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      Sofia Coppola’s Best Needle Drops

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      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “The Virgin Suicides,” “Lost in Translation,” “Priscilla” and more.Finely chosen songs are the lifeblood in almost all of Sofia Coppola’s films, including “The Virgin Suicides.”Paramount ClassicsDear listeners,Few working filmmakers curate soundtracks with as much flair, style and intentionality as Sofia Coppola: Consider the melancholy dream-pop smeared through “Lost in Translation,” the new-wave tunes that give “Marie Antoinette” a playful modernity, or the eerie, weightless Air score that haunts the sleepy suburbs of “The Virgin Suicides.”Coppola’s latest film, “Priscilla” — based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis & Me” — comes out today, and it features some of her boldest and most unconventional musical choices yet. That’s apparent right from the movie’s opening scene, in which the celestial sounds of Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” fade unexpectedly into the Ramones’ 1980 cover of a Ronettes ballad, “Baby, I Love You.”These aren’t obvious choices when it comes to soundtracking a movie about Elvis, but since Presley’s estate did not grant Coppola permission to use his music in the film, the obvious choices were off the table. No matter. Coppola — along with the music supervisor Randall Poster and the band Phoenix, whose frontman, Thomas Mars, is Coppola’s husband — used those limitations to create something more distinctive and personal than a standard biopic carpeted wall-to-wall with Presley tunes. (Plus, you know, one of those already came out last year.) They have instead crafted a movie that re-centers a woman too often pushed to the side in her own life story, and found the music — some historically accurate, some imaginatively not — that reflects her own increasingly disillusioned perspective.“Priscilla” may be the Coppola movie most explicitly about music, but finely chosen songs are the lifeblood of almost all of her films. Coppola characters often use music as a tool of communication, to sing or suggest things they can’t say aloud. Think of the unforgettable karaoke scene in “Lost in Translation,” or the way the imprisoned Lisbon sisters in “The Virgin Suicides” use their record player to communicate with the forbidden boys of the outside world.Today’s playlist is a collection of some of the greatest needle drops in Sofia Coppola’s filmography. Pour yourself a glass of Suntory, gaze dreamily out a window and press play.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Jesus and Mary Chain: “Just Like Honey”Only I know what Bill Murray whispers to Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation”: “The Jesus and Mary Chain. ‘Psychocandy.’ It’ll change your life! (Don’t expect quite as much from the rest of the discography, though.)” (Listen on YouTube)2. Gang of Four: “Natural’s Not in It”This spiky, 1979 post-punk song that opens Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette” immediately signals that this isn’t going to be an ordinary biopic — it’s going to be one with a deliciously anachronistic soundtrack. There’s a sly irony to the way Coppola uses it here, too, since the politics that Gang of Four espouses on “Entertainment!” aren’t exactly simpatico with the excesses of Versailles. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Ramones: “Baby, I Love You”Ever aware of the importance of plunging the audience directly into a film’s atmosphere, Coppola sets the tone of “Priscilla” by running this swooning 1980 Ramones cover of the Ronettes over the opening credits. (Listen on YouTube)4. Heart: “Magic Man”The seductive, bowl-cutted Trip Fontaine (played by Josh Hartnett) blows into “The Virgin Suicides” to the tune of this period-specific Heart classic, indicating to the Lisbon family that he and his aviator shades are a very particular kind of trouble. (Listen on YouTube)5. Gwen Stefani: “Cool”From the 2010 film “Somewhere” — in my opinion, Coppola’s most underrated, and one of her best — this Gwen Stefani ode to getting along with your ex soundtracks a memorable scene between an absent, movie-star father (Stephen Dorff) and his preteen daughter (Elle Fanning). The girl practices an ice-skating routine while her father watches from the bleachers. That she’s framed in a wide shot, and in long, unbroken takes, emphasizes both the distance between them and the affection of her father’s gaze. “Cool” is a perfect accompaniment for such a bittersweet moment. (Listen on YouTube)6. Air: “Playground Love”The French electronic duo Air composed the gauzy, atmospheric score for Coppola’s 1999 debut, “The Virgin Suicides.” Variations on the lead melody of “Playground Love” wind through the film like a recurring theme, before the haunting song — featuring vocals from Coppola’s future husband, Mars — plays over the closing credits. (Listen on YouTube)7. Bow Wow Wow: “I Want Candy”One of the great montages in the S.C.C.U. (Sofia Coppola Cinematic Universe) is the pastel-hued, shamelessly indulgent shopping spree scene that comes midway through “Marie Antoinette,” to the tune of this early ’80s bop. Let them eat candy! (Listen on YouTube)8. Sleigh Bells: “Crown on the Ground”This blown-out, sky-scraping song from Sleigh Bells’ singular 2010 album “Treats” — an underappreciated founding document of hyperpop — opens Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring” with a time-stamped jolt. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Cure: “Plainsong”If you’re going to use the Cure’s achingly gorgeous “Plainsong” in a movie, the scene had better be epic. Coppola understood this, and made it the sumptuous soundtrack to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI’s coronation. (Listen on YouTube)10. My Bloody Valentine: “Sometimes”Kevin Shields, the famously slow-working singer and guitarist of the shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, wrote four original songs for the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack — some of the first music he’d released since his group’s landmark 1991 album, “Loveless.” But it’s My Bloody Valentine’s dream-pop classic “Sometimes” that underscores one of the movie’s most beloved scenes, as Johansson gazes out of a taxi window in the middle of the night, the passing neon of Tokyo rendered a romantic blur. (Listen on YouTube)11. Tommy James & the Shondells: “Crimson and Clover”In “Priscilla,” Elvis and Priscilla share their first kiss in the late ’50s to the tune of this woozy classic — which, in reality, came out in 1968. I like the way the critic Stephanie Zacharek describes this anachronism in her review of the film: “After Elvis bestows his first, gentle kiss on Priscilla’s lips, she enters a fugue state, having shifted to a new plane of existence. At that point, it’s Tommy James & the Shondells’ ‘Crimson and Clover’ that cocoons around her like a whisper, a song from the future, a haunting in advance.” (Listen on YouTube)12. Roxy Music: “More Than This”A spot-on choice — world-weary, full of ennui, still showing off some taste — of what Murray’s “Lost in Translation” character Bob Harris would sing at karaoke. (Listen on YouTube)13. Dolly Parton: “I Will Always Love You”I don’t want to spoil exactly when this song plays in “Priscilla,” but I do want to give you some context that will make the moment hit even harder. Elvis loved Dolly Parton’s 1974 hit and wanted to record it himself, but his manager, Col. Tom Parker, asked for at least half of Parton’s publishing rights. Though it killed her to turn him down — Elvis! — selling off her publishing was a bridge too far. So she said no. Karma took until 1992 to arrive. “Then when Whitney’s version came out,” Parton said, “I made enough money to buy Graceland.” (Listen on YouTube)Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Sofia Coppola’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Just Like Honey”Track 2: Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not in It”Track 3: The Ramones, “Baby, I Love You”Track 4: Heart, “Magic Man”Track 5: Gwen Stefani, “Cool”Track 6: Air, “Playground Love”Track 7: Bow Wow Wow, “I Want Candy”Track 8: Sleigh Bells, “Crown on the Ground”Track 9: The Cure, “Plainsong”Track 10: My Bloody Valentine, “Sometimes”Track 11: Tommy James & the Shondells, “Crimson and Clover”Track 12: Roxy Music, “More Than This”Track 13: Dolly Parton, “I Will Always Love You”Bonus TracksOn this week’s new music Playlist, we’ve got fresh tracks from Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion, Torres and more. Listen here.Also, there’s a new Beatles song? Sort of? In a Critic’s Notebook from earlier this week, Jon Pareles considered the wistful, uncanny “Now and Then.”And finally, regretfully, in Tuesday’s newsletter I provided the wrong link to Sam Sodomsky’s wonderful Pitchfork interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. For real this time: Read it here. More

