Like a number of US composers of the thirtysomething generation, Timo Andres takes the minimalism of John Adams and Philip Glass as the starting point for his eclectic musical language. But as shown by the solo piano Colorful History, which Andres himself plays as the centrepiece to this collection, his music explores a much broader musical landscape.
The solo piece, a chaconne of increasing complexity, is framed by two concertos: The Blind Banister for piano from 2017 (composed for Jonathan Biss, but with Andres as the soloist here) and Upstate Obscura for cello. The piano concerto (Andres’s third for the instrument) was commissioned as part of a series inspired by Beethoven’s five examples: for Andres, the pairing was with the second piano concerto, but there’s no hint of Beethovenian pastiche or allusion in his music. Instead the work begins almost like one of Glass’s piano studies, though when the orchestra enters it quickly veers off into territory that is very much Andres’s own.
In its very different way, Upstate Obscura, for chamber orchestra and cello, is just as original and arresting. Andres never shies away from allowing the solo cello to do what it inherently does so well: launch long-limbed expressive melody, while the orchestra supplies it with a glinting, pulsing backdrop. And the soloist, Inbal Segev, clearly relishes the lyrical opportunities Andres gives him. It’s a highly accomplished disc all round.
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I only have two of my pictures up at home – and this one lives in the bathroom. It was commissioned by The Face and was among the first documentary photographs I had published. In the 1990s, everyone wanted to work for The Face. My first assignment was shooting neo-Nazis in Rome. It only took 15 years of work for me to become an overnight success. After that, I suggested a story on travellers.
It was 1992 and the Tories’ Criminal Justice Bill was due to give police new powers to stop the movement of travellers, taking away some of their rights to authorised sites. Myself and the writer Amy Raphael went off in search of travellers – and ended up at Glastonbury, where this photograph was taken. I’d had too much to smoke and was lying on the ground with my Leica when I saw the Bubbleman – and a naked bloke who came along and started playing with the bubbles. As I pressed the shutter, the bubble burst and I thought: “Shit, I didn’t get it!” But when I saw the contact sheet, there it was, the very last frame – with the material covering his willy.
The Bubbleman picture was a pivotal one for me. Around the same time, I’d done an Ally Capellino catalogue that had made a splash in the fashion world. It was documentary style, with loads of people on the beach in Margate. For a time, I was set, but these things never last. In 1997, I stopped doing fashion. I had split up with my girlfriend, who was a model, and I just couldn’t do fashion any more. Then Elle sent me to shoot pictures for a “night out with a geezer” feature. I ended up in the St Moritz bar in Soho, London, drinking with one of the “dodgy characters”, talking about our our fathers. We bonded. It got me out of my misery and started me on a new project. I spent the next five years shooting The Firm: photographs of the British underworld. The book came out in 2001.
My adopted dad died when I was a baby and I was brought up by four wonderful women. My birth father was an aristocrat and photographer’s assistant, my birth mother a model. Anyone who’s got a singular background tends to hide away and a Rolleiflex camera will conceal just about your entire face as you shoot. It’s why I’m a photographer.
I enjoy the traditional aspect of composing a picture. After a while, you learn where to stand and how to avoid telegraph poles coming out of people’s heads. I was blown away by the perfect composition of the old masters like Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and Henri Cartier-Bresson who said “sharpness is a bourgeois concept” – only an old Frenchman could say that! My bible was Mary Ellen Mark’s Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay, which I bought for £4.95 in WH Smith in 1979. It inspired me, the idea of this young woman among strangers, highlighting a horrible situation with real sympathy.
At the moment, I am putting together pictures I have taken over the last 25 years. I also want to honour the four women who raised me, and my mother, as well as my lifelong muses and friends. To me, photography is like that moment when you’re a child, looking at the night sky. Someone explains infinity to you and you go: “Oh my god!” It’s magical. When I take pictures now I still feel like a child, looking up at the night sky saying: “Wow!”
