NYT > Music

Hundreds of artifacts are being prepared for the opening on Tuesday of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, a $9 million branch of the Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

“Chinese Democracy” is the Titanic ship of rock albums: It’s outsize, lavish, obsessive, technologically advanced and, all too clearly, the end of an era.

The bimonthly series tend to feature young composers who disregard the classical-pop divide. Wednesday’s installment was a showcase for the violist Nadia Sirota and the guitarist Andrew McKenna Lee.

The band seamlessly connected the dots between emo and early 1980s soft-rock in their show at the Roseland Ballroom on Wednesday.

The multimillion-selling band from Oklahoma performed an entertaining set of blues rock and power ballads to the willing crowd at the Nokia Theater on Wednesday.

Girl Talk set off instant pandemonium as its set began at Terminal 5.

Mr. Gertz was a prolific though often uncredited B-movie composer whose melodies haunt a spate of pictures with words like “Hell,” “Thing” and “Creature” in the titles.

For Steven Blier, a pianist and the artistic director of the New York Festival of Song, Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Meeraugen” suggested a concert.

Even before the full board of New York City Opera learned that its proposed savior, Gerard Mortier, was saying goodbye, its chairwoman had turned to a man known in the arts as a turnaround specialist.

The harpsichordist Richard Egarr’s performance of Book I at Weill Recital Hall on Tuesday evening addressed what Bach meant by well tempered.

Chita Rivera, 75, is the most commanding physical presence ever to grace the tiny platform stage of Feinstein’s.

A federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday convicted Alberto W. Vilar on 12 counts of fraud.

Mr. Reynolds had a single hit, “Endless Sleep,” which ushered in a wave of tragic teenage pop songs in the 1950s.

The orchestra, led by Valery Gergiev, did rough justice to music full of loose and rough edges in its performance of works by Prokofiev at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday.

The latest orchestra to have its mettle tried by the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the Warsaw Philharmonic.

As part of Israel’s 60th-anniversary celebration, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra visited Carnegie Hall on Sunday and Monday with the young Venezuelan firebrand Gustavo Dudamel on the podium.

A concert performance by the conductor Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus of the Maryinsky Theater at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday was a reminder that Prokofiev’s “Love for Three Oranges” is endlessly inventive.

During a return engagement on Friday night Jeffrey Milarsky authoritatively conducted the American Composers Orchestra in five disparate works, including three commissioned premieres.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center hosted a concert in honor of the violinist sisters Ani and Ida Kavafian, who made their Carnegie Hall debut as a duo 25 years ago.

Andrea Marcovicci’s new show, “Marcovicci Sings Movies II,” at the Oak Room, is an extensively altered and improved revival of one she performed there 21 years ago.

The violinist Vadim Repin played Prokofiev’s spooky violin scales at the end of the first movement in his Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor with eerie, barely audible pianissimos during a performance with the pianist Nikolai Lugansky.

The pianist Garrick Ohlsson brought fingers, fortitude and a freewheeling imagination to his all-Scriabin recital on Saturday evening at the 92nd Street Y.

The afternoon video show, which ended Sunday after being an MTV flagship for 10 years, was just a little too 20th-century to survive the YouTube age.

The cellist Matt Haimovitz, no stranger to offbeat spaces, played at Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday.

Nickelback seems eager to shed at least a little of its politeness on “Dark Horse,” its sixth album — by far its loosest and most jagged in years.

Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic through suites from “On the Waterfront” and “West Side Story” on Friday as part of an ongoing festival honoring Leonard Bernstein.

“Things to Ruin,” by theater composer Joe Iconis, isn’t a political revue per se, but its 19 songs express a fed-up attitude in the final days of the Bush era.

A new track from the Beatles? Paul McCartney hopes to unleash “Carnival of Light,” a 14-minute experimental Beatles track recorded in 1967 but never released.

A 27-year-old man was in critical condition on Sunday after being stabbed when a brawl broke out at the sixth annual Urban Music Awards ceremony at the O2 Arena in London on Saturday night.