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      What the Suburbs Did for Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen

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      A new book by the author Jim Cullen explores the uncanny parallels between the careers of these two musicians, and how they were products of their time and place.It was the 25th anniversary concert celebrating the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Madison Square Garden in 2009 when Bruce Springsteen bellowed to the crowd: “Are you ready for the bridge-and-tunnel summit meeting right here, right now? Because Long Island is about to meet New Jersey on the neutral ground of New York City!”Out came Billy Joel, and the two performed a set together of their greatest hits. Springsteen crooned on Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” while Joel returned the favor on Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” The two had crossed paths occasionally in their hit-making careers, but never in such a high profile way.In retrospect, it was surprising it had taken so long. The author Jim Cullen argues in his new book released in October, “Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century,” that Springsteen and Joel’s careers had more uncanny parallels than most realize, and that their rise was a product of socioeconomic conditions of the era, particularly the growth of the suburbs. In fact, the author argues, it’s likely that Joel and Springsteen could only have become famous at the time they did.Both were born within months of each other. Both are intrinsically identified with their home states — Springsteen with New Jersey, Joel with New York. They both came from the suburbs — Freehold, N.J., for Springsteen, and Hicksville, N.Y., for Joel. Both were signed to Columbia Records and released their first albums the same year. Their careers started off slow — and almost sputtered completely — but broke through around the same time with records that would make them famous — Springsteen’s “Born To Run” (1975) and Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977).Mr. Cullen, a historian who has written several academic books about pop culture, discussed the connection between the two that formed the thesis of his latest book.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What does the rise of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen in the 1970s say about the era they were living in?They lived in what you might call the golden age of the American dream. This was the period when the American dream was most realizable on a mass basis. As products of suburbia, they were sort of in the cockpit of this.One of the things I found interesting when I started to look into their lives was that they were actually products of downward mobility. Their immediate families had suffered reverses in the generation before they were born. And then, of course, they caught the wind of this massive economic and social current in the aftermath of World War II.Mr. Cullen, a historian, has written several academic books about pop culture.Frances F. Denny for The New York TimesWhat were the conditions in the music industry that helped make someone like Joel or Springsteen such a success?The record business had been immensely profitable in the years prior to these guys making it. And so there was just a lot of money floating around to invest in new acts in a way that there really hadn’t been before or after this.Another is that the business was designed at that point to reward the thing that these two guys did really well, which was to perform live. This was an era when touring supported records — rather than the age we live in, which is the other way around.The last thing I would say is that the industry was much more tolerant of failure than it had been before or since. So both of these guys could literally afford to make a couple of records that stiffed before they built up enough of a head of steam to really take off commercially.People might argue that when we talk about the rise of the suburbs, we’re really talking about the rise of a white middle class. I don’t think there’s any question that these guys were beneficiaries of their racial identity. Broadly, their relative affluence gave them a leg up. That’s inarguable.I will say that both of these people had a very strong vision of integration as sort of the aesthetic basis of their work.Are there modern-day equivalents to Joel and Springsteen?One of the ways in which they were also really beneficiaries of their time is that they were products of what I’ll call generally an age of broadcasting. And I mean that not just in terms of television, but especially in terms of radio. There was a kind of shared national audience.I did a book on “All in the Family,” a television show [in the 1970s] that got 50 million viewers a week. The finale of “Game of Thrones,” people got excited because it got 10 million viewers. It’s just a different world. So it’s not easy for anybody to continue to do what Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen did. Not because Springsteen or Joel were sort of Promethean artists, but because they were beneficiaries of a media infrastructure that was very rewarding to them.Having said all that, I do think that there are figures who approach what they did. Beyoncé comes to mind as someone who’s built a very large, broad audience over a long period of time and inspires a level of commitment and engagement that I think is comparable. The obvious other example is Taylor Swift, who in commercial terms, has probably exceeded them. More

