THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 9
ILLUSTRATION BY XAVIERA ALTENA
Pop girl groups are back in vogue, but the U.K.’s Little Mix has been
holding it down since 2011, when the quartet formed on the British
version of “The X Factor.” The band’s empowered music, drawn from
a strength-in-numbers approach, has always skewed toward self-care
amid encroaching cynicism (“Wings”) and heartbreak (“Shout Out to
My Ex”), and on its new album, “Confetti,” the songs are even more
ebullient and optimistic. As other pop acts have grown more radical or
experimental, Little Mix continues to color inside the lines, focussing
on a clean-cut, well-kept sound. Yet “Confetti” still has the capacity to
surprise: the bubbly minimalism of “Holiday” and the anthemic power pop
of “If You Want My Love” push the limits of the members’ precision as a
unit, and the ingenious “Not a Pop Song” challenges the notion of girl-
group superficiality—and its status as a guilty pleasure.—Sheldon Pearce
POP
headquarters. The program includes a section
from “Runes,” the animalistic male quartet
“Cloven Kingdom,” and the joyous finale from
“Esplanade,” in which the dancers run, slide,
and fall across the floor with abandon. There
will also be a site-specific version of “I Guess
the Lord Must Be in New York City,” from the
1993 work “A Field of Grass,” filmed in East
River Park.—M.H. (ptamd.org/benefit2020)
“Tethered”
Since May, the performing-arts organization
four/four has been arranging novel pairings of
musicians and dancers for let’s-make-some-
thing-during-the-pandemic collaborations,
in a series called “Tethered.” The musicians
record something new, the dancers film them-
selves moving to it, and the results are edited
into a video. The latest one—with Antonio
Brown, Rakeem Hardy, and the Spanish troupe
Marcat Dance responding to the sounds of the
Chicago indie-rock band Ohmme—débuts on
Nov. 18, on the community-broadcasting Web
site publicrecords.tv.—B.S.
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MUSIC
Adulkt Life: “Book of Curses”
INDIE ROCK In the nineties, Chris Rowley briefly
bellowed for Huggy Bear, a sparkplug quintet
that represented England’s distinctive wing of
the riot-grrrl movement. Now he has emerged
with the quartet Adulkt Life, shaping his snarl
with a bilious din. The racket is casually mul-
tigenerational: the guitarist John Arthur Webb
and the bassist Kevin Hendrick hail from
the band Male Bonding, which formed in
2008, and the drummer Sonny Barrett entered
Adulkt Life while still in his teens. Through
its vocal rants and instrumental eruptions,
Adulkt Life presents punk as a folk tradition,
passed down as a secret, if not exactly quiet,
handshake.—Jay Ruttenberg
William Basinski: “Lamentations”
ELECTRONIC Since the late seventies, the prolific
composer William Basinski has assembled his
sepulchral ambient music from heavily treated
found-audio loops, and his pieces can often feel
haunted—imbued with a freighted sense of
recovered memory. His new album, “Lamenta-
tions,” hangs in the air like a cobweb, reflecting
new layers at every angle. Instrumentation
that seems at first purely vaporous becomes
the steely backbone of these tracks. Basinski
assembled many of these pieces in real time,
and it shows: little is stable in this music, and
therein lies its power.—Michaelangelo Matos
Brownlee & Spyres:
“Amici e Rivali”
OPERA Rossini’s flamboyantly decorated arias
showcase the facets of an individual singer’s voice
as if it were a diamond under a jeweller’s loupe.
Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres’s new
album of duelling-tenor pieces, “Amici e Rivali,”
is a nice reminder of the sparks that fly when two
first-rate voices meet in the playground of a Ros-
sini opera. Spyres’s warm, baritonal colors beau-
tifully complement Brownlee’s shinier timbre in
excerpts from “Otello,” “La Donna del Lago,”
“Ricciardo e Zoraide,” and other works. The
pair dispatches the punishing tessitura, intricate
filigree, and endless scales of these duets with
undaunted charm, and Corrado Rovaris conducts
I Virtuosi Italiani with style.—Oussama Zahr
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
CLASSICAL In recent weeks, the music director
Louis Langrée has rallied the Cincinnati Sym-
phony Orchestra for a virtual concert series
infused with finesse and diversity. The newest
program includes “You Have the Right to Re-
main Silent,” a bold, stinging, painfully timely
clarinet concerto by the Pulitzer Prize-winning
composer Anthony Davis, with Anthony McGill,
the New York Philharmonic principal clarinet-
tist, as the soloist. Julia Perry’s “Homunculus
C.F.” and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony
complete the bill.—Steve Smith (Nov. 21 at 8;
cincinnatisymphony.org.)
Joel Ross Group and
Steve Nelson Quartet
JAZZ The vibraphone has never been thought
of as a quintessential jazz instrument, but
there’s been no shortage of significant mallet
players in the genre since at least the nine-
teen-thirties. Two such musicians continue
the legacy of the jazz vibraphone in consecu-
tive performances from Smalls’ subterranean
stage—the young upstart Joel Ross and the
veteran percussionist Steve Nelson. Ross,
riding the acclaim of his recent release, “Who
Are You?,” takes advantage of the inclusive op-
tions of millennial jazz. Nelson is a master of
bop-and-beyond postures. The live-streamed
shows shed light on a generational and stylis-
tic divide.—Steve Futterman (Nov. 21-22 at 5
and 7; smallslive.com.)
Ragas Live Festival
CLASSICAL Now in its ninth year, Ragas Live Fes-
tival, a twenty-four-hour radio broadcast on
WKCR-FM emphasizing unity and harmony,
transforms into a global online celebration. Pre-
sented by Pioneer Works, the Rubin Museum
of Art, and other creative partners, the concert
brings together more than ninety artists per-
forming in locations across the world; notable
participants include Terry Riley, Zakir Hussain,
Toumani Diabaté, and Betsayda Machado. The
penultimate set, by Brooklyn Raga Massive, pays