Jocelyn Bain Hogg’s CV
Jocelyn Bain Hogg. Photograph: Seamus Murphy/VII
Born: London 1962. Trained: Newport Art College 1982-84. Influences: “Powell and Pressburger, Jacques-Henri Lartigue.” High point: “Garnering recognition for a difficult and personal body of work, The Firm, which kickstarted my career in documentary photography.” Low point: “Although I’m incredibly proud of it, I’ve done so much varied and more personal work, but The Firm is what people only seem to want to know me for” Top tip: “Get a good accountant.”
IFPI, the organization that represents the recorded music industry worldwide, has published its Global Music Report, which reports on global trade revenues for the recorded music industry in 2023.
The headline stat from IFPI‘s report, which you can read in full here: Global recorded music revenues rose 10.2% YoY in 2023 to reach USD $28.6 billion.
Last year (2023) marked the global music market’s ninth consecutive year of growth.
Subscription streaming revenues grew by 11.2% YoY last year, accounting for 48.9% of the global market, which in dollar terms, means that subscription streaming revenues reached $14 billion in 2023.
In July 2023, Spotifyincreased its flagship subscription prices in 53 markets, including the US, typically by around 10%.
In addition to Spotify, IFPI’s numbers will also have been affected by price rises by other streaming services such as Apple Music (October 2022), Amazon Music (January 2023), and YouTube Music/Premium (August 2023).
Total streaming revenues (including both paid subscription and advertising-supported) grew 10.4% YoYto reach $19.3 billion in 2023 and accounted for more than two-thirds (67.3%) of the total global market.
In 2023, the number of paid subscriptions to music streaming services passed 500 million for the first time, according to IFPI. There are also now more than 667 million users of paid subscription accounts.
Elsewhere, IFPI reports that physical revenues grew 13.4% YoY to $5.1 billion in 2023, while performance rights revenues rose by 9.5% YoY to $2.7 billion.
IFPI also breaks down its latest numbers geographically, showing that Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was the fastest-growing music region in 2023. (It was also the fastest-growing music region in 2022.)
Recorded music revenues in Sub-Saharan Africa grew by 24.7% in 2023, fuelled, according to IFPI, by a 24.5% rise in paid streaming revenues.
Europe saw growth of 8.9% in 2023, while the USA & Canada – the world’s largest region in revenue terms – grew 7.4% in 2023.
In Latin America, recorded music revenues rose 19.4%, marking the region’s 14th consecutive year of revenue growth. IFPI reports that “there were double-digit percentage climbs in revenues” in Brazil (+13.4%) and Mexico (+18.2%), the region’s largest markets. Streaming was the key driver behind the region’s growth and made up 86.3% of its revenues in 2023.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), revenues rose by 14.4% in 2023. Australasia saw growth of 10.8% in 2023, boosted by an increase in subscription streaming revenues (+13.5%).
Revenues in Asia rose by 14.9% in 2023. In Japan, the world’s second-biggest market, revenues were up by 7.6%. China (the world’s fifth largest market) saw growth of 25.9%, which IFPI notes was “the fastest rate of increase in any Top 10 market”.
The world’s Top 10 music markets in 2023 remained unchanged compared to 2022. According to the IFPI, the Top 10 music markets in 2023 were:
1. USA
2. Japan
3. UK
4. Germany
5. China
6. France
7. South Korea
8. Canada
9. Brazil
10. Australia
“The figures in this year’s report reflect a truly global and diverse industry, with revenues growing in every market, every region and across virtually every recorded music format.”
John Nolan, IFPI
Commenting on the release of the Global Music Report, IFPI’s Chief Financial Officer and Interim Joint Head of IFPI, John Nolan, said: “The figures in this year’s report reflect a truly global and diverse industry, with revenues growing in every market, every region and across virtually every recorded music format.
“For the third year in succession, both physical and digital formats grew with a strong rise in the users of paid streaming subscribers – as well as price increases – contributing significantly to total revenue growth.
