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5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More
5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More
With the opening of a big African American music museum, new retro bowling halls and a ramped-up food scene, Nashville just kept on growing over the last two years. A visitors’ guide.As the weather warms, travelers anxious to get back to honky-tonkin’ in Nashville can expect not only to find things much as they were prepandemic — Tootsies Orchid Lounge, Legends Corner and Robert’s Western World are still cranking out boisterous fun along Lower Broadway — but also a vertiginous number of new restaurants, hotels and music venues. They will also find one of the most impactful music museums to open anywhere in decades: the National Museum of African American Music.There were losses, of course, such as the closing of Douglas Corner, the well-known music venue, and Rotier’s Restaurant, but venerated country music draws like the Ryman Auditorium, the Grand Ole Opry House and the small-but-mighty singer/songwriter venue, The Bluebird Cafe, made it through, as did most Nashville restaurants.Indeed, according to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. (NCVC) the city added a staggering 197 new restaurants, bars and coffee shops; a couple of jazzy retro bowling alleys; and 23 hotels in 2020 and 2021.“I think we are one of the very few destinations that kept building while everything was shut down,” said Deana Ivey, the president of the NCVC. “We have more music, more restaurants, more hotels and a growing arts and fashion scene. If the early numbers we’ve received for March are correct, then March will be the best month in the city’s history.” As an indicator, she said, the preliminary number for hotel rooms sold in March 2022 was 7.6 percent higher than March 2019.Currently, according to the NCVC, vaccination and masking requirements are being left up to businesses, and a number of music venues are requiring proof of a negative Covid-19 test, so visitors should contact those venues directly.From left, James Lee Jr., his sons Cy and Brooks, and Mr. Lee’s wife, Asha, listen to music at one of the hands-on exhibits at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville.William DeShazer for The New York TimesCulture and revelryNashville’s newest cultural gem, the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM), opened last year at the long-planned 5th + Broadway, a complex of restaurants, shops, offices and residential space across the street from the Ryman Auditorium. The museum aims to tell the comprehensive story of African American music’s influence on American culture. Museum designers have done a noteworthy job of laying out the intersectionality of varying genres in the 56,000-square-foot facility where videos of musicians are in constant rotation.Numerous artifacts on display include B.B. King’s guitar “Lucille,” George Clinton’s wig and robe, and a microphone used by Billie Holiday. Storytelling is partitioned into six main rooms, five dedicated to specific genres, including R&B, hip-hop, gospel, jazz and blues, with rock ’n’ roll mingled throughout. The main gallery, Rivers of Rhythm, ties it all together within the context of American history. The museum also informs visitors that Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard and Etta James all spent time singing and playing in Nashville.Nashville has two new venues — Brooklyn Bowl Nashville (above) and Eastside Bowl — that combine bowling with live music and a restaurant-bar scene.William DeShazer for The New York TimesIn the revelry lane, Nashville now has two venues with a common theme, Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, in the Germantown neighborhood, and Eastside Bowl, in Madison. Both claim a stylish 1970s décor and vibe that combine bowling with a restaurant/bar/music experience. The music venue at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, based on the original Brooklyn Bowl in, well, Brooklyn, seats 1,200. Jimmy Fallon hopped onstage in February to join the local Grateful Dead cover band The Stolen Faces, and Grand Ole Opry’s new inductee, Lauren Alaina, recently played; Neko Case is scheduled for August.Over in Madison, Eastside Bowl, which seats 750, is also bringing in respected talent. The singer-songwriter Joshua Hedley performed in April, and the Steepwater Band rockers are scheduled for May. Eastside Bowl has regular bowling and “HyperBowling,” a cross between pinball and bowling with a reactive bumper used to navigate the ball. The food includes the much-missed shepherd’s pie from the Family Wash, an Eastside institution that closed in 2018.The French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten developed the concept for the new restaurant Druisie & Darr at the recently renovated Hermitage Hotel.William DeShazer for The New York