“I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade,” the rapper Kanye West said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A folk fiddler, a salsa star and a bossa nova singer are among the headliners scheduled for the 2009 season at Town Hall, which will begin Jan. 23.

Beyoncé Knowles on her study of the life of Etta James and how it altered the direction of her new album.

A quintet with twin goals: to lift the presence of blacks and Hispanics in classical music and to expand the repertory for woodwind quintets.

Reviews of releases by Sonny Rollins, James Moody and Hank Jones, White Denim, Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, and Bill Carrothers.

Mr. Levinson, a music publicist, parlayed his close familiarity with jazz personalities into rich and sometimes intimate biographies of them.

On Thursday night the enterprising Opéra Français de New York presented an elaborate and overdue production of Kurt Weill’s “Marie Galante,” its American premiere, at Gould Hall.

Don Byron, a clarinet virtuoso, is performing with a different ensemble every night for the Jazz Standard’s four-night celebration of his 50th birthday.

Columbus Symphony Orchestra announced on Thursday that Junichi Hirokami, its music director, would be moving on, calling it a mutual decision.

Juanes picked up awards for Album of the Year, Best Male Pop Vocal Album, Song of the Year and Record of the Year at the ceremony on Thursday.

At Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, the 35-year-old band remained committedly lowbrow with its flamboyant stagings and remarkably familiar-sounding new songs.

More than 1,000 people attended a memorial service for Edward Scott McMichael, a busker with perfect pitch and an improbable horn whom most people in Seattle knew as Tuba Man.

The violinist Gil Shaham is ideally suited to convey the energetic optimism of Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto, which he performed with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday.

Dawn Upshaw whispers, shrieks and sings with ravishing warmth, and she moves easily from the mundane to the comic to sheer terror.

When belting in the expansive chest voice that dominated Wednesday’s show at the Metropolitan Room, Baby Jane Dexter exerted a formidable command.

The conductor James Conlon continues to find ways to revitalize programming at the Juilliard School with “Trilogy,” a piece fashioned from little-known one-act works, two Russian and one German.

For the fourth time, the Country Music Association’s gave its top award to Kenny Chesney on Wednesday.

Brian Stokes Mitchell seized the moment on Tuesday evening when he opened a too-short five-night engagement at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency.

Mr. Mitchell, a jazzy and versatile drummer, was one of two Englishmen in the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

In his exciting sold-out recital at Zankel Hall on Tuesday night the pianist Jeremy Denk paired Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

“Now That’s What I Call Music!” has been a reliable blockbuster for 10 years by sticking to a simple, recognizable brand.

Prokofiev, like Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, is in these musicians’ fingers and souls, and their performance of “Romeo and Juliet” could hardly have been more passionate or vividly characterized.

David (Honeyboy) Edwards’s 11-song, half-electric, half-acoustic set at the B. B. King Blues Club and Grill on Monday was a mix of traditional covers and original compositions.

The series, “Music in Exile: Émigré Composers of the 1930s,” which opened on Sunday, focuses mostly on composers who escaped to Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States during the Nazi era.

A tablespoon of blues and two teaspoons each of soft-rock, jazz and traditional pop: that recipe only begins to describe the stylistic ingredients in the music of Boz Scaggs, who opened at the Blue Note on Monday.

To be the voice of a nation speaking to the wider world is a tough mission for any performer. To be the voice of an entire continent is exponentially more difficult. Both were mantles that the South African singer Miriam Makeba took on willingly and forcefully.

On Sunday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall, Valery Gergiev conducted the Kirov Orchestra of the Maryinsky Theater in the first of four programs devoted to theatrical works of Prokofiev.

It must be great fun for James Levine to concoct the programs he presents with the Met Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie Hall.

Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes shimmied intensely alongside his other group, the Mystic Valley Band, at Terminal 5 on Sunday, while performing material from his recent solo album.

