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      Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPeter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84He wrote with passion and bite about classical music, and especially opera, over a 50-year career at The Times and New York magazine.Peter G. Davis in 1990 on a visit to Sissinghurst Castle Garden in England. As a student years earlier he toured  Europe’s summer music festivals.Credit…Scott ParrisFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETPeter G. Davis, who for over 30 years held sway as one of America’s leading classical music critics with crisp, witty prose and an encyclopedic memory of countless performances and performers, died on Feb. 13. He was 84.His death was confirmed by his husband, Scott Parris.First as a critic at The New York Times and later at New York magazine, Mr. Davis wrote precise, sharply opinionated reviews of all forms of classical music, though his great love was opera and the voice, an attachment he developed in his early teens.He presided over the field during boon years in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, when performances were plentiful and tickets relatively cheap, and when the ups and downs of a performer’s career provided fodder for cocktail parties and after-concert dinners, not to mention the notebooks of writers like Mr. Davis, who often delivered five or more reviews a week.He wrote those reviews with a knowing, deadpan, at times world-weary tone. During a 1976 concert by the Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov, an activist protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union threw a paint bomb at the stage, splattering Mr. Spivakov and his accompanist. Mr. Davis wrote, “Terrorists must be extremely insensitive to music, for tossing paint at a violinist playing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ is simply poor timing.”He maintained faith in the traditions of classical music not for the sake of perpetuating the past but for their intrinsic power, and he looked askance at those who tried to update them just to be trendy.In a 1977 review of the Bronx Opera’s staging of “Fra Diavolo,” by the 19th-century French composer Daniel Francois Auber, he decried what he saw as a “refusal to believe in the piece by treating it as an embarrassment, a work that needs a maximum of directorial gimmicks if the audience is to remain interested.”He could be equally dismissive of new music and composers who he thought were overhyped. The minimalist composer Philip Glass and Beverly Sills (early on “a dependable, hard-working but not especially remarkable soprano” who became a star, he felt, only after her talents had peaked) were regular targets.In a review of a performance of Mr. Glass’s work at Carnegie Hall in 2002, he wrote, “It was pretty much business as usual: the same simple-minded syncopations and jigging ostinatos, the same inane little tunes on their way to nowhere, the same clumsily managed orchestral climaxes.”Which is not to say that Mr. Davis was a reactionary — he championed young composers and upstart regional opera companies. His great strength as a critic was his pragmatism, his commitment to assess the performance in front of him on its own terms while casting a skeptical eye at gimmickry.“He was a connoisseur of vocal music of unimpeachable authority,” said Justin Davidson, a former classical music critic at Newsday who now writes about classical music and architecture for New York magazine. “He had a sense that the things he cared about mattered, that they were not niche, not just entertainment, but that they cut to the heart of what American culture was.”Peter Graffam Davis was born on March 3, 1936, in Concord, Mass., outside Boston, and grew up in nearby Lincoln. His father, E. Russell Davis, was a vice president at the Bank of Boston. His mother, Susan (Graffam) Davis, was a homemaker.Mr. Parris, whom he married in 2009, is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Davis fell in love with opera as a teenager, building a record collection at home and attending performances in Boston. During the months before his junior year at Harvard, he took a tour of Europe’s summer music festivals — Strauss in Munich, Mozart in Salzburg, Wagner in Bayreuth.He encountered European opera at a hinge point. It was still defined by longstanding traditions and had yet to fully emerge from the destruction of World War II, but poking out of the wreckage was a new generation of performers: the French soprano Régine Crespin, the Austrian soprano Leonie Rysanek, the Italian tenors Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano. Mr. Davis got to see them up close.Mr. Davis’s 1997 book is exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history of opera in America.He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in music. After spending a year at a conservatory in Stuttgart, Germany, he moved to New York to complete a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University.Mr. Davis wrote a number of musical works of his own in the early 1960s, including an opera, “Zoe,” and a pair of Gilbert and Sullivan-esque operettas. But he decided that his future lay not in writing music but in writing about it. He became the classical music editor for both High Fidelity and Musical America magazines, as well as the New York music correspondent for The Times of London.He began writing freelance articles for The New York Times in 1967, and in 1974 was hired as the Sunday music editor, a job that allowed him to supplement his near-daily output of reviews — whether of recordings, concerts or innumerable debut recitals — with articles he commissioned from other writers. “He had a superb memory,” said Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker. “Anything you threw at him, he was able to speak about precisely and intelligently.”Mr. Davis moved to New York magazine in 1981. There