodate 5,000 people. The spaces can be used individually, combined or divided to create several distinct, acoustically isolated performance areas.The seats in the theater can be taken out for gigs; the floors can flood and drain; you could hang 100 cars from the ceiling of the Warehouse. “We want people to imagine seemingly impossible things,” said John McGrath, Factory International’s artistic director, during a tour of the building.The massive 144,000-square-foot space hopes to revitalize the arts scene in Manchester.Marco Cappelletti, via OMA and Factory InternationalLiving up to these ambitions in an opening show is a tall order, even for Boyle, the Academy Award-winning film director (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) who masterminded the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. For “Free Your Mind,” he teamed up with the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, the composer Michael “Mikey J.” Asante, the designer Es Devlin and the writer Sabrina Mahfouz to create a show loosely based on the “Matrix” movies, with their prescient themes of artificial intelligence taking over human life.At the news conference, Boyle talked about using “The Matrix” (directed by the Wachowski siblings) and its sequels as a widely available cultural reference, and “Free Your Mind” is mostly interesting as a statement of intent. It’s accessible, fun, visually spectacular and entirely unchallenging. But on the evidence of opening night, the show draws an impressively young, hip and diverse audience.“Free Your Mind” opens in the Hall, with a lecture delivered via an old-fashioned television screen and new-fashioned technology by the mathematician Alan Turing, who developed an early vision of modern computing. There is a quick history of Manchester as the home of the machine, and a question asked early: “Should we be worried that machines could think?”Dancers in trench coats appear, moving with robotic jerkiness and Neo (Corey Owens), the hero of “The Matrix,” emerges from the front row and is confronted by a dark-glasses-wearing, sinister group, before the scene changes to a cluster of faceless figures encased in stretchy white fabric that is attached to the ceiling. As they move in a circle, the tubes of fabric entwine like a maypole; visually arresting and oddly old-fashioned, reminiscent of the choreographer Alwin Nikolais’s experiments with form and fabric in the 1950s and 1960s.The show begins with a monologue delivered by an avatar of the mathematician Alan Turing, which the visual effects company Union VFX created from a photograph.Tristram KentonThe show’s movements are directed by the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy.Tristram KentonThese figures are presumably the humans whose energy is being harvested by an evil artificial intelligence: the truth revealed by the omniscient Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix.” A series of episodes move us through a meeting between Neo and the female warrior Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), confrontations with the police and the machine Agents who guard the Matrix, and the trial of the first robot to kill a human.Sandy’s movement language, drawn from hip-hop and street dance vocabularies, is boldly graphic, and he adeptly moves the 50-dancer cast in crisp, cascading formations, but there is little subtlety or variety either here or in Asante’s serviceable atmosphere-creating score. (The sound system, however, is fab, as is Lucy Carter’s lighting.) The only standout dance moment comes in part two, when Sandy himself, as Morpheus, performs a compelling solo of sweeping, martial arts-inflected motion, legs kicking high as his body arches backward.In the intermission, Matrix-agent figures were suspended around the huge lobby and bar space (rather more effectively Matrix-y than anything onstage), and white rabbit-headed figures danced with audience members. (A reference to the message, “Follow the white rabbit,” that appears on Neo’s computer screen in the movie, but surely also to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” with its lyrics about mind-bending pills.)Part two, in the Warehouse, is more abstract, with Devlin’s spectacular set as the star: a huge cocoon of white Manchester cotton rounding out the angles of the space and enclosing the audience, mostly standing on each side of an enormous catwalk. Long narrow screens above this stage offer a montage of Manchester cultural history — footage of millworkers, British soap operas, references to pop bands like Joy Division — then show an incessant stream of images that blur into a kind of visual wallpaper as one scene after another plays out beneath.The show’s sets are by the designer Es Devlin.Tristram KentonPart two of “Free Your Mind” plays out on an extended catwalk in a part of Aviva Studios called the Warehouse.Tristram KentonThis section is presumably our present in which data, rather than energy, is