“This growth results from record companies’ sustained investment in artists and their careers – more than USD $7.1 billion annually on A&R and marketing* alone – and the impact it has on music ecosystems all over the world. Fans are increasingly valuing music, with unprecedented choice and access to new releases, with 2023’s IFPI Global Charts including a diverse range of new genres and artists. This is testament to the talent of these artists, the passion of their fans, and the work of record labels both in championing artists and providing the best possible foundations for their global success.
“Music has shown time and time again that it can evolve and innovate but the report demonstrates it is the partnership between artist and label which is at the heart of the growth of music markets worldwide with the ensuing positive impact these have on their local economies.”
IFPI’s Chief Legal Officer and Interim Joint Head of IFPI, Lauri Rechardt, added: “The sustained growth of the recorded music market is encouraging, but it’s also right for us to acknowledge the challenges the industry faces, including streaming fraud, digital piracy in all its forms and, of course, the threat from the abuse of generative artificial intelligence if it is not developed responsibly and with respect for artists’ and labels’ rights.
“Music fans greatly value authenticity and our industry has a strong track record of licensing music and supporting the development of new services that create these experiences for fans.
“That said, we still need effective tools and the support of authorities to tackle unauthorised uses and to ensure the music ecosystem remains one that is sustainable for the long-term.”Music Business Worldwide
Early Saturday, Piknik, one of Russia’s most popular heritage rock bands, published a message to its page on Vkontakte, one of the country’s largest social media sites: “We are deeply shocked by this terrible tragedy and mourn with you.”
The night before, the band was scheduled to play the first of two sold-out concerts, accompanied by a symphony orchestra, at Crocus City Hall in suburban Moscow. But before Piknik took the stage, four gunmen entered the vast venue, opened fire and murdered at least 133 people.
The victims appear to have included some of Piknik’s own team. On Saturday evening, another note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte page to say that the woman who ran the band’s merchandise stalls was missing.
“We are not ready to believe the worst,” the message said.
The attack at Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over four decades.
Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “monsters of rock,” with songs inspired by classic Western rock acts including David Bowie and a range of Russian styles.
Since releasing its debut album, 1982’s “Smoke,” Piknik — led by Edmund Shklyarsky, the band’s singer and guitarist — has grown in popularity despite its music being often gloomy with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage shows.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kukulin said, the band began performing with exciting light displays, special effects and other innovative touches. At one point in the 1990s, the band’s concerts included a “living cello” — a woman with an amplified string stretched across her. Shklyarsky would play a solo on the string.
This month, the band debuted a new song online — “Nothing, Fear Nothing” — with a video that showed the band performing live before huge screens featuring ever-changing animations.
Unlike some of their peers, Piknik was “never a political band,” Kukulin said, although that did not stop it from becoming entwined in politics. In the 1980s, Soviet authorities banned the group — along with many others — from using recording studios, while Soviet newspapers complained of the group’s lyrics, including a song called “Opium Smoke” that authorities saw as encouraging drug use.
In recent years, some of Russia’s most prominent rock stars have left their country, fed up with President Vladimir V. Putin’s curbs on freedom of expression, including regular crackdowns on concerts. Piknik had benefited from that exodus, Kukulin said, because the band had fewer competitors on Russia’s heritage rock circuit.
Unlike some musicians, Shklyarsky had not acted as a booster for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kukulin said. Still, Ukrainian authorities have long banned Piknik from performing in the country because the group has played concerts in occupied Crimea. In a 2016 interview, Shklyarsky said he was not concerned about the ban.
“Politics comes and goes, but life remains,” he said.
Kukulin said that among Piknik’s songs was “To the Memory of Innocent Victims” — a track that could be interpreted as being about those who were politically oppressed under communism. Now, Kukulin said, many fans were hearing the song in a new way, as a tribute to those who lost their lives in Friday’s attack.
