Fans Sue Madonna Over Delayed Concert Start Times: ‘Had To Get Up Early’ The Next Day
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The two concertgoers filed a federal lawsuit against the singer, claiming she got on stage two hours late.
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Category: Music
Partners in Time: Oregon Bach Festival brings new leadership to venerable institution
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The Oregon Bach Festival’s long, twisty search for stable artistic leadership has finally reached its goal. On Friday, after a years-long search process, the festival announced that Jos van Veldhoven, the longtime artistic director of the Netherlands Bach Society, and Conspirare artistic director Craig Hella Johnson will be the festival’s new “artistic partners.”
“Johnson and van Veldhoven are charged with shaping the Grammy-winning festival’s artistic vision, contributing to the development of the festival’s annual concert schedule, and cultivating artist relationships that result in new works and commissions,” reads the announcement from its parent organization, the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance. “They also will play key roles in the recruitment of acclaimed conductors, instrumental and vocal performers, and educators.”
The pair will join OBF’s other artistic leaders: choral directors Kathy Saltzman Romey with the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus, Anton Armstrong with the Oregon Bach Festival Stangeland Family Youth Choral Academy, and Sharon Paul with the University of Oregon Chamber Choir, as well as Grammy-winning organist Paul Jacobs of the Oregon Bach Festival Organ Institute.
Long and Winding Road
The festival has lacked a unified artistic leader since the previous executive director abruptly forced out — for reasons never fully disclosed — Halls, the acclaimed young English conductor, in 2017. Since then, it has auditioned several candidates but never wound up appointing one of them. You can read more about how one of Oregon’s most important artistic institutions arrived at this point in our previous coverage, especially here and here. As I wrote in 2022:
Since its last leadership team departed, the festival, which had enjoyed independence under its founding fathers and then Halls, has been fully folded back into the UO’s School of Music and Dance, which welcomed a new dean, who promptly parted ways with the controversial executive director who’d earlier forced out Halls and left the festival artistically adrift. Once a new AD is named, a new team and presumably new vision will energize the venerable festival.
That was supposed to happen even earlier, before the virus crisis scrambled everybody’s schedules, and further unexplained delays, not to mention the withdrawal of a prime candidate accused of harassment at his previous position. While the festival still lacks a single artistic director — the title given Halls and his predecessor, festival co-founder Helmuth Rilling — the new team bestows a collective leadership role on a group of accomplished artists.
Vision Infusion
Writing last month in ArtsWatch, longtime festival observer and former National Public Radio classical music critic Tom Manoff suggested that the festival find its long-lost artistic focus in its namesake’s music and inspiration. “The annual summer festival was created at the University of Oregon in 1970 specifically to perform and study J.S. Bach’s music,” he wrote. Its world-class reputation rests squarely on that vision. While past festivals included music by other composers — often connected to Bach in some way — Bach was the center of the programming. This year, there were no strong intellectual connections to Bach, and relatively few of his works performed during the festival.
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Manoff continued:
My hope was that Veldhoven would reinvigorate the festival’s Bach profile – potentially providing a point of focus on the festival’s namesake.
Returning the focus to Bach’s music and its continuing cultural importance and influence in contemporary works would stabilize the cohesiveness of the programming. If Bach’s music made up, say, half the concerts, such concerts would be at the festival’s core and a constant theme.
There may be no more qualified figure in classical music to do that than Veldhoven, who’s been artistic director of the Netherlands Bach Society for more than 35 years (the position is currently listed as vacant) and spearheaded hundreds of performances and recordings of Bach’s music, including putting recordings of his entire unbelievably prolific repertoire online.
During his annual academic residency in Eugene, he’ll shape the Oregon Bach Festival Period Orchestra (and maybe give it a more mellifluous moniker), and the Berwick Academy for Historically Informed Performance training program. And as Manoff wrote, he could even return to some of Rilling’s original vision, too: “Veldhoven, who likes to talk with the audience and is a world-famous Bach specialist, would have been perfect to revive Helmuth Rilling’s signature Discovery Series, once a bedrock feature of the festival but abandoned some years ago.” He offers a lot of promise and potential to a festival that has long needed both.
“I feel like I am getting my youth back,” van Veldhoven, who turns 72 this year, said in a statement. “New energy is flowing through my veins again and I am eager to get started! It is an honor and an extraordinary pleasure.”
As leader of the great Austin-based vocal ensemble Conspirare, Johnson — a Rilling protege, composer, nine-time Grammy winner, director of choral studies at the University of Texas for a decade in the 1990s and now artist in residence at nearby Texas State – seems perfectly positioned to advance the Bach Festival’s primary educational mission as well as honing its vocal performances and providing a long-needed boost there for contemporary choral music. For example, Conspirare has performed and recorded Bach-influenced music by UO composition prof and esteemed Oregon composer Robert Kyr, who directs the OBF’s biennial Composers Symposium (which, alarmingly, no longer appears on the festival website), and we’d expect that partnership, and more opportunities for Oregon composers, to continue.