Wenge Musica BCBG, the acclaimed Congolese soukous band, brought its long, intricate songs, elaborate drumming and wall of vocals to the Fillmore New York on Saturday night.

Reviews of performances by the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert and the Guarneri String Quartet.

Psychic TV’s show at Club Europa on Sunday night, its first performance since Lady Jaye Breyer’s death, was suffused with sweetness and good feeling.

The video wizardry on stage should not obscure the big news of the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Damnation de Faust”: the magnificent performances of the opera and chorus.

Ms. Makeba was a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom in her own country even though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against.

With the departure of its director, Gerard Mortier, and finances in turmoil, the New York City Opera has scrapped Mr. Mortier’s production plans and begun the search for a new leader.

Reviews of new albums by T-Pain, David Archuleta, Deborah Cox and Butch Walker.

Tetzlaff Quartet at Zankel Hall and “Petite Messe Solennelle” at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The genre-blurring group Bang on a Can All-Stars played a well-attended concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Saturday, meshing elements of jazz, rock, classical and world music.

Steve Tyrell, a good ole boy from Houston with an aw-shucks charm and an easygoing machismo, began his fourth season at the Café Carlyle last week.

Mr. Dunn was a prominent conductor whose work helped animate the early music revival that took place in the mid-20th century and afterward.

Stressing young love and personal connections, Taylor Swift expands country music’s audience.

As champions of Kurt Weill always point out, there is more to his catalog than “The Threepenny Opera.” Two new projects will bring some of his lesser-known productions to the stage.

Jared Followill of Kings of Leon discusses music by M83, Glasvegas, She & Him, Chairlift and Animal Collective.

Reviews of recordings by David Greilsammer, Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and Ursula Oppens.

Aaron Copland’s modest house — recently named a National Historic Landmark — will be the nurturing home to nine successive composers.

Many volunteered time, work or money to help restore the theater, including Bruce Springsteen and his band, who played a benefit concert raising $3 million.

Hanging out with Joseph Arthur, the singer, songwriter and artist, who has created his own little artistic paradise in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn.

The departure of Gerard Mortier came 21 months after New York City Opera had staked its future on his vision.

Few other conductors have become so involved in the public realm as Valery Gergiev, whose Kirov Orchestra will perform at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday and Monday.

The Hold Steady and Drive-By Truckers, who co-headlined at Terminal 5 on Thursday, share a commitment to underdogs but have different ways of expressing it.

The book “Hip Hop Speaks to Children,” which features lyrics by Mos Def, Kanye West and Queen Latifah, as well as poems by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks, has become a modest hit.

The Smashing Pumpkins’ lineup has changed and Billy Corgan still annoys as well as enthralls, but the music has stayed explosive.

Noting the fuss over Elliott Carter’s impending centenary, partisans of the music of Milton Babbitt, 92, are getting their ducks in a row.

A remarkably youthful Florence Henderson reviews her life, from her impoverished childhood in Kentucky to fame and fortune.

“Olivier Messiaen at 100,” a centenary tribute at Symphony Space on Thursday, included exquisite examples of the composer’s idiosyncratic, wholly expressive style.

Mr. Busby was a music executive who helped return an industry giant to the top of the charts.

A production of Berlioz’s “Damnation de Faust” at the Metropolitan Opera introduces an unprecedented level of technological stagecraft to the house.

A history of the events and people who defined the Mississippi blues.

Mr. Black was the acerbic drummer of Frank Zappa’s mischievous, innovative band the Mothers of Invention.

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra makes use of folk forms, marches and anthems, but it’s all rearranged, put through a prism, warped a little, forced into broader meanings.

“Arjuna’s Dilemma,” an opera based on the Bhagavad-Gita and presented at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has an appealing and unabashedly eclectic score.

Lang Lang and Christoph Eschenbach returned to Beethoven’s First Concerto with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday night.

Caleb Burhans is part of a new generation that doesn’t feel compelled to specialize and works easily in classical, rock and much in between.

CLASSICAL.

POP.

JAZZ.