One of a kind, the composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83) eludes fashion for several reasons. So many aspects of her life now look dated: she was a British aristocrat (daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens) who moved in elite social circles, cared little about the opinions of others, embraced European modernism ahead of her time, smoked and drank heavily and had a reputation for being fierce musically, and verbally prickly to lesser mortals. Her Piano Works Volume 3(Resonus), performed byMartin Jones, includes short works dating back to 1944, the oddly touching Holiday Diary (1949) – tiny pieces with narrated text – as well as three sets of Bagatelles. Having regarded her music as quite resistible in the past, I found this album engaging, serious, stimulating.
Also highly recommended: La Muse Oubliée II(IBS Classical), in which Antonio Oyarzábal continues his travels through little-known repertoire by women, an example to all his fellow pianists.
The sparkling string sextet Souvenir de Florence, Op 70 takes its name from the Italian city in which Tchaikovsky first worked on this enduringly popular composition. Pairing it with Erich Korngold’s Sextet, Op 10 (Hyperion), the Nash Ensemble play each work – both written for the standard sextet combination of two violins, two violas and two cellos – with restless verve and panache. Korngold shares Tchaikovsky’s melodic gift but his youthful work, dating from 1914 and influenced by Schoenberg, is sharp-edged and harmonically modernist in comparison.
The Nash make a compelling case for both. To call this ensemble venerable is to reflect on the group’s standing over 60 years, since its foundation in 1964 (by Amelia Freedman). The reason to listen to these players now is not for old time’s sake but for the vigour and precision they show in the wide repertoire they tackle, including this.
As the Veronicas see it, there is a thread connecting every mistake they’ve made in their nearly 20-year career: surrendering control. Across their two decades in music, they say others have pushed them in certain directions, sometimes against their own gut feelings. And it’s rarely gone well.
“The only regrets we have are the times that we haven’t listened to that inner voice, and we’ve been like, ‘OK, we’ll do it’,” says Jess Origliasso, one half of the chart-topping pop duo with her twin sister, Lisa. “And, like any career after that long, there have been quite a few of those times.”
Not that their own instincts have always worked for them, Lisa adds. “I mean, there’s been a lot of wild times, I’m not gonna say that there hasn’t. God, it’s [been] 20 years – it could have been a lot worse for us. We didn’t go to jail. None of us went to rehab. If anything, we were little punk rock emo girls just writing out our little feelings into music, and people were connecting with it.”
‘We were little punk rock emo girls just writing out our little feelings’: the Veronicas at the 2008 Aria awards. Photograph: PhotoNews International/FilmMagic
We’ve met to discuss the Veronicas’ sixth album, Gothic Summer, and the ups and downs that led to it. The ups are obvious. At age 20 they signed a $2m record deal with Warner Records in the US (one of the biggest deals in history for an Australian artist, Lisa proudly notes), kickstarting a career that would take them around the world. Their 2005 debut album went four times platinum and earned them an Aria award; the follow-up went platinum too, thanks in part to the global hit Untouched, a song you probably had on high-rotation on your iPod nano, and which cemented them as Australian pop royalty.
As for the downs, they may include some of those “wild times”. The pair became a tabloid fixture early on, the inevitable consequence of being candid and confident young women in the mid-aughts, an era famously cruel to female celebrities. Jess, who identifies as queer, was treated particularly badly, outed by the tabloids and then accused of kissing women as a publicity stunt. More recently, there have been other headlines. A high-profile relationship that broke down very publicly. A 2021 accusation that reality show Celebrity Apprentice was selectively editing them. There were endless rumours aired about the year the pair went without speaking, and the time they were removed from a plane by cabin crew.
The Veronicas haven’t much reason to trust the press – which gives context to how parts of the interview play out.
The Veronicas staged their own photoshoots for Gothic Summer, under the mentorship of photographer Tyler Shields. Photograph: Logan Huffman
When I meet them in a Sydney hotel lobby, the pair are cheery and warm, greeting me with a hug and sliding on to my wrist a leftover friendship bracelet from the Taylor Swift concert they were at two nights prior.