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“The Oregon choral community will be over the top that one of the nation’s most respected choral conductors will join us each summer,” says ArtsWatch choral music columnist Daryl Browne. “OBF further validates choral artistry with this appointment.”
“It is with great joy and profound gratitude that I join Oregon Bach Festival,” the 61-year-old Johnson said in the festival’s announcement. “This specially designed OBF framework of seeking artistic sparks and inspiration from a circle of collaborating creatives feels fresh, vibrant and truly contemporary. I love this festival, and the time feels so right for this kind of collaborative dynamic structure.”
Collaborative Model
That quote, as well as the fact that OBF (like Portland Opera last fall) avoided using the term “artistic director” in announcing its new partners’ accession, suggest that artistic direction will be determined collectively, which can be tricky but also potentially allows for a more diverse and expansive vision than a single leader could provide.
Questions arise. Will each of the partners control their own realm’s programming and development, or will such decisions be collectively determined, and if so, how? Of course, the details of planning, process and programming will need to be worked out before the new team’s product is ready for prime time in 2025 (this year’s festival planning is already well under way). But the new arrangement already constitutes a step up from the festival’s previous programming-by-academic-committee approach, or its proposed antecedent, the thankfully aborted idea of an annually rotating guest AD.
Inevitably, and happily for its continuing artistic vitality, the new leaders’ strengths will dictate the direction of the festivals much needed evolution. That might mean losing some features as well as gaining others.
“Looking at their backgrounds, which of these men would be comfortable with a big orchestral/choral work like the Penderecki Credo?,” Manoff told ArtsWatch. “The programming of the upcoming festival will give some indication how these choices will work out.”
I suppose guest conductors could handle those and the 19th century orchestral classics lately sprinkled throughout OBF programs. But personally, I’d be happy with a festival that fiercely focuses on Bach and other Baroque composers and on contemporary composers who draw on that tradition. It would give the festival the distinctive identity and focus missing since Halls’s apparently unjustly forced departure, and bring listeners — including new and younger ones — some of the most vibrant music in the classical tradition being created today.
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No doubt many such details remain to be worked out among the leadership team. But at least and at last, that team is in place. ArtsWatch will be asking these and other questions, and covering this beloved Oregon arts institution’s next phase as it evolves.
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6 Highlights of Maria Callas’s Opera Career at La Scala
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Following is an overview of some of Callas’s career highlights at La Scala.
“Aida” (Verdi): April 12, 1950
Callas’s very first performance onstage at La Scala was as a substitute for the much-adored Renata Tebaldi, who was unwell. It was, by all accounts, a tepid debut. A skin condition had given the 26-year-old soprano facial blemishes that she awkwardly covered with veils. In “Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography,” by Anne Edwards, the director Franco Zeffirelli (who would go on to work with Callas) recalled “this overweight Greek lady, peeping out from behind her trailing chiffon,” with an “unevenness” in her voice. Her two remaining performances of “Aida” went much better, but this inaugural “Aida” was a blow to the young prodigy’s self-confidence.
“I Vespri Siciliani” (Verdi):
Dec. 7, 1951
This was the first time that Callas was headlining a La Scala production — kicking off the opera house’s season, in fact — and it was a triumph. She was understandably nervous at the start. “The miraculous throat of Maria Meneghini Callas did not have to fear the demand of the opera,” the music reviewer Franco Abbiati wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera (according to the biography “Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb,” by David Bret). Mr. Abbiati lauded the “phosphorescent beauty” of her tones, and “her technical agility, which is more than rare — it is unique.”
“Lucia di Lammermoor” (Donizetti): Jan. 18, 1954
This was Callas’s first time with the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan at the baton, and she didn’t disappoint. In the famous “mad scene” — where Lucia stabs her new husband on her wedding night — Callas appeared barehanded, in a nightgown and messy hair, on a dimly lit staircase; she had turned down the dagger and fake blood that are usually used to portray the murder. Yet her performance was so realistic that mesmerized audience members jumped up mid-performance, clapping and cheering, and tossed red carnations onstage that Callas touched as if they were gobs of blood. In Opera News, the critic Cynthia Jolly hailed “Callas’s supremacy amongst present-day sopranos,” and “a heart-rending poignancy of timbre which is quite unforgettable,” according to the Bret biography.