TimesEat and sleepNashville fans coming back to the city for the first time in two years will find a food scene still ramping up at breakneck speed with the chef and founder of Husk, Sean Brock, doing some heavy lifting. In 2020, he opened Joyland, a burgers and fried chicken joint, and, on the other end of the spectrum, the Continental, an old-school, fine-dining restaurant in the new Grand Hyatt Nashville. Recent dishes there included tilefish with crispy potatoes, leeks and watercress, and an unforgettable whipped rice pudding with lemon dulce de leche and rice cream enveloped in a sweet crisp. Last fall, Mr. Brock launched his flagship restaurant, Audrey, in East Nashville, which centers on his Appalachian roots; upstairs his high-concept restaurant, June, is where he hosts “The Nashville Sessions,” which highlight tasting menus created by notable chefs.Other renowned chefs are finding a place in Nashville. The French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten developed the concept for the new restaurant Druisie & Darr at the recently renovated Hermitage Hotel, and the James Beard Award-winning chef Andrew Carmellini has brought in Music City outposts of New York’s The Dutch and Carne Mare, both at the newly installed hotel W Nashville in the Gulch neighborhood. Others are adding on; RJ Cooper, also a James Beard winner, launched Acqua, next door to his swanky Saint Stephen in Germantown last month.A Nashville favorite, the Elliston Place Soda Shop, is back on the scene after recently relocating.William DeShazer for The New York TimesA slice of coconut meringue pie at Elliston Place Soda Shop.William DeShazer for The New York TimesFor both locals and travelers, the opening of a second Pancake Pantry downtown is relieving fans of having to wait in line at the Hillsboro Village location for the shop’s made-from-scratch flapjacks (their heavenly sweet potato pancakes with cinnamon-cream syrup come to mind). Similarly, the much-applauded Arnold’s Country Kitchen on 8th Avenue South now has a night and weekend schedule to accommodate the usual crush of meat-and-three fans. Cheering things up on the West End Corridor is the historic and colorful Elliston Place Soda Shop, back after relocating to 2105 Elliston Place. The ice-cream shop had been in operation for over 80 years right next door, and now has a polished-up menu, a full bar and, you guessed it, a stage for live music.Certainly, there won’t be a dearth of accommodations for visitors any time soon. The city added 4,248 hotel rooms over the last two years. The 130-room, hipster-forward Moxy Nashville Vanderbilt is the first hotel ever to open in cozy Hillsboro Village, and the massive new luxury monolith, the Grand Hyatt Nashville, downtown has one of the highest rooftop bars in the city, along with seven restaurants.Travel Trends That Will Define 2022Card 1 of 7Looking ahead. More
5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More
5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More
A festival, Summer for the City, which includes elements of Mostly Mozart, is part of an effort to attract younger, more diverse audiences.After more than two years of upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center will stage a festival this summer aimed at helping New York City heal.Called Summer for the City, the festival will take place across 10 outdoor spaces and three indoor stages at the campus from mid-May to mid-August and will be programmed around themes of rejoicing, reclaiming and remembering. It is also part of Lincoln Center’s efforts to recalibrate its image as an exclusive bastion of classical music and appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd.The center plans to feature more popular music and install a large disco ball, 10 feet in diameter, that will hang over a dance floor at the center’s main plaza.“My hope is that we’re making space for people to find their neighbors again, to find each other again and to find their own inner performer,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “And to really be in their whole body with other New Yorkers and come back together again as a city.”The festival, which is expected to include over 300 events and 1,000 artists, is the first under Thake, who joined Lincoln Center last year with a mission of broadening its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.This year’s programming will open with a mass singalong on the Josie Robertson Plaza, featuring the Young People’s Chorus of New York, under the direction of Elizabeth Núñez, and including classics like “This Little Light of Mine” and Elton John’s “Your Song.”In August, two versions of Mozart’s Requiem will be on offer — a traditionally presented one, by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and a reimagined dance version, “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth,” choreographed by Kyle Abraham and performed by his company, A.I.M, featuring the electronic musician Jlin.Summer in the City will unite the center’s festivals — including the discontinued Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival, which has largely been put on hold since 2020.