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      ‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life

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      Austin Butler plays the singer, with Tom Hanks as his devilish manager, in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic.My first and strongest memory of Elvis Presley is of his death. He was only 42 but he already seemed, in 1977, to belong to a much older world. In the 45 years since, his celebrity has become almost entirely necrological. Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. Luhrmann, whose relationship to the past has always been irreverent and anti-nostalgic, wants to shock Elvis back to life, to imagine who he was in his own time and what he might mean in ours.The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist with jolts of hip-hop (extended into a suite over the final credits), slivers of techno and slatherings of synthetic film-score schmaltz. (The composer and executive music producer is Elliott Wheeler.) The sonic message — and the film’s strongest argument for its subject’s relevance — is that Presley’s blend of blues, gospel, pop and country continues to mutate and pollinate in the musical present. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Its rendering of a quintessentially American tale of race, sex, religion and money teeters between glib revisionism and zombie mythology, unsure if it wants to be a lavish pop fable or a tragic melodrama.The ghoulish, garish production design, by Catherine Martin (Luhrmann’s wife and longtime creative partner) and Karen Murphy, is full of carnival sleaze and Vegas vulgarity. All that satin and rhinestone, filtered through Mandy Walker’s pulpy, red-dominated cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of lurid, frenzied eroticism. You might mistake this for a vampire movie.It wouldn’t entirely be a mistake. The central plot casts Elvis (Austin Butler) as the victim of a powerful and devious bloodsucking fiend. That would be Col. Tom Parker, who supplies voice-over narration and is played by Tom Hanks with a mountain of prosthetic goo, a bizarre accent and a yes-it’s-really-me twinkle in his eyes. Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.“I didn’t kill Elvis,” Parker says, though the movie implies otherwise. “I made Elvis.” In the Colonel’s mind, they were “the showman and the snowman,” equal partners in a supremely lucrative long con.Luhrmann’s last feature was an exuberant, candy-colored — and, I thought, generally underrated — adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” and the Colonel is in some ways a Gatsbyesque character. He’s a self-invented man, an arriviste on the American scene, a “mister nobody from nowhere” trading in the unstable currencies of wishing and seeming. He isn’t a colonel (Elvis likes to call him “admiral”) and his real name isn’t Tom Parker. The mystery of his origins is invoked to sinister effect but not fully resolved. If we paid too much attention to him, he might take over the movie, something that almost happens anyway.Luhrmann seems more interested in the huckster than in the artist. But he himself is the kind of huckster who understands the power of art, and is enough of an artist to make use of that power.Butler with Tom Hanks, left, as Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager. The film depicts him as a small-time grifter and full-time Mephistopheles.Warner Bros.As a Presley biography, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. The basic stuff is all there, as it would be on Wikipedia. Elvis is haunted by the death of his twin brother, Jesse, and devoted to his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Relations with his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are more complicated. The boy grows up poor in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, finds his way into the Sun Records recording studio at the age of 19, and proceeds to set the world on fire. Then there’s the Army, marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), Hollywood, a comeback broadcast in 1968, a long residency in Las Vegas, divorce from Priscilla and the sad, bloated spectacle of his last years.Butler is fine in the few moments of offstage drama that the script allows, but most of the emotional action is telegraphed in Luhrmann’s usual emphatic, breathless style. The actor seems most fully Elvis — as Elvis, the film suggests, was most truly himself — in front of an audience. Those hips don’t lie, and Butler captures the smoldering physicality of Elvis the performer, as well as the playfulness and vulnerability that drove the crowds wild. The voice can’t be imitated, and the movie wisely doesn’t try, remixing actual Elvis recordings rather than trying to replicate them.At his first big performance, in a dance hall in Texarkana, Ark., where he shares a bill with Hank Snow (David Wenham), Snow’s son, Jimmie (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and other country acts, Elvis steps out in a bright pink suit, heavy eye makeup and glistening pompadour. A guy in the audience shouts a homophobic slur, but after a few bars that guy’s date and every other woman in the room is screaming her lungs out, “having feelings she’s not sure she should enjoy,” as the Colonel puts it. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. Elvis is a modern Orpheus, and these maenads are about to tear him to pieces. In another scene, back in Memphis, Elvis watches Little Richard (Alton Mason) tearing up “Tutti Frutti” (a song he would later cover) and sees a kindred spirit.The sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity of early rock ’n’ roll is very much in Luhrmann’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Its racial complications less so. “Elvis” puts its hero in the presence of Black musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who offers career advice. An early montage — repeated so often that it becomes a motif — finds the boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay) simultaneously peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) plays “That’s All Right Mama” and catching the spirit at a tent revival.There’s no doubt that Elvis, like many white Southerners of his class and generation, loved blues and gospel. (He loved country and western, too, a genre the film mostly dismisses.) He also profited from the work of Black musicians and from industry apartheid, and a movie that won’t grapple with the dialectic of love and theft that lies at the heart of American popular music can’t hope to tell the whole story.In the early days, Elvis’s nemesis is the segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland (Nicholas Bell), whose fulminations against sex, race-mixing and rock ’n’ roll are intercut with a galvanic performance of “Trouble.” Later, Elvis is devastated by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed “just three miles from Graceland”) and Robert F. Kennedy. These moments, which try to connect Elvis with the politics of his era, are really episodes in his relationship with Colonel Parker, who wants to keep his cash cow away from controversy.Alton Mason as Little Richard in the film. Early rock’s sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity are in Luhrmann’s wheelhouse, our critic writes, but the music’s racial complications are not.Kane Skennar/Warner Bros.When Elvis defies the Colonel — breaking out in full hip-shaking gyrations when he’s been told “not to wiggle so much as a finger”; turning a network Christmas special into a sweaty, intimate, raucous return to form — the movie wants us to see his conscience at work, as well as his desire for creative independence. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight.And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood. His relationships with Vernon, Priscilla and the entourage known as “the Memphis mafia” receive cursory treatment. His appetites for food, sex and drugs barely get that much.Who was he? The movie doesn’t provide much of an answer. But younger viewers, whose firsthand experience of the King is even thinner than mine, might come away from “Elvis” with at least an inkling of why they should care. In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.Like a lot of people who write about American popular culture — or who just grew up in the second half of the 20th century — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elvis. “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to him, as if for the first time.ElvisRated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      For a Kyiv Techno Collective, ‘Now Everything Is About Politics’

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      Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the team behind Cxema parties have shifted its focus, but political engagement is nothing new for the artists.When Slava Lepsheiev founded the Ukrainian techno collective Cxema in 2014, “I thought it should be outside politics and just a place where people can be happy and dance,” the D.J., 40, said in a recent video interview from Kyiv.Until the pandemic, the biannual Cxema (pronounced “skhema”) raves were essential dates in the techno calendar of Ukraine, which has become an increasingly trendy destination for club tourists over the past decade. These parties — in factories, skate parks and even an abandoned Soviet restaurant — united thousands on the dance floor to a soundtrack of experimental electronic music.But as the Cxema platform grew bigger, and Ukraine’s political climate grew more tense, “I realized I had a responsibility to use that influence,” Lepsheiev said, and to look beyond escapism on the dance floor. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February deepened that commitment, and the war has transformed how Lepsheiev and his team think about their priorities and work.“I think this war has destroyed the statement that art could be outside politics,” said Amina Ahmed, 25, Cxema’s booking and communications manager. “Now everything is about politics.”As shelling intensified in Kyiv, the city’s tight-knit electronic music community abandoned clubs and synthesizers to shelter with families, volunteer or enlist in the armed forces.For Maryana Klochko, 30, an experimental musician who was scheduled to play her Cxema debut in April, it now “feels much more important to be a good person than to be a good musician,” she said in a recent video interview from outside Lviv. Klochko has rejected two invitations to perform in Russia since 2014, and now she has decided to stop singing in Russian. “It hurts to sing in the language of the people who are killing my people,” she said.A 2019 party Cxema organized in Kyiv in collaboration with Pan, a Berlin-based record label. Vic BakinMany members of the Cxema team have recently been volunteering in humanitarian efforts, like Oleg Patselya, 21, who has been delivering medicine and food to soldiers at the front lines in Donetsk. Ahmed has been using Cxema’s social media channels to share information about the war. She called countering Russian propaganda with facts from inside Ukraine “working on the informational front line.”Throughout the history of electronic music, from the 1980s house scenes in Chicago and New York, to Britain’s 1990s rave culture and the techno explosion in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, clubs have created safe spaces for marginalized communities and so have been, implicitly or explicitly, political spaces.Lepsheiev started to D.J. in 1999 as part of the buzzy arts scene that emerged in Kyiv after the fall of the Soviet Union. Everything ground to a halt with the 2014 Maidan revolution, when violent clashes between protesters and the police led to the ousting of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, swiftly followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Lepsheiev saw this “cultural vacuum” as an opportunity to start something new, founding Cxema to help revive the city’s arts scene and contributing to Kyiv’s emergent position on the European culture map over the past decade.Now, the war is changing