being harvested from us humans. Amazon packages are delivered, Twitter ticks, the Apple logo and Google are referenced in Gareth Pugh’s costumes; dancers move while unable to take their eyes off their phones. Finally we get the battle between Neo and Smith, with a re-enactment of the famous bullet-stopping sequence in the original film, before a group finale to Asante’s portentous chords. The final image is of the screens, showing human figures effaced by vertical lines of code. (Oh dear.)The audience, which clearly knew and loved “The Matrix,” didn’t seem depressed by that, and gave the show a rousing ovation. “Free Your Mind” is a good night out and a decent demonstration of the new building’s capacities, even if its muddled mix of pure-dance display and clumsy propositions don’t say much about what it means to be human. Something stranger and more genuinely boundary-pushing would have been a welcome opening salvo from the often-visionary minds at Factory International. Perhaps that’s next.Free Your MindThrough Nov. 5 at Aviva Studios, in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org. More

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      After 47 Years, the Emerson Quartet Has One More Weekend

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      The group, famed for its rich vitality, easy power and a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly, is saying farewell.Five years ago, Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, got a call from a financial adviser. To sketch out a plan for Drucker, the adviser needed his target retirement age.“When he asked me, it seemed like a fairly academic question,” Drucker, now 71, recalled recently. “The quartet had not at all discussed an endgame.”He told the group the anecdote as something of a joke. (This is a foursome that laughs — a lot.) To his surprise, it spurred a more serious discussion about the future of the Emerson Quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles in classical music for almost half a century.The conversation eventually led to a decision, and on Saturday and Sunday at Alice Tully Hall — next to the Juilliard School, where the quartet formed — the quartet will play its final concerts. With three members near or over 70, and little desire to keep the name alive without its founders, it’s quitting while it’s ahead.Setzer and Drucker, the violinists at left, were original members of the quartet, which was founded in 1976 when they were students at Juilliard.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“There’s a feeling I think we all had: We were afraid of going on too long,” said Philip Setzer, the other violinist. “People have memories of what it was like to go to an Emerson Quartet concert, and we didn’t want to start having them hear a lesser version of that. I’m a big sports fan, and you see people play past when they should stop.”Lawrence Dutton, the group’s violist, added: “We saw it with teachers and mentors and players we had incredible respect for. It’s not pretty when it happens.”And from its formation in 1976, the Emerson Quartet sounded pretty. It became famous for its rich vitality and easy power in a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly.“Particularly in the U.S., the Emerson was maybe the only reference a lot of people had for a string quartet,” said the violinist Ryan Meehan of the Calidore Quartet, one of many younger groups the Emerson has mentored. “It speaks to their incredible artistry and their recording and performing: how far their reach was, even for people who weren’t really classical concertgoers.”Setzer and Drucker met as students of Oscar Shumsky at Juilliard and were original members. In the country’s bicentennial year, it seemed right to name the group after the great idealist American writer.Signing CDs at Watkins’s home. The group recorded profusely for Deutsche Grammophon.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really. I’ve never seen any tension between them. I’ve seen discussion and critical thinking, but there’s no ‘this side’ and ‘that side.’”From the Juilliard Quartet, long illustrious by the 1970s, the group learned the lessons of raw vigor and commitment to a broad repertory, including new commissions. Listening to the Guarneri Quartet, younger but already august, the Emerson took on a polished, burnished, sheerly beautiful tone. (For certain listeners, on certain nights, that beauty could tip into blandness.)