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform six pairs of concerts this summer, including a free opening program in July under the ensemble’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, with Conrad Tao as the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” (Tao will also play the William Grant Still solo “Out of the Silence” from “Seven Traceries.”)Thake, a former associate artistic director at the Public Theater, where she spent a decade managing the cabaret-style venue Joe’s Pub, said that she hoped to broaden the audience for Mostly Mozart by integrating it with Lincoln Center’s other summer offerings.“What we’re experimenting with this year is really the breaking down of our internal silos,” she said. “They’re all under the same banner, and this is one Lincoln Center audience that is very broad, and we’re going to see how that works.”Summer for the City aims to build on Restart Stages last year, when the center hosted small-scale performances outdoors, to help get artists back to work after months of pandemic cancellations. According to Lincoln Center, that series attracted more than 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of whom were first-time visitors.The disco ball is the centerpiece of the Oasis, an outdoor stage designed by the costume and set designer Clint Ramos, that will host live music and dance parties throughout the summer.In June, Jazz at Lincoln Center, embracing a New Orleans tradition, will lead a second-line processional from Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center, to mourn those who have died since the pandemic started. And in July, the center will host “Celebrate LOVE: A (Re)Wedding,” as a ceremony for couples who canceled or scaled back nuptials in the past two years, with live music and a reception on the dance floor.The arts, Thake said, “speak to all of the deep trauma that we’ve all collectively been through and also bring so much of the joy and revitalization that the city needs.” More
He arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-1960s and drew comparisons to Dylan. But he left the music business not long after.Paul Siebel, a folk singer and songwriter who drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in the 1960s and ’70s but dropped out of the music business, hindered by stage fright and disappointed by the lack of attention his work received, died on April 5 in hospice care in Centreville, Md. He was 84.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his nephew, Robert Woods, said. Mr. Siebel had lived in nearby Wye Mills.In the mid-1960s, Mr. Siebel (pronounced SEE-bel) moved from the folk music scene in Buffalo to the more thriving one in Greenwich Village.“He knocked me out,” the folk singer and multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg, who backed Mr. Siebel in performances and remained his friend for decades, said by phone. “He was a great singer and songwriter. But he had the worst stage fright of anyone I ever met. If not for the stage fright, he would have continued.”Mr. Siebel, whose music was infused with a country sound, sang in a nasal voice and wrote evocative songs with strong narratives. In “Louise,” his best-known composition, he sang about the death of a truck-stop prostitute:Well, they all said Louise was not half badIt was written on the walls and window shadesAnd how she’d act the little girlA deceiver, don’t believe her, that’s her tradeLinda Ronstadt, in her book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” (2013), recalled seeing Mr. Siebel at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1969.“We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise,” Ms. Ronstadt wrote.She recorded “Louise” and included it on her album “Silk Purse” (1970). It was subsequently covered by Bonnie Raitt, Leo Kottke and at least 20 other artists. Another of Mr. Siebel’s songs, “Spanish Johnny,” was recorded by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings and by Mr. Bromberg.Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra Records after Mr. Bromberg set up a concert for him at the Folklore Center, in Greenwich Village, so that Peter Siegel, a producer for the label, could hear him.When Mr. Siebel’s first album, “Woodsmoke & Oranges,” was released in 1970, Gregory McDonald, a critic for The Boston Globe, wrote that it “justifies his currently being compared with Bob Dylan.” He called Mr. Siebel “the big new name in folk music.”But “Woodsmoke & Oranges” did not sell well and neither did his follow-up album, “Jack-Knife Gypsy,” released the next year.There would be only one more, a live album recorded with Mr. Bromberg and the singer-songwriter Gary White in 1978 and released in 1981.