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      Laufey’s Old-Time Pop Is Smooth. Its Relationship to Jazz Is Spikier.

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      The 24-year-old multi-instrumentalist found fame on TikTok with her nostalgic songs. But her dedication to her followers may be holding her music back.About 20 minutes into her set at Town Hall on Wednesday night — the first of two sold-out shows at the Midtown Manhattan theater — the nostalgic TikTok star Laufey put down her hollow-body electric guitar. With her hands free, she started singing “Dreamer,” the barbershop-pop tune that opens her second album, “Bewitched.” As she moved across the stage, she struck a new pose for each line: bending forward at the waist, as if to share a morsel of gossip; leg straight, hip bent; head turned sideways, as if mid-sigh.The act of posing is a key component in the Laufey equation. So is the big sigh.If you are one of the millions who have fallen for Laufey (pronounced LAY-vay) in the past 12 months, you are probably online enough to consume a good deal of your music through 15-second video clips; young enough to feel powerfully seen by a song about the catastrophe of a crush; and only vaguely aware of the midcentury pop repertoire that she so precisely draws upon.Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, 24, is a cellist and multi-instrumentalist who grew up between Washington and Reykjavik. Half-Chinese and half-Icelandic, she is a third-generation musician, and as a youngster she often tagged along to her violinist mother’s orchestra rehearsals. She studied music business at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and when the pandemic sent students home, she returned to Iceland and began posting videos of herself covering tunes by Billie Eilish and Chet Baker — always in a throwback style swelling with overdubbed vocal harmonies and jazzy acoustic guitar. (Mind that word, jazzy. We’ll come back to it.) Amid the pandemic, this content was a comfort, and a following developed fast.Laufey likes to remind interviewers that she considers herself “old-fashioned.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLaufey’s vibe is somehow both hopelessly nostalgic and ideally suited to our extremely online world, where huge feelings are best delivered in Pop Tart-size bites. Almost everything except her lyrics — which sometimes mention social media, or the disappointments of digital-age dating — would have sounded at home on the American radio waves between 1940 and the mid-1960s, before the Beatles and the Stones started breaking the rules.Before 2020, Laufey hadn’t written much original music, but as a talented, classically trained musician, she discovered a knack for piecing pleasant parts into a satisfying whole. (The jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely in September released an erudite explainer of the science of her music, and he had little trouble decoding its DNA.)One of the first original tunes Laufey wrote was “Street by Street,” which she recorded with the help of a music production major living across the hall, the day she left Berklee’s campus for lockdown. That song became popular in Iceland, and then all over the internet. It showed up on the EP that she released the following year, “Typical of Me,” which pulled some yellowy pages out of the old jazz and bossa nova books, but also felt lodged in a wishful dream of Laufey’s own making. With an unfussy drum machine sound and a Corinne Bailey Rae-adjacent grooviness, there was something distinct and precarious about this music. Like most of us in that moment, it wasn’t sure where it stood or what the future held.Since then, you could say that her process has become subsumed into her profile. She now has over three million followers on TikTok, plus another two million on Instagram, and her feed has gradually turned into a kind of direct-to-fan service. Putting a premium on relatability, posting almost daily, Laufey — who writes music primarily with the composing partner Spencer Stewart — says that her followers dictate much of what she writes and covers. When someone asked her to write a song about being a love interest’s second choice, she came up with “Second Best,” a doleful and catchy but hard-to-place tune from “Bewitched,” on which she laments, “You were my everything/I was your second best.”Onstage at Town Hall, Laufey sang in front of a dark-blue drape dotted with little stars and a set of big movie-set spotlights. It looked like a set from “La La Land.” (A follower recently said her music sounded “like if La La Land had a sequel”; she loved this feedback.) Joined by a four-piece band and a string quartet, she alternated between guitar, piano and cello, playing each one with an expert’s touch. She motored expediently through a set that fit 17 songs into almost exactly 75 minutes (not including a short encore).About 70 percent of the audience was in their 20s, but there was also a significant contingent of older listeners who seemed grateful to see that Laufey’s pleasant, everyday-can-be-Christmastime aesthetic had caught on with a younger crowd. We live, after all, in messy and anxious times. Laufey’s amalgam of bossa nova, romantic pop and show tunes is here to reassure us that, yes, some old standards do still apply. (Mid-set she played “I Wish You Love” and quoted “Misty.”)Laufey says that her followers dictate much of what she writes and covers. Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLaufey likes to remind interviewers that she considers herself “old-fashioned,” a term that, on her lips, sounds like it’s splitting the difference between quirky and virtuous. She talks often about her love for Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, and their influence is obvious. But the swooning syrup of her voice has a lot more to do with, say, Patti Page, the grande dame contralto of the 1950s, known for “Tennessee Waltz” and “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”None of this is necessarily a problem. But it can be off-putting to hear Laufey (and her now formidable P.R. apparatus) proclaim herself an ambassador of jazz, a genre that she says has been “gate-kept” by an older crowd. “Jazz music was created in the first place as kind of like a deviation from rules, and something that was meant to be free and for everyone,” she told the podcast host Zach Sang recently. “So the fact that it’s become something that feels like it isn’t for everyone is kind of sad, actually. And I think is the death of the genre.”Equal access, openness, nonjudgmentalism. All important. And yes, it’s possible that her music will bring some listeners to the very much alive and wide-open creative landscape that is jazz. But Laufey — who does not improvise on her instrument, play music with even an ounce of swing rhythm or engage with the chancy collaborative spirit that is the real joy of jazz — is not the music’s ambassador. She is, in fact, making a kind of antiquated radio pop and calling it jazz — precisely the kind of thing that holds the music back, and leaves casual listeners confused about how jazz could possibly still be relevant.Meanwhile, there is a bumper crop of young, alchemical jazz singers who are smartly engaging with the past, reinventing it in the present, and trying to figure out how its values might translate in our increasingly isolated, digital future. Samara Joy, who won the Grammy for best new artist this year, knows what it means to celebrate the classics while pushing ahead. Esperanza Spalding has been doing it with peerless creativity for over a decade, and she too has caught on with young people by the millions. Melanie Charles’s live show is bold and joyous and well-crafted, but anything but careful or predictable.The biggest tell at Town Hall was how Laufey played her own tunes: more or less exactly as they appeared on record. It seemed not unrelated to her process on social media: When your followers are dictating what you make next, then you’re trapped in a loop of familiarity. What’s known of you is also what’s expected, and that becomes what you make. To take her music to another level, Laufey may want to take a cue from Mitski — a musician she has covered and for whom she’s expressed admiration — and log off for a while. More

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      Second Woman Accuses Steven Tyler of Sexually Assaulting Her in the 1970s

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      In a lawsuit, a woman says that the Aerosmith frontman groped and fondled her in a New York phone booth when she was about 17.For the second time in the past year, Steven Tyler has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the 1970s, when his band Aerosmith was rising to fame.In the new lawsuit, which was filed in New York on Thursday, Jeanne Bellino accuses Mr. Tyler of assaulting her twice in one day in approximately 1975, when she was about 17 years old and a model living in Queens. He would have been in his late 20s at the time.While Ms. Bellino was visiting Manhattan for work, the lawsuit says, a friend arranged for them to meet Aerosmith. As Ms. Bellino was walking down the street with Mr. Tyler and his entourage, which included his bandmates, he forced her into a phone booth, where he aggressively kissed, groped and fondled her, according to the lawsuit.“Others stood by outside the phone booth laughing and as passers-by watched and witnessed, nobody in the entourage intervened,” the lawsuit says.Because Ms. Bellino did not have money for transportation home, according to the suit, she was taken to the Warwick Hotel with Mr. Tyler and his entourage. The lawsuit says Mr. Tyler pinned her against a wall in a public area and again assaulted her. Shortly after, a doorman at the hotel helped her get into a cab and flee.“He never even asked me what my name was,” Ms. Bellino said of Mr. Tyler in a news conference on Thursday.A representative for Aerosmith did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Bellino’s lawsuit was filed under a New York City law that in March opened a two-year window for people to accuse someone of gender-motivated violence that would otherwise be beyond the statute of limitations.In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in December, Julia Misley accused Mr. Tyler of using his status and power to “groom, manipulate, exploit” and “sexually assault” her over the course of three years, starting in 1973, shortly after her 16th birthday. Ms. Misley said in her lawsuit that she had met Mr. Tyler at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Ore., and that the musician had persuaded her mother to let him become her legal guardian.Mr. Tyler, who is now 75, wrote about sexual encounters with a teenager in his 2011 autobiography, “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?,” saying that he gained custody of a person who nearly became his “teen bride.” More