“La Traviata” (Verdi): May 28, 1955
The character of Violetta in “La Traviata” is widely considered one of Callas’s three finest roles — along with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma.” And the May 1955 staging by the director Luchino Visconti is, in turn, considered her finest “Traviata.” It was “a revolutionary production” that was “renowned for its realism, the intimacy and the gorgeousness of the setting, the painterly qualities,” said Mr. Fisher of The Times. It also “encapsulated so much” of the Maria Callas that audiences have come to know and revere. Set in La Belle Epoque, with ornate décor and costumes, the show triggered another audience frenzy on opening night. People cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which a tearful Callas picked up as she took a solo bow. The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini later confessed that he, too, had wept in the pit. Yet Callas’s monopolizing of attention in her solo bow was too much for the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who quit the show that night.
“Anna Bolena” (Donizetti):
April 14, 1957
This was another Visconti spectacular, and another triumph. Callas played Anne Boleyn, a doomed wife of Henry VIII, in a somewhat lesser-known Donizetti opera. Queenlike, she appeared in a dark blue gown and enormous jewels at the top of a grand staircase, surrounded by royal portraits. Musically, she gave it her all, triggering 24 minutes of applause (according to the Edwards biography), a La Scala record.
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End of My Days album review – soprano’s eclectic set moves through vulnerability to strength | Classical music
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This is an intriguing, eclectic programme from the soprano Ruby Hughes and a string quartet from the Manchester Collective, led by her childhood friend Rakhi Singh. Music of quiet stillness, often nodding to folk or spiritual traditions, dominates early on, with Hughes’s voice closely captured. There is, however, a sudden burst of instrumental energy from Caroline Shaw’s Valencia, which captures the exuberant potential of the tiny capsules of juice in an orange segment.
Overall, the music takes us from uncertainty to a kind of acceptance. Vaughan Williams’s Along the Field hangs in the air like a spider’s web, at once impossibly vulnerable and strongly sustained. Between three of John Tavener’s Akhmatova Songs and Ravel’s Kaddisch come David Bruce’s imaginative arrangements of two Dowland songs, Hughes’s delivery taking an emphatic turn. There’s a kind of culmination in the title track, a 1994 song by Errollyn Wallen that hits an exultant if fleeting climax.
Then the harmonic complexities of Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Bilitis, seamlessly arranged by Jake Heggie, make a refreshing bridge to the final two songs. It’s not easy for any composer to follow Mahler’s Urlicht, performed here with careful intensity, but Deborah Pritchard’s specially commissioned song Peace makes an effective valediction in the context.
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Pitchfork’s absorption into GQ is a travesty for music media – and musicians | Music
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In late summer 2011, I was in Norway covering a music festival for NME. One night at a party in another writer’s hotel room, I got talking to an American guy called Zach Kelly. Zach, it turned out, wrote for Pitchfork. As a 22-year-old music journalism freak, I could only imagine this was how it must feel to meet a member of your favourite football team. He kindly let me pin him into a corner to probe him about life there – he had started as an intern at their Chicago office – and the kind of work he did. That would have been thrill enough, meeting someone from a publication I perceived as so untouchable it was hardly worth aspiring to. Shortly after I got back to the UK, I got an email from an editor there, Mark Richardson: Zach had recommended me, and would I like to review albums for them? NME said no. But Mark persisted, and a year later, Pitchfork asked me to become their first UK member of staff, an associate editor. I said yes.
I tell this story as it is one of hundreds like it: Pitchfork’s editors were extraordinarily committed to investing in new critical talent, the writers and editors who were the driving force in unearthing and chronicling the defining alternative acts of the 21st century, as the website that midwestern record-store employee Ryan Schreiber founded in 1996 evolved into an authoritative, professional outlet. Arguably not since the inky heyday of NME itself had a music publication developed such a distinct reputation, thanks in part to its famous decimal-point scoring system and early take-no-prisoners reviews. “Pitchfork” even became a byword for a certain kind of music and music fan: artisan before artisan culture took over everything; a little forbidding, cloistered; maybe you loved to hate it, but still clicked through half a dozen times a day.
The multimedia giant Condé Nast recognised that value when it bought the company in 2015, a moment that gave many pause. What were the ramifications of an independent publication that highlighted some pretty niche music being sold to a company of this scale? And why, given the site’s massive diversification of critics and music genres covered that decade – moving from its bread-and-butter indie rock to include pop and rap – was Condé’s chief digital officer Fred Santarpia proudly telling the New York Times that the acquisition brought “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster”?
Eight years later, Pitchfork has reached the inevitable fate of seemingly every new media company. On 17 January, Anna Wintour (global chief content officer for Condé, as well as editor of US Vogue) emailed staff to say that they were “evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organisation”, though as long-term employees tweeted their redundancies – including executive editor Amy Phillips after more than 18 years – it wasn’t entirely clear what “team” would be left to run a presumably strip-mined vertical on the GQ website. It is bleak on so many levels, first and foremost the job losses during a straitened time for media. Pitchfork was one of the last stable music outlets going – where else are the former staff, and the site’s hundreds of freelancers, meant to work now?