the Cxema artists’ relationship with music itself. “If you hear explosions once or twice, you become afraid of every loud sound,” Klochko said. “It’s stressful to wear headphones because you are isolated, so you could miss an attack.”In the rare moments artists feel safe to listen, they now prefer ambient or instrumental music to their previous diet of club tracks. “At the moment I don’t see the sense of electronic music,” Patselya said. “I feel nothing when I listen to it.”A new micro-genre of patriotic club tracks has even emerged, where President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches are grafted wholesale onto a throbbing techno beat.When Russia invaded Ukraine, “I felt this existential question about my skills, like they were no help to anybody,” the producer Illia Biriukov said.Eugene StepanetsThe electro producer Illia Biriukov, 31, has continued to write music through the war. “In the difficult first days in Kyiv, electronic music seemed like a decadence of peacetime,” he said. He left town with his synthesizers and attempted to work on an album. “But against the backdrop of brutal events it was very difficult to focus,” he said. “Making music seemed useless. I felt this existential question about my skills, like they were no help to anybody.”Still, he continued making music, partly as a sonic journal of his emotional state. “But when I listen back to those tracks now,” he said, “they feel too aggressive. I’d like to bring a little less aggression into the world.”Artem Ilin, 29, who has played at Cxema three times, has also kept creating music. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, I could die,” he said. “This pushed me to make music because if I die, it’s OK, but my music will be here and people can listen to it.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      The Netrebko Question

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      MONTE CARLO — Anna Netrebko, the superstar Russian soprano, stood on the steps of the ornate Casino de Monte-Carlo, taking photos with friends and watching Aston Martins and Ferraris zoom through the night.“It feels quiet and peaceful here,” she said in a brief interview outside the casino shortly before midnight. “And everybody loves each other, which is very rare.”It was late April, and Netrebko had just finished a performance of Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” at Opéra de Monte-Carlo. It was not how she had planned to spend the evening: She was supposed to be nearly 4,000 miles away, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, headlining in another Puccini opera, “Turandot.”After Russia invaded Ukraine, Netrebko announced that she opposed the war but declined to criticize President Vladimir V. Putin, whom she has long supported. Almost overnight she was transformed from one of classical music’s most popular and bankable stars into something of a pariah. Appearances at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Zurich Opera and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, were called off. The Met Opera, where she has been the reigning prima donna for years, canceled her contracts for two seasons and warned that she might never return.The Monte Carlo engagement, her first in more than two months, was the start of an effort to rebuild her imperiled career. It was perhaps an unusual setting to stage a comeback: Its 517-seat jewel box of an opera house is attached to the famous casino, with slot machines near the lobby. Netrebko, whose seasons are usually booked years in advance, was invited at the last minute, when a singer contracted the coronavirus and efforts to bring in two other replacements were unsuccessful.But Netrebko was warmly received, winning ovations and shouts of “Brava!” at her final performance. (That same night in New York, Liudmyla Monastyrska, the Ukrainian soprano who replaced her at the Met, was cheered when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag for her curtain calls.)After the performance, as Netrebko walked back to the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo with her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, who had starred with her in “Manon Lescaut,” she said she felt a reprieve from the scrutiny of critics in the United States and Europe, as well as in Russia, where she had recently come under fire for speaking out against the war.“They shoot you from both sides,” she said, forming her hand into the shape of a gun.Anna Netrebko and her husband, Yusif Eyvazov, performing “Manon Lescaut” in Monte Carlo, part of an effort to rebuild her career.Alain Hanel – OMCClassical music’s answer to BeyoncéAfter the invasion of Ukraine, cultural institutions in the United States and Europe denounced Moscow. And they were confronted with difficult decisions about how to deal with Russian artists.Many cut ties with close associates of Putin — especially the conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime friend and prominent supporter of the Russian president. Gergiev, who leads the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he nurtured Netrebko’s career, has conducted concerts over the years that were freighted with political meaning, including one in a breakaway region of Georgia and another in Palmyra, after it was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces.Other Western institutions, though, were criticized for overreach after they canceled performances by Russian artists who were not closely identified with politics, and even with some who had spoken out against the invasion.Now many cultural organizations face an uncomfortable question: What to do about Netrebko?Her ties to Putin are not as deep as Gergiev’s, but they are substantial, according to a New York Times review of news reports in Russian and English and public records.Her name appeared on a list endorsing Putin’s election in 2012, and she has spoken glowingly of him over the years, describing him as “a very attractive man” and praising his “strong, male energy.” In 2017, in the run-up to Putin’s re-election, she told a