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      Review: ‘Chicago,’ With Nary a Finger Snap

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      Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of the 1975 musical adds a touch of burlesque and a dash of Bertolt Brecht.The seedy, culturally vibrant and rapidly modernizing Berlin of the 1920s was nicknamed “Chicago on the Spree.” That moniker sprang to mind recently during the premiere of a masterful and muscular new production of “Chicago,” directed by Barrie Kosky at the Komische Oper Berlin.“Chicago,” a “story of greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery,” to quote the prologue, is the longest-running show currently on Broadway, but it got a very mixed reception when it opened there in 1975. Many of those early audience members were uncomfortable with Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse and John Kander’s use of musical showstoppers in the service of an amoral satire, and the show’s jerky and pastiche-like narrative technique.For his production, Kosky has gone back to the original concept of the show as a musical vaudeville with a heavy dose of bile and a dash of Brechtian alienation, while also embracing burlesque elements. Michael Levine’s dazzling set is outfitted with nearly 7000 light bulbs, which intelligently frame the actors, and the action, in frequently changing configurations that suggest a nightclub, a prison cell and a circus ring.Many of the costumes in Kosky’s production give a nod to the musical’s roots in burlesque and vaudeville.Barbara BraunThere are definite echoes of Kosky’s darkly glittering take on “The Threepenny Opera” from 2021. But this “Chicago” is not another radical rethinking of a canonical work, nor is Kosky clearing the cobwebs from an aged classic, as he did previously with “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Candide.” This “Chicago” is simply a damn good show, with an attention to choreography and musical verve rarely found outside Broadway or the West End. The production offered further proof, if any was needed, that Kosky has made the Komische Oper — which has always embraced various forms of music theater — the best place for classic American musicals on the continent.The show, performed in a limber German translation by Helmut Baumann and Erika Gesell, is impeccably cast. Katharine Mehrling, an acclaimed chanteuse and regular Kosky collaborator, brings the right mix of naïveté and tenacity to the role of Roxie Hart, the washed-up chorus girl whose trial for murdering her lover catapults her to stardom. As her jail mate and rival vaudevillian Velma Kelly, Ruth Brauer-Kvam gives a sexy, assured performance. She’s also the cast’s truest triple threat, singing, twirling and acting her way through the evening without breaking a sweat.Jörn-Felix Alt brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as Billy Flynn, the shyster lawyer who orchestrates media circuses for his female clients. Andreja Schneider makes a sassy, straight-shooting Mama Morton, the crooked warden of Cook’s County Jail, while Ivan Tursic doesn’t overdo the pathos as Roxy’s chump of a husband, Amos.The music, performed in its original 1975 orchestration, sounds fantastic played by a full orchestra — a luxury you rarely get on Broadway. The conductor Adam Benzwi shapes the music with precision and vitality, and his band gives the changing temperatures and moods the score requires.Jörn-Felix Alt, center, brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as the lawyer Billy Flynn.Barbara BraunHandsome and sleek, the staging is as stripped-down as some of Kosky’s other recent productions, but he also knows when to pull out the stops. Mehrling makes her bold entrance in “All That Jazz,” trailed by a dozen dancers hiding behind red ostrich feather fans. Kosky brings back the razzle-dazzle in the final number, “Nowadays,” when Roxy and Velma are outfitted in the sparkliest suits legally permitted onstage. In between, Victoria Behr’s costumes provide plenty of other fresh and smoothly executed ideas, including orange silk robes for the prisoners and surreal touches like masks of oversized heads and cartoon lips.The choreographer Otto Pichler, credited as a co-director, crafts sparkling dance numbers for the soloists and his 12-person troupe with nary a finger snap, twist or slow-motion hip roll in sight. This is a welcome choice, since anything that is overdone — even a style as vivid as Fosse’s — can become fossilized.After the Komische Oper opened its season with a monumental production staged in an airport hangar, “Chicago” is the company’s first show at the Schiller Theater, its temporary home, in the west of Berlin, while lengthy renovations to its historic house continue.Luring audiences to the other side of town this season doesn’t appear to be an issue: Even before opening night, virtually the entire run of “Chicago” had sold out.ChicagoThrough Jan. 27, 2024, at Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More

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      Review: An Opera About Drones Brings a Pilot’s War Home