I’m surprised to find their manager will be sitting in too: a soft-spoken American woman called Alex seated at an adjacent table, who is also Jess’s fiance. Alex has held the role officially for the last six months, after two years of self-management. Part of the job description, Jess laughs, is to “try to shut us up and stop us from having opinions”.
And Alex does make her presence felt. At one point, I ask about the well-documented year the sisters didn’t speak, and she pauses her breakfast to interrupt: “You don’t have to answer. These are not approved topics.” But while sometimes specific subjects are flagged as off-limits before an interview is agreed to, that didn’t happen here; I’d been told in advance “some personal questions are OK”, and that they wanted to focus on their music.
Later, I bring up their 2019 reality show, The Veronicas: Blood is For Life, in which the pair get beauty injections, play shows, and bicker with each other. “I don’t think we need to talk about the reality show,” Alex says.
The sisters themselves are more forthcoming. “The reality of that show wasn’t necessarily reality. You know what I mean?” Jess answers. “It was a joke. It was a dramatised version of our lives. I was saying to Lisa, where’s my Gold Logie for the fight we had in the last episode?”
At this, Lisa shrugs. “I don’t even know why we did it.”
The Veronicas. Photograph: Logan Huffman
When answering a tricky question, the Origliassos have a habit of saying more, not less. Sometimes they’ll correct each other on details, or display a little sisterly tension, like when Lisa gently suggests Jess have “some self-awareness” about her own role in letting personal matters play out publicly.
But they’re also very funny, happily joking about the rare moments in their career where they had too much control. “We did style ourselves and do our own makeup way back in the day – I wish we hadn’t, to be honest,” Lisa laughs. “People were offering help but we said, no, we are doing this ourselves!”
The Origliassos had their eyes set on music from the beginning. The pair had been singing and dancing since they were little girls and, after their parents bought them guitars for their 16th birthday, began playing live wherever they could – they racked up “probably 1,000” gigs before they got signed, from local council Christmas concerts to sets at palliative care units. Then in their late-teen years, they signed a publishing deal as songwriters and spent two years “learning to collaborate and write”. It was on a songwriting trip to the US in 2004 that they met the manager who helped broker their huge deal with Warner.
The Veronicas on stage at the 2008 MTV Australia awards. Photograph: Kristian Dowling/Getty Images
What followed was years of nonstop touring and recording – as thrilling a time as it was “ultimately exhausting”. But instead of swiftly following up their first two hit albums with a third, it took four years for the Veronicas to get even a new single out, and another three before they had another record. It was, as Lisa says, “like we disappeared”.
They blame the changing industry of the late 2000s that left their label in a state of flux and without a steady A&R manager. It was impossible to get music approved for release, they say; in industry lingo they were “shelved”, and Jess says their career took “an irreconcilable hit”. “To have absolutely no power to release music to your fans, when you have built to that level – it was devastating to us.” (Warner Music declined to comment.)
The pair wrote a heartfelt plea for release from their contract to the new CEO of Warner, and signed to Sony Music instead; after their first single on the new label went to #1, Jess celebrated by tweeting “surprise, bitch” at Warner. “I don’t know why people didn’t take Twitter away from me at that time,” she groans now – but the full album went platinum too.
Michael Paynter, who worked as the Veronicas’ musical director from 2013 to 2020, says the twins have always had a strong vision for every element of their career – from what merch should look like to how a drum snare should sound.
“Those girls are razor sharp … Anything you’ve heard or seen or experienced about the Veronicas is because they wanted it that way,” Paynter says. “And I think that’s the reason why they’re still around – because they don’t leave anything about their career up to anybody else.”
But some things they had no control over. It would take another seven years to release their next album, and this time the break was personal. First was their year apart in 2017, which they don’t want to discuss. Then in 2018, their mother became sick with a degenerative illness, and they moved back to Australia to care for her until she passed in 2021. This time brought the pair closer together.
“When you have to … [come] together every day to try to alleviate a suffering that you can’t control, I don’t think that there’s a greater respect you could have for someone that’s willing to show up and be there,” Jess says. “Because a lot of people aren’t.”