Russian state news agency that it was “impossible to think of a better president for Russia.” She has also occasionally lent support to his policies; she once circulated a statement by Putin on Instagram alongside flexed biceps emojis. In 2014, she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists, and was photographed holding a separatist flag.Putin, in turn, has showered Netrebko with praise and awards over the years. She was invited to sing at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and other state celebrations. Last September, on her 50th birthday, he sent a telegram calling her the pride of Russia, and describing her as an “open, charming and friendly person, with an uplifting personality and a clear-cut civic stance.” At a concert celebrating her birthday at the State Kremlin Palace, the president’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, read Putin’s message from the stage.Before the invasion, Netrebko was at the height of her career. With a larger-than-life personality and a taste for extravagance, she built a loyal fan base and was sometimes called classical music’s answer to Beyoncé.Now she hopes to persuade the cultural world to look beyond her ties to Putin. She has hired a crisis communications firm, lobbied opera houses and concert halls for engagements and filed a labor grievance against the Met.Netrebko with Putin when he awarded her the title of People’s Artist of Russia in 2008 at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated PressPeter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said it would be “immoral” to engage her during the war. The Met has worked to rally support for Ukraine, hosting a benefit concert and helping form an orchestra of Ukrainians, to be led by Gelb’s wife, the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson. The company recently cut ties with another Russian singer, Hibla Gerzmava, who had also spoken in support of Putin.“She is inextricably associated with Putin,” Gelb said of Netrebko. “She has ideologically and in action demonstrated that over a period of years. I don’t see any way that we could possibly do a back flip.”Netrebko has declined repeated requests for an interview from The New York Times over the past several months.Elsewhere, Netrebko’s comeback is gaining momentum. Several European institutions that had sought distance from her have recently announced plans to engage her, some as soon as next year. In late May, she sang recitals before enthusiastic crowds in Paris and Milan, where her concert at Teatro alla Scala sold out. Italian news outlets declared it a “triumph,” writing, “Anna Netrebko retakes La Scala: flowers and applause after her break for the war.”In other theaters, she has faced boycotts, protests and persistent questions about her ties to Putin.At a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris last month, about 50 Ukrainian activists staged a die-in outside the theater. They played a soundtrack that mixed the music of Tchaikovsky with gunshots and sirens meant to evoke the war. A woman dressed as Netrebko, with fake bloodstains on her dress, danced as the protesters lie still on the ground.‘I’m still a Russian citizen’Netrebko was in Moscow with her husband, her frequent artistic collaborator, when the invasion began, on Feb. 24. The night before, the two had performed in Barvikha, a town of villas and luxury boutiques near Moscow, singing works by Verdi and Puccini before an audience of wealthy Russians. Tickets for the concert, sponsored by the Swiss jeweler Chopard, for which Netrebko serves as a brand ambassador, sold for as much as $2,000 apiece.The trouble for Netrebko started almost immediately. When she and her husband arrived for a concert in Denmark scheduled for the day after the invasion, she was forced to cancel amid an outcry from local politicians.In the days that followed she came under pressure to forcefully denounce the invasion. A diva for the digital age, with more than 700,000 followers on Instagram, she preferred to speak directly to her fans in English and Russian on social media.On Feb. 26, she posted a statement opposing the war. But she also seemed to resent the scrutiny, adding, “Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.” In another post, alongside heart and praying hands emojis, she shared a text that used an expletive to refer to her Western critics, saying they were “as evil as blind aggressors.”As her cancellations mounted, her behavior grew more unpredictable. In early March she sent a photo on WhatsApp to a senior executive at Deutsche Grammophon, her longtime label, who had been trying to reach her, according to a person briefed on the photo, who was granted anonymity to discuss private interactions. The photo showed what appeared to be Netrebko’s hand holding a bottle of tequila up to a television with Putin on the screen, the person said. Her decision to send the photo frustrated friends and advisers, who saw it as unprofessional and worried it could further damage her career, the person said. Netrebko’s representatives declined to comment on the photo.Netrebko has a history of courting controversy. When the Met tried to stop her from using makeup to darken her skin during a production of “Aida” in 2018, concerned that the practice recalled blackface, she went to a tanning salon instead. The next year, appearing with dark makeup in a production of “Aida” at the Mariinsky, she wrote on Instagram, “Black Face and Black Body for Ethiopian princess, for Verdi greatest opera! YES!”As the war intensified, the Met’s general manager, Gelb, called Netrebko’s representatives and asked her to denounce Putin. Netrebko demurred, and during their last conversation, Netrebko told Gelb she had to stand with her country, Gelb said. Gelb, who had made Netrebko a cornerstone of his efforts to rejuvenate the company, canceled her contracts and said she might never return to the Met.Netrebko, a citizen of Russia and Austria who lives in Vienna, has since made it clear that she would not criticize Putin. “No one in Russia can,” she said in an interview with Die Zeit, a German newspaper, published this month. “Putin is still the president of Russia. I’m still a Russian citizen, so you can’t do something like that. Do you understand? So I declined to make such a statement.”