“There wasn’t really a long-term plan, because we were young,” Drucker said. “But there was the greatness of the repertoire for string quartet. And as a proto-Emerson student group, we had elicited a fairly strong positive reaction, which made an impression on us that this was something to pour energy and time and resources into.”By the end of the ’70s, Dutton and the cellist David Finckel had joined, and the roster was set for more than three decades. It didn’t change until 2013, when Finckel stepped aside to focus on other endeavors, including the leadership of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which is presenting the finale. He was replaced by Paul Watkins, the baby of the group at 53.Watkins said he prepared for his first session with the others, a kind of audition, by listening to Emerson recordings.The group’s final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“But I didn’t want to imitate what David had done,” he added. “I wanted to show that I could be sympathetic to them, and bring my own personality and sound into it as well. It needed to happen instinctively, and quickly: love at first sound. And thank god, it did.”A quartet is an intimate, intense unit — “a benevolent four-headed monster,” Hannigan said. Peter Mennin, then the president of Juilliard, went to an early Emerson concert and told its members that if they could survive five years, they might be able to go the distance.Five years later, in 1981, came a milestone: a marathon performance of Bartok’s six string quartets at Tully Hall for the composer’s centennial, two and a half hours of demanding, opulently bristling music. Many groups were playing the works that year, but not like that.“At first people said, ‘That’s ridiculous; you’re just doing it for show,’” Setzer said. But the concert was an unlikely sensation, establishing the Emerson as an ensemble to be reckoned with.The group was also notable (and, initially, somewhat polarizing) for having Drucker and Setzer switch between the first and second violin parts for different pieces. This is common in student ensembles, but professional quartets usually have set first and second violinists.At Alice Tully Hall, the musicians will play Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which David Finckel, a former member, will join them.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“It’s close to 300 pieces we’ve done, which is a lot,” Setzer said. “And part of that was because of the switching. I can’t imagine doing that amount if I’d had to do first violin in all of it.”With a smooth, vigorous, cleanly modern sound that also nodded to the golden glow of an earlier era, the Emerson was, Dutton said, “at the right place at the right time, blossoming just as the CD boom was happening.” The ensemble scored a contract with the eminent label Deutsche Grammophon, which wanted new digital versions of as much music as the group could set down.The explosion of albums made the Emerson omnipresent, and included benchmark recordings of the complete Beethoven, Shostakovich and Bartok quartets. And there is also — among some three days’ worth of recorded sound — warmly lucid Bach, Haydn and Mozart; nostalgic yet energetic Dvorak and Tchaikovsky; and contemporary music by composers as different as Gunther Schuller and Ned Rorem.All this was toured indefatigably, with over 140 concerts one year. “The sheer volume, playing this incredible repertory, it takes its toll,” Dutton said. (“If you do it right,” Setzer added.) The group tapered its schedule, but was still regularly playing almost 100 performances a year until the pandemic.“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe end of the Emerson Quartet doesn’t mean full retirement for its members, who will maintain a variety of solo performing, arts administration and teaching duties. For more than 20 years the group has been in residence at Stony Brook University, where last Saturday they gave a preview of their magisterial Tully program: Beethoven’s Opus 130, rendingly fragile and vulnerable, and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which Finckel poignantly joined.Their final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with bracing yet seductive works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month, featuring Hannigan.“We were rehearsing onstage,” she said, recalling her farewell appearance with the group on Oct. 10 in Milan, in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. “And they were still playing it over slowly, tuning every note, discussing, ‘Is this really the right tempo?’ It was the last rehearsal before a piece they will never play again, and they were still saying: ‘What do you think he meant here?’”“We’re lucky because our very different personalities fit together,” Dutton said. “We respected each other. We knew we were different, but we had one purpose: to make great music. And we achieved that.” More

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      Review: Laurie Anderson Gets Back to Having a Good Time