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      Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday, is headed to the Metropolitan Opera next year.The young mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo has a wide grin, haunted eyes and a mellow, confident voice that flashes with lean anxiety. In tone and presence, she’s driven, intense, wry. Onstage she’s unsentimental — and unsettled.She is, in other words, perfectly cast as a swaggering fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator in “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday at the Kennedy Center.“Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next fall, originated as a one-woman play a decade ago, when the ethics of drone warfare were at the center of national attention. Written by George Brant, the play traveled widely, and had an Off Broadway run featuring Anne Hathaway, who at one point was planning to star in a film adaptation.But opera swept in first. The Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, known for intelligently audience-pleasing musicals like “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” took on the project through the Met’s commissioning program.Tesori and Brant expanded the piece, giving the anonymous pilot a name (Jess) and giving voice to other characters, including Jess’s beleaguered husband and the cacophonous “kill chain” of commanders she hears over her headset. Washington National Opera was eventually brought on as a kind of out-of-town tryout for Michael Mayer’s production.This led to some unwelcome news coverage earlier this year, when Washington announced its season — sponsored by the military contractor General Dynamics, a longtime company donor. The headlines wrote themselves: A drone maker was paying for a “killer drone opera.”The production, directed by Michael Mayer, with set design by Mimi Lien, is dominated by LED screens.Scott SuchmanThe company put out a statement insisting that benefactors had no role in the work’s creation. But it was still a little surprising to hear Timothy O’Leary, the general director in Washington, thank General Dynamics, alongside other major givers, from the stage at the Kennedy Center before the performance on Saturday.The opera begins in Iraq, where Jess is doing her best “Top Gun” impression as a hotshot F-16 pilot. (The F-16 was developed by General Dynamics.) The quietly ominous rumble at the start of Tesori’s score gives way to a chorus of fliers whose stentorian march morphs into a neo-Baroque fugue.The Middle East is suggested by rustling rainsticks, part of a big, varied percussion section, and some modal harmonies; Jess’s voice soars as she sings of “the solitude, the freedom, the peace” she finds in the sky. Tesori’s lyrical ease and eclecticism, the fluidity with which she blends, blurs and moves between styles, are impressively on display, guided with a sure hand by the conductor Daniela Candillari.On leave with her squadron in Wyoming — the pretext for some whispers of swaying cowboy hoedown music — Jess falls in love with a rancher, Eric, and gets pregnant. (The brief duet when she returns to let him know, her profane apologies melting into shared happiness, is perhaps the most charmingly natural moment in the piece.)Her pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter, takes her out of her beloved cockpit. When she wants to return to the skies, she is instead assigned to drone duty — appropriately enough in Las Vegas, the capital of American not-quite-reality.However demeaning for a onetime star pilot, the job will let Jess go home at night, and she is promised by her commander that “the threat of death has been removed” — a mantra taken up by Washington National Opera’s excellent chorus with grim fervor. The Trainer (Frederick Ballentine, his tenor frighteningly shining) describes the Reaper drone’s capabilities and exorbitant cost in a worshipful call-and-response, religious-style chant.Tesori smartly conjures the uncertainty with which Jess begins to learn her new task, with an orchestral landscape of eerie, jittery spareness. Missile explosions happen with uncanny, anesthetized sweetness, a soft choral “boom.”The assurances that this will be “war with all the benefits of home” go awry, of course, as Jess’s professional and domestic lives begin to collapse together. On a trip to the mall with her daughter, she grows paranoid that they’re being surveilled by cameras, just as her Reaper spies on its targets. A double, Also Jess (the forbiddingly pure-voiced soprano Teresa Perrotta), emerges for duets of slippery dissonance as the tension ratchets up.Ratchets up, but not enough. The impact of “Grounded” is surprisingly unexplosive. This may be because Tesori is at heart a composer of normality — even (or especially) when abnormal things are happening, like the accelerated-aging disease at the center of “Kimberly Akimbo.”D’Angelo as Jess, the fighter pilot turned drone operator.Scott SuchmanHer 2003 masterpiece, “Caroline, or Change,” was a perfect marriage of her music with a text, by Tony Kushner, that steadily maintained its reserve amid heartbreak. Her previous opera, “Blue” (2019), about police violence, emanated a sad, wounded dignity. Tesori is at her best mining emotion from this dignified reserve — from the everyday.But “Grounded” is more surreal — and eventually psychotic — material, and Tesori and Brant don’t pursue Jess’s dissolving mental state with the relentlessness, economy or extremity of, say, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” While it’s understandable that the Met would want a single-actor play expanded into something more traditionally grand, the bagginess is palpable in the transition from an 80-minute monologue to a two-and-a-half-hour opera.Eric, for one thing, remains a cipher. His arias feel more like the result of post-workshop notes — “flesh out Jess’s husband” — than emotional imperative or importance to the plot. While the tenor Joseph Dennis is affable in the role, his chemistry with D’Angelo is nil. Besides the messianic Trainer, the stylized characters of the drone operation — the Commander; Jess’s teenage partner, the Sensor; and the “kill chain,” amplified over loudspeakers from offstage — are insufficiently vivid.And while Jess’s ambivalence and troubles are clearly depicted, the storytelling, especially in the second act, is too busy to build the necessary claustrophobia, despite D’Angelo’s talent and earnest commitment. “Grounded” should come as a sobering shock, with the laser-guided horror of a Tomahawk, but for all the touches of churning darkness in the music, it’s oddly gentle.In Mayer’s swiftly shifting if not quite elegant staging, much of Mimi Lien’s set is dominated by LED screens. The projections have been designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, who did similar work on the triptych “Proximity,” which premiered earlier this year at Lyric Opera of Chicago.On the screens, in impressive high definition, we see blue skies rushing past, nighttime mountains, a sonogram, the grayish desert landscape observed from above by the Reaper drone’s pitiless eye. And we see the Reaper stretched across the stage, as rivetingly chilly as an empire vessel in “Star Wars.” On our first encounter with it, there’s even a shiver of sinister John Williams in Tesori’s score.Yet it is a little pat to describe “Grounded” — as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, did in an interview in May with The New York Times — as an “antiwar opera.” It is not exactly that, even if it culminates (spoiler alert) in Jess intentionally crashing the $17 million Reaper because she hallucinates that her target’s daughter is her own.The opera implies that old-fashioned fighter piloting is nobler, and better for soldiers’ mental health, than the video-game-style drone deployment that has expanded the battlefield to encompass, potentially, all of us. Darkly, given the state of global affairs lately, the piece seems to say that war is OK; there are just better and worse — more and less authentic — ways of waging it.GroundedThrough Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center; kennedy-center.org. More