“Anna Netrebko retakes La Scala,” one Italian news outlet wrote after Netrebko performed a sold-out recital there in May.Brescia and Amisano, via Teatro alla Scala‘I am guilty of nothing!’Netrebko and Putin have crossed paths for decades, sharing a friendship with Gergiev, whom Netrebko has called her “godfather in music.” It was at the Mariinsky, run by Gergiev, that Netrebko made her career, rising from a promising vocal student who washed the theater’s floors as a part-time job to become one of the company’s biggest stars.From his perch in the royal box at the Mariinsky, Putin often saw Netrebko perform, going back to at least 2000, when she was 28 and starred as Natasha Rostova in Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. Netrebko was the “undisputed star of the performance,” the newspaper wrote.Netrebko became one of Russia’s most famous cultural ambassadors, and in 2008 Putin awarded her the title of People’s Artist, the country’s highest honor for performers, at a ceremony in St. Petersburg that also featured Gergiev.Netrebko, in turn, seemed to embrace Putin’s brand of nationalism. She has been photographed wearing the black-and-orange St. George ribbon, a symbol of the Russian military that has become popular among Putin supporters, and a T-shirt celebrating a victory in World War II.“I am always unambiguously for Russia and I perceive attacks on my country extremely negatively,” she said in a 2009 interview with a Russian state-owned newspaper, in which she denounced foreign news coverage of the war in Georgia.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Review: ‘The Ordering of Moses’ Shines at Riverside Church

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      The Harlem Chamber Players presented R. Nathaniel Dett’s 1937 oratorio in honor of the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance, for the Juneteenth weekend.The Harlem Chamber Players offered a rare, heartfelt performance of R. Nathaniel Dett’s 1937 oratorio “The Ordering of Moses” at Riverside Church on Friday, as part of a centennial celebration of the Harlem Renaissance that had been delayed by the pandemic.Timed to coincide with the Juneteenth weekend, the event felt like a broad community gathering, as though a sampling of city dwellers stepped off a subway train and headed to the same place. New Yorkers across ages and races, including a crying baby or two, filled the pews. Some dressed in natty suits, others in picnic shorts. The only thing stuffy about the evening was the weather outside.With the concert running behind schedule, Terrance McKnight, a host for WQXR and artistic adviser for the ensemble, was on hand to M.C. Noting that the performance was being recorded for his radio station, he encouraged the audience to make some noise: “What’s a Juneteenth celebration in New York City sound like?” The reply: jubilant shouts and applause.That energy continued into a stirring rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” arranged for chorus and soprano soloist (a hard-to-hear Janinah Burnett) by the evening’s conductor, Damien Sneed. Known as the Black National Anthem, it brought the congregation to its feet. Sneed’s harmonization gave it a discordant underbelly reflective of struggle — a reminder that it has been only two years since protests for George Floyd swept the globe, and one year since Juneteenth, an annual observation of Emancipation dating to 1866, was consecrated as a federal holiday.Damien Sneed, conducting the pieces on Friday.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe evening’s centerpiece, “The Ordering of Moses,” tells the story of Exodus: Moses, inspired by God’s call, overcomes his hesitation and leads the Israelites out of Egypt with his sister Miriam.Dett ingeniously wove spirituals into the typical oratorio structure of soloists and chorus expounding a biblical story with orchestra. In a letter around the time of the premiere, he wrote of the synergy between folk lyrics and scripture, calling it “striking” and “natural.”The score elides musical styles, as well. The emotional restraint of the soloists’ parts suits the solemn subject, and when their voices intermingle, the lines move perhaps too neatly. But the orchestration admits richer, Romantic influences, and a call-and-response with the chorus gives the music the sway of a spiritual.Central to the structure is one spiritual in particular, “Go Down, Moses,” and Dett’s bracing fugue on its melody honors its august history. Harriet Tubman sang its promise of deliverance from oppression on the Underground Railroad, and Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson popularized it across a segregated country.At Riverside Church, the bass section of the Chorale Le Chateau strongly anchored the fugue, and the altos lent it clarity. The tenors and sopranos shied away from the swiftly moving harmonies, reflecting a general timidity among all the choristers when they didn’t have a clear melody to sing.The tenor Chauncey Parker (Moses) let his voice ring and popped out triumphant high notes. The soprano Brandie Sutton (Miriam) phrased her music with confident individuality, echoing the style of the evening’s dedicatee, the legendary Jessye Norman. The baritone Kenneth Overton (the Word and the Voice of God) sang authoritatively, and the mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann (the Voice of Israel) offered glimmers of radiance in the taxing contralto writing.The Harlem School of the arts alumni, teen and junior ensembles, in “The Ordering of Moses.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn her opening remarks, Liz Player, the Harlem Chamber Players’ executive and artistic director, noted that “The Ordering of Moses” was the ensemble’s largest-ever undertaking. It showed sometimes in the careful tempos and less-than-sure-footed ensemble.But moments shone. As the story opens up, moving from Moses’ self-doubt to an affirmation of his purpose, so does the music: A lonely cello (touchingly played by Wayne Smith) begins the piece, and an orchestra in full cry ends it, with Parker and Sutton declaiming their lines on high as the chorus cushioned them with long, held notes. The effect was resplendent.Juneteenth, asserted McKnight, is “a celebration of liberty for all Americans,” and in those final moments, as the music bathed the diverse assemblage in its glow, it seemed he was right. More