Incorporating Pitchfork into a men’s magazine also cements perceptions that music is a male leisure pursuit, and undermines the fact that it was women and non-binary writers – Lindsay Zoladz, Jenn Pelly, Carrie Battan, Amanda Petrusich, Sasha Geffen, Jill Mapes, Doreen St Félix, Hazel Cills; the fearless editing of Jessica Hopper and then the most recent editor-in-chief Puja Patel, to name but a handful – who transformed the website in the 2010s. It also suggests that music is just another facet of a consumer lifestyle, not a distinct art form that connects niche communities worthy of close reading, documentation and, when warranted, investigation. It was Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan who reported that Win Butler of Arcade Fire – a band entwined with the site’s rise to relevance – had been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women (extramarital relationships that Butler says were consensual); Pitchfork that published writer Amy Zimmerman’s report into 10 women accusing Sun Kil Moon songwriter Mark Kozelek of sexual misconduct (Kozelek denies the allegations). I wonder whether GQ will invest resources into reports like this, to sit alongside e-commerce pieces on how “The Best Cordless Stick Vacuum Will Turn You Into a Clean Freak”, to take one current example from their culture news feed.
Pitchfork has many flaws – the dodgy reviews in the archives, more recent overweening and ahistorical coverage, a strong sense of its own gatekeeping – and it has many great competitors in the likes of Stereogum, Consequence of Sound, the Quietus, NPR Music, plus the recent blogging and newsletter resurgence. But as the biggest fish, its looming dissolution is comparable to HMV disappearing from the high street: without a leading example to coalesce around, define yourself against, fight about, the notion that specialist music journalism can viably exist at all starts to fade into the margins. (A plight we’ve already faced in the UK with the disappearance from shelves of NME and Q magazine, a brand that appears to have been recently sold and revived as a pitiable blog.)
Some have lamented Pitchfork’s poptimist shift over the past decade – where it once only reviewed Ryan Adams’ cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989, not the original, now pop is a key fixture – and you could argue that it is a less specific proposition than it was in its late-2000s heyday when it became synonymous with the likes of Arcade Fire and Grizzly Bear. But that shift represents the voracious reality of modern music consumption, and Pitchfork was the only music outlet dedicated to publishing two to four long-form reviews of new records every day, highlighting everything from the latest indie and rap records to fiercely niche work, and always introducing new writers to the fold. I can’t tell you whether “Hanoi conceptualist” Aprxel’s Tapetumlucidum<3 is worthy of the 7.0 it got last week, but it heartens me that it’s up there alongside reviews of Lou Reed’s reissued final, ambient album, Kali Uchis’ Orquídeas and Bob Dylan’s Desire, from their great Sunday Review series on classic albums missing from their archives.
I know from having written dozens of these reviews how much work goes into them: two editors, fact-checking, final reads – a meticulousness that can be the making of young writers, each edit imparting a lesson you carry with you. (Features editor Ryan Dombal’s careful assistance on my first long piece for the site, in 2012, pretty much taught me how to write profiles.) And much as musicians love to hate Pitchfork, a robust music media is pivotal for them, too: exposing their work to a wider audience, mythologising and storytelling in a way that leaves more of a lasting impression on listeners than marketing has ever managed – “bridging the gap between ‘this is good music’ and ‘this is a good artist’”, as Peter Robinson of Popjustice put it – and paying them the respect of a close and fair critical read, even if that assessment is negative. A fulsome Pitchfork review can suddenly vault an act to a larger audience – take Mike Powell’s review of Courtney Barnett’s 2013 single Avant Gardener, or Sasha Geffen’s review of MJ Lenderman’s Boat Songs in 2022, or anything by deep-in-the-weeds rap critic Alphonse Pierre – or shift the terms by which you’re seen, as with Jessica Hopper’s masterful review of Lana Del Rey’s 2015 album Honeymoon.
after newsletter promotion
You might say: why do I need Pitchfork when I’m reading several thousand words on this in the Guardian? But specialist music publications can do much that the music sections of generalist title and newspapers cannot – just recently, Pitchfork surprised me by accepting a Sunday Review pitch on an astonishingly obscure album (it’s yet to run, but who knows if it will now), the kind of piece we couldn’t justify here as it has little cultural currency or news relevance. But in writing it, I got to contact the national library of the artist’s home country to ask them to dig out newspaper clippings from the 80s, and their original record label for any contemporaneous artefacts; to ferret around on obscure forums, excavating information tucked into dusty archives for a wider audience. There is value in this that doesn’t register with parent media companies fixated on the bottom line, which instead – as with Bandcamp’s recent woes – condemn platforms that don’t meet their shifting goalposts (remember “pivot to video”?) to the enshittification that is coming for the last good parts of the internet. Sure, we don’t know what Pitchfork x GQ will look like yet, but there’s a clear clash in values between an outlet that prioritises criticism and one that revolves around access to celebrities.