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      With the jazz combo Sexmob, this enduring avant-gardist revisited vintage and recent songs with a grooving spirit.Laurie Anderson sounds like she’s ready to have fun again.That much was clear after the first minute or so of her thrilling multimedia show on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This one-night-only, 100-minute set, titled “Let X = X,” featured new arrangements of several 1980s-era Anderson songs. It also featured a fun backing band in the jazz combo Sexmob, reliable purveyors of a good time.Hasn’t Anderson earned a romping concert? So far in this century, she has kept her eye on grave matters. She mourned a changing, vulnerable New York City after Hurricane Sandy in “Landfall,” with the Kronos Quartet. She has likewise mourned the death of her longtime partner, Lou Reed, across multiple projects — including in her graceful, meditative film “Heart of a Dog.” And she detailed human rights violations in “Habeas Corpus,” a 2015 collaboration with a former Guantánamo prisoner, Mohammed el-Gharani, at the Park Avenue Armory.I attended and admired all those. But I have never witnessed her really enjoying a groove — at least not in the same way that I’ve enjoyed on some of her first recordings, such as “Home of the Brave” or “United States Live.” On Tuesday, though, at the tail end of one spoken interlude that detailed a variety of her heroes — such as Gandhi and Philip Glass — she concluded by mentioning James Brown. When Anderson named the tune “Get on the Good Foot,” the Sexmob slide-trumpeter Steven Bernstein and the drummer Kenny Wollesen indulged her with a musical quotation. Then Anderson whooped a funk-accurate exultation and danced a bit in front of her array of electronics.It wasn’t the only time she behaved like that. From the moment she strode onstage and triggered the synth samples of “From the Air,” she seemed to be enjoying herself, and reveled in the droll lyrics of that number: “Good evening. This is your captain. We are about to attempt a crash landing.”Tuesday’s concert wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums. With musicians who can double on electric guitar and bass clarinet, its members offered a rich range of textural variation throughout the evening. “Walk the Dog” was no longer spare, but galvanic. This new backing-band energy seemed to make Anderson’s high, digitally pitch-shifted vocals avoid rote, greatest-hits-show style. Similarly, a medley of “Born, Never Asked” and “It Tango” had fresh, more syncopated force.Recitations of childhood memories that appeared in “Heart of a Dog” were also part of the set, along with some basso profundo observations from Fenway Bergamot, Anderson’s male alter-ego (as heard on the 2010 album “Homeland”).And when Anderson and Sexmob played “Only an Expert” — perhaps her only banger from this century — she also took the opportunity to address the gravity of breaking news from the current Israel-Hamas war. (She avoided assigning blame for a hospital bombing in Gaza that day, while acknowledging the undeniable fact that it happened.) Originally, the song’s litany of state-sponsored crimes was a gloss on America’s invasion of Iraq, ironically noting:Even though a country can invade another countryAnd flatten it and ruin it and create havoc and civil war in that other countryIf the experts say it’s not a problem and everyone agrees they’re expertsAnd good at seeing problems then invading those countriesIs simply not a problem.But on Tuesday, she slipped in a new travesty: “and bomb hospitals.” (At another point, she invited the audience to scream — cathartically, Yoko Ono-style — against “genocides happing everywhere” and the holding of “hostages in Gaza.”)In a concert that otherwise offered breezy, rocking, swinging fun, such invocations of unsettling current events rode a fine line. But to my eyes and ears, Anderson pulled off that tricky task. In this moment, all sophisticated, adult-coded entertainment is obligated to compete with our awareness of sobering topics, the ones that Anderson has focused on in recent years, like increasingly dangerous waves of water and lethal tides of government-sponsored dehumanization.There was a great deal else in the show: her electronically modified solo violin playing; a performance of her Massenet-inspired pop hit, “O Superman”; aperçus from her friend Sharon Olds, the pathbreaking confessional poet; video art of Anderson’s design that embraced concepts of artificial intelligence. But it was her willingness to keep tragic contemporary material in view — even when enjoying the breadth of a half-century’s catalog — that amounted to its own form of spiritual advice or moral instruction.When Anderson appeared for an encore, she led the audience in tai chi movements. This risked objections of blasé appropriation, but her creative practice has always made space for genuine gestures of cultural synthesis. And on Tuesday, it was good to see these aspects of her art operating in counterpoint once again.Laurie Anderson and SexmobPerformed on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More

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      Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

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      He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More