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      in Music

      Hipgnosis Made Mega Deals for Song Catalogs. Its Future Is Unclear.

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      The company’s shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining its current structure.The future of Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the British company that helped kick off the music industry’s trend of top-dollar deals for artists’ song catalogs, is in question after its shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining the company’s current structure.Hipgnosis, founded by Merck Mercuriadis, a former manager of stars like Beyoncé and Elton John, was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 and pitched investors on music rights as a special kind of financial asset that is “more valuable than gold or oil.” Since then Hipgnosis, along with a sister fund backed by the private equity giant Blackstone, have spent more than $2 billion to acquire music catalogs from Neil Young, Shakira, Justin Bieber, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blondie and other artists and songwriters.But in recent months Hipgnosis has come under increasing pressure from dissatisfied investors who have seen the company’s share price drop in comparison to its so-called net asset value, an estimate of its catalogs’ worth prepared by an independent firm. Its share price closed at 74.20 pounds on Thursday, down about 43 percent from a high of 129.20 in November 2021. Its market capitalization is about $1.2 billion.The company also shocked investors last week by suspending its quarterly dividend, after saying that Citrin Cooperman, the independent firm that values its assets, had reduced the amount the company was expected to receive as a result of an industrywide royalty rate adjustment in the United States. Citrin Cooperman, the company said, had calculated that Hipgnosis would receive $21.7 million in retroactive payments, but recently reduced that to $9.9 million, and Hipgnosis said it had suspended the dividend payment — which had been announced at 1.3125 pence, or about 1.6 cents, per ordinary share — to remain compliant with its debt covenants.The global rise in interest rates has altered the calculus of many top-dollar catalog deals, but the investors in Hipgnosis have also grown concerned about the company’s management.“No investor ever knew that the fund was being managed so close to the edge that they were very close to tripping the debt covenant,” Sachin Saggar, a research analyst at Stifel, said in an interview.Hipgnosis recently proposed selling 29 catalogs for $440 million to the Blackstone-backed fund, which is managed by a company led by Mercuriadis. The proceeds were to help pay off Hipgnosis’ debt and buy back shares. But many investors balked, calling the price too low.At the company’s general meeting on Thursday, shareholders rejected the catalog sale and voted against maintaining the company’s structure as an investment trust, a decision that must be renewed every five years. According to an announcement by Hipgnosis, the company’s board now has six months to introduce proposals for future plans, which “may or may not involve winding-up the company or liquidating all or part of the company’s existing portfolio of investments.”The chairman, Andrew Sutch, and two other directors will leave the board.One possibility is that the assets could be sold to Hipgnosis Song Management, the advisory firm led by Mercuriadis, who has that right through an agreement known as a call option.In a statement on Thursday, Mercuriadis said: “Our conversations with shareholders have revealed a consensus that they are enthusiastic about the quality of the company’s iconic portfolio of songs, however it is also clear that they are asking for change and we respect that feedback.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Make Noise Enough’: Excavating Shakespeare’s Songs