Even trying to assess the issue through Condé’s corporate lens strains logic. Pitchfork was one of its most agile, fast-moving brands; one Condé audience development editor tweeted that “by volume, Pitchfork has the highest daily site visitors of any of our titles … despite scant resourcing, esp from corporate.” Nimble publications like this can be canaries in the coalmine for parent companies to try out new ideas to receptive, youthful audiences that might then be transported to more sclerotic titles. Maybe it moved too fast for such stodgy leadership, embracing a far greater spread of representation that alienated Pitchfork’s perceived formative male audience, who over the site’s existence have moved from their 20s to their 40s perhaps without bringing in sufficient replenishers, thus eroding an easily defined marketing demographic. If that is what they think – about what, and who, music criticism is for – perhaps Condé should try being as adventurous with staking out new readerships and revenues as its misunderstood acquisition was at finding new voices, both behind the mic and the keyboard.
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Green Day Bassist Drops Blunt Reaction To MAGA Lyric Backlash
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Mike Dirnt, the band's co-founder, weighed in on the "American Idiot" tweak that got Trump lovers ― and Elon Musk ― upset.
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Universal Music Group to Lay Off ‘Hundreds’ in First Quarter
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After weeks of rumors, Universal Music Group has confirmed that it will be laying off an unspecified but significant number of employees in the coming weeks. The company’s recorded-music division is said to be receiving the brunt of the layoffs.
UMG chairman Lucian Grainge mentioned forthcoming layoffs in the company’s October earnings call; on Friday, Bloomberg was first to report the scale, although rumors had gained momentum in the last several days and other sources tell Variety the numbers will be in the hundreds.
A Universal rep said in a statement: “We continue to position UMG to accelerate its leadership in music’s most promising growth areas and drive its transformation to capitalize on them. Over the past several years, we have been investing in future growth—building our ecommerce and D2C operations, expanding geographically, and leveraging new technologies. While we maintain our industry-leading investments in A&R and artist development, we are creating efficiencies in other areas of the business so we can remain nimble and responsive to the dynamic market, while realizing the benefits of our scale.”
While the Bloomberg article painted an overly and arguably inaccurately bleak picture of the music business’ current macro outlook, there’s little question that the industry is seeing a leveling-off in growth since streaming revived its fortunes in the mid-2010s, and since the pandemic furthered that growth due to people sheltering at home, with more leisure time than usual, during much of 2020 and 2021.
During the October earnings call, Grainge said, “We will cut overhead in order to grow it elsewhere. We do have experience in managing the business, in managing the teams, and the businesses within that make up the group, and we’ve got a plan.”
Universal is hardly the only major to be hit with layoffs in recent months: Warner reduced staff by around 4% in March and new CEO Robert Kyncl laid out plans in an internal memo last week for a broad change in the company’s focus over the next 10 years, and sources tell Variety that layoffs at Sony Music, the third major music group, may be imminent as well.
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Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Is Dead at 82
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Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.
Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.
Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.
“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”
She performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.
A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.
Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.
She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.
Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.
After moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.
Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.
Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”
Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).
In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.
“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.
In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist Gary Peacock and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.
She recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.
“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”
Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.
She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.
To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.”
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Albert Herring review – Opera North’s glorious glimpse of village politics | Opera
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Albert Herring is one of Benjamin Britten’s more fortunate “outsider” protagonists: he emerges not only alive, but appreciably happier, from an opera whose dissection of class conflict and small-mindedness comes in much fizzier form than Peter Grimes or Billy Budd. Crowned Loxford’s “May King” in the absence of any local girl sufficiently chaste to be Queen, unworldly Albert’s modest descent from virtue into vice – a night on the tiles precipitated by some spiked lemonade – provokes outrage from the pillars of his community; but for the young man himself, and the postwar generation he represents, that hazily remembered pub crawl heralds a new sense of self-possession.
Scored for chamber orchestra, the opera is nevertheless one of Britten’s most musically extravagant, brimming with pastiche and stylistic flourishes, and Eric Crozier’s libretto, which transports a Maupassant short story from Normandy to Suffolk, is a similarly dense, colourful affair. Giles Havergal’s production, revived by Elaine Tyler-Hall, wisely resists further embellishment. Staged in the round in the bijou Howard Assembly Room, with characteristically slick designs by Leslie Travers – plastic grass and fruit crates serving as parlour, shop, and street – it succeeds instead by drawing its audience irresistibly close, for an intimate view of village politics in all their cacophonous glory.