While their career came second, songwriting was their “coping mechanism” – and in 2021 they released a pair of albums through Sony, wrapping up their contract and leaving them free agents to think about their next step.
They decided to do it all differently for album number six. Gothic Summer was released as a non-exclusive, one record deal through the independent US music publisher Big Noise, a label co-founded by their friend John Feldmann. The Veronicas are, as Jess puts it, “basically independent artists now”.
And they’re now directing every stage of the album release, including making their own music videos and styling and staging their own photoshoots, under the mentorship of US photographer Tyler Shields with Lisa’s husband, Logan Huffman, behind the camera. (The Veronicas did their own shoot for this piece, but the images weren’t released to the Guardian by deadline.) Having put as much of themselves into the business side has made Gothic Summer “a really rewarding body of work for us,” Lisa says.
The album is also a wildly fun romp: bouncy, carefree pop songs that feature drum from Blink 182’s Travis Barker, a guest appearance from Australian rapper Kerser and the occasional twangy strum of surf guitars. “It was a very hard few years for us,” Jess says. “It just felt really nice and fun to arrive at that place – like we were feeling joyful again.”
But there’s sincerity behind the snappy lyrics. The album’s lead single, Perfect, hits back at the airbrushed image of beauty that social media often presents, the sort of superficiality the twins have lost all interest in the years since losing their mum. “Loss is the number one thing that just changes your entire world,” Lisa says. “It’s like, oh, wait a minute, am I getting caught up in something that doesn’t actually matter?”
This new album finds them settled in their lives, both now happily partnered and splitting their time between homes in Queensland and the US, pulling back from putting so much of their lives on social media largely because “of the last seven years,” Jess says.
“I got tired of being loud … [Drama] is fun, we’re geared towards it, we’re human. But I didn’t want to be the person being the doer of that any more. I didn’t like who I was when I was doing that. It didn’t make me feel good.”
It’s a lesson they’ve learned the hard way.
“It is kind of wild to think about the fact we grew up in the public eye over the most formative years of our life,” Lisa says. “[People know] even more than, in hindsight, we would probably have liked them to.”
The interview doesn’t end as friendly as it began, and within about 20 minutes I get a call from one publicist, and an email from another; I’m told the Veronicas would like the profile killed. And in hindsight – if it does run – they’ve decided it should be focused on their new album and their future, as “this is not a 20th Anniversary piece”.
But after so long in the spotlight, the Origliasso sisters know better than most that that’s not how this works; that giving access means losing at least some control.
“We’ve always been proud of being strong, opinionated women, I feel like our hearts have always been in the right place,” as Lisa put it in our interview.
“How that’s perceived and written about and talked about, we can’t control that. But we can stand in our integrity and know that we’ve always done the best we can.”
Ben Platt is set to usher in the next phase of his music career this spring with a Broadway return and a nod to his self-proclaimed “foremothers,” Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli.
To celebrate his third album, “Honeymind,” Platt is set to perform a series of 18 concerts at New York’s Palace Theatre, beginning May 28. In doing so, the Emmy-, Grammy- and Tony-winning actor and singer follows in the footsteps of Garland and Minnelli, both of whom played the Palace in their primes with sold-out residencies. He’ll also become the first performer to grace the century-old theater’s stage since 2018, when it closed for a $2.5 billion renovation.
Though the May 31 release of “Honeymind” seems auspiciously timed to the Palace’s reopening, Platt never envisioned himself playing the historic venue as a solo artist. Still, he’d been looking for ways to bridge his Broadway background with his work as a singer-songwriter, so when the Palace opportunity arose, it felt like “the universe really did me a favor,” he said.
Ben Platt is set to unveil his third studio album, "Honeymind," on May 31.
“So many people I admire, from the days of yore to the Barbra [Streisands] of the world ... that kind of synergy doesn’t really exist anymore,” Platt told HuffPost in an interview. “Doing something that felt like a little tapestry of all the things that I do felt like an exciting idea.”