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      In Shakespeare, music is an integral part of the action. But the First Folio, which turns 400 this year, failed to transmit how it should sound.Musicians from the early-music ensemble Collectio Musicorum were practicing a 17th-century round on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. The tune was jaunty, full of the cantering rhythms and mimetic horn calls that fit a song about hunting. But sung in canon, some of the notes bumped roughly against one another in daring dissonance. The singers broke off, looking at their conductor for guidance.Jeff Dailey, the group’s director, glanced up encouragingly from his music stand. The dissonances they were hearing were not a mistake, he said, then added: “If you want to make it any more chromatic, like you’ve just killed a deer, you could do even more shouting than singing. Remember, you’re drunk at this point.”The performers were preparing a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays that brings to life the tunes scholars think might have been part of the earliest productions. Some of the numbers that will be featured in a concert on Friday at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side are exquisite settings for voice and lute by composers like Robert Johnson and Thomas Morley.But there are also humble songs laced with innuendo, the kind that would have appealed to the groundlings in the cheap section of the Globe Theater, like the one Dailey and his singers were rehearsing, “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?” from “As You Like It.” A nobleman commands a forester to “Sing it: ’tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.”This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of what is known as the First Folio, which comprises 36 Shakespeare plays, half of which had never been published previously. Put out by members of his company only a few years after his death in 1616, in the weighty format normally reserved for important religious works or histories, the First Folio determined how Shakespeare’s writings would be transmitted.Dailey leads singers in a rehearsal. From left, Christopher Preston Thompson, Chad Kranak and Alex Longnecker.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut the folio failed to transmit one vital part of Shakespeare’s vision: the music. His plays are punctuated by drum rolls, fanfares and dances, indicated in stage directions. And they are teeming with verses meant to be sung. In the First Folio these verses are clearly marked as “song” in the stage instructions and set apart typographically with italics. Singing is essential for rendering Ophelia’s madness, Ariel’s magic and the inebriated antics ratcheting up the comic confusion in “Twelfth Night.”In much of Shakespeare, Dailey said in an interview, “music is an integral part of the action.” But figuring out what it sounded like is another matter.Music printing was a specialized craft, and it would have been too expensive for even a luxury edition like the First Folio to include notated music. And though settings of Shakespeare lyrics appear in many 17th-century English song collections and lute books, these often date to later decades, making it difficult to determine their origin. A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time, but even then, Dailey said, “it’s a chicken and egg question: Did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 2004, the musicologist Ross W. Duffin published “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” which sets hundreds of lyrics to tunes he identified as likely matches. Among them is the hunting round “What shall we have” that was first published, with textual variants, in a collection from 1652. In a manuscript in the Folger Library, Duffin found a version appearing to date back as far as 1625, with a text that more closely aligns with the First Folio. That’s nearly contemporaneous with the play’s publication, but it’s still a quarter century off from 1599, when scholars think Shakespeare first wrote “As You Like It.” In the play, moreover, a single forester is bidden to sing it, whereas this is a round for four voices. Which characters would have joined in onstage?Another song from the play, “It was a Lover and his Lass,” survives in a setting by Morley printed in 1600, which some see as evidence that it was the original song, perhaps even commissioned by Shakespeare. Yet even such a seemingly clear attribution raises questions in performance. Morley’s setting is for a solo voice, whereas in the play it is sung by two pages.“How do you then perform it?” Dailey asked. “Do you have two singers sing it in unison? Do you have two actors alternate verses? Or do you compose an additional part for the second singer?”In concert, Dailey will have his performers take turns with the verses and then sing the refrain in unison. But Duffin, in a recent article, makes a case for reconstructing the song as a duet. He argues that the lute accompaniment in Morley’s printed version is so unusually awkward that it was probably adapted from a previous version for two voices.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesRecords show that Shakespeare and Morley were neighbors, leading some to conjecture that they were friends and collaborators. But Duffin sees no reason to believe that Shakespeare ever commissioned specific music. The clues linking him to Johnson, a master lutenist and the author of artful settings in the plays, are also inconclusive. “The evidence that he was the composer of the King’s Men is so circular,” Duffin said in an interview, referring to Shakespeare’s company of actors. “Everybody wants him to be. The songs are beautiful, but were they the original songs? Probably not.”Much of Duffin’s research has focused on the humble tunes that were the currency of popular culture in Shakespeare’s time. He said ballads in particular were so ubiquitous that an actor presented with a particular meter and rhyme schema would have known which tune to supply. Looking into the names of actors listed in the First Folio, he said he found evidence that many were “tumblers, jugglers and song-and-dance men,” adding that they would have brought their musical skills into the theater.A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time. But, Dailey said, “did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesDuffin believes that there is even more music in Shakespeare’s works than is evident from the italicized lines in the First Folio. He has identified dozens of what he calls “snatches” of songs embedded in dialogue that turn out to be the opening lines or key phrases of popular songs. These would have sparked a shower of associations in contemporary audiences.In “Winter’s Tale,” a brief allusion to a ballad about a murderously jealous husband would have raised the stakes for an audience following the play about a jealous king. In “Twelfth Night,” an otherwise out-of-context reference to “The 12th Day of December” would have been recognized as the title of a famous ballad about a battle, evoking the noise of war in a scene of domestic mayhem.“Everybody would have known these ballads from down the pub,” Duffin said, “so when he quotes a line everybody would have made the connection.”Part inside jokes, part cryptic crossword clues, these brief references would have made performances interactive experiences for contemporary audiences. In 1623, the readers of First Folio would have still been able to listen between the lines, as it were. But over time, the brilliance of Shakespeare’s imagination would come to be defined by what the First Folio was able to capture: the language, divorced from the real and imagined music of the plays. More