Until Albert finds his voice, it’s the fearsome Lady Billows who dominates, and soprano Judith Howarth is a riot of strop and stridency in the role: Emmeline Lucas meets Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She’s delectably partnered by Heather Shipp’s warmly sung, campily censorious housekeeper Florence, and flanked by her upstanding committee – vicar, policeman, schoolmistress, mayor – each of whom navigates Britten’s complex ensembles while making their individual marks: Amy Freston’s skittish, silvery Miss Wordsworth is one standout, as is Paul Nilon’s lavish-toned Mr Upfold.
Down on the high street, Dominic Sedgwick brings easy charisma to butcher’s boy Sid, while Katie Bray is outstanding as spirited, self-willed Nancy; her duet with Claire Pascoe’s Mrs Herring, in which they grapple with the possibility of Albert’s death, sees both artists find real humanity in a moment which could easily topple into farce. As Albert himself, Dafydd Jones makes an auspicious company debut, his glossy, high-lying tenor ideally placed for the role, and there’s a dry humour to his portrayal which makes it clear that this Albert is no “village simpleton” at all.
A chamber-sized orchestra benefits from the up-close-and-personal approach too: both players and conductor Garry Walker are in full view at one end of the set, maintaining admirable contact with the cast despite the unconventional set-up, and revelling in Britten’s playful, virtuosic writing. Albert Herring might go to pieces when all eyes turn upon him – but the forces of Opera North emphatically do not.
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Keyon Harrold: Foreverland review – genre-defying post-bop | Jazz
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Trumpet star Keyon Harrold’s previous album, 2017’s The Mugician, was a mashup of jazz, hip-hop and R&B; over the course of his career, he has played alongside the likes of Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Rihanna. This third album continues to defy conventional categories, albeit with more emphasis on balladry and the complications of romance. Much of it is set to languorous beats that allow Harrold to unfurl long, sultry solos, with the influence of Miles Davis strong in the mix – unsurprising, given that Harrold played the trumpet on the soundtrack of the 2015 biopic Miles Ahead.
He is, however, his own stylist – instrumentals The Intellectual and Gotta Go (Outer Space) are dazzling pieces of post-bop, and his ability to switch from pensive to swagger keeps things surprising. The showcase cuts are mainly vocal-powered, however. Opener Find Your Peace has singer Jean Baylor and rapper Common (an old friend) alongside Harrold’s trumpet, the angry Don’t Lie is voiced by Malaya while the seven-minute title track puts Harrold singing alongside Britain’s Laura Mvula. For the trumpeter: “Some of these notes, I play them because there’s not a better word.”
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Ozzy Osbourne Names The 'Best Cover' Of 'War Pigs,' And The Singer May Shock You
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Social media users were also stunned to find that the musician — who people assumed was a bad singer — also has a great set of pipes.
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Augusta Holmès’s most virile compositions, ranked
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Have you ever wondered why they call it the long 19th century? From Beethoven’s hammering martellatos, to Wagner’s massive, veiny works that seem to last forever, to Liszt’s immense hand size (…), the Romantic period was in many ways a musical virility contest with many—many—climaxes. But there was one composer who critics considered the most virile of them all. We know this because almost every review of her work comments first and foremost on its virility. That composer is Augusta Holmès.
If you haven’t heard of Augusta Holmès, a French composer of Irish descent, her virility may in fact be why. As with all women composers of her era, Holmès’s music was evaluated more as a gender performance than a musical one. “The most surprising thing about her musical talent is its completely virile quality,” the poet Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam enthused. “Her music has a vigor, a virility, an enthusiasm, which deserve better than the banal praise usually bestowed on female composers,” added La Liberté. By 1900, however, Holmès’s fame, sexual freedom, and toned brass chorales began to work against her. “This music gives me the impression of being transvestite,” a Le Courrier Musical critic wrote that year. “Oh, Ladies, be mothers, be lovers, be virgins…but don’t try to be men. You will not succeed in replacing us, not entirely.” After her death, her music was rarely heard again.
But it was too late. The throbbingly virile works of Augusta Holmès had already proved that virility, like artistic merit, has no gender. “I have the soul of a man in the body of a woman,” Holmès once declared. Born in Versailles in 1847, the composer was raised in the company of her Irish military father’s mounted weapons, as if to prepare her for the battle of being a woman composer in Third Republic France. Primarily self-taught (women were barred from the Paris Conservatory), she was anointed by the infamously virile Wagner and Liszt, and lusted after by the less-virile-but-trying Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Massenet, Franck, D’Indy, and more. A composer of art songs as much as large-scale works, I don’t even need to tell you that she wrote her own texts.