he could pick and choose his reviews as well as occasionally stand back to survey the classical music landscape.Increasingly, he didn’t like what he saw.As early as 1980, Mr. Davis was lamenting the future of opera singing, blaming an emphasis on “pleasing appearance and facile adaptability” over talent and hard work and a star system that pushed promising but immature vocalists past their physical limits.The diminished position of classical music in American culture that he documented did not spare critics, and in 2007 New York magazine let him go. He went back to freelancing for The Times and wrote regularly for Opera News and Musical America.For all his thousands of reviews, Mr. Davis seemed most proud of his book “The American Opera Singer” (1997), an exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history in which he praised the versatility of contemporary American performers while taking many of them to task for being superficial workhorses.“I can’t think of a music critic who cares more deeply about the state of opera in America,” the critic Terry Teachout wrote in his review of the book for The Times. “Anyone who wants to know what is wrong with American singing will find the answers here.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Don Letts, Mad Professor Team With Times on Carnival Story

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderBreaking Down the Sounds of Carnival, on Your PhoneThe pandemic has dampened the celebrations worldwide. But a Times special project, which includes an interactive music mixing feature, lets readers get into a party mood.The Notting Hill Carnival in 2019. Although parties over the past year have been canceled, a Times project seeks to keep the Carnival spirit alive this winter. Credit…Peter Summers/Getty ImagesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 10:48 a.m. ETTimes Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The world could definitely use a party. Unfortunately, because of the coronavirus pandemic, cities around the globe have canceled or curtailed what is annually their biggest bash, Carnival.These celebrations, many of them pre-Lenten, trace back hundreds of years to the Caribbean islands, and the tradition has continued with the Caribbean diaspora in cities like New York (the West Indian American Day Parade), Toronto (Caribana) and London (Notting Hill Carnival).In the chill of February, readers of The New York Times can get a flavor of the sensory richness of these blowouts with Carnival in Winter, a special online package of multimedia experiences about the festivals produced by the Narrative Projects department.Carnival is all about history, community, costumes, food — and music. To immerse readers into the sonic experience, Narrative Projects teamed with the Graphics department and the R.& D. department to create a special effect on Instagram that puts you inside a classic Carnival song. The effect, through the Instagram Spark feature that can be downloaded on phones, uses augmented reality, which lays a computer-generated image or animation over a user’s view of the real world. (Click here from your phone.)In this case, you can hear a Carnival anthem broken down into four musical tracks — and you can “see” the tracks through Carnival-inspired 3-D animations and manipulate the music by moving in your physical space. The effect turns your phone — and living room —  into a virtual mixing board.Picking just one song to represent the music of Carnival — which incorporates soca, calypso, reggae, dub, house and more — is a near impossible task. So, as one of the editors on the project, I reached out to an expert.Don Letts at the Roxy in London in 1977. Recently, he suggested the song that was used in The Times’s interactive feature on Carnival music. Credit…Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty ImagseDon Letts, a 65-year-old filmmaker, broadcaster and musical matchmaker, is an icon of the British music scene. In the 1970s as the D.J. at the Roxy in London, he introduced the club’s punk clientele to reggae, the rising sound from Jamaica, his parents’ homeland. Between his friendship with Bob Marley and his close ties to the fledgling punk scene (he later formed the band Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones of the Clash), Letts earned the nickname “The Rebel Dread” for bucking convention and orchestrating cultural collisions that changed the course of popular music.He also has been a regular at the Notting Hill Carnival for over 40 years. In 2009, he directed a documentary, “Carnival!,” on the history and politics of the festival.Asked to name a “typical” Carnival anthem, Mr. Letts at first dismissed the task as impossible. Upon reflection, though, he directed us toward an old friend, the producer Mad Professor, and his 2005 track “Elaine the Osaka Dancer” — “A strange title, I know,” said Mr. Letts — which was written for a performer, Panafricanist, on the Mad Professor’s label. Mad Professor, whose name is Neil Fraser, is himself a well-known name in British music history. He pioneered the emergence of the British dub sound and collaborated with performers like Sade and Massive Attack.Mr. Letts chose “Elaine” because, as he put it: “At Carnival you can stand on a street corner and hear a float going past with steel pans, along with the sound of a Jamaican sound system right around the corner. This song perfectly captures that sound: the collision of calypso and soca with the bass-heavy rhythms of reggae.”If you’re reading this article on a desktop computer or tablet, you can view the AR experience on Instagram by opening your camera on your device and point to this QR code. For those reading on their phones, the link in the story above will call up the effect. Credit… Mad Professor agreed to license the song, so we asked him to break it down into individual instrumental tracks or “stems,” each of which would then be manipulated by the user of