“He was very critical of himself,” Mr. Bromberg said. “After those two albums, he wrote another bunch of songs, but he destroyed them. He said they weren’t as good as the ones on the albums.”By the early 1980s, he had left the business altogether.“I started drinking, things started coming apart,” he told the magazine American Songwriter in 2011. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted, and without that, how can you write? And then after a while I just couldn’t go out and do those same songs again and again. I soured. It soured.”Mr. Siebel in the 1970s. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted,” he said of his decision to leave the music business, “and without that, how can you write?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesPaul Karl Siebel was born on Sept. 19, 1937, in Buffalo. His father, Karl, was a farmer and restaurateur. His mother, Dorothy (Hosmer) Siebel, was a homemaker and seamstress.Paul studied classical violin as a child and later became proficient at the guitar. After attending what is now the University at Buffalo, he served in the Army in Europe before beginning to perform on the folk circuit in Buffalo. When he moved to New York City, he supported himself by working in a baby carriage factory in Brooklyn.Robert Zachary Jr., his manager, told Dirty Linen, a folk and world music magazine, in 1996 that, before Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra, he didn’t have a telephone. “I used to have to send him telegrams, you know, to get him to come uptown and see us and talk to us or sign a contract,” he said.After Mr. Siebel walked away from the music business, he became a bread baker for a restaurant and a county park worker in Maryland.He leaves no immediate survivors.Asked in 1996 how he thought he would be remembered, Mr. Siebel said: “He was a guy who wrote a couple of pretty good songs. What ever happened to him?” More
Yefim Bronfman discusses Galina Ustvolskaya’s Fourth Sonata, which he will play at Carnegie Hall on Monday.Galina Ustvolskaya, a reclusive composer who lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, from her birth in 1919 to her death in 2006, has acquired a reputation for works of unearthly spiritual strength and formidable technical demands. “Your fingers literally bleed,” the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja has said of playing them.But if Ustvolskaya’s few, grim compositions are works of violent extremes, the brutally loud cluster chords that often smash their way dissonantly through them are tempered with moments of quiet, rapt tranquillity.It’s that prayerful side of a composer who wrote for God as much as for mortals that appeals to the pianist Yefim Bronfman, who performs her Sonata No. 4 (1957) alongside sonatas by Beethoven and Chopin at Carnegie Hall on Monday.Ustvolskaya insisted that her music was not susceptible to ordinary analysis, and she vowed that no influences could be traced in it; even without her efforts, it would still sound unique. After all, as the historian Simon Morrison has written, Ustvolskaya “challenged the conventions not just of art, but of our understanding of art” — writing not “for workers in obeisance to official aesthetics,” but turning “music into work.”Still, no music exists entirely outside history. Asked in an interview to choose a favorite page from the Fourth Sonata, an 11-minute piece in four brief, continuous movements, Bronfman discussed how Ustvolskaya’s work extends traditional forms, as well as its political context. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.An excerpt from the final movement of Ustvolskaya’s Fourth Sonata.SikorskiUstvolskaya’s music has only really become prominent outside Russia since around the end of the Cold War. How did you come across it?I never really knew her until seven or eight years ago, when a conductor asked me to perform her “Composition No. 2” for piano, percussion and eight double basses. Somehow the performance never happened, but having studied the score, there was something very special about it. I started looking into her other music, of which there is not very much. I spoke to Markus Hinterhäuser, who recorded all the sonatas. It’s been a fantastic experience, I have to say, very different from anything else I have ever played in my life.I didn’t find any connection to anybody, except Beethoven maybe. Everybody leads toward Beethoven in a direct way or an abstract way. Hers is an extremely abstract way. As Beethoven grew older, his sonata form got shorter and shorter. Hers relate to that. No matter how short a movement, there is always a sonata form in it. Sometimes the development section is only a few notes, but then there’s a clear indication of the recapitulation in each movement.Music usually has a life span. The music starts and ends, and then life