Holmès’s virile lifestyle, as much as her works, put Ernest Hemingway’s to shame. Between having four to five children in an affair (the numbers are hazy because she lived alone in her own Parisian bachelor pad), joining the ambulance corps during the Franco-Prussian War, and posing nude for oil paintings, she also composed. Late in life, she studied with César Franck, who wrote his near-pornographic Piano Quintet for her, to the chagrin of his wife. A dual-national nationalist who spoke five languages, Holmès composed jingoist banger after banger for France, Ireland, Poland, and Italy. As Saint-Saëns put it: “She was powerful—maybe too powerful.”
What was the most virile composer’s most virile work? There is no single metric for virility in classical music, but I have attempted to create this ranking through an intensive process involving cold showers, Schenkerian analysis, and CrossFit. Musical factors included how extended is the duration, how pounding is the fortissimo, how forward-thrusting is the tempo, how imposing is the number of players onstage, how intellectually unfathomable is the form, how fawning is the reception, and how long is the hair. Try these Romantic works on for size and see if you, too, aren’t surging with potent ideas, dominating your rivals, and generally inseminating the world with your presence.
15. “Trois anges sont venus ce soir” (1887)
This is arguably Holmes’s biggest hit, but there’s not much that’s virile about Christmas. An immaculate conception? Virility score: 3/10.
14. “La Montagne Noire” (1895)
“La Montagne Noire” was the first opera by a woman to be staged at the Paris Opera (virile), but had a short run, likely due to its Wagnerian leanings (virile) and being way too long (virile). Listeners should be warned that the lead soprano’s vocal and sexual power is not punished with death in this opera. Not only does she get her man and her money, she exits the stage entirely unscathed by misfortune.
Holmès was not as lucky. “We do not want to open the doors of our theatres and opera-houses to women writers and composers,” one reviewer wrote. Franck biographer Laurence Davies said of the opera: “It was Augusta’s faiblesse that she could not resist the temptation to write virile, explosive sounds, such as no other woman composer would have dared to make.”
“They have tied me to a stake and pelted me with arrows and mud,” she told Saint-Saëns afterwards in a letter. (Not unlike fellow virile queen, Joan of Arc.) Virility score: 5/10
13. “Les Argonautes” (1880)
One critic panned this piece for its “excessive virility—a frequent fault with women composers.” Another, however, praised that there was “nothing of the feminine about it.”
Virility score: 5/10; “excessive virility” is gauche unless you’re a Germanic composer whose last name starts with “B.”
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12. “Astarté” (1871)
Liszt weighs in: “In comparison to your ‘Astarté,’ the works of the most daring composers are no more than little pieces from a girl’s boarding school.”
Virility score: 6/10; unpublished, thus un-virile.
11. “Ouverture pour une comédie” (1870)
It was notoriously difficult for women to corral enough support to get their operas staged (see Leah Broad’s group biography, Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World). To overcome this hero’s trial, Holmès devised the stratagem of performing her overtures like singles before the album. Pure, uncut virile ingenuity.
Unfortunately, this early work was never published, and the harp here is used angelically, not furiously. Virility score: 6/10.
10. “Molto lento” and “Fantaisie in C minor” for Clarinet and Piano (1900)
Holmès had a special preference for this long, wooden instrument and even played it herself (yes she did). The “Molto lento” is titillating, but we all came here to hear Holmes`s steamy “Fantaisie.” (A personal favorite—very vivid.)
Virility score: 7.5/10; only one player.
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9. “Le ruban rose” (1899)
In this fecund little art song, one of over 100 that Holmès both composed and wrote (virile), a marquise bones her page in the woods. When a passing prince wants to join the action, chaos ensues. 7.5/10
8. “La princesse sans coeur” (1889)
The only thing more virile than a princess without a heart is the way this song teeters on the brink of chromatic apocalypse before nonchalantly going back to seducing the listener. 7.5/10
7. “La guerrière” (1892)
Holmès was known for her inhuman vocal range, which this dramatic ode to a slain woman warrior flaunts. The song ends with a liquid dissonant surprise, but could have been more formally unfathomable. The moral of the story is never trust your brother. Virility score: 7.5/10.
6. “Pologne” (1883)
This symphonic poem is gloriously martial, building to a graphic musical battle inspired by an 1861 Polish political uprising that ended in a massacre by the Russians. The epigraph on the score reads in French: “You’ll pray, you’ll laugh, you’ll dance, and the enemy’s bullets will cross your feasts. You’ll suffer martyrdom, triumphant in song.” Did I mention that Holmès was a Sagittarius?