the Instagram effect.This process proved to be slightly more analog — and painstaking — than anticipated. At one point, when asked for a progress report, Mad Professor relayed that he was “baking the tapes” — which might sound (or did to me, anyway) like a bit of music producer slang. In fact, it’s a literal description of the process in which analog master tapes are restored by exposing them to a high temperature for hours, reducing humidity that can affect the quality of the tapes.Once the tapes were baked and the stems were procured, our graphics and R. & D. team built the Instagram effect. With the effect, the user can play with the drums, bass, horns and steel pan tracks while seeing commentary from Letts on why each element is crucial to a Carnival song.It’s not the same thing as dancing to steel pans on a simmering street in London’s Notting Hill in the heat of summer. But in a year when Carnival has been canceled nearly everywhere, we hope it gets you as close to that feeling as possible.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Control of Britney Spears’s Estate Debated at Court Hearing

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Britney Spears’s Legal BattleControl of Spears’s Estate‘We’re Sorry, Britney’Justin Timberlake ApologizesWatch ‘Framing Britney Spears’ in the U.S.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyControl of Britney Spears’s Estate Debated at Court HearingLawyers for the pop star and her father, from whom she is estranged, discussed how he would share management of her finances with a corporate fiduciary.Fans of Britney Spears returned to a courthouse in Los Angeles on Thursday to argue in favor of ending the conservatorship that now directs her life and finances. Credit…Mike Blake/ReutersJoe Coscarelli and Published More

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      Times's Five Minutes Series on Classical Music a Hit

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHooking Readers on Classical Music, Five Minutes at a TimeDrawing on the passion of experts, a Culture desk series has doubled its audience for the genre.CreditCredit…Angie WangFeb. 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMark Hamill was spellbound by a Mozart composition, but he couldn’t remember its name. The haunting choral masterpiece played near the end of the Broadway production of “Amadeus” more than 40 years ago, in which he performed the title role.So when Mr. Hamill, the actor who portrayed Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars,” was approached in June 2020 by Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music editor, to suggest an irresistible Mozart piece, he responded with one request: Can you track it down?With some help from the team at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Mr. Woolfe identified the mystery earworm: a section of Mozart’s Requiem. Mr. Hamill played the composer hundreds of times on Broadway and in the first national tour of “Amadeus” in the early 1980s. But, he told Mr. Woolfe, “I never got tired of the sound.”Mr. Woolfe chatted with Mr. Hamill for the Mozart installment of The Times’s classical music appreciation series, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love _____.” Once a month online, about 15 musicians, pop-culture figures and Times writers and editors each select the piece they would play for a friend tied to a theme, be it an instrument, composer, genre or voice type. This month’s theme, published today, is string quartets.The series aims to make classical music as accessible to readers as a Top 40 track, Mr. Woolfe said. You don’t need to know the difference between a cadenza and a concerto. “It’s about pure pleasure and exploration,” he said.Now two and a half years and a dozen segments into the project, Mr. Woolfe said he had been surprised at readers’ appetite for the series, regardless of the theme. “It’s like, ‘OK, ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mozart’ is super appealing,’” he said. “But ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music’? Or ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Composers’? But those both did terrifically as well.”The name for the series came to him in the shower in 2018 as he was pondering ways he could make The Times’s classical music coverage accessible to a broader audience. “I was thinking about being at a concert or listening to a recording, and being like, ‘OMG, that note she hit!’” Mr. Woolfe said. “Then I had the idea of asking different people to pick their favorite little five-minute nuggets and presenting them like a playlist.”The first installment, in which he asked artists like Julia Bullock, the young, velvety-voiced soprano, and Nicholas Britell, the composer of the Oscar-nominated score for “Moonlight,” to choose the five minutes they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, became a runaway hit with readers, racking up more than 400,000 page views in its first week alone.That reception inspired him to expand the series — first to individual instruments like the piano, then to genres like opera and composers like Mozart and Beethoven. And the pandemic motivated him to ramp up the pace: Since last April, new segments have published on the first Wednesday of every month.