begins anew. But a piece by Ustvolskaya — you play it, and it lingers for a long time. It’s almost like a meditation. It gives you a very peaceful feeling playing it.Do you see it as religious or at least spiritual music in that sense?Not religious, but very spiritual. She grew up in Soviet times, and religion was prohibited. A lot of people who leaned toward religion experienced it in a spiritual way, not in a biblical way. That’s how I feel about Ustvolskaya.So you hear her personal introversion in her music as well?Definitely, I hear total loneliness. She’s talking to the universe and she doesn’t want to be involved with anything else. I don’t feel there is any gravity to the music; most music has an epicenter, but hers is in slow motion, out there. That is not to say there are no explosions; there are very violent explosions. But they are usually followed by very serene and soft sounds.I have to say that she’s also a very Russian composer in the sense that one always hears bells. Bells and choruses, human voices, like in the second movement of this sonata, it begins with bells, and there is a chorale. The third movement is all bells.The third movementMarkus Hinterhäuser, piano (Col Legno)Some of it sounds quite close to chant.Right. She’s maybe more connected to medieval music, but with a very modern voice. You know, it’s very hard to talk about this music because one needs to hear it and experience it.She herself said that she didn’t want us to analyze her music, that it should just be felt.Correct, and she didn’t want to appear influenced by anybody. Even Shostakovich, her teacher, she rejected. She felt a regret for how much he tried to influence her, and she tried to throw it all out. I don’t think there is even one inch of his music in hers. She is completely unrelated to anything before her or after her, which is quite fascinating.So much of Shostakovich’s work was shaped by his political context. Do you hear similar struggles in her later work?Shostakovich suffered a lot from being persecuted by the authorities. He wrote a lot of Soviet music to please the authorities, and so did she. But music like the sonatas has nothing to do with politics; it’s totally apolitical music.It’s interesting that she was able to create that space, given the traditional Western clichés about composers working in Soviet society.I’m sure she experienced the same as other composers who wanted their voice to be heard, and were not allowed. A lot of composers at this time were much more creative writing between the notes than in the notes. The message was always hidden. A little bit like Schumann, in a different time and for different reasons.Ustvolskaya wrote six piano sonatas over four decades. Why perform this one?I picked it because it’s not so violent. Especially the last movement, it has those cluster chords but most of it is very peaceful and has a very beautiful, meditative quality that I think is needed for this program, after the intensity of Beethoven’s “Appassionata.”Is there a page of the score that you particularly enjoy or that is revealing of her?I like the middle section of the second movement, where it’s “pppp”: It’s almost like human voices coming from another world or from space, in the middle of this violent piece. I also love the murmurs of the trills in the last movement; you have those long notes against them — for me that’s very special.The opening of the fourth movementMarkus Hinterhäuser, piano (Col Legno)Those trills, to my ears, suggest the first movement of Schubert’s last sonata.It definitely has an echo of that. They go through the whole movement, those trills, then the cluster chords with sforzandos, then you have a pianissimo progression. It has a fascinating sonority and imagination.Ustvolskaya was fastidious about how people performed her music. She reacted strongly against people being particularly expressive with it. And she’s asking an enormous amount of you. How possible is it to distinguish between a “ppp” and a “pppp,” a “fff” and a “ffff”?Dynamics are relative, in all music. “Piano” means “piano” only in context with what comes before and follows after. The same thing with her. If it’s “ppp” it’s one sound, but if it’s “pppp” it has to be softer; there’s no magic to it. You find an instrument on which you can really differentiate between dynamics, that’s all we can do.Every composer I have worked with is different. Stravinsky said just play the notes, play what’s written and don’t exaggerate. I imagine she belonged to the same school; she wanted you to execute exactly what is on the page. The music speaks for itself. You don’t need to work hard to make it sound the way it should.Will you play her other sonatas in concert?I really want to. Why not? She’s a good composer, I think a great composer. She has a strong message, however abstract it is, and rare, but there’s something there that has a magnetism to it. More