“Pologne” goes out to everyone resisting their political oppressors. I find the piece best enjoyed blasted from the subwoofers of a 1000 horsepower Exorcist Camaro. Virility score: 8.5/10
5. “Ludus pro patria” (1888)
“There reigns in this work a virile and powerful spirit that is astonishing in a woman. And, so that my meaning is not misunderstood: It is not a matter here of the imitation virility that, too often, women affect in their artistic productions.”—Le Figaro. Virility score: 8.5/10.
4. “Rolande furieux” (1867)
Holmès’s virility has two main modes: the heroic and the sensual. “Rolande Furieux” is a rich paleo feast of both. Based on Ludovico Ariosto’s 16th century epic poem Orlando Furioso, this symphonic adventure tone-paints many essential virile experiences: lovemaking in the woods, galloping long distances by horseback, and flying into a jealous rage so frenzied that you soar to the moon. Once, while listening, I was moved to accidentally walk up an extra flight of stairs. Virility score: 8.5/10.
3. “Irlande” (1882)
Each of these pieces has, of course, been tested for use while weightlifting. I find that “Irlande” is ideal for skull-crushers and squats. Written almost 20 years before its overplayed cousin, Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” “Irlande” is a symphonic poem that both gets you agitated and stirs you to agitate for Irish Home Rule.
Grab a dumbbell and start slowly lifting to the beat of the seductive clarinet opening. Visualize the liberation of the Irish people and the curvature of your future triceps. Next, at a prancing Allegro vivace, get lost in the green pastures of your squat routine. The most common dynamic marking in this section is, obviously, triple forte—as you soon will be. 9/10
Note: This piece was a favorite of Irish revolutionaries Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats, the latter of whom approached Holmès to compose an opera on his work. She was too busy for him. (Virile.)
2. “Andromède” (1883)
As Lionel Salter wrote in Gramophone in 1994: “There is nothing in the least ‘feminine’ (if one may use that word in these politically correct times) about the challenge flung out by the brass at the start of ‘Andromède.’”
Although for pure size reasons “Andromède” had to come second, this symphonic poem is undeniably virile. What’s that? A monumental brass opening like a shirt being ripped open by the winds of fate? Strings crescendoing into a tornado until they blow their—be warned, there is a grand refractory pause at minute four. Yet, as a truly virile composer, Holmès is soon back in action to paint the hero Perseus flying on his winged horse to free the princess chained naked to a rock (virile). 10/10
1. “L’Ode triomphale” (1889)
Holmès’s “Ode triomphale” is so virile that it has never been recorded. Scored for a 300-piece orchestra and 11 separate choirs, this magnum-sized opus premiered at the Paris World Exposition for the unsheathing of France’s largest phallic symbol, the Eiffel Tower.
We can only begin to imagine how virile it sounded to the 15,000 who went to the Palais de l’Industrie in 1889 to watch a veiled, chained woman appear on a darkened stage, suddenly replaced by fanfares to celebrate La République. Virilely, Holmès had a hand in everything: she rehearsed the choirs, directed the conductor(s), sketched the sets, and insisted that the third night of performance be free for the public. A full 1,200 musicians participated—a size record (Mahler, a fan, was clearly taking notes). After the performance, the public flooded the stage and the London Musical Courier reported that Holmès was carried through the streets in celebration.
Virility score: Mere numbers cannot contain it. ¶
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Norby Walters, 91, Dies; Music and Sports Agent Who Ran Afoul of the Law
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Mr. Walters closed the club soon after.
He switched to booking musical acts into nightclubs, lounges and hotels, which proved lucrative. Over the next two decades, the client list of Norby Walters Associates (later called General Talent International) included Gloria Gaynor, Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Commodores, Luther Vandross, the Four Tops, Run-DMC, Kool & the Gang, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.
In the early 1980s, Mr. Walters glimpsed a new opportunity in the top tier of college athletes. With a partner, Lloyd Bloom, he established World Sports & Entertainment. From 1984 to 1987, the two men signed dozens of athletes to secret contracts that included inducements like cash, loans and cars in exchange for giving the agency exclusive rights to handle their future negotiations with professional teams, most of them in the National Football League, according to a 1988 federal indictment against Mr. Walters, Mr. Bloom, a third agent and a football player.”
Most of the inducements violated National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations and would have rendered the athletes ineligible to compete had their schools known about them. But Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom said their lawyers had assured them that the contracts were legal even if the players were still with their college teams.
The indictment charged Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom with conspiring with the athletes to conceal the payments by having them agree to postdated contracts that appeared to have been signed after their last collegiate games.
“The crime alleged that he conspired with students to steal their educations, which was preposterous, since the schools had little concern about whether they got an education,” Gary Walters said in a phone interview. He added, “Norby wasn’t doing anything different in the sports business than he did in the music business: giving fair compensation to players who had been denied it.”
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