“It has doubled our audience for classical music,” Mr. Woolfe said. “It’s gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it.” But he added that he had been happy to hear that classical aficionados have enjoyed the series, too.David Allen, a freelance critic for The Times and a frequent contributor to “5 Minutes,” said he targeted both novices and experts with his selections. “I sometimes have thought deeply about finding pieces that are off the beaten track,” he said, like a little-heard piece from Bach’s organ music or a movement from a Mozart serenade.Mr. Woolfe also credited the appeal to the series’s vibrant, eye-catching animations, like pulsating cello strings or a silhouette of Mozart caught in a colorful confetti storm. “They enhance the playfulness and accessibility of the series,” he said.Angie Wang, the freelance illustrator who creates them, said she watched videos of the musicians and noted their characteristic movements, paying particularly close attention to wrist and elbow articulation. “I wanted to render them with delicacy,” she said. “The animations are a kind of visualization for the music.”One of Mr. Woolfe’s favorite aspects of working on the series has been getting to know artists outside the performance context in which he typically encounters them (“Renée Fleming is a really good writer,” he said), as well as talking to notable names outside the classical music world about a subject they are rarely, if ever, asked to discuss.“I get to see how people think in addition to how they perform,” he said. “It’s another facet of the personalities of artists.”Although the series was not conceived as an antidote to the polarization that has gripped politics and public health in the past year, Mr. Woolfe is glad it has worked out that way. “I’m so happy it’s been counterprogramming for people during the pandemic,” he said. “And I hope they’ll keep listening.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How to Improve the Oscars? We Asked Five Culture Journalists

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonNetflix’s First Winner?Our Best Movie PicksNew Diversity RulesOscar-Winning DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderHow to Improve the Oscars? We Asked Five Culture JournalistsYes, even in a year when the show will be held during a pandemic, the question is predictable. But these answers aren’t.The Academy Awards, which will be held on April 25, could do more to be fan-friendly.Credit…Matt Petit/Getty ImagesJan. 31, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTimes Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The New York Times’s Culture desk recently looked at how the 93rd Academy Awards, scheduled for April 25, will take shape during the pandemic. One article features five Hollywood insiders talking about ways the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could make the Oscars more entertaining. Below, five of the journalists on the desk offer their thoughts on the same topic — well, four of them do.Live from … New Orleans?I’m in the camp that believes the Oscars would benefit from brevity, or at least finishing on time. (We on the East Coast have tight deadlines and work in the morning!) But aside from that, my dream is for the academy to host the ceremony in a different location each year, like the Super Bowl. The film industry has expanded in Atlanta, New Orleans and Austin, Texas — it could be another economic boon for those cities. Hollywood is often criticized for being out of touch with regular people. What better way to combat that notion? And fans would get a kick out of it. — Maira Garcia, digital news editorTime to retuneRethink the musical numbers. Songs in movies are written to help tell stories, not to be bellowed, devoid of context, by off-key pop stars backed by phalanxes of chorines. The orchestral arrangements and attempts at dance are too often informed by a generic idea of Hollywood spectacle — or, on the other hand, of pop spirituality. Get more specific! And since the Oscars take place in a theater, get a theater choreographer to stage them. — Jesse Green, chief theater critic‘I’d like to start my puzzling tangent immediately’After nominations have been announced, all finalists would have to submit to the academy the names of agents, managers, publicists, assistants and any other professional colleagues that they would have otherwise thanked in their acceptance speeches; these names would then be posted on the academy’s website or displayed alongside the eventual winner during the Oscars broadcast. Winners would thus have to focus their acceptance speeches on inspirational lessons gleaned from the making of their movie; ribald needling of rival nominees in their category; endorsement of fringe political beliefs that they are trying to articulate for the first time; and heartfelt expressions of gratitude to parents, mentors and school-age children watching at home. (Any violations of these rules would be enforced by catapult.) — Dave Itzkoff, culture reporterBest (loved) pictureAt a time when Hollywood has lamented the loss of moviegoing (I sorely miss it, too), wouldn’t it be nice if the Academy Awards celebrated moviegoers? One way to do that would be to let audiences nationwide vote on their favorite film and award a new Oscar to the winner. This wouldn’t be the same as the academy’s proposed prize for “achievement in popular film.” That short-lived, much maligned idea would have left the decision up to the organization’s members. This would give fans a voice. And who knows? Their favorite could match up with best picture. A win all around. — Stephanie Goodman, film editorLet Oscar be OscarI’m not sure the Oscars need to be, or can be, “improved,” at least as a TV show. (Whether they really measure the best work in movies is another question.) They will always be a mixed bag on average. They inevitably have to serve a casual audience along with a smaller audience of movie buffs. You can hire good producers and cast good talent and make room for spontaneous moments, but beyond that, it’s a matter of chance and whether lightning strikes. It’s easier to make an awards show bad — with ill-conceived stunts, e.g. — than to make one good. But I also don’t think there was any golden age when awards shows were better than they are now. This may be a terrible thing for a TV critic to say. But, just watch them or don’t! If you’re dissatisfied with the Oscars, you may just not be a person who likes awards shows very much, and that’s fine. — James Poniewozik, chief television criticAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More