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      Donald Pippin, Conductor on Broadway and Beyond, Dies at 95

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      As music director, he contributed to the success of acclaimed shows including “Oliver!,” “Mame,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “A Chorus Line.”Donald Pippin, a versatile conductor and composer who won a Tony Award in 1963 on his first try at being musical director for a Broadway show, “Oliver!,” and went on to work on some of the biggest musicals in Broadway history, including “Mame” and “A Chorus Line,” died on June 9 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 95.His former wife, the Broadway performer Marie Santell, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may have been a factor.Mr. Pippin had more than two dozen Broadway credits, mostly as music director — the person in charge of preparing the orchestra and often conducting it, interpreting the score and coordinating with the director and choreographer — though he was also often credited with vocal arrangements. He was a favorite of the composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, serving as music director not only for “Mame” (1966), for which Mr. Herman wrote the music and lyrics, but also for “Dear World” (1969), “Mack & Mabel” (1974), “La Cage aux Folles” (1983) and other Herman shows.“La Cage” ran for more than four years, but it wasn’t Mr. Pippin’s biggest success. That was “A Chorus Line,” which opened on Broadway in 1975 with Mr. Pippin as music director and ran for some 15 years, a record at the time.Mr. Pippin talked his way into the music director job on “Oliver!,” the musical based on Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” with few credentials. He’d worked as assistant conductor on the 1960 show “Irma la Douce,” which was produced by David Merrick. When he heard Mr. Merrick was bringing “Oliver!” to Broadway, he hounded his secretary for an appointment, although the two had never met, and told Mr. Merrick that he should hire him. Mr. Merrick did.Mr. Pippin won a Tony Award in 1963 for “Oliver!,” the first Broadway show for which he was the musical director..“You’d better be as good as you think you are,” Mr. Merrick told him, as Mr. Pippin recounted the moment in an interview with the Baylor School of Chattanooga, Tenn., where he went to high school.His self-confidence was not misplaced. The show ran for 774 performances, and Mr. Pippin won the Tony for best conductor and musical director. He was one of the last people to win that award, which was discontinued after 1964.Mr. Pippin’s other Broadway credits as musical director or musical supervisor included “110 in the Shade” (1963), “Applause” (1970), “Woman of the Year” (1981) and another Herman show, “Jerry’s Girls” (1985).The conductor Larry Blank, for whom Mr. Pippin was both friend and mentor, said in a phone interview that Mr. Pippin had a warm personality that was well suited to working with the varied figures in the theater, especially leading ladies like Angela Lansbury (“Mame”) and Lauren Bacall (“Woman of the Year”).“He said to me once that he believed in ‘persuasive accompaniment,’” Mr. Blank said. “He would say it with a twinkle in his eye.”Broadway was only one element of Mr. Pippin’s résumé. He also wrote the score for several musicals, including “The Contrast” and “Fashion,” both staged in New York in the 1970s. In 1979 he was named music director of Radio City Music Hall, a post he held for years. In 1987 he shared an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in music direction for “Broadway Sings: The Music of Jule Styne.”He also appeared as guest conductor with orchestras all over the United States. One program he enjoyed presenting was a salute to his friend Mr. Herman, featuring songs from “La Cage,” “Mame” and other shows, with Broadway singers joining him. Critics agreed that his long working relationship with Mr. Herman enhanced those performances considerably.The director and choreographer Michael Bennett and members of casts past and present at the record-breaking 3,389th performance of “A Chorus Line” at the Shubert Theater on Broadway in 1983. The show was Mr. Pippin’s greatest success.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Pippin and the orchestra exposed all of the music’s many subtle and complex orchestrations,” John Huxhold wrote in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch when Mr. Pippin presented the Herman program with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1997.In 2020, when Broadway staged a tribute to Mr. Herman, who had died in December 2019, Mr. Blank, who led the orchestra for that show, said he made sure to ask Mr. Pippin to conduct one of the numbers, the title song from “Mame,” using Mr. Pippin’s original vocal arrangement. Mr. Pippin was 93.Mr. Pippin was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Macon, Ga., and grew up in Knoxville, Tenn. His father, Earl, worked at an A.