As for those “foremothers,” he added: “I wouldn’t be here, as happy and openly queer as I am, without those two women and everything they stood for, and the support they gave the LGBTQ+ community. So I feel immense pride, and I want it to be a show they would both love.”
Platt’s residency concerts will be directed by Michael Arden, who won a Tony last year for the Broadway revival of “Parade,” in which Platt also starred. Songs from “Honeymind” will be prominently featured on the show’s set list, but Platt also plans to include a number of special guests as well as some classic covers and “a Broadway moment or two.”
On May 28, Platt will kick off an 18-show residency at New York's Palace Theatre.
Jesse Grant via Getty Images
A Los Angeles native, Platt rose to national prominence in 2012 when he portrayed Benji Applebaum in the movie musical “Pitch Perfect.” His breakout role, however, arrived four years later when he endeared himself to a generation of theatergoers as the tormented teen protagonist of the Broadway smash “Dear Evan Hansen.”
It was during his “Evan Hansen” run that he signed with Atlantic Records. His debut solo album, 2019’s “Sing to Me Instead,” was a sterling showcase for his powerhouse vocals, featuring piano ballads and other self-reflective tracks. His sophomore effort, 2021’s “Reverie,” found him embracing an electro-pop vibe.
According to Platt, “Honeymind” was partly inspired by iconic 1970s musicians like Carole King and James Taylor; it’s also his initial release under a new deal with Interscope Records. The album’s first single and music video, “Andrew,” finds him recalling the unrequited crushes he had on a number of his straight male friends as a closeted gay teen.
“No one’s to blame and it’s no one’s fault,” he said. “It’s just a shitty situation. The irreverent melancholy of that immediately felt like a song to me.”
The remainder of “Honeymind,” however, will reflect what Platt describes as his “gay Americana era.” The album’s cover art finds him and his fiancé, fellow stage and screen actor Noah Galvin, sharing a steamy embrace in a vintage convertible.
“I was inspired by very traditional American imagery,” he said. “Things like Coca-Cola and drive-in theaters that feel almost cliché in how American they are. ... I wanted to twist them through a queer lens and reclaim them. I had this image of two guys in the 1950s at a drive-in, getting it on in the back seat, and the joy and excitement of what it would’ve felt like if they didn’t have to worry about being seen.”
Noah Galvin, left, and Platt got engaged in 2022.
Emma McIntyre via Getty Images
Galvin’s presence on the “Honeymind” cover is fitting, as Platt feels their relationship has afforded him “such comfort, freedom and confidence” that he had yet to experience before the two were together.
“It’s clear on the album that I’m at a turning point, and having the support of my partner allows me to feel a lot freer creatively and less afraid,” he said.
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UMG played an instrumental role in bringing together a coalition of 150-plus organizations both in and outside the industry last year for the Human Artistry Campaign (HAC), which established a framework for the responsible use of AI for creative endeavors while respecting copyrights and artists’ likenesses. – Fast Company
“The encounter with Weill’s music, which I had never heard before because it was not allowed to be played in the Third Reich, was absolutely overwhelming for me because it opened up a tonal but completely new sound world,” Mr. Reimann said in a 2018 interview for his former secondary school’s annual publication.
He also began composing short works for piano at 10. Shortly after, he accompanied his mother’s vocal students at concerts.
In 1955, after graduating from high school, he worked at the newly founded opera studio of the Städtische Oper Berlin, now the Deutsche Oper, while taking composition and piano classes at the city’s music conservatory. He also briefly studied musicology at the University of Vienna.
One of his professors at the Berlin conservatory was the influential German composer Boris Blacher, who advised Mr. Reimann to avoid the avant-garde hubs of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen — incubators of modern music with reputations for being experimental but dogmatic — and instead to forge his own path. Doing so, he distinguished himself from older contemporaries, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze, and throughout his long career he remained radically individual, even solitary, as an artist who never belonged to any musical movement or school.
