Larry Wolff Rebel Without a Cause The Met’s new production of Carmen strips away most of the opera’s Spanish flavor, transferring it to an American world of popcorn and cotton candy. February 22, 2024 issue
J. Hoberman Outsider’s Outsider At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture. March 21, 2024 issue
Matthew Aucoin Alone in Paradise George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera Picture a day like this illuminates not just the loss of a child but also music’s power to create imagined spaces so alluring they become an escape from reality. March 7, 2024 issue
Geoffrey O’Brien Furious Stasis Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations. April 18, 2024 issue
Daphne Merkin The Way She Was “I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she has flirted with the possibility that she was. April 4, 2024 issue
FT Just Enough Blues George Michael’s career was driven by two imperatives: to be the biggest pop star in the world and to be taken seriously as an artist. February 17, 2024
Nate Wooley ‘Sound Is in My Hands’ The electronic musicians Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood spent their shared life pushing listeners into states of greater attentiveness. January 25, 2024
Ben Ratliff Not Not Jazz When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band. January 13, 2024
Greil Marcus The Brotherhood of Rock “The Band had made, Robertson says, a brotherhood, and in the way that in the songs each man’s contribution shaded and jumped into every other’s, they acted out an ideal of democracy and equality.” March 23, 2017 issue
Lorrie Moore Ain’t It Always Stephen?Stills For a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones. August 17, 2017 issue
Adam Shatz The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix “Hendrix used a range of technological innovations (feedback, sustain, effects pedals) to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.” January 9, 2014 issue
Geoffrey O’Brien Rock of Ages “Music was scarcely the point by now: this was literature, theater, religion, noise opera, political action, erotic paradise.” December 16, 1999 issue
Joanna Biggs ‘Give Me Joy’ Madonna’s genius is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes. It is for doing it all with no apology. May 23, 2024 issue
Matthew Aucoin Perpetual Expectation The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil. May 23, 2024 issue
Philip Clark The Bernstein Enigma In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, Maestro fails to explore his tortured artistic life. February 8, 2024 issue
Christopher Benfey Solo Sonata In December 1943 the composer Bela Bartok, in exile from fascist Hungary, arrived for a stay in Asheville, North Carolina. December 17, 2023
Adam Shatz Ever-New Sound Worlds Henry Threadgill’s memoir is a spirited account of his lifelong search for imaginative musical improvisation and new systems of composition. December 21, 2023 issue
Adam Shatz Cries and Whispers Throughout her long career, Meredith Monk has pushed beyond verbal language to explore the full potential of the human voice. November 22, 2023
Zoe Hu Child’s Play Sofia Coppola’s film about Priscilla Presley feels like a document less of romance than of the comforts and dangers of fantasy. November 18, 2023
Geoff Mann Whose Country? It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past. November 23, 2023 issue
Paige K. Bradley Boogie on the Higher Levels Judee Sill made two exquisite, defiantly spiritual albums in the early 1970s. A flawed documentary attempts to reckon with her too-brief career. October 26, 2023
Simon Callow Mozart the Modernist In his new biography, Patrick Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world. November 2, 2023 issue