&P. and later was a poultry wholesaler. His mother, Irene (Ligon) Pippin, started him on piano lessons when he was 6. At 8 he won a state piano competition, so when he was 9, since he had already won in the younger age group, the contest organizers put him in the division for 10- and 11-year-olds. He won that too.When Mr. Pippin returned to Knoxville in 1996 to lead a program called “Donald Pippin’s Broadway Melody” with the Knoxville Symphony Pops Orchestra, a high point of the evening came when he paid tribute to Evelyn Miller, his first piano teacher, who was in the audience. In her honor, he played Grieg’s Waltz in A Minor, which she had taught him for that first piano competition.Ms. Miller had also come to a preview performance of “Oliver!” in New York in 1963, and Mr. Pippin invited her to a party afterward, where she met the cast members, including Bruce Prochnik, the British boy who played the title character. He autographed a photo for her, trying for something he thought sounded Southern. “To my Tennessee honey chile,” he wrote.Mr. Pippin’s mother died when he was 10, and in 1938 he was sent to the Baylor School, then a military-style school for boys. The school let him bring his Steinway piano, which was installed in the chapel.He graduated in 1944, then served in the Army Medical Corps in occupied Japan. He attended the University of Chattanooga before moving to New York in 1950 to study at the Juilliard School, paying his way by playing in piano bars and at churches.He left Juilliard without graduating to enter the working world and took a job at ABC-TV writing for its musical productions. He found the job frustrating.“The conductors were so inept that they’d just destroy the music by having the wrong tempos,” he told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1996.That inspired him to learn conducting. He studied with Oscar Kosarin, who had worked on Broadway. Then came “Irma la Douce” and his breakthrough, “Oliver!”He and Ms. Santell married in 1974. They eventually divorced but remained close. Mr. Pippin, who lived in Brewster, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.He especially enjoyed his years at Radio City Music Hall.“Nothing’s more exciting than to come rising out of that orchestra pit on those hydraulic lifts and playing an overture at Radio City in front of 6,000 people,” he told The News-Sentinel.His work there found him conducting the annual Christmas show, which featured live animals, including camels. Ms. Santell recounted a story he used to tell about one particular camel, which apparently took a liking to him when they encountered each other backstage. The beast would even sometimes rest his head on Mr. Pippin’s shoulder.In Ms. Santell’s memory, the camel’s name was Henry; when Mr. Pippin told the story to The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., in 1992, it was Oscar. In any case, what happened during one performance is uncontested: Henry, or Oscar, was led onstage, saw his buddy Don, folded his legs, sat down where he wasn’t supposed to and resisted all entreaties to move along.“He wanted to watch me conduct,” Mr. Pippin explained to the newspaper.Ms. Santell provided the kicker: the note Mr. Pippin received from the stage manager the next day.“To the maestro,” it read. “Do not fraternize with the camels anymore.” More

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      BTS Ponders Its Future, and South Korea’s Economy Warily Takes Note

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      The band’s label saw its stock price plunge, and the possibility that the K-pop group won’t tour as pandemic restrictions ease threatens to reverberate through South Korea’s economy.The fallout from BTS’s announcement on Tuesday that the K-pop juggernaut would be taking a break as members explore solo careers was immediate and drastic.In just a day, the stock price of the group’s management label, HYBE, plummeted 28 percent to 139,000 won — or $108 — its lowest price since the company went public nearly two years ago, shedding $1.7 billion in market value. The stock price has barely moved since.The drastic plunge underscores how South Korea’s best-selling boy band has become not only a cultural sensation but also a powerful stakeholder in South Korea’s economy.Since the group’s debut in 2013, BTS has raked in billions of dollars through album sales, concert tickets and social media. Its YouTube channel alone, which is the 20th largest in the world, can generate up to $2 million a month. By 2020, the group was contributing $3.5 billion annually to the nation’s economy, according to the Hyundai Research Institute.Japanese fans of BTS sharing mementos of the band at a cafe in Seoul on Wednesday.Kim Hong-Ji/ReutersEven during the pandemic, which devastated the live concert industry, BTS drove a 58 percent increase in HYBE’s revenue, according to the company’s year-end reports for 2021. The label raked in a 1.3 trillion won last year, nearly a billion U.S. dollars.The group’s financial contribution to South Korea’s economy had only been expected to grow as pandemic restrictions eased, according to the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, which predicted that a single BTS concert could generate upward of $500 million or more.News of the group’s planned hiatus convulsed the internet once the group posted its video announcement, which drew over 16 million views in two days. The group’s fans, who call themselves Army, swarmed social media in expressing support — and anguished distress — over the news.“Thank you BTS for being our home, for your beautiful music that enlightens our life, for your love & happiness to us,” one Twitter user posted. “We’ll support you. We’re always here for you. We’ll wait for you. ARMY FOREVER. We love you.”Fans were particularly confused by the term “hiatus,” which was used in the English translations in the original video. Reports in South Korean media outlets were quick to link the announcement to the fact that Jin, the oldest member of the group, would need to enlist for mandatory military service by the end of this year.Speculation about the group’s possible disbandment led to a quick backpedaling of statements by the label and the group members themselves.News organizations reported the group was not taking a hiatus, but that group members were pivoting to focus more on their individual careers. The group will “remain active in various different formats,” according to the statement.RM, the group’s leader, posted on the social media site Weverse on Thursday, saying that many people had sent him messages assuming the group was breaking up.A mural depicting RM, the leader of BTS, in Goyang, South Korea. Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Although it’s not like I didn’t anticipate this or was oblivious that this could happen, I still feel bitter,” he said, explaining that his intentions were to communicate openly with fans on the group’s reflections of the past decade and not to announce that the group was disbanding.Jungkook, the youngest BTS member, also tried to clarify matters in a live video stream on Thursday. “We don’t have any thoughts of breaking up,” he said, adding that BTS still had plans to perform in the future.In Tuesday’s announcement video, members gathered around a table and spoke candidly about the intense pressures they face to constantly churn out music and deliver, ultimately leading to their decision to temporarily pursue solo careers.“I felt like I was trapped and couldn’t get out,” said Namjoon, who explained that he felt the years of constantly being in the spotlight as a K-pop idol didn’t leave him much room for personal growth. More

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      Beyoncé Announces New Album ‘Renaissance,’ Out Next Month

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      The new project, apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” will be released on July 29, according to the singer’s social media accounts.Cue up the celebratory tweets: A new Beyoncé album is coming.Early Thursday, Beyoncé updated her social media accounts to indicate that a new project called “Renaissance,” apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” would be released on July 29. A link on her website allowed fans to add the album in advance to their collections on streaming music services, and her site is selling four “poses” — versions, or at least bundles — of boxed sets for the album, containing items like T-shirts, posters and a collectible box.“Renaissance” will be Beyoncé’s first solo studio album since “Lemonade” in 2016. But she has released other material since then, including “Everything Is Love,” her joint album with Jay-Z, her husband, in 2018 (credited to the Carters); “Homecoming” (2019), a live album and concert film from her appearance at the Coachella festival; “The Lion King: The Gift,” a companion album to the 2019 remake of “The Lion King”; and songs like “Black Parade” (2020), which won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance, and “Be Alive” (2021), which appeared in the movie “King Richard” and was nominated for an Oscar.Most surprising is that Beyoncé teed up “Renaissance” in advance at all. Back in 2013, she blew up the music industry’s marketing playbook by releasing her visual album “Beyoncé” with no notice, simply telling fans via social media that it was available to purchase. The album, and its novel method of release, became a global news story, demonstrating the power of superstars on social media to corral their fans and bend the rules of the business to their favor. For years after, artists and their record companies sought to “pull a Beyoncé” and repeat her success. Of course, only Beyoncé could pull it off again, as she did in 2016 with “Lemonade.”To Beyoncé’s superfans in the BeyHive, who constantly scour the internet for any clues about their heroine, the news about “Renaissance” was not a total surprise. In recent days, fans have tweeted about the registration of what appear to be new Beyoncé songs on industry databases, like the one for ASCAP, the licensing agency for songwriters and music publishers. More

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      BTS Says It’s Taking a Break, but Promises It’s Not Permanent

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      Members of the K-pop juggernaut said in a video conversation that they wanted time to explore their individual artistic identities.After nearly a decade together, the seven members of BTS need some time apart.The Korean boy band released a video on Tuesday discussing the members’ desire to take a break from their current arrangement in order to explore their individual music careers; the move, they said, would also take some pressure off their lives as international pop sensations.“We’ve talked among ourselves several times and we believe it’s good to take some time apart,” J-Hope, one of the members, said in the video. “I hope that people don’t think negatively about this step and that they see this is a healthy, important part of our plan that will let BTS grow stronger.”But messages of support and heartbreak from the group’s dedicated fan base — known as Army — became tinged with confusion on Tuesday when news organizations reported that the entertainment company associated with the Grammy-nominated band had released a statement saying that BTS was not, in fact, taking a hiatus and that its members were simply focusing more on solo projects. The statement said BTS will “remain active in various different formats.”The BTS video was released as the K-pop group celebrated the ninth anniversary of its debut. While chatting and reminiscing over a meal, the members — J-Hope, RM, Jin, Suga, Jimin, V and Jungkook — touched on some of the challenges they were facing as artists, including the pressure to keep churning out hit songs.“I should be writing about what I’m feeling and the stories I want to tell,” Suga said, “but I’m just forcefully squeezing out words because I need to satisfy someone.”RM, who often speaks for the group in English — including at a recent White House visit — said it was challenging for him to balance his own artistic work with the demands of acting as a kind of group spokesman.The singers seemed to agree that some time focusing on their solo careers would strengthen their future collaborations and would ultimately be in the service of their fans. And future solo performances are already on the books: Earlier this month, Lollapalooza, a music festival in Chicago, announced that J-Hope would be a headliner at the event this summer.“I want to keep performing,” RM said, “but I feel like I’ve lost direction.” More