Starting in his 20s, Mr. Reimann accompanied Mr. Fischer-Dieskau and the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in recitals and wrote music for them. Throughout his career he remained a sought-after and frequently recorded accompanist, and he championed young composers through the establishment of the Busoni Composition Prize in 1988 and the Aribert Reimann Foundation, which was founded in 2006.
In 1962, his concert piece, “Fünf Gedichte von Paul Celan,” or “Five Poems by Paul Celan,” premiered at the Berliner Festwochen, an annual performing arts festival, with Mr. Fischer-Dieskau as soloist. Mr. Reimann had met Mr. Celan, a Jewish-Romanian poet who had survived the Holocaust, in Paris in 1957, and was among the first to set his haunting German-language poems to music. Mr. Reimann returned to Mr. Celan’s poetry in 1971, a year after the writer died by suicide, for “Zyklus,” a setting of six poems in a single movement of about 20 minutes.
When it was completed in 1981, what is now Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, was reportedly the largest glass building in the world. This was the venue for which James MacMillan wrote his 2020 choral work Fiat Lux. Its UK premiere, with MacMillan himself conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, was in the very different, subterranean setting of the Barbican Hall.
It started with faint, glimmering breaths from the orchestra, introducing the two soloists, the soprano Mary Bevan and baritone Roderick Williams – he singing Latin, she English. With the horns tracing elemental rising figures, this opening section felt like Britten’s Canticles meeting Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a not unhappy prospect. Further episodes turned in different directions: the men of the excellent chorus intoning Latin against decorative choral soprano lines; perky, cyclical dances on woodwind; a huge organ chord of arrival, coming at us through loudspeakers in the absence of a suitably colossal instrument. The text seemed to evolve almost organically from biblical phrases to Dana Gioia’s evocative poetry.
Soloists Roderick Williams and Mary Bevan with composer and conductor James MacMillan. Photograph: Mark Allan
The half-hour score culminated in a huge wall of sound: at the premiere it must have felt as though those glass walls might shatter. Here it was certainly impressive, but one felt the lack of an inspiring venue: elements of repetition earlier in the work, which might have felt devotional and meditative in another setting, had a hard time conjuring magic in this context.
Fiat Lux came as the culmination of a thoughtfully put together programme exploring light and loss. It began with the mesmerising descending scales of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten and continued with the work Britten wrote on the death of his own parents, the Sinfonia da Requiem. MacMillan set steady tempos in the latter that emphasised the work’s mournful tread yet made for low levels of momentum.
Things grew more optimistic after the interval – first, MacMillan was presented with Fellowship of the Ivors Academy, joining a distinguished and eclectic roster that includes Pierre Boulez and Kate Bush. Then, paving the way for Fiat Lux at the end, came the teeming textures of Rautavaara’s Into the Heart of Light, a warm, slightly bittersweet string piece full of thickly woven, glowing harmonies. Every piece had an impact, and MacMillan held the large audience silent to let each one sink in.
Kacey Musgraves has turned over a new leaf. On the serene title track of her sixth album, Deeper Well, the Nashville-based country crossover star, known for singing about her love of smoking weed, admits that she has given it up. Within that admission, and the song’s delicate, pared-back pop-country arrangement, is the promise of a more clarified, mature iteration of Musgraves, and sometimes that’s what Deeper Well provides. On Lonely Millionaire, which samples a song by the rapper JID, she invokes the shallowness of fame and wealth with the earnest but acerbic sparkle that filled her previous album, jaded divorce record Star-Crossed.
At other times it seems as if this gesture towards maturity has instead resulted in a tilt into the generic: Heart of the Woods is the kind of community-minded ballad that sizzled on earlier Musgraves albums but here feels sapped of specificity. Elsewhere, songs such as Jade Green are so focused on the minutiae of her life as to feel tedious. She finds a delicate balance between the two, though, on Anime Eyes, a dizzying, almost comically lovestruck track that finds Musgraves eschewing the tasteful zen of the rest of the album in favour of all-out lyrical maximalism. It’